The first gurdwara serving the Sikh community in the United States and Canada is founded in 1912 on South Grand Street in Stockton. For 55 years, it is the only gurdwara in the western United States.
Sikhs, mostly from the Punjab in India, begin immigrating to California in the early 1900s, seeking railroad, timber and agricultural work. a better economic future. On April 6, 1899, the San Francisco Chronicle reports the arrival of four Sikh men – the first record of South Asian immigrants to California.
California is now home to more than 1 million Sikhs, some 300,000 of them in the San Francisco Bay area.
Because of its similarities to their homeland – annexed by Great Britain in 1849 – many Sikh immigrants settle in the Sacramento Valley. It is Sikh pioneers that help introduce rice growing to the northern part of the valley.
In Southern California, Sikhs bring cotton farming to the Imperial Valley.
Gurdwaras are social centers as well as temples. Each contains a community kitchen – langar – that serves vegetarian fare daily.
The founders of Stockton’s gurdwara are Jawala Singh and Wasakha Singh. Sikh men all have the surname “Singh,” or lion. Sikh women have the surname “kaur,” or princess. The shared surnames are designed to promote equality, a central tenet of Sikhism.
Like Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Sikhs are branded “alien” and seen by labor unions as a threat to whiter workers. California newspapers in the first two decades of the 20th Century trumpet the threat of a “Hindoo Invasion” – despite Sikhs not being Hindu.
Jawala Singh also forms the Ghadar Party, which seeks to end British occupation of India. The party’s newspaper, The Ghadar, is the first Punjabi newspaper in America. The party dissolves when India gains independence in 1947.
The original Stockton gurdwara is now used as a library, replaced by a more modern temple in 1930.
Dalip Singh Saund, who served as Secretary of the Stockton Gurdwara, is the first Sikh, first Asian and first Indian to ever serve in the U.S. Congress.
A Democrat, he represented California’s 29th Congressional District, which included Riverside and Imperial counties, from 1957 to1963.
While a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Saund lives in a two-story clubhouse established and maintained by the Stockton gurdwara.
The gurdwara purchases the house so students from India have a place to live, rent-free. Resident students pay their gas and electricity expenses and run the clubhouse as a “co-op,” taking turns at cooking.
