Arvind-Pal S. Mandair - Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity

Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity

Edited by

Christopher Shackle, Gurharpal Singh & Arvind-pal Singh Mandair

First Published in 2001

by Curzon Press

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Editorial Matter 2001 Christopher Shackle,

Gurharpal Singh & Arvind-pal Singh Mandair

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ISBN 13: 978-0-700-71389-9 (hbk)

Contents

Editors

Gurinder Singh Mann

Jeevan Deol

Arvind-pal Singh Mandair

Balbinder Bhogal

Christopher Shackle

Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh

Gurharpal Singh

Darshan S. Tatla

Harjot Oberoi

Balbinder Bhogal is a Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Derby. He is completing his PhD on The Word of Guru Nanak: Hermeneutics, Nonduality and Skilful Means at SOAS, University of London.

Jeevan Deol is completing his PhD at St Johns College, University of Cambridge. His publications include The Minas and their Literature, Journal of the American Oriental Society (1998); and Surdas: Poet and Text the Sikh Tradition, Bulletin of SOAS (2000). He compiled entries in the catalogue of the major international exhibition Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms.

Arvind-pal Singh Mandair is a Research Fellow in the Department of the Study of Religions at SOAS, University of London. Besides Sikhism and North Indian religions, his interests include continental philosophy and cross-cultural theory. His publications include Religion and the Translatability of Cultures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). He was responsible for constructing and teaching the Sikh and Punjab Studies programme at Coventry University.

Gurinder Singh Mann is Kundan Kaur Kapany Professor of Sikh Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His publications include The Goindval Pothis: the Earliest Extant Source of the Sikh Canon (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Oriental Series 51, 1996); and The Making of Sikh Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is Director of the Columbia-UCSB Summer Programme in Punjab Studies at Chandigarh.

Harjot Oberoi is Professor of Indian History in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Christopher Shackle FBA is Professor of Modern Langages of South Asia at SOAS, University of London. Besides linguistics, his wide academic interests include both comparative literature and comparative religion. He has published extensively on Punjabi and Urdu, and is the compiler of An Introduction to the Sacred Language of the Sikhs (London: SOAS, 1983), and A Guru Nanak Glossary (2nd ed., New Delhi: Heritage, 1995).

Gurharpal Singh is the C.R. Parekh Professor of Indian Politics at the University of Hull. His most recent publication (co-edited with Ian Talbot) is Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999). He was formerly editor of the International Journal of Punjab Studies.

Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh is Professor of Religious Studies at Colby College. Her interests focus on poetics and feminist issues. She has published widely in the field of Indian Religions. Her recent books include The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and The Name of My Beloved: Translations of the Verses of the Sikh Gurus (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995).

Darshan S. Tatla is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Punjabi University, Patiala. His recent publications include Sikhs in North America (New York: Greenwood, 1991), and The Sikh Diaspora: the Search for Statehood (London: UCL Press, 1999).

Introduction: New Perspectives in Sikh Studies

Editors

Developments in any academic field are too dependent upon complex combinations of clusters of individual and team talent with more general changes in social trends and ideological fashions to make predicting patterns of growth and transformation anything other than a very risky business. It certainly now seems extraordinary that it should have been possible for one of us less than twenty years ago to question the status of Sikh studies as a field that was going to be able to claim genuinely viable academic existence in Western universities (Shackle 1985). That scepticism has for a while now seemed increasingly implausible, and it is certainly strikingly disproved by the variety and vitality displayed in the present volume of essays.

The book has developed from an international workshop held at SOAS on 2829th May 1998 under the joint auspices of De Montfort University and the SOAS Centre of South Asian Studies. The workshops title New Perspectives in Sikh Studies was intended to focus the discussion on the many lines of fresh inquiry being pursued by the growing numbers of scholars actively involved in Sikh studies with positions in Western universities, and this purpose was amply fulfilled in the liveliness of the ensuing debates between the participants who were brought together from both sides of the Atlantic, often for their first opportunity to meet face to face.

The opportunity was also provided for reflection upon the development of Sikh studies in the West and how these have typically come to differ from Indian Sikh studies. Whereas Indian scholars, clustered in the universities of Punjab and the surrounding area, are able to rely upon a central institutional position, if at the price of considerable political and ideological constraints, the freedom enjoyed by those in the West is counterbalanced by their lack of institutional density. As tends generally to be the case for any field of study whose practitioners are relatively isolated in their own institutions, international conferences and workshops and the collaborative volumes issuing therefrom have therefore had a particular importance for the development of Western Sikh studies, beginning little more than two decades ago on the West Coast of the United States with the conference organized at Berkeley by two of its leading American pioneers (Juergensmeyer and Barrier 1979).