Sikh Tradition Research Articles

“Extremely Stupid Guidelines”: On The Development of Historical Questions Around Guru Tegh Bahadur’s Martyrdom

ABSTRACT In 1675, Mughal authorities beheaded Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru and, today, the martyrdom has become a highly contested historical question within scholarly circles. This article investigates the emergence of the event as a historical question and how the emphasis of historical fact-finding refashioned scholarly approaches to the Sikh tradition in the colonial and postcolonial periods. I end by exploring how the famous Sikh intellectual and politician, Sirdar Kapur Singh (1909-1986), drew upon the Sikh tradition to challenge the very premises of such historiographical framing in his landmark essay, “Who Killed Guru Tegh Bahadur?” and the limits to his challenge. I ask: What do we make of Kapur Singh’s frustration and disgust at the history writing that came to dominate the Sikh tradition? I show how Kapur Singh does not transcend the epistemological constraints of history through a better or more accurate rendition of the past. Instead, he disrupts the historiographical operation in his frustration with history writing and what he calls its “extremely stupid guidelines.”

Religion-making in South Asia: An interstitial perspective

The study of ‘Hinduism’ in contemporary academia has generated considerable controversy. Many scholars have argued that the idea of a single ancient religion is difficult to substantiate based on the historical record. A common alternative position is that Hinduism is a colonial construct, without well-defined historical antecedents. This paper contributes to a scholarly middle ground, which provides an empirically based yet still contingent analysis of the evolution of ‘Hinduism’, by drawing on evidence from the Sikh tradition. In doing so, it also draws on approaches which interpret Islam as a discursive tradition, subject to contestable representations, shaped by conditions of knowledge and power, as well as by collective aspirations. Sikh attempts at self-definition included distinguishing their tradition from the two larger, pre-existing traditions of Muslims and Hindus in an explicit and self-conscious manner. In doing so, Sikh leaders recognised ‘Hindu’ as a religious category to some degree, well before the colonial period.

Who owns religion? Scholars, Sikhs and the public sphere

ABSTRACT This paper revisits the question “Who Owns Religion?”, in the context of a recent analysis of debates in religious studies, marked by controversy and friction between members of religious traditions and scholars writing about those traditions. Habermas’s concept of a public sphere is at the center of an analysis by Laurie Patton that uses six case studies, including one involving the Sikh tradition. The paper reviews this conceptual framing and the accompanying analysis, provides a reconsideration of the Sikh case, which pertains to the construction of religious boundaries in that tradition, and draws more general lessons, including the functioning of academia as well as the contextual appropriateness of the concept of the public sphere. It argues that “eruptions” in the public sphere can be reduced by improvements in academic knowledge production, to provide a better foundation for navigating differences in modes of reasoning, or between the religious and the secular.

Representing Sikhs and Sikhi in Museum Spaces

This paper provides a dual perspective on an exhibit of Sikh art from the Kapany Collection that was curated at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from January to March 2022. The collection was donated to the Sikh Foundation International by Dr. Narinder Singh Kapany, a scientist, entrepreneur and art collector. The exhibit was a collaboration between the Foundation and the University, and was accompanied by an educational exhibit on the history of Sikhs in the United States, particularly California. This paper has two parts. First, Tauna Coulson, a professional art curator, describes her experiences of curating the exhibit. In the second part, Tejpaul Singh Bainiwal, co-founder of the Sikh American History Project, provides a broader perspective and analysis on the question of representing Sikhs and the Sikh tradition in museum spaces, along with a commentary on this particular effort.

