The First Gurdwara in the United States

A gurdwara in the Central Valley

Punjabi farm labourers had been arriving in California since the first years of the century. In 1912 the Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society, founded by Jawala Singh and Wasakha Singh, opened a gurdwara at Stockton; prayers began on 24 October. A brick building replaced it in 1929.^1,3

For roughly fifty years it was the only gurdwara on the American west coast.²

Not only Sikhs

Because it was the only one, it served everyone. Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus used the building together, along with the Catholic wives and American-born children of Punjabi men — American immigration law of the period made it effectively impossible to bring a wife from India, and anti-miscegenation statutes shaped who they could marry instead. The result was a congregation that looked nothing like a Punjabi village and functioned as the social centre of South Asian California for half a century.¹

The Ghadar connection

Stockton was also political. The gurdwara was a base for the Ghadar movement, the revolutionary campaign for Indian independence organised from the American west coast, and Punjabi farmers in the surrounding valley helped fund its newspaper — the first Punjabi-language press in the United States.^1,2

Dalip Singh Saund, who in 1957 became the first Asian American, Sikh American and Indian American to sit in the US Congress, served as the gurdwara’s secretary.¹

Counting American Sikhs

There is no reliable figure. The US census does not ask about religion, and estimates for the Sikh population range from about 280,000 to more than 500,000 — a gap wide enough to matter for everything from political representation to hate-crime reporting.