Academic History and Sikh Studies

Abstract

The last three decades can be described as the golden age of modern Sikh Studies. We now have five chairs in Sikh Studies in the United States, three in Canada and two in England. For every single year of the twenty-first century, a major university press has published a landmark book in the area of Sikh Studies. Funding bodies like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada have released tens of thousands of dollars in support of Sikh Studies. Major journals like History of Religions and the open-access Religions have published Special Issues fully devoted to highlighting advances in the field of Sikh Studies. Practitioners within the field have launched their own specialized journal: Sikh Formations. Graduate students trained and nurtured under the auspices of Sikh Studies programs have started finding employment in Departments of Religion. The evolving digital commons now feature blogs, podcasts and YouTube lectures that routinely host prominent scholars in the field. However, despite these phenomenal advances a key paradigmatic shift keeps eluding Sikh Studies: contemporary Sikh public sphere generally speaking has very low trust for all that modern scholarship has to offer, whether it be in sociology, history, gender studies or theology. Such trust deficit is particularly noticeable when it comes to the craft of history, a core discipline within modern Sikh Studies.