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The Parmigiano Punjabis
A documentary chronicles the Sikhs who saved the Italian cheese industry
Italians abandoned the formaggio factories as it meant long hours and hard labour. But for immigrant Sikhs, it was a ticket to a better life.
A documentary chronicles the Sikhs who saved the Italian cheese industry
Italians abandoned the formaggio factories as it meant long hours and hard labour. But for immigrant Sikhs, it was a ticket to a better life.
It's past midnight when Onkar Singh bustles into a dairy farm in northern Italy's Pessina Cremonese comune.
Rows of Friesian cows nod a greeting, some a little sleepy themselves. The elderly Sikh looks them over, hoses them down and sets up the automatic milking system -a task that wraps up around daybreak.
It's exhausting, and Singh is aware that not many Italians want to do this job."They feel this work is dirty and don't have the time for it. Waking up in the night, working in wet clothes -the Italians don't like it." For the first-generation immigrant from Punjab though, this job has been the gateway to a better life.
As Singh's day winds down, Inderjit Singh Bains gets started. He works at a cheese factory in Pessina Cremonese, and over two daily truck runs, collects milk from the area's dairy farms. "When I first came to Italy, I did not wish to work with formaggio (Italian for cheese)," Bains says, as he skims the giant vats of milk churning in the factory. But after nine years at the family-run factory, he finally feels at home.
Singh and Bains are among the numerous Sikh immigrants in the region, working on dairy farms and in factories producing the famed Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano cheeses. They milk the cows, skim the latte, pack the cheese into moulds, and stack the wheels in the cascina -the storage area with sturdy wooden shelves.When the long hours and hard work pushed local workers into white-collar jobs, the Sikh migrants moved in. A new documentary, `Sikh Formaggio' explores how the community has now become vital to the region's formaggio industry .
The catalyst for the project, says director Katie Wise, was a newspaper article that chronicled the Sikhs' contribution to the Italian cheese industry . But Wise and her co-directors -Devyn Bisson and Dan Duran -soon realized that they had noth ing more than the article to go with. They made some cold calls to cheese factories in Italy with the help of a university student who spoke the language. Some owners slammed down their phones, others were confused and couldn't help. They managed to get a lone contact -a Sikh who didn't work in the industry but assured them that he would connect them to those who did, but only after they actually reached Italy. The team, youngsters barely out of their teens, hopped on a plane, hoping they would somehow find enough material to make a film. It was a gamble that would pay off.
Sikhs have been working as agriculture labourers in Italy for a while now but they became vital to the cheese industry only in the 1990s. Sixteen percent of Pessina Cremonese's population now comprises immigrants, mostly of Indian origin. In 2011, a gurudwara was constructed in the area, an indicator of the community's growing significance. "They truly saved our economy ," says the mayor of Cremona in the documentary .
The workers interviewed in `Sikh Formaggio' say they have now comfortably settled in their adopted country but speak of the age-old struggle -retaining their customs while adapting to the western life. Singh had cut his hair to fit in when he first moved to Italy . Some years later, after his "life was settled, work was good and the situation improved", he felt comfortable enough in his own skin to grow his hair and return to the turbaned look."He realized that nobody was judging him, nobody was afraid of him," says his daughter Jaspinder, who is studying foreign languages and international trade at the University of Verona.
The education their children have received will ensure they don't need to find work in farms and factories, says Singh.The next generation is likely to opt for white-collar jobs instead of the manual labour that the cheese industry involves.A vacuum again looms in the distance for the formaggio factories.
Source:- The Parmigiano Punjabis - The Times of India
