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261 Book Reviews
Verne A. Dusenbery, Sikhs at Large: Religion, Culture, and Politics in Global
Perspective, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008) x + 337 pp. (hb) Rs. 650.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-568598-5 and ISBN-10: 0-19-568598-9.
This is a rich resource in terms of its range and its analytical sharpness.
Dusenbery has brought together almost three decades of his ethnographically
grounded publications on Sikh communities resident in South-East Asia
(Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia) and Australia as well as in North America.
The volume‟s two strongly inter-connected sections, „Sikh Ethnosociology‟ and
„Sikhs and the State‟ focus respectively on „Sikh understandings of their social
world and their place in it‟ (p. 1) and Sikh response to life as a minority in
diverse political contexts.
Each chapter engages with its specific historical and geographical context,
and by so doing deepens the reader‟s critical grasp of subsequent developments.
In some cases the speculation about relevance to other parts of the diaspora is set
out, as in chapter eight‟s discussion of the currently „coinciding interests‟
between Sikh organisations and the state in Singapore. In several chapters,
careful comparisons are deployed to yield insights: between, for example,
(chapters one and two) Gora Sikhs and Jat Sikhs in North America or (chapter
nine) between „the contrasting experiences of Sikhs‟ (p. 227) in the two modern
nation-states of Canada and Singapore with regard to nationalism and
multiculturalism.
Dusenbery usefully analyses the concept of a „Sikh diaspora‟ itself: chapter
four invites the reader to examine the shifting relative importance for Punjabis of
ancestral „genera‟ such as mode of worship, territorial attachment, language and
occupation. He argues that the concept of a territorially delimited Sikh nation
state has no secure basis in early Sikh discourse – witness Guru Nanak‟s travels
far beyond Punjab and Guru Gobind Singh‟s location of the Guru in the Granth
and Panth (p. 100). Dusenbery suggests that it was the Partition of 1947 that
precipitated the sense of a Sikh qaum and the tie of Sikhs to Punjab so
specifically. Chapter five further deconstructs „nation‟ and „world religion‟ as
„master narratives of Sikh identity‟ (p.118).
In chapter two izzat (honour), too, is critically discussed (in terms