Punjabi matrimony in New Zealand

A community older than most people realise

The first Sikhs known to have settled in New Zealand, the brothers Phuman Singh and Bir Singh Gill from Moga district, arrived in 1890, and a small wave of Punjabi men followed over the next twenty years until the 1899 Immigration Act closed the door. Those who stayed worked the land. By the late 1950s Punjabi Sikh families were dairy farming in the Waikato, and the first gurdwara in the country opened in Hamilton in 1977, a decade before Auckland had one.

That history still shapes where Punjabi families are. The 2023 Census counted 17,295 Indian New Zealanders in the Waikato, a region where Punjabi farming families are into their third and fourth generation. The much larger newer community is in South Auckland: Papatoetoe, Ōtāhuhu, Manurewa, Takanini and out to Flat Bush and Botany. The Bay of Plenty, with its kiwifruit and horticulture around Te Puke and Katikati, has grown fast enough that Tauranga now has two gurdwaras. Christchurch is the largest Punjabi community in the South Island by some distance.

So a Punjabi rishta in New Zealand is often a conversation between a family that has been here eighty years and a family that arrived in 2019. Both are Punjabi. They do not always want the same things.

What families here ask

They ask the questions they would have asked in Ludhiana or Jalandhar, plus a few that only make sense here.

Which pind, which got. Native place and community matter to some families and not at all to others. On Rishta, community is a field you fill in if you want to, a filter you can switch on, and a must-have if it is one. No preference is always an option, and the choice is private.

Sikh or Hindu. A Punjabi family is as likely to be Hindu as Sikh, and the big sites tend to fold the two together or force a choice. Here religion and community are separate fields, and mother tongue is a third, so a Punjabi Hindu Khatri and a Punjabi Sikh Jat are both described exactly.

Does he keep kesh. Every Sikh man’s profile answers it. Every Sikh profile says whether the person is Amritdhari and how practising they are. It saves a conversation nobody enjoys.

Settled, or on a visa. The question families here ask first and most quietly. Residency status is on every profile and in every search, and so is whether someone is open to living in the other country.

Vegetarian or not. A field, and a filter.

Will they move. New Zealanders can live and work in Australia without a visa, and many Punjabi families here have cousins in Melbourne or Sydney. Search covers both countries if you want it to.

What a Punjabi family does not want

A public gallery. The Punjabi community in New Zealand is close enough that a photo on an open profile will be recognised at the gurdwara on Sunday. That is why daughters say no to the big sites, and why their mothers end up asking around at langar instead.

On Rishta there is no gallery. Photos are private until she approves a particular person. She decides whether every approved man can find her, only men who match her preferences, or nobody except her matchmaker. Phone numbers and emails are never shown. And every profile has been ID-checked and read by a person before it is visible to anyone, so a man writing from Papatoetoe is a man from Papatoetoe.

From interest to roka

An interest on Rishta always carries a personal message, so it cannot be sent in bulk. If she accepts, both see each other’s photos and can message and call inside the site. When the families are ready, our guides cover the parts that are different here: the roka when one family is in Auckland and one in Punjab, the Anand Karaj at a New Zealand gurdwara, the culturally arranged marriage visa if the match is in India, and registering the marriage so the ceremony counts in law.

If you want a person to do the looking, a matchmaker is available to women and men alike, as a separate paid service, and never from your own city.

Punjabi, across both countries

The Sikh and Punjabi pages for New Zealand, Australia and Melbourne describe the same site from each side of the Tasman. Everything is one search if you want it to be.