Cultivating Sikh Culture and Identity: Art, Music and Philology (Routledge Critical Sikh Studies)

Cultivating Sikh Culture and Identity explores the development of modern Sikh identities through the concept of ‘cultivation of culture’.It investigates diverse, but repeatedly overlapping, Sikh encounters in the fields of art, music and philology, and considers their role in the making of a continuous living tradition. The volume focuses particularly on the imperial encounter and intellectual interaction between coloniser and colonised.It emphasises the enduring importance of the modern rational approach of the Singh Sabha (Tat Khalsa) reformers in defining a normative Sikh tradition.In so doing, the author reflects on the importance of philological research and the complexity of modern knowledge production in relation to the formation of cultural identities.The chapters offer a critical historical overview of the changes in the performance and reception of Sikh devotional music in the context of the community’s successive encounters with the Mughals, the British and globalisation.The