The Spacing of Sikh Studies: Language, Experience, and Poetry

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?