This panel examines Sikh political thought and its engagements with sovereignty, nationalism, technology, and global governance. Spanning early modern Panjab, the colonial/technological encounter, and contemporary US politics, these papers map how Sikh communities imagine and negotiate political authority across time. Together they offer a rich, multi‑scalar account of Sikh political imaginaries — constitutional, spiritual, technological, and diasporic.
Between 1469 and 1708, Sikh, Hindu, and Sufi communities in Mughal Panjab developed three incompatible answers to the same question: what makes political authority legitimate? This paper identifies each as a distinct constitutional logic. Sikh foundational sovereignty, rooted in Guru Nanak's critique of Babur and consolidated through two centuries of scriptural and institutional development, rejected imperial legitimacy outright. Hindu monastic centers at Pindori and Jakhbar pursued negotiated autonomy, accumulating Mughal farmāns as trans-dynastic legal precedent. Sufi spiritual jurisdiction, drawing on Ibn ʿArabī's Hidden Caliphate, claimed ontological superiority over temporal rule precisely by refusing to document it. These were not different tactics for the same game but structurally incommensurable frameworks—each community's founding commitments ruled out the political paths available to the others. Drawing on Persian, Panjabi, Brajbhasha, and Sanskrit sources, the paper recovers these competing political imaginations.
This paper argues that the Technocene provides a more philosophically rigorous framework than the Anthropocene for understanding the contemporary epoch, identifying modern technology as the primary geological and spiritual force. By critiquing the Anthropocene’s assumption of universal human agency, the study situates our current crisis within the planetary dominance of Heideggerian "Western humankind." Central to this inquiry is the existential tension faced by the Sikh community: the necessity of adopting modern technology for survival versus the subsequent transformation of their spiritual praxis.
The investigation explores three dimensions: the introduction of a "technological way of thinking" following the 1849 fall of the Sikh Empire; the resulting secularization and Westernization that severed traditional bonds with land and language; and the historical resilience of Sikhs against rationalization. Finally, the paper assesses how Artificial Intelligence—as an intensification of calculative logic—tests the endurance of Sikh spiritual resilience in a technologically conditioned global landscape.
In this paper, I examine the tensions between pluralism and religious nationalism in the US looking at how they have both shaped the Sikh experience. Religious nationalism is on the rise globally, and the US is no exception. Christian nationalism has only become more influential in recent years. Simultaneously, the ideology of pluralism is increasingly subject to critique. Studying pluralism and religious nationalism by drawing on the Sikh case has the potential to shed light on religious nationalism generally, theories of immigrant integration, and the Sikh response to religious nationalism.