The Adi Granth ('original book'), the primary scripture of the Sikhs, comprises approximately 3,000 hymns. Although the authorship of the hymns is well recorded, the history of the compilaiton of the Adi Granth - the creation of the Sikh 'canon' - is the subject of considerable speculation and debate. In this book, Gurinder Mann attempts to construct a comprehensive picture of the making of Sikh scripture, drawing on the recently discovered early manuscriots as well as the extensive secondary literature on the topic. His findings on some key issues differ from the traditional Sikh position and from the hypotheses of the other 20th-century scholars, as well as raising some entirely fresh questions. Mann's revised and expanded picture of the history of the text and institution of Sikh scripture will be of interest not only to scholars of Sikhism and Sikh religionists, but to scholars of comparative canon formation.

It is commonly assumed that all Sikhs are the same, but the very existence of different groups who have varying beliefs and practices within the Sikh community shows that a corporate identity for the Sikh community is not possible and serves to alienate a substantial proportion of Sikhs from the overall fold of the Sikh faith. Introducing the beliefs and practices of a range of individual Sikh groups, this book addresses the issue of Sikh identity across the Sikh community as a whole but from the viewpoint of different types of Sikh. Examining the historical development of Sikhism from the period of Guru Nanak to the present day, the author takes an in-depth look at five groups in the Sikh community - the Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha; the Namdharis; the Ravidasis; the Valmikis; and the Sikh Dharma of the Western hemisphere (associated with the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization - 3HO). Their history, beliefs and practices are explored, as well as their diverse and shared identities. Concluding that there is no authoritative yardstick with which to assess the issue of Sikh identity, the author highlights Sikhism's links to its Hindu past and suggests a federal Sikh identity with one or two fundamental beliefs at the core and individual groups left to express their own unique beliefs and practices.

This timely and significant study explores the reasons behind the rise in Sikh militancy over the 1970s and 1980s. It also evaluates the violent response of the Indian State in fuelling and suppressing the Sikh separatist movement, resulting in a tragic sequence of events which has included the raiding of the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The book reveals the role in this movement of a section of young semi-literate Sikh peasantry who were disaffected by the Green Revolution and the commercialisation of agriculture in Punjab. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Deol examines the role of popular mass media in the revitalisation of religion during this period, and the subsequent emergence of sharper religious boundaries.

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The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies innovatively combines the ways in which scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, religious studies, literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics have integrated the study of Sikhism within a wide range of critical and postcolonial perspectives on the nature of religion, violence, gender, ethno-nationalism, and revisionist historiography. A number of essays within this collection also provide a more practical dimension, written by artists and practitioners of the tradition. The handbook is divided into eight thematic sections that explore different 'expressions' of Sikhism. Historical, literary, ideological, institutional, and artistic expressions are considered in turn, followed by discussion of Sikhs in the Diaspora, and of caste and gender in the Panth. Each section begins with an essay by a prominent scholar in the field, providing an overview of the topic. Further essays provide detail and further treat the fluid, multivocal nature of both the Sikh past and the present. The handbook concludes with a section considering future directions in Sikh Studies.

Sikhism, one of the major spiritual-philosophical traditions of India, is often missing from discussions of cross-cultural philosophy. In this introduction, Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair, an internationally acknowledged expert in Sikh studies, provides the first rigorous engagement in the West with Sikh philosophy. Sensitive both to the historical formation of Sikh thought, and to the decolonial context in which he writes, Mandair examines some of the key concepts of Sikh philosophy and how they inform its vision of life. He asks what Sikh philosophical concepts tell us about the nature of reality, the relationship between mind/self/ego, and whether it is possible to discern broad contours of a Sikh logic, epistemology and ontology. Additionally, the book looks at how these concepts address broader themes such as the body, health and well-being, creation and cosmology, death and rebirth, the nature of action and intention, bioethics and, a theme that undergirds every chapter, spirituality. Each chapter concludes with a set of bullet points highlighting the key concepts discussed, a set of questions for further discussion and teachings points to aid discussion. Through this much-needed introduction we understand the place of Sikh Philosophy within modern Sikh studies and why the philosophical quest became marginalized in contemporary Sikh studies. Most importantly, we recognize the importance of looking beyond the well-trodden terrain of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers and involving Sikh philosophical thought in the emergent field of world philosophies.

