Photographer Sutej Pannu travels between Chandigarh and Punjab, the Sikh-majority states of India, and Vancouver, Canada, which has a thriving Punjabi-Sikh diaspora, taking tender portraits of the elderly Sikh community. They are often perceived as having a steely exterior or reduced to their striking physicality or hard-working hands, but Pannu’s photos shift the focus back onto their gentler sides, highlighting their humility and kindness. He tells writer ARSHIA about his unrushed, unforced approach to each shot, and how much it means to so many of his subjects to have a photo to pass down through their families and keep their memory alive.
Seattle-based photographer Sutej Singh Pannu was born into a Sikh family in the city of Jalandhar, an agricultural and manufacturing hub in the north-Indian state of Punjab. His father was a farmer, and his mother a local boutique owner who would sew salwar-kameez suits for the neighborhood ladies. On the surface, they had very little in common—except for their love for photographing their children, an unusual hobby for small-town India in the 90s.
Even if books weren’t, a camera was always within hand’s reach, and the kids were never denied a chance to tinker with them, which, Pannu acknowledges, was a privilege rarely granted to South Asian children back in the day, but he put this freedom to good use. In 2009, when he was in high school, his elderly teacher’s son—a graphic designer—invited him to take photographs for a local school’s brochure. Soon after, the images were plastered all over town—on flyers, wall posters and hoardings, the faces his 17-year-old self had captured smiling back at him. “I figured there must be some higher energy at play, considering how every opportunity was coming my way and falling into place,” Pannu says.
It was in 2017 that he launched his passion project—a digital archive on Instagram that documents the Sikh community, especially the elderly folk, who he often meets on his spiritual sojourns in India. Pannu is simply a messenger of his peoples—an agrarian and warrior class formed to spiritually enlighten not just themselves, but also vulnerable communities oppressed in the Indian subcontinent. As history laid more and more emphasis on their striking physicality and little else, it reduced them to just their muscles and their hands, which shifted the focus away from the values of humility and kindness that form the bedrock of the community’s identity.
Pannu’s endeavor makes them whole, in order to humanize them. He shifts the lens back onto the gentler sides of the Sikhs, especially the ones in their twilight years. “When I photograph a couple, I want to record the care and softness with which they speak to each other, the respect they show each other and the love that shines through it, for posterity,” he says, “because I don’t think the future generations will ever know such tenderness otherwise.”
It all started at home when he would photograph his nani ji (maternal grandmother), and soon enough, he found himself ambling down the streets of Punjab to make conversation with strangers who would pause for his camera for a moment of respite from their daily drudgery. “I just pray to God and leave home, hoping that I meet my subject, and I always do. I just know them when I see them,” Pannu says.
No matter how harsh the sun, Pannu’s lens knows how to mellow it down to a demure glow that lights up the faces of his subjects with a warmth that reveals every laugh line touching their eyes. “I do this consciously,” he says, ”I don’t use any artificial light and make my subjects stand against the natural light, so they are highlighted,” lending them an almost otherworldly glow, as if caught in a moment of bliss.
The brief is uncomplicated—to keep it “simple, raw and earthy,” and Pannu heavily leans on the universe to show him the way. “There’s a saying in Hindi: ‘Bin maange moti miley, maange miley na bheek’ (‘If you don’t ask for something, you might get the world’s riches; but if you forcefully demand something, you may end up with nothing’). I really believe in that, so I don’t force anything. Not my subjects, not even the composition. I don’t rush the process, and I listen to devotional songs like a bhajan or a qawwali before approaching my subjects,” he says.
In 2023, Pannu was on a trip to the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib (which roughly translates to “exalted court” in English) in Punjab’s Amritsar city. Also known as the Golden Temple owing to its gold-wrapped dome, the gurdwara is among the holiest sites for Sikhs across the world. There, he met an elderly man in his 70s, clad in pristine white, trudging towards the temple’s food hall. When Pannu walked up to him, the man almost instinctively agreed to being photographed even before the artist could ask.
“He trusted me intuitively and did not ask me anything, except one question: If I could give him a printout of his photo,” Pannu says. The reason he gave for this request is what reaffirmed the photographer’s faith in his calling. “He said that if he takes this photo home, his grandchildren, when they grow up and are my age, will be able to remember what he looked like, as there is no other photo of him at home.”
One can tell that the people Pannu documents have seldom imagined themselves being photographed outside of official reasons. Their bodies have slowed down after a lifetime of labor, leaving them with little time to look at the contours of their faces. Pannu’s camera fills that gap, acting like a mirror that reflects back their kindness to them, one portrait at a time.