This panel brings together papers that interrogate the disciplinary boundaries, methodological futures, and epistemic infrastructures of Sikh Studies. Both contributions offer forward‑looking interventions: one through a decolonial reconstruction of Sikh intellectual history and literary agency; the other through a critique of AI‑mediated authority and a proposal for digital custodianship grounded in Sikh principles. Together, they illuminate how Sikh Studies might evolve in response to colonial inheritances, technological disruption, and shifting modes of knowledge production.
The British colonisers and their European counterparts invented the discipline of Sikh Studies to study “Sikhism,” a colonial imaginary for the religion of the Sikhs. The advent of Sikh Studies reduced Sikhī to a subject and located it in a discursive domain constituted in English: an alien language that belonged to the British colonisers. Since then, Sikh Studies has been fluctuating between blatant theoretical imperialism to somewhat liberating theoretical constraints. The future of Sikh Studies depends upon whether the indigenous sources begin to intervene as an agency. In this paper, I'll explore the questions, such as: What is the potential of the literary as an agency, and to what extent did it subvert the hegemony of the discursive processes in the Sikh context? How are the literary and the idea of lived experience connected to religion and dharam, or Christianity and Sikhī, to be more precise?
This paper interrogates how religious authority can be preserved when generative AI optimises for fluency, virality and visual impact rather than provenance. Taking recent Sikh controversies as a focal lens I argue that the most consequential harms are not only factual but form‑level including depiction violations, lineage invisibility, and blended or hallucinated lines presented as canonical. Bridging digital religion and media studies. I trace how these form‑level harms arise from platform logics that reward speed and spectacle, and I outline a lineage‑first design vocabulary, drawn from Sikh custodianship, that treats provenance as a visible, verifiable precondition for interpretation.