Description
First Sikh Turban Women in Royal Navy of Canada
Some Lesser Known Facts About Harkiran Kaur:-
- Harkiran was born into a Catholic family
- She came to Sikhi about a decade ago now when a Sikh friend had got her interest and she started reading Guru Granth Sahib Ji (in English translation) and agreed with not only her own beliefs about reality and our place in it, but also with science and philosophy.It’s like Gurbani tied everything together and was the missing link, the universal equation as it were.
- she started attending Gurdwara regularly about 7 years ago and knew from the start she wanted to take Amrit. She tried to be active in the community as much as possible.
- As for her career in the Royal Canadian Navy since 1997 and was one of the first women to qualify to serve on submarines.
- After some time attending the Gurdwara and being inspired by another Singhni who tied turban, she saw how spiritual she looked – what she later would recognize as being in Guru Gobind Singh Ji’s roop.
- She believe the uniform of Khalsa was meant for all Sikhs. she decided when she took Amrit that she also wanted to tie turban. However, there was a bit of a stumbling block as Canadian military had allowance for Sikh males to tie turban in uniform but not females. So with the help of World Sikh Organization they worked to change that. She became the first Sikh woman to tie turban in uniform in the Royal Canadian Navy.
- Since then she served two years in a row as a member of the Gurudwara Management committee here in Halifax (as treasurer and member at large).
- She also worked on the Defence Visible Minority Advisory Group where she worked to advise Command teams on issues specific to different cultures and minorities.
- She also helped plan and organize several large scale cultural awareness events as well as a local military event directed towards raising awareness about unconscious bias in cooperation with the Human Rights Commission of Nova Scotia (Canada).
- She is married to an Amritdhari Singh from Srinagar Kashmir, where she also took Amrit several years ago. she is now engaged in learning kirtan in my spare time and want to be more involved with gender inequality issues within Sikhi because she believes they need to be tackled head on.
- Her dream is to one day see Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s vision of equality of all humans regardless of caste colour ethnicity gender rich or poor come to fruition.
