(2021). The legacy of militancy in Punjab: long road to ‘Normalcy’. Sikh Formations. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Legacies of the militancy era and understanding the new ‘normal’ in Punjab. Sikh Formations. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This study answers the research question: can any systematic patterns of factionalism and fissures within the Akali Dal be discerned through its organisational history since 1920? I argue that the Akali Dal went through five distinct periods of internal factionalism, each with its own distinct intra-party and leadership dynamics. Furthermore, I argue that factions, fissures, and mergers within

(2021). Reconsidering Sikh architecture: The Sama̅dhi of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore. Sikh Formations. Ahead of Print.

(2021). The long shadow of Punjab’s militant past and contested ‘normalcy’. Sikh Formations. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Aftermath of 1984: Texture of uncertainty, collapse of trust. Sikh Formations. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Through a series of fragments, vignettes, and a montage, this essay explores the underlying crises of contemporary capitalism and the nation-state as presented in Sunjeev Sahota's 2015 novel The Year of the Runaways. The essay examines the novel's innovative Anglo-Punjabi diglossia as an index of social contradiction and political crisis in the wake of immigration and nationalist reaction

(2020). The first Sikh: the life and legacy of Guru Nanak. Sikh Formations: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 475-476.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the structures and strategies whereby the Shiromani Akali Dal, along with other Sikh religio-political institutions including the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, gains support from social groups outside the realm of coalition politics – that is, the interaction of the SAD with its coalition partner, the BJP. Using the theory of consociationalism as a lens through

ABSTRACT The Sikhs in Punjab turned against militants in early-1990s, after nature of violence changed from being politically oriented to largely indiscriminate. The Akali Dal guided by desire to remain politically relevant in post-militancy era, wove ideological and electoral strategy around moderate idioms, stressing consociationalism and economic development. Tracing party’s transition to moderation

ABSTRACT Shiromani Akali Dal, the oldest state party in India, emanated from an ethnic movement launched by the Sikh community in Punjab to take control of their gurdwaras. As an ‘ethnic’ party, it has claimed to be the sole political custodian of the minority Sikh community in India since colonial times. The party has often found itself trapped at the crossroads of region and religion. This explains

ABSTRACT When the 'green revolution' began in Punjab in 1964, Punjab sprang to the front rank of Indian agricultural production. But since about 2000, it has been increasingly clear that the technology is leading to an encompassing ecological disaster. The reason for the change lies in the organizational framework. Born in a spirit of flexible egalitarian democracy, it is now dominated by rigid central

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

ABSTRACT The Shiromani Akali Dal has provided an important platform for the Scheduled Caste community which has been integral to the party's electoral success. This paper empirically shows that share of the SC community in electoral success of the Akali Dal has always remained one-fourth or more since 1962 except 2017 election alongwith better electoral success rate of the SC community leaders. Despite

ABSTRACT This article explores the ideological foundations in the formation of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). It begins with the examination of the process of institutionalization from the Kartarpur period to modern times, focusing on the centrality of sacred space in Sikh corporate life. The overall structure, organization, and the underlying arguments

ABSTRACT In this slightly revised version of my presentation of 4 September 2019 at the inaugural conference of The Centre for Sikh and Panjabi Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K., I identify and begin to elaborate upon an historical sequence of five frames – ‘overseas Sikhs,’ Punjabi/Sikh ‘migrant communities,’ ‘the Sikh diaspora,’ ‘transnational’ Sikhs, and ‘global Sikhs’ – through which

ABSTRACT Jathera worship is a popular devotional practice of Punjab in which obeisance is paid to ancestors of the got/gotra. This paper presents a case study of a jathera known as Baba Kala Mehar Sandhu in Faridkot. Its worship is marked by heterodox rituals such as offering and consuming liquor as parshad (oblation) to the deity. I argue that the continued persistence of the practice into the twenty-first

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to discuss the varying perceptions and interpretative responses of Jat Sikhs and Dalits of a Punjabi village with respect to Sunny Deol, the popular Hindi film star, and relates these variations to certain salient aspects of their respective identity constructions, in the context of their day-to-day patterns of being, including such identities as caste, class, gender, religion

ABSTRACT A number of religions mandate that members of that faith cover their hair and head. Depending on its nature, this head covering can interfere with the design and efficacy of protective head gear such as helmets. This is exacerbated in situations where religious mandates prevent the cutting of head hair, such as among Sikhs, as this adds to the volume to be covered by protective head gear.

