My Daughter Decided to Cover Her Hair

She had a speech competition coming up, and we were working through the preparation book together — the two of us at the table, reading a chapter at a time. Then we reached a chapter on kesh, and somewhere in the middle of it a plain question came up: why do so many Sikh girls not cover their hair?

She looked at me and said she’d never really thought about it before.

I want to be honest about that sentence, because it’s the whole reason I’m writing this. She’d never thought about it before — not because she wasn’t thoughtful, but because I’d never given her a reason to. I had a daughter old enough to enter a regional speech competition, and the significance of her own kesh had simply never been put in front of her in a way she could take hold of.

What I’d handed her, and what I hadn’t

Here’s the part that doesn’t flatter me. I’d talked to my kids about being Sikh plenty. But when I look at what I actually passed on, so much of it was abstract — values in the air, the right words, the general shape of “we are Sikh.” I’d told her what far more often than I’d shown her why, and I’d let the specifics — her kesh, what it is, where it comes from, why we keep it and wear it with pride — sit as unexamined habit rather than something she understood from the inside.

It’s easy to help a child form an identity early, when they’re still assembling who they are. It is much harder to try to mould it in later, once the world has already handed them its version. I had told myself I was doing the first. Reading that chapter with her, I realised I’d mostly deferred it.

So I didn’t lecture. I did the one thing I should have done years earlier: I got curious with her, out loud, and let the history do the work.

What we found in the chapter

We went back to Khalsa Sajna — to Guru Gobind Singh Ji giving the Khalsa its form. And the thing that stopped her was simple: the kesh was given to both. When the Guru gave the Khalsa its shape, the unshorn hair, and the dignity of the crown that honours it, were a gift to sons and daughters alike. Kaur and Singh. The dastaar was not a rule pinned on one half of the community — it was that crown, and it was for everyone who took it.

She sat with that. Nobody argued her into anything. She reasoned her way from the history to a conclusion I had never quite handed her: that if the kesh was hers too, then covering it wasn’t borrowing a boy’s practice — it was claiming her own. And she decided, on her own, to start wearing a rumal over her head in public.

I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t. It isn’t a verdict on anyone else. Sikh girls and women carry their kesh with love and dignity in many ways, and I hold every one of those choices with respect. This is not a ruling on how another family lives — it’s the story of one child who was handed the why, sat with it, and chose for herself.

There’s a line of Guru Arjan Dev Ji’s I kept returning to afterwards. It borrows the vocabulary of another faith on purpose, to speak to everyone:

ਨਾਪਾਕ ਪਾਕੁ ਕਰਿ ਹਦੂਰਿ ਹਦੀਸਾ ਸਾਬਤ ਸੂਰਤਿ ਦਸਤਾਰ ਸਿਰਾ ॥੧੨॥

Purify what is impure, and let the Lord’s Presence be your religious tradition. Let your total awareness be the turban on your head.

— Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Ang 1084

ਸਾਬਤ ਸੂਰਤਿ — the whole, unbroken form, kept as it was given — and ਦਸਤਾਰ, the crown that honours it. There is no clause anywhere in it that says sons only.

The transition, and the lesson underneath it

None of this made it small. Deciding to change how you look, at an age when the entire unspoken project is to not stand out, is a genuinely hard thing to do. For a stretch she was, briefly, a question other people asked out loud. Classmates were curious about the rumal. A few said it looked cool. And then — this is the part that turned out to matter most — they mostly moved on.

That became its own lesson for her, and honestly for me. We spend so much energy bracing for what everyone will think of us, and it turns out most people are busy with their own lives and are not thinking about us nearly as much as we fear. The audience we perform for is smaller and more distracted than the one in our heads. She learned that at an age when I was still learning it myself.

And then the speech. When she stood up to deliver it, she talked about assimilation — about the pull to blend in, her own experience of it, and her decision to start wearing the rumal to school. She spoke about the thing she had just lived. She won first place in the regional competition.

I’m not putting that here as a trophy. I’m putting it here because it’s the clearest proof I have of the whole argument: when a child truly understands the identity they carry, they don’t just wear it — they can stand up and explain it, with confidence, to a room full of people who don’t share it. Understanding is what makes identity portable. It’s what lets a kid answer the curious classmate instead of shrinking from them.

What I’d pass to another parent

Do it early, and do it connectably. Not the rule — the reason. Sit with your child in the actual history: who the Khalsa was for, what the kesh is, why we keep it and wear it with pride, that it was given to all of them. Make the why something they can hold, not an abstraction floating over the dinner table. A child who understands what they carry can defend it, explain it, and choose it. A child who’s only been handed the outline has nothing to reach for when the world starts asking.

And notice, honestly, where you’ve been vague. I thought I was raising my kids with a strong sense of who they are. In one specific, important place, I’d handed over the label and skipped the substance — and I only found out because a speech-prep book forced the question. Don’t wait for the book. Go looking for the places you’ve deferred.

The honest limit

I want to be careful, because I’m wary of any parent offering a formula. A child given all the history and all the warmth may still land somewhere different, or later, or waver. You cannot install this. I happen to be writing on a good week, and I know it. What I’m sure of is narrower: that the choice should be theirs to make from understanding, not ours to enforce from habit — and that the earlier we make the why reachable, the more likely they are to reach for it at all.

What I felt watching her keep the rumal on, day after day, wasn’t pride exactly. It was relief. Relief that she’d arrived somewhere solid about who she is — from her own reasoning, earlier and more surely than I did at her age. My job was never to make her cover her hair. It was to put the real why in front of her, early and in a language she could feel, and then get out of the way. She took it from there.

---

If you’re raising Sikh children far from Punjab: is there a part of our inheritance you’ve handed down as a label without ever really passing on the substance behind it? I’d like to hear where you found the gap — and what closed it.

Maastarji.com makes free, English-first Punjabi and Sikhi learning resources for diaspora families.