The Harmonium in Sikh Music

The harmonium has become the standard instrument in all Sikh musical worship (kirtan) performances and it seems inseparable from the Sikh musical experience. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the kirtan experience was considerably different. Until the early twentieth century, kirtanis performed kirtan on stringed instruments and adhered to a number of complex traditional musical themes and structures. Following the introduction of the harmonium, kirtanis became attracted to this instrument and in the space of 50 or 60 years, the harmonium became their instrument of choice. This paper explores this theme and attempts to deconstruct the history of the harmonium and the reasons why it became so attractive as an instrument of choice for Sikh kirtanis. We explore the popularity of the harmonium amongst Indian musicians in general before attempting to understand why Sikh kirtanis rejected stringed instruments and chose the harmonium.     

Materializing Sikh pasts1

Objects and sites related to the Sikh Gurus, heroes and martyrs are ubiquitous in Punjab and beyond. As objects of memory, they function to represent the past and participate in a larger narration of that past as history. This paper examines exemplary cases of Sikh historical objects and sites and considers their role as lieux de memoire, as theorized by Pierre Nora, to commemorate the Guru and the relationships that constitute the community around him. Narration constitutes the animating principle for these objects, making them both like and unlike other kinds of material religious traditions generally known as ‘relics’. The early Buddhist tradition is provided for productive contrast, to suggest a parallel case of a narrative frame that determines the historical meanings of the material aspect of religious practices and ideologies.     

GURBANI KIRTAN RENAISSANCE: REVIVING MUSICAL MEMORY,REFORMING SIKH IDENTITY

This article examines the modes of revival within the contemporary renaissance of traditional Gurbani Kirtan (Sikh devotional music) in an effort to differentiate historically operative practices from modern products being sold as tradition. Modern reformist tendencies have attempted to institutionalize a normative Sikh musical identity into one homogeneous ‘Gurmat Sangeet’ genre through codifying Sikh raga forms and promoting a particular Sikh musical orthopraxy and history. The process of institutionalization privileges written sources as authoritative, erasing the memory of operative practices passed down orally since the time of the Sikh Gurus through the Gurbani Kirtan parampara (tradition). In questioning how Sikh musical knowledge has been propagated and authenticated since modernity, I propose a reassessment of what values and musical modes are indelible to the fabric of Gurbani Kirtan, what aspects are modern derivatives, and what aspects are negotiable. I believe such an approach will not limit Sikh musical expression to a past identity subsumed by orthodox rigidity. Instead it will move toward a phenomenological epistemology that recognizes how orality and embodied experience are intrinsic to the Gurbani Kirtan parampara that remembers, practices, and teaches a particular methodology to embody the Bani as Guru for newly creative Sikh subjectivities.     

廖平的《左传》研究

随着今文经学的复兴,晚清学术在今古文学的激烈冲突中展开。在这一过程中,《左传》研究一直是核心的内容。晚清《左传》研究主要呈现出刘逢禄、康有为为代表的今文学与章太炎为代表的古文学两大学派争论的态势。廖平的《左传》研究,与两派的学术路径既有联系,有呈现出不同的学术特色,在晚清学术研究中独树一帜,值得关注。     

THE OTHER SIKHS

In the last 100 years, Sikhs have travelled to different countries in the West and beyond. There is a significant amount of scholarly writing about the presence of Sikhs across the globe. However, their experience in migration and settlement in different parts of India beyond Punjab remains a comparatively neglected area of Sikh studies. Its history goes back to the medieval days and includes a larger numbers of Sikhs than that exist in the Western diaspora. These Sikh sites are numerous and scattered across India. They communicate the message of home in poly-vocalic voices and point to the surfacing of another Sikh diaspora within India beyond Punjab. This article seeks to outline a small part of it with reference to the Sikh past in Manipur. Manipur is located along the Indo-Myanmar border and seeks to emphasize the local Sikh community's distinctiveness and plurality.     