ABSTRACT Punjabi hawkers provided an essential service to rural communities and isolated farms in south-eastern Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Living a marginalised existence, they were perceived as unwelcome competition and often vilified, ethnically different, the cultural and spiritual requirements of many Punjabi were alien concepts to the host communities. Even

ABSTRACT This essays concerns the destruction of Sikh Reference Library during the Indian army’s invasion of the Golden Temple, Amritsar in June 1984. The Library built over several decades drew upon almost five centuries’ Sikh literature from various sources containing much of the most precious heritage of the Sikh community. Among its contents were priceless handwritten birs of Guru Granth; recensions

ABSTRACT The paper presents three short essays on three specific institutions or symbolic representations, namely, Akal Takht Sahib, purusharthas, and the ‘demon’ king Ravana in order to highlight certain aspects of Sikh axiology as I see it. The essays reveal that the integration of the spiritual (sannyas), the material (grihasta) and the temporal (rajya) in the life of individual and society lies

ABSTRACT Participants in this study included Sikh/Punjabi parents who had a child enrolled in the K-12 school system. These parents were invited to complete a survey and participate in a focus group. The purpose of this study was to gauge the current experiences of children within the Sikh/Punjabi community by eliciting parents for their perceptions of whether schools and educators possess an understanding

Rethinking their mission statement in 2013, Timothy Mitchell and Anupama Rao, the editors of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, note that the ways in which theories and methods of the humanities and social sciences ‘relate to regions, and how regions generate theories and methods of their own, are issues of great interest, even urgency, to the contemporary academy’ (135)

This special issue of Sikh Formations developed out of a scholarly workshop entitled Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957): Rethinking Literary Modernity in Colonial Punjab, that was held at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in August 2017 and organized by the issue coeditors, Anshu Malhotra and Anne Murphy. It marked an important milestone. The workshop program included both prominent and emerging scholars

ABSTRACT What were women's relationships with their children like in the partition of India in 1947 and the anti-Sikh Pogrom of 1984, and what were the children's experiences of these violent moments? While with the partition, many children were abandoned and post-abduction children were seen as a symbol of humiliation for the woman, with the massacre of 1984, surviving children were seen as symbols

ABSTRACT This study examines the portrayal of the Sikh diaspora in Canada in the film Breakaway/Speedy Singhs (2011). In particular, I explore two scenes that are at the intersections of transnational configurations and homeland paradigms: (i) the depiction of the Taj in specific aesthetic ways (ii) the micro-interplays of the use of the ancestral material object – the metal headgear resembling a pagri

ABSTRACT The paper looks at Sikh educational thought along with the development of the religion since 15th century. The emphasis on distinct Sikh identity and its diversity has been written about in detail. The paper argues that the Sikhs viewed education as a key source of marking a distinct identity for the community. In carving their identity as ‘Sikhs’ during colonial times and a minority after

ABSTRACT My paper proposes to assess the contributions of Bhai Vir Singh to the newly emergent Punjabi print spheres in the late colonial period. Critical literature on the print and public spheres in colonial Punjab has described these as imitative of the prototype of western models and as ‘derivative' discourses. It is through the example of Bhai Vir Singh that we can argue otherwise. This paper

ABSTRACT This paper undertakes a detailed reading of BVS’ novel Sundarī. Commenting on the as yet uncertain and experimental form of the modernist novel, the essay demonstrates how fiction and history, genealogy and folksong, contribute to the heteroglossia and polysemy of this much read and analyzed book. Through characters like Lakhpat Rai and his own ancestor Kaura Mal, BVS explores the relations

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates that a three-quarter view became a typical mode of representing the face of Guru Nanak through his depiction in paintings of the Janam-sakhis, hagiographic accounts of Guru Nanak, from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. In the B-40 set, completed in 1733, Guru Nanak was already painted in three-quarter view, which enabled audiences to distinguish him

ABSTRACT The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 as a universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, colour, gender or social background, promoted an ‘ageless wisdom' that resonates to some extent with Sikh teachings. This article explores how Theosophists and Theosophy introduced Sikhism to a western audience, by focusing on Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant and Dorothy Field. The three

ABSTRACT This paper examines narratological changes made in Bhāī Vīr Singh's Purātan Janamsākhī (1926). These changes encode an alternate narrative logic for producing images of a past that entrenches ‘religious’ identity at the center of cognitive self-becoming for individual Sikh moderns. Philology enacts a philosophical transgression to invent an autodialogic structure through grammatological changes