Crisis of Identity in 20th Century: The Case of the Sikhs in India

Punjab has been in turmoil since the partition of British India and now its predicament is the outcome of blend of factors. These factors may include mixing of religion with politics, central machination, vote-bank polities and obvious economic grievances. In the post-partition period, the Sikhs demanded affirmative discrimination largely based on colonial heritage job and regional autonomy. They started using ethnic symbols like history, geography, culture and land to gain sympathies of the masses and to attain greater political autonomy and economic benefits. Unfortunately, the Congress considered their struggle for identity disturbing for the secular outlook of India and put this social issue into the conceptual framework of communal politics and aligned it with Sikh tradition. The situation was politically engineered by Congress through mixing religion with politics and it took decisive actions following the divide and rule policy and extracted electoral benefits out of it. The militant operations against fellow the Sikh citizens and manipulated actions radicalized the society which created social unrest and urged the Sikhs to demand a separate state. This article has highlighted the Sikh political struggle for the
 recognition of their separate identity and demand for Khalistan. The critically analyzed historical study is based on qualitative methods by using secondary sources. 
 Punjab has been in turmoil since the partition of British India and now its predicament is the outcome of blend of factors. These factors may include mixing of religion with politics, central machination, vote-bank polities and obvious economic grievances. In the post-partition period, the Sikhs demanded affirmative discrimination largely based on colonial heritage job and regional autonomy. They started using ethnic symbols like history, geography, culture and land to gain sympathies of the masses and to attain greater political autonomy and economic benefits. Unfortunately, the Congress considered their struggle for identity disturbing for the secular outlook of India and put this social issue into the conceptual framework of communal politics and aligned it with Sikh tradition. The situation was politically engineered by Congress through mixing religion with politics and it took decisive actions following the divide and rule policy and extracted electoral benefits out of it. The militant operations against fellow the Sikh citizens and manipulated actions radicalized the society which created social unrest and urged the Sikhs to demand a separate state. This article has highlighted the Sikh political struggle for the recognition of their separate identity and demand for Khalistan. The critically analyzed historical study is based on qualitative methods by using secondary sources.

Religion, Morality, and Economics: Insights from the Sikh Tradition

This paper analyses the Sikh religious tradition in light of research on the connections between religion, morality, and economics. Sikhism provides a compact and well-documented example of the creation and evolution of a religious community, in which moral guidance is paramount, but interacts with material incentives and material conditions. The time scale of this case, and its geographic and conceptual location in juxtaposition to Hinduism and Islam, make Sikh tradition a useful additional data point for analyses of the relationship of religion, morality, and economics. At the same time, considering the Sikh tradition in these more general conceptual frameworks provides a clearer understanding of this specific case.

Birha

AbstractFocusing on early twentieth-century Punjab, this article considers how situating the region into historical context circumscribes the literary by tying it to place, thereby creating a seamless economy of exchange. In contrast, noting the refusal of literary and artistic output to be adjudicated into context, this article asks, Is it possible to consider the encounters within the Punjabi literary and artistic scene through a dislocation rather than a circuitous exchange within a singular Punjab? The author ponders this question by considering how analyses centered on exchange are unavoidable when situated within historicity—analyses that emerged in the colonial period as a central way to understand Sikh literary production. Such a grasp on Punjab, the Sikh tradition, and historicity, however, is loosened when we consider the nonhuman. The nonhuman, in other words, challenges the overt focus on history, conquest, and vision that undergirds our understanding of the Punjabi literary scene by functioning as an impediment to mediation, translation, and recognition. The focus on the nonhuman is not to offer a more robust or precise recognition to Punjab but to disarticulate the very contours of recognition through a focus on the eye.