BOOK REVIEWS

The storming of the Golden Temple complex in 1984 is central to the imagination of both a Sikh ‘nation’ and a specifically Sikh ‘diaspora’. Both ‘derivative discourses’ construct Sikhs as ‘victims’ of a ghallughara which forced them into a physical or emotional exile from India. Translated as ‘genocide’, the term ghallughara resonates deeply with earlier pogroms in Sikh history, and is memorialized through the image of the desecrated Akal Takht. Mediated through Information and Communications Technologies, this on-line lieux de mémoire provides testimony to the attempt by the ‘secular’ Indian state to violently wrench the temporal from the spiritual dimensions of Sikh sovereignty as embodied in the Khalsa, thus leaving Sikhs ‘mute and absolutely alone’ in a world of nation-states. In contrast to the nationalist imaginary, it is suggested that Sikh claims to sovereignty should be grounded not in territorial claims to an imagined homeland of Khalistan, but in a reconceptualization of the Khalsa as a distinct de-territorialized religio-political community, one better able to articulate the universal values of the Gurus in an increasingly ‘post-western’ world.     

PAKISTAN AND SIKH NATIONALISM: STATE POLICY AND PRIVATE PERCEPTIONS

The paper will examine Pakistan policies and perceptions of Sikh nationalism in the period from 1947 until the present day. The policies, it will be argued, have been opportunistic rather than strategic and have embraced both covert support for militancy against the Indian state in the 1980s and the attempt to use Sikhs and East Punjab as a bridge between Pakistan and India in the post-2001 period of composite dialogue. Private perceptions will be explored first through the accounts of partition survivors. They contain a typical mixture of romanticized views of Muslim–Sikh rural harmony before 1947 and of the Sikhs as an aggressive ‘Other’ in the ‘War of Religions’ at the time of the massacres and mass migrations. Their official counterpart is the attempt to ‘blame’ Sikhs for the violence and to understand the attacks in East Punjab as part of a Sikh Plan of ethnic cleansing. Secondly, private perceptions will be examined in terms of accounts written at the time of the 1980s Punjab crisis. These Pakistani works support the view of Sikhs as an ‘aggrieved minority’. Sympathy for Sikh nationalist struggle stops short of overt support for the militants in such texts. They frequently indulge, however, in attacks on the ‘Brahminical’ hegemony within India, thus echoing Sikh ethno-nationalist writings. Contemporary writings are suffused with romanticist imaginings of the Punjab, bringing harmony to the region in which the ‘love’ aspect of the love/hate relationship between Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs is emphasized. The extent to which the two Punjabs have drifted away from each other since partition is seldom acknowledged; nor the history of competing Muslim and Sikh nationalisms in the region.     

EARLY SIKH HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this paper I explore how ‘doxa’ has influenced the historical study of medieval and early modern Sikhism. In particular the paper focuses on the reign of Guru Hargobind and his intellectual contest with his cousin and spiritual rival, Miharvan. The contest between Hargobind and Miharvan demonstrates how medieval Sikh society was not conveniently divided into ‘orthodox’ and ‘unorthodox’ sections. Rather, the Sikh community was influenced by a variety of socio-economic, political and intellectual factors that affected the way in which the community thought about Sikhism. Moreover, the paper examines how dialogical readings of primary sources can enable scholars to develop a more dynamic historical understanding of early Sikhism.     

The Other Sikhs: Sikhs and Sikhism in Odisha (c. 1600–2000)

The study argues that Odisha has long been a contested terrain between different Sikh traditions. The Otherization of Indian-Sikhs in Sikh Studies has marginalized their enduring and variegated agency in Odishan history. Immigrant Sikhs came from diverse territorial locations and wide-ranging professional expertise. Their growing presence, with numerous gurdwaras under an apex body, celebration of community festivals, Khalsa schools, and so on, gave them the opportunity to recreate home in Odisha. These representations made them not only a visible minority community in the host society, but transformed them into a diaspora. Some of these issues are critically examined in the essay.