This pocket-sized paperback is ideal for travelers, students and spiritual seekers. Simple Guides Sikhism will help you to understand what it means to be a Sikh (especially the guru-disciple relationship), recognize the key festivals of the Sikh year as well as the different aspects of Sikh worship and practice. The guide will also help you to avoid faux pas in conversation, in travelling and in personal relationships.Contents: . History (including How a guru is perceived and Punjabi heritage). Teachings (including Universality of truth and Monotheism). Sikh Traditions (including The caste system and What is Dharma?). Scriptures (including Historical Context and The Dasam Granth). The Gurdwara and Sikh Worship (including Family gurdwaras and History of the Golden Temple). Festivals (including Gurpurb and Diwali). The Khalsa (including Baisakhi day and Sahaidhari Sikhs). Rites of Passage (including Birth and Wedding ceremony). Sikh Sects (including Namdhari Sikhs and The 3H organization. Sikh Diaspora (including Migration to East Africa and Integration)

This book is a major intervention in the understanding of the dynamics of internal migration in South Asia. It traces the historical roots of certain migrant Sikh communities to the south and north-east India; chronicles their social, religious and economic practices; and examines peculiar identity formations. This first-of-its-kind empirical study examines the socio-economic conditions of Sikhs in the Deccan and the North-East who are believed to be the descendants of the soldiers in Maharaja Ranjit Singh's army despatched to the two regions in the early nineteenth century. It draws on extensive ethnographic accounts to present the social realities of the different communities, including language, religion, culture, occupation, caste, marriage and kinship, and agency. It also questions the idea of Sikh homogeneity that many within the community have come to believe in, while revealing both differences and similarities. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, migration and diaspora studies, religion, especially Sikh studies, cultural studies, as well as the Sikh diaspora worldwide.

The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies innovatively combines the ways in which scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, religious studies, literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics have integrated the study of Sikhism within a wide range of critical and postcolonial perspectives on the nature of religion, violence, gender, ethno-nationalism, and revisionist historiography. A number of essays within this collection also provide a more practical dimension, written by artists and practitioners of the tradition. The Handbook is divided into eight thematic sections that explore different 'expressions' of Sikhism. Historical, literary, ideological, institutional, and artistic expressions are considered in turn, followed by discussion of Sikhs in the Diaspora, and of caste and gender in the Panth. Each section begins with an essay by a prominent scholar in the field, providing an overview of the topic. Further essays provide detail and further treat the fluid, multivocal nature of both the Sikh past and the present. The Handbook concludes with a section considering future directions in Sikh Studies.

Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of the material aspects of Sikh identity, showing how material objects, as well as holy sites, and texts, embody and represent the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social construction. Widening traditional scholarly emphasis on holy sites and texts alone to include consideration of iconic objects, such as garments and weaponry, Murphy moves further and examines the parallel relationships among sites, texts, and objects. She reveals that objects have played dramatically different roles across regimes-signifers of authority in one, mere possessions in another-and like Sikh texts, which have long been a resource for the construction of Sikh identity, material objects have served as a means of imagining and representing the past. Murphy's deft and nuanced study of the complex role objects have played and continue to play in Sikh history and memory will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Sikh history and culture.

In the Punjab, a culture of migration and mobility had already emerged in the nineteenth century. Imperial policies produced a category of hypermobile Sikhs, who left their villages in Punjab to seek their fortunes in South East Asia, Australia, America and Canada. The practices of the British Indian government and the Canada government offer telling instances of the exercise of governmentality through which both old imperialism and the new Empire assert their sovereignty. This book focuses on the Komagata Maru episode of 1914. This Japanese ship was chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Sikh businessman from Malaya. It carried 376 passengers from Punjab and was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure and forced to return to Kolkata where the passengers were fired at, imprisoned or kept under surveillance. The author isolates juridical procedures, tactics and apparatus of security through which the British Empire exercised power on imperial subjects by investigating the significance of this incident to colonial and postcolonial migration. Juxtaposing public archives including newspapers, official documents and reports against private archives and interviews of descendants, the book analyses the legalities and machineries of surveillance that regulate the movements of people in the old and new Empire. Addressing contemporary discourse on neo-imperialism and resistance, migration, diaspora, multiculturalism and citizenship, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of diaspora studies, post colonialism, minority studies, migration studies, multiculturalism and Sikh /Punjab and South Asian studies.

