Chicagoਸ਼ਿਕਾਗੋ

Chicago is the largest city in Illinois and the American Midwest, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, with 2,746,388 residents in the 2020 census and about 9.62 million people in its metropolitan area. Its Punjabi community is the Midwest centre of Punjabi America: rooted on Devon Avenue in the city and in suburbs such as Palatine, Schaumburg and Naperville, and served by the largest gurdwara in the Midwest.

Where is Chicago, and why do Punjabis live there?

Chicago stands on the western shore of Lake Michigan in Cook County, whose county seat it is, at the historic Chicago Portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. Settled around 1780, it was incorporated as a town on 12 August 1833 and as a city on 4 March 1837, and it grew into the third most populous city in the United States, an international hub for finance, commerce and transport, and the largest railroad hub in North America.

Punjabis live here because Chicago offered what professional migrants after 1965 were looking for: universities, hospitals, engineering and technology jobs, and a big, affordable metropolitan area to raise families in. Sikh students had come earlier and mostly returned home under the old immigration rules. After the mid 1960s changes to United States immigration policy, doctors, engineers and scientists settled, brought their extended families, and built institutions that drew more Punjabis to the city and its suburbs. Chicago is listed under Punjabi places in the United States.

What do the numbers say?

The American Community Survey for 2017 to 2021 counted 5,711 Punjabi Americans in the Chicago and Naperville combined statistical area, 0.06 per cent of its population, the tenth largest Punjabi concentration in the country in those tables, and 6,195 Punjabi Americans across Illinois. These are language and ancestry based survey counts, the standard measure for Punjabi America.

The United States census does not ask about religion, so every Sikh figure here is an estimate and is labelled that way. In 2020 the census counted Sikh as an ethnicity for the first time: 840 Illinois residents recorded Sikh alone, and the standard derived estimate built from those counts puts the state's total Sikh population at about 5,087. For Cook County, which holds Chicago, 328 residents recorded Sikh alone and the derived estimate is about 2,062 Sikhs. No city only figure for Chicago exists in those tables, so this entry does not invent one.

Devon Avenue and the suburbs

The community's best known address is Devon Avenue, a major east west street at 6400 North in the city's address system. The stretch between Ravenswood Avenue and California Avenue is Chicago's Little India, also called the Desi corridor, described as one of the best known and largest communities of its kind in North America, lined with South Asian shops, restaurants and grocery stores. The first location of the Patel Brothers grocery chain opened on Devon in 1974. Devon is a shared South Asian corridor, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi as well as Punjabi, and parts of it have been renamed for figures including Gandhi and Jinnah.

Much of Punjabi Chicago now lives in the suburbs. A South Asian American study using the 2010 census counted South Asian Americans at 12.02 per cent of Schaumburg, 12.96 per cent of Hoffman Estates and 8.55 per cent of Naperville, with Chicago, Naperville, Schaumburg, Aurora, Skokie and Hoffman Estates holding the largest South Asian numbers in Illinois. Those figures cover South Asians as a whole, not Punjabis alone, but the gurdwaras tell the Punjabi part of the story: the suburban temples at Palatine and Wheaton serve sangat from Naperville, Aurora and the western suburbs.

Gurdwaras and Punjabi institutions

The anchor institution is the Sikh Religious Society of Chicago, based in Palatine, a northwestern suburb. Incorporated in 1972, the society manages what its profile calls the largest Gurdwara Sahib in Midwest America, at 1280 Winnetka Street, Palatine, on a campus spread over fourteen acres. It opened in 1979 as the first gurdwara in the Greater Chicago metropolitan area, and at the time it was the only one in the whole Midwest: families drove in from Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and Iowa. Its Gurmat School teaches Punjabi language, Gurbani kirtan and Sikh history, and its langar kitchen serves the thousands of Sikh families of the region.

Inside the city, the Devon Gurdwara Sahib of Chicago stands at 2341 West Devon Avenue, in the heart of the Desi corridor. To the west, the Illinois Sikh Community Center in Wheaton, established in 2010 at 2131 Creekside Drive, serves the Sikh sangat of DuPage County and the western suburbs, including Wheaton, Naperville and Aurora, with Sunday classes for children in Gurmat Gyan, Gurmukhi and kirtan instruments.

Culture has its own home too. The Punjabi Cultural Society of Chicago, a nonprofit based in Palatine, works to encourage Punjabi culture in the Chicago area and the wider Midwest. It runs Rangla Punjab, described as the premier Punjabi variety show, and PCS Night, provides dhol players for mainstream events, and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2019 at the College of DuPage before more than 1,000 attendees.

A community built after 1965

The Greater Chicago Sikh community began to grow quickly after the 1965 changes to United States immigration policy. Through the 1960s Sikh students came to Chicago universities and mostly went home again, because the rules of the time expected it. The professionals who followed settled for good, meeting at first in private homes and rented public spaces in the early 1970s, then incorporating the Sikh Religious Society in 1972, breaking ground at Palatine in 1975 and opening the gurdwara in 1979.

Three generations on, Punjabi Chicago is suburban and established: gurdwaras with Punjabi schools, a cultural society filling auditoriums, and families spread from Devon Avenue to Naperville. It is the northern anchor of Punjabi America between the coastal heartlands of California and New York and newer southern centres such as Houston. For the full map, see Punjabi places in the United States.