The Rise of Sikh Empire and Its Influence on the Indian Subcontinent

The Sikh Empire was a major power in the Indian subcontinent during the 19th century. It was founded by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1799 and lasted until its annexation by the British Empire in 1849. The empire was based in the Punjab region, and its capital was the city of Lahore. Maharaja Ranjit Singh unified the various Sikh factions in the region and expanded the empire to include much of the Punjab, as well as parts of present-day Afghanistan, Kashmir. The Sikh Empire was known for its religious tolerance and military prowess, and it was a major regional power in South Asia. The culture of the empire was a mix of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh traditions. The empire was eventually defeated by the British Raj in the Second Anglo-Sikh War, but its legacy remains to this day. This essay explores the Sikh Empire's ascent from the late 18th century to its fall in the middle of the 19th century. and its lasting impact on the Indian subcontinent. It looks at the rise of the Sikh Empire under the leadership of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the consolidation of the Sikh Empire, and how its political and military power was used to shape the region. It considers the political influence of the Sikh Empire, its impact on culture, art, and literature, and how it left a legacy of religious and political tolerance and an appreciation of diversity in the region. The demise of the Sikh Empire and its legacy in contemporary India are covered last. The paper concludes that the Sikh Empire had a significant part in shaping the Indian subcontinent's history and culture.

The Use of Brajbhasha in Sikh Contexts

Abstract This article connects the Sikh tradition to wider cultural and literary worlds by examining how gurbilās literature—written from the end of the seventeenth century into the nineteenth—is tied to the wider Braj literary world and more specifically to Braj martial poetry. Gurbilās literature—or “the play or pastimes of the Guru”—refers to a collection of biographies of the Sikh Gurus emphasizing the narration of life stories of Guru Gobind Singh and his heroic deeds. This essay focuses on the portrayal of an important battle widely narrated in Sikh history, the battle of Bhangani (dated to 1688), in three gurbilās texts. Its goal is to examine two main issues: first, how these three narratives, and gurbilās literature more broadly, interact along multiple poles with the wider world of Braj literary traditions, specifically with Braj martial poetry; and second, how these texts provide us with material to think about the context of performance of these texts. It concludes with a broad reflection on how these three narratives represent a textual microcosm that reveals the many connections gurbilās literature—and more broadly the Sikh cultural world—has with other genres and traditions.

Domestic deities: Indo-Caribbean spatial territorialization and sacred space in South Richmond Hill, Queens

ABSTRACT Shaped by immigrants, the occupancy patterns and visual cultures of American urban neighborhoods have continually shifted over time. The South Richmond Hill section of Queens, New York demonstrates the socio-spatial theories of ethnic succession, collective memory, and heterotopia in relation to participatory place-making. Once home to German, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants and their multigenerational descendants from the early 1900s through the 1970s, the spiritual landscape of the neighborhood – today known as Little Guyana-Trinidad and Tobago – has largely shifted away from its European immigrant origins toward Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jain faith traditions. Here, uniquely Hindu spiritual markings reveal a globalized and religiously diverse neighborhood, as well as an increasingly multicultural American society writ large. This research identifies seven primary elements – jhandi prayer flags, ceremonial gates, garden shrines, living room window deities, adapted house temples, storefront temples, and pooja shops – that define the parameters of Indo-Caribbean socio-spatial territorialization in South Richmond Hill.

The violent-nonviolent binary of democratic protest: phantasmagoria, gursikhi, and Khalsa sovereignty

ABSTRACT The connection between the recolonization of India’s economy through neoliberal reforms and the re-emergence of rhetoric around Khalistan during the farmers’ protest in Delhi are examined in this article. Despite the use of humanistic principles based on the Sikh tradition during the protest to draw attention to issues around food and land insecurity, lack of education, and poverty the Indian state creates phantasmagoria around the issue of Khalistan to enact economic liberalization while, counterintuitively, destabilizing its democratic institutions. I argue that the Delhi Morcha requires the dynamics of religion, politics, and violence in democracies needs to be rethought.

