This text presents an overview of Sikh history and religiosity by firmly placing it against the backdrop of other religious traditions of the world. It includes a basic introduction to the faith, its history, beliefs, practices and modern developments.

This volume is an omnibus edition of four classic studies on the history and evolution of Sikhs and Sikhism, by one of the world's leading scholars in this field.Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion examines the life and teachings of Guru Nanak, offering an analytical view of the first Guru of the Sikhs, so essential for an understanding of later Sikh history and contemporary Sikh society. In Early Sikh Tradition, McLeod traces the origins of the janam-sakhistyle, describes the anecdotal and discourse forms used by narrators, and reconstructs a pattern whereby janam-sakhi traditions were assembled and transmitted. The Evolution of the Sikh Community questions the traditional, and rather simplified, view of the Sikh community and its history by probingfurther into the past, to the roots of Nanak's teachings. The last work, Who is a Sikh? offers lucid accounts of key events and phases that led to the development of Sikh identity into its current form. This book seeks to provide an understanding of the Sikh individual, historical community andreligion.

An accessible introduction to the world's fifth largest religion, this work presents Sikhism's meanings and myths, and its practices, rituals, and festivals, also addressing ongoing social issues such as the relationship with the Indian state, the diaspora, and caste.

Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair unsettles the politics of knowledge construction in which the category of "religion" continues to be central. Through a case study of Sikhism, he launches an extended critique of religion as a cultural universal. At the same time, he presents a portrait of how certain aspects of Sikh tradition were reinvented as "religion" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. India's imperial elite subtly recast Sikh tradition as a sui generis religion, which robbed its teachings of their political force. In turn, Sikhs began to define themselves as a "nation" and a "world religion" that was separate from, but parallel to, the rise of the Indian state and global Hinduism. Rather than investigate these processes in isolation from Europe, Mandair shifts the focus closer to the political history of ideas, thereby recovering part of Europe's repressed colonial memory. Mandair rethinks the intersection of religion and the secular in discourses such as history of religions, postcolonial theory, and recent continental philosophy. Though seemingly unconnected, these discourses are shown to be linked to a philosophy of "generalized translation" that emerged as a key conceptual matrix in the colonial encounter between India and the West. In this riveting study, Mandair demonstrates how this philosophy of translation continues to influence the repetitions of religion and identity politics in the lives of South Asians, and the way the academy, state, and media have analyzed such phenomena.

Articles on Sikh doctrines and polity.

Sixty-six photographs that depict traditional sites and places of worship, major festivals, rites of the life cycle, and attempts by artists to represent great religious teachers and heroic martyrs provide the basis for this study of contemporary religious practices of Sikhs in Delhi and the Punjab region of northern India.