NPR · 7 hours ago

In Ohio, the Sikh Community Passes Traditions on to the Next Generation : the Picture Show

Photographer Akash Pamarthy spent two years documenting Ohio's Sikh community - not as an outsider, but as someone drawn close enough to chop wood beside an 82-year-old man and sit with him through long evenings by the fire. What he found was a community shaped by centuries of persecution and displacement that has never, as he puts it, abandoned its faith or identity - a people who are "rooted in a different faith, but proud to be there in this country, proud to contribute, proud to represent or call themselves as American." His photographs move quietly between the sacred and the ordinary: families seated on gurdwara floors, a mother worrying her son will be bullied for his turban, a child trick-or-treating in Halloween costume with his Sikh hair grown long by choice. Across generations and geographies, the same impulse surfaces - to hold onto what is true about yourself while making room for where you have landed. There is something instructive in that, not only for immigrants, but for anyone trying to live with integrity inside a world that does not always make it easy.