Knowledge Meals, Research Relationships, and Postqualitative Offerings: Enacting Langar (a Sikh Tradition of a Shared Meal) as Pedagogy of Doctoral Supervision

In research, particularly within the pedagogies of doctoral supervision, the significance of relational experiences is less explored and understood. Such relational aspects determine the nature and quality of the doctoral research output and are a crucial element of successful doctoral completions. A conscious assessment, estimation and management of the vulnerable sensibilities surrounding these relation fosters a deeper insight into the way student-researchers and supervisors experience their doctoral journeys. In this paper, to feature the importance of these relational experiences and to accentuate ideas and concepts for pedagogical change, my co-authors and I forsake the repetitious and employ Langar - a Sikh cultural practice of congregational cooking and consumption of a shared meal as a postqualitative methodological alternative. We utilise the innovative insights of Langar to reflect on our own research experiences and demonstrate the complexities of ‘becoming’ researchers to explicate how a sometimes-distant cultural practice could induce a shift in our research thinking. In context of methodological approaches, and within an educational framework, we argue that such a shift may instil freshness into the way doctoral journeys and cognate supervision pedagogies are viewed, navigated, and experienced. Methodological innovation, we submit, may occasion pedagogical transformation.

Religion, Morality and Economics: Insights from the Sikh Tradition

Religion, Morality and Economics: Insights from the Sikh Tradition

The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition, by Harjot OBEROI, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 494 pages

The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition, by Harjot OBEROI, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 494 pages. An article from journal Culture (Volume 17, Number 1-2, 1997, pp. 5-139), on Érudit.

Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition

AbstractThis article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

Introduction to Special Issue: Exploring Sikh Traditions and Heritage

It was quite an exciting moment when the Religions Editorial Office reached out to me to be a guest editor of a Special Issue (SI) on a broad theme of “Exploring Sikh Traditions and Heritage” for the celebrated Open Access Online Journal, Religions [...]

The Institution of the Akal Takht: The Transformation of Authority in Sikh History

The Akal Takht is considered to be the central seat of authority in the Sikh tradition. This article uses theories of legitimacy and authority to explore the validity of the authority and legitimacy of the Akal Takht and its leaders throughout time. Starting from the initial institution of the Akal Takht and ending at the Akal Takht today, the article applies Weber’s three types of legitimate authority to the various leaderships and custodianships throughout Sikh history. The article also uses Berger and Luckmann’s theory of the symbolic universe to establish the constant presence of traditional authority in the leadership of the Akal Takht. Merton’s concept of group norms is used to explain the loss of legitimacy at certain points of history, even if one or more types of Weber’s legitimate authority match the situation. This article shows that the Akal Takht’s authority, as with other political religious institutions, is in the reciprocal relationship between the Sikh population and those in charge. This fluidity in authority is used to explain and offer a solution on the issue of authenticity and authority in the Sikh tradition.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Exploring Gender and Sikh Traditions

Gender analysis has not received a great deal of attention within Sikh Studies (Jakobsh 2003) [...]

Akali Dal’s Dilemma in relegating an ethnic agenda to moderate politics: An empirical analysis of the dera controversy and sacrilege issue

ABSTRACT The article argues that the moderation of Akali politics brings electoral gains for the party so long as it is in congruence with Sikh ethnic agenda. However, any drive for moderation of ideology beyond marked boundaries, relegating Sikh issues to the backburner has backfired for the party socially and politically. This was demonstrated during the assembly elections (2017) when the party tried to appease Dera Sirsa for electoral considerations, even compromising with Sikh traditions. As a result, the party suffered heavy electoral losses due to Sikh anguish over its soft attitude towards the Dera controversy and desecration of Guru Granth Sahib.

Interrogating Gender in Sikh Tradition and Practice

In contemporary Sikh society, what we consider religious is constantly being challenged, but for Sikhs, what remain constant are Sikhi’s sacred texts—they continue to be the paramount teacher and guide. Within this consistency, I ask the question: how can Sikh feminist ideas of representation and identity find expression in response to our understanding/practice of our faith, our institutions, and of the everyday Sikh symbols? This paper critically examines the gendered nature of the Guru Granth, practices within the gurdwaras, and focuses on a part of the Rahit Maryada (Code of Conduct) as an area of exploration in the understanding of the everyday ascribed five symbols of Sikhi (punj kakar) through a feminist lens. I undertake this in order to gain a gendered appreciation of how the scriptures, religious institutions, and the articles of faith resonate with the feminine.