As religion and politics become ever more intertwined, relationships between religion and political parties are of increasing global political significance. This handbook responds to that development, providing important results of current research involving religion and politics, focusing on: democratisation, democracy, party platform formation, party moderation and secularisation, social constituency representation and interest articulation. Covering core issues, new debates, and country case studies, the handbook provides a comprehensive overview of fundamentals and new directions in the subject. Adopting a comparative approach, it examines the relationships between religion and political parties in a variety of contexts, regions and countries with a focus on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Contributions cover such topics as: religion, secularisation and modernisation; religious fundamentalism and terrorism; the role of religion in conflict resolution and peacebuilding; religion and its connection to state, democratisation and democracy; and regional case studies covering Asia, the Americas, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa. This comprehensive handbook provides crucial information for students, researchers and professionals researching the topics of politics, religion, comparative politics, secularism, religious movements, political parties and interest groups, and religion and sociology.

This book examines the constructions and representations of male and female Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture through the consideration of the role of violence as constitutive of Sikh identity. How do Sikh men and women construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? The book explores Indian literature and culture to understand the role of violence and the feminization of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, as well as identity formation of Sikh women who are either virtually erased from narratives, bodily eliminated through honor killings, or constructed and represented as invisible. It looks at the role of violence during critical junctures in Sikh history, including the Mughal rule, the British colonial period, the Partition of India, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India, and the terror of 9/11 in the United States. The author analyzes how violence reconstitutes gender roles and sexuality within various cultural and national spaces in India and the diaspora. She also highlights questions related to women's agency and their negotiation of traumatic memories for empowering identities. The book will interest scholars, researchers, and students of postcolonial English literature, contemporary Indian literature, Sikh studies, diaspora studies, global studies, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, history, sociology, media and films studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and South Asian studies.

In 1812, Sir John Malcom, a Lieutenant General in the British Army wrote "A Sketch of the Sikhs," commonly believed to be the first account of the Sikhs written by a non-Sikh. In truth, soldiers, travelers, diplomats, missionaries, and scholars had provided accounts for many years before that. Drawing on this difficult-to-find material, the editors of this volume have compiled a unique source that offers a fascinating insight into the early developments in Sikh history. From the first ever written accounts of the Sikhs by Persian chroniclers of the Moghul Emperor to the travel diary of an Englishwoman, this volume contains material invaluable to those studying the evolution of the Sikh religion.

This book explores a traumatic event known throughout India as Operation Bluestar. During the Operation, the Indian army entered one of Sikhism's most sacred shrines, the Darbar Sahib in the city of Amritsar, to dislodge militants who had taken shelter within. Among the many who died during Operation Bluestar was the militant leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who is now remembered and commemorated as a martyr. Sikhs revere their martyrs. Images and religious souvenirs of martyrs share space with posters and portraiture of the ten Sikh Gurus. The visual idiom is a key form of remembering the modern martyrs of Operation Bluestar. Despite the emotive imagery, a tension exists between the need to forget the violence of militancy and remembrance of martyrs. It is this tension that shapes accounts of "what happened" in the city of Amritsar in 1984 before and after Operation Bluestar. But "what happened" is an account that changes over time and between storytellers. Each account might have a little omission, a small part that is overlooked, ignored, or sometimes laid to rest. Memory has the quality of bringing the past into the present, but with deletions that suit the storyteller and audience. This book traverses the terrain of memory, hollowed out by little bits of forgetting.

Violence and the Sikhs interrogates conventional typologies of violence and non-violence in Sikhism by rethinking the dominant narrative of Sikhism as a deviation from the ostensibly original pacifist-religious intentions and practices of its founders. This Element highlights competing logics of violence drawn from primary sources of Sikh literature, thereby complicating our understanding of the relationship between spirituality and violence, connecting it to issues of sovereignty and the relationship between Sikhism and the State during the five centuries of its history. By cultivating a non-oppositional understanding of violence and spirituality, this Element provides an innovative method for interpreting events of 'religious violence'. In doing so it provides a novel perspective on familiar themes such as martyrdom, Martial Race theory, warfare and (post)colonial conflicts in the Sikh context.

This book is a major intervention in the understanding of the dynamics of internal migration in South Asia. It traces the historical roots of certain migrant Sikh communities to the south and north-east India; chronicles their social, religious and economic practices; and examines peculiar identity formations. This first-of-its-kind empirical study examines the socio-economic conditions of Sikhs in the Deccan and the North-East who are believed to be the descendants of the soldiers in Maharaja Ranjit Singh's army despatched to the two regions in the early nineteenth century. It draws on extensive ethnographic accounts to present the social realities of the different communities, including language, religion, culture, occupation, caste, marriage and kinship, and agency. It also questions the idea of Sikh homogeneity that many within the community have come to believe in, while revealing both differences and similarities. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, migration and diaspora studies, religion, especially Sikh studies, cultural studies, as well as the Sikh diaspora worldwide.

Louis E. Fenech offers a compelling new examination of one of the only Persian compositions attributed to the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708): the Zafar-namah or 'Epistle of Victory.' Written as a masnavi, a Persian poem, this letter was originally sent to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707) rebuking his most unbecoming conduct. Incredibly, Guru Gobind Singh's letter is included today within the Sikh canon, one of only a very small handful of Persian-language texts granted the status of Sikh scripture. As such, its contents are sung on special Sikh occasions. Perhaps equally surprising is the fact that the letter appears in the tenth Guru's book or the Dasam Granth in the standard Gurmukhi script (in which Punjabi is written) but retains its original Persian language, a vernacular few Sikhs know. Drawing out the letter's direct and subtle references to the Iranian national epic, the Shah-namah, and to Shaikh Sa'di's thirteenth-century Bustan, Fenech demonstrates how this letter served as a form of Indo-Islamic verbal warfare, ensuring the tenth Guru's moral and symbolic victory over the legendary and powerful Mughal empire. Through analysis of the Zafar-namah, Fenech resurrects an essential and intiguing component of the Sikh tradition: its Islamicate aspect.

The Dasam Granth is a 1,428-page anthology of diverse compositions attributed to the tenth Guru of Sikhism, Guru Gobind Singh, and a topic of great controversy among Sikhs. The controversy stems from two major issues: a substantial portion of the Dasam Granth relates tales from Hindu mythology, suggesting a disconnect from normative Sikh theology; and a long composition entitled Charitropakhian tells several hundred rather graphic stories about illicit liaisons between men and women. Sikhs have debated whether the text deserves status as a "scripture" or should be read instead as "literature." Sikh scholars have also long debated whether Guru Gobind Singh in fact authored the entire Dasam Granth. Much of the secondary literature on the Dasam Granth focuses on this authorship issue, and despite an ever-growing body of articles, essays, and books (mainly in Punjabi), the debate has not moved forward. The available manuscript and other historical evidence do not provide conclusive answers regarding authorship. The debate has been so acrimonious at times that in 2000, Sikh leader Joginder Singh Vedanti issued a directive that Sikh scholars not comment on the Dasam Granth publicly at all pending a committee inquiry into the matter. Debating the Dasam Granth is the first English language, book-length critical study of this controversial Sikh text in many years. Based on research on the original text in the Brajbhasha and Punjabi languages, a critical reading of the secondary literature in Punjabi, Hindi, and English, and interviews with scholars and Sikh leaders in India, it offers a thorough introduction to the Dasam Granth, its history, debates about its authenticity, and an in-depth analysis of its most important compositions.

Inter-religious relations in India are notoriously fraught, not infrequently erupting into violence. This book looks at a place where the conditions for religious conflict are present, but active conflict is absent. Bigelow focuses on a Muslim majority Punjab town (Malkerkotla) where both during the Partition and subsequently there has been no inter-religious violence. With a minimum of intervention from outside interests, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs have successfully managed conflict when it does arise. Bigelow explores the complicated history of the region, going back to its foundation by a Sufi saint in the fifteenth century. Combining archival and interview material, she accounts for how the community's idealized identity as a place of peace is realized on the ground through a variety of strategies. As a story of peace in a region of conflict, this study is an important counterbalance to many conflict studies and a corrective to portrayals of Islamic cultures as militant and intolerant. This fascinating town with its rich history will be of interest to students and scholars of Islam, South Asia, and peace and conflict resolution.

Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair unsettles the politics of knowledge construction in which the category of "religion" continues to be central. Through a case study of Sikhism, he launches an extended critique of religion as a cultural universal. At the same time, he presents a portrait of how certain aspects of Sikh tradition were reinvented as "religion" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

India's imperial elite subtly recast Sikh tradition as a sui generis religion, which robbed its teachings of their political force. In turn, Sikhs began to define themselves as a "nation" and a "world religion" that was separate from, but parallel to, the rise of the Indian state and global Hinduism. Rather than investigate these processes in isolation from Europe, Mandair shifts the focus closer to the political history of ideas, thereby recovering part of Europe's repressed colonial memory.

Mandair rethinks the intersection of religion and the secular in discourses such as history of religions, postcolonial theory, and recent continental philosophy. Though seemingly unconnected, these discourses are shown to be linked to a philosophy of "generalized translation" that emerged as a key conceptual matrix in the colonial encounter between India and the West. In this riveting study, Mandair demonstrates how this philosophy of translation continues to influence the repetitions of religion and identity politics in the lives of South Asians, and the way the academy, state, and media have analyzed such phenomena.