2023

The 2023 Sikhlens Calendar is Hidden Histories: Pioneer Sikhs in Canada, curated by Karen Dosanjh. Karen is a Canadian-born historian and the author of Untold Stories: The South Asian Pioneer Experience in BC. She documented the first wave of migrants from Punjab to Canada in the early 1900s, including the racial barriers they met and the work they did to settle families.

The history is also her family's. Her forefather Gian Singh Johal arrived in 1906. Her husband's paternal grandfather Narain Singh Dosanjh arrived in 1907, and grandmother Maha Kaur Dosanjh in 1929, among the first five Sikh families in New Westminster, BC. Sikhlens also worked with Karen on a documentary filmed in British Columbia.

The cover photograph is a 1945 delegation of BC Sikhs who visited the Sikh community in Stockton, California with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Kesur Singh, a Risaldar Major in the British Indian Army, is considered the first Sikh settler to arrive in Canada in 1897, landing in Vancouver on the Empress of India on the way to Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.