ਸਾਰ ਈਕੋਕ੍ਰਿਟੀਸਿਜ਼ਮ (Ecocriticism) 70 ਵਿਆਂ ਦੇ ਦੌਰਾਨ ਵਿਕਸਿਤ ਹੋਈ ਪਹੁੰਚ ਵਿਧੀ ਹੈ| ਇਸ ਵਿਧੀ ਦੁਆਰਾ ਸਾਹਿਤ ਨੂੰ ਵਾਤਾਵਰਨ ਅਤੇ ਕੁਦਰਤੀ ਆਲੇ- ਦੁਆਲੇ ਪ੍ਰਤਿ ਸੁਚੇਤਤਾ ਦੇ ਸੰਦਰਭ ਵਿੱਚ ਪੜ੍ਹਿਆ ਜਾਂਦਾ ਹੈ| ਈਕੋਕ੍ਰਿਟੀਸਿਜ਼ਮ ਦੇ ਅੰਤਰਗਤ ਮਨੁੱਖੀ ਜੀਵਨ ਦੇ ਨਾਲ- ਨਾਲ ਸਮੁੱਚੇ ਬ੍ਰਹਿਮੰਡ, ਜੀਵ- ਜੰਤੂਆਂ, ਜੰਗਲੀ ਜੀਵਨ, ਭੋਜਨ – ਪ੍ਰਣਾਲੀ (Food Chain) ਵਿੱਚ ਮਨੁੱਖ ਦੀ ਥਾਂ, ਜੈਵਿਕ ਵਿਭਿੰਨਤਾ (Bio- diversity), ਪ੍ਰਕ੍ਰਿਤਕ ਸਮਤੋਲ (Ecological balance), ਪ੍ਰਦੂਸ਼ਣ, ਕੀਟਨਾਸ਼ਕਾਂ

ABSTRACT This paper explores how notions of intertextuality and reception history unfold in a Sikh literary context by examining interactions between Bhai Vir Singh’s Srī Kalgīdhar Camatkār and gurbilās literature. These texts’ portrayals of an important battle of Sikh history, the battle of Bhangani, illustrate how the various historical circumstances of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries shaped

ABSTRACT Bhai Vir Singh's didactic play Raja Lakhdata Singh (1910) is one of the earliest modern Punjabi plays. The play was written in order to make the Sikhs aware of the ills assailing the community and to help set them on a path of reform. As an early play, the text is worthy of analysis in terms of the message it tries to propagate as well as its textual form and structure. This paper pursues

ABSTRACT This paper examines Bhai Vir Singh's novella, Sundri (1898) from the context of the Singh Sabha reform movement (1880–1920). Sundri, Vir Singh's fictional heroine, became an important and idealized site of female identity construction during this time. Bhai Vir Singh's Sundri will be juxtaposed with a pixelated version, a recent animated film by the same name. Similar to the novella, the animated

Thanks to the generosity and vision of a family in our region, Phoenix Art Museum now has a gallery space devoted to Sikh art, in which our Sikh community as well as the general public can learn about the heritage of this faith. In 2017, Dr Parvinder Singh Khanuja, a medical oncologist who arrived here in 1993 and began collection Sikh art. As an act of seva he decided to create a dedicated space that

Disputes concerning state interference in the religious practices and traditions of citizens have created uproar in public debate in India and Europe during the past decades. The contributors to th...

ABSTRACT In many parts of the world, Sikhs have come to be perceived as a ‘model' minority – so much so that some have critiqued the Sikh community for taking up positions that are perceived as assimilationist. Such critiques, however, gloss over the sense of precarity, and the litany of hardships, racial discrimination and legal battles in which Sikhs have been forced to be engage in a post-9/11 world

ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine the afterlives of insurgent and counterinsurgent violence in Punjab and the US. We explore how the period of the 1980s and 1990s came to have effects that linger into the present, and how violence is remembered by ordinary people, especially non-elite women. We argue that memories unfold in relation to the slow and structural violence that has manifested through years

Macroergonomics dates back to 1982 in Seattle, WA, USA. A group of concerned physical ergonomics researchers concluded that increasing the physical aspects of the job was important but not enough to improve human conditions in labor settings. Thus, to improve work conditions, a new approach was necessary for evaluating the organizational context. Under this scenario, the notion of Organizational Design

This collection of twenty-eight essays written by T. Sher Singh provides us with a window to look into the author’s living experiences at various points in time. We can certainly understand his rem...

ABSTRACT Assaults on Sikhs and other South Asian Americans represent not merely cases of ‘mistaken Muslims.’ Their victimization is different—yet not distinct—from anti-Muslim sentiment. They are the casualties of an American racial and secular nationalist project to discipline citizens into a ‘safe’ religious subjectivity. Although a variety of Hollywood films demonstrate a slowly growing sophistication

ABSTRACT As the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance returns to power in India, it is appropriate to reflect on the coalition’s first term in office. This paper provides an overview of the government’s performance in key areas, especially vis-a-vis religious minorities, and of the competing approaches through which its policies have been understood. It argues for a need to move away from conventional

ABSTRACT The paper attempts to understand the emergence of a New Sikh middle class in Panjab and its growing, transnational visibility in a transnational spread through the kaleidoscope of Panjabi cinema. The paper seeks to map this new middle class both locally and globally with the emergence of the icon of the New Sikh middle class, the turbaned Diljit Dosanjh. His persona and the popularity of his

ABSTRACT Sikh migration to Canada has been theoretically framed and structured largely through colonial, imperial and diasporic historicized trajectories, articulating tremendous engagement in the Canadian economy. The Great War foregrounds Sikh engagement in the military history of Canada and this article examines the ‘martial race’ ideological construction of Sikhs, the fortuitous sighting of the

ABSTRACT Harjant Gill, in the documentary film, Sent Away Boys, explores connections between Jat Sikh masculinity, success and international migration to the West. The film is part of a series on masculinity. Roots of Love and Mardistan precede this one. All three films examine Jat Sikh masculinity, but each is distinct in its focus on its particular dimension. Here, I review them with special attention

ABSTRACT In recent years there has been a resurgence of public discourse about the role of tolerance as one of the key elements of the Western philosophical heritage. The fact that Western societies remain largely oblivious to the importance and benefits of diversity points to the pitfalls of the liberal model of religious toleration. Jakob De Roover’s monograph ‘Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism’

ABSTRACT Through a comparative analysis of sound and pilgrimage in Bhakti, Sufi and Sikh cultures, this paper examines their musical repertoires and divergent views from the standpoint of sacred journeying. While the Gurū Granth Sāhib is critically inclusive of Bhakti and Sufi voices, the musical setting and the performance of the hymns incorporated into the Sikh scripture suggest a distinct function

Dr. Pashaura Singh’s ‘review essay’, advances several problematic assertions and mischaracterizations concerning my paper, ‘Memory and Pedagogy of Gurbān ī San gīta: An Autoethnographic Udāsī,’ that warrant a direct response. Specifically, Pashaura Singh asperses the veracity of my being descended from Bhai Sadharan, a close disciple of Guru Nanak, thereby impugning the historical credibility of

I am pleased to contribute to this volume with my new research on kīrtan and pilgrimage in Sikh culture. The readers may be puzzled, however, to find that Pashaura Singh’s response to my essay does not correspond to the authorized version of the paper published in this issue. As clarified with the editors, Pashaura Singh was discussing an earlier draft of my work. I was still in the process of revising

ABSTRACT The Sikh Gurus promoted gender equality, but still women’s voices are being silenced from playing Gurbānī Kīrtan inside the Golden Temple. The reasons for their exclusion center around the sexualization of the female body, purity and pollution, appeals to tradition, and questions of musical proficiency. Today, Sikhs in India and the diaspora ask that the Sikh philosophy of equality be fully

ABSTRACT Religion and aesthetics are demarcated as two different avenues with ‘God’ and ‘Beauty’ as their respective goals. Opposite of anesthetic, aesthetics is clearly the heightening of the senses. But religion with its focus on God dwelling in a world beyond ours mandates a negation of those very senses. Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, overturns such an antithesis. My paper focuses on Guru Nanak’s

ABSTRACT In 1989, I began an undertaking to revive the nearly-extinct Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta tradition, the centuries-old Gur-Sikh heritage. I located vidyādhārīs (knowledgeable memory bearers) who remembered original rāga forms and śabadrītas (Gurbāṇī compositions), knew how to play or make musical instruments that had all but vanished, and were versed in the exegetical attendance of Srī Gurū Granth Sāhib

This special interreligious issue on ‘TheMusic and Poetics of Devotion in the Jain and Sikh Traditions’ is the product of papers adapted from those presented at the first Sikh-Jain conference held at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, 25–27 February 2016. It was made possible by a three-year endowment from generous individuals in the Jain and Sikh communities as well as the Uberoi Foundation

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the scholarship concerning the Sikh diaspora by critically examining the experiences of Punjabi Sikh American students in a Northern California community college to identify factors inhibiting or promoting their progress and success. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of Sikh college students. Findings demonstrate that microaggressions

An underlying fabric enfolds this collection of essays on Jain music and musicality, poetry and the poetic, a fabric woven of words and rhythm. These four essays, two on music, and two on the more musical aspects of spoken language, convey the complex ways in which orality contributes to cultured communication. To experience Jainism is to hear Jainism, chanted, sung, narrated, or shared. It may take

This review essay is related to an independent analysis of the revised versions of five papers presented in the conference on The Music and Poetics of Devotion in the Jain and Sikh Traditions, orga...

ABSTRACT In November 2018, the governments of India and Pakistan agreed to develop the Kartarpur corridor linking the Sikhs’ two holiest shrines. The initiative is an important symbolic moment in the access to Sikh sacred spaces in Pakistan. This paper examines critically the efforts to control and manage this access since 1947. It assesses the policies of the two states to control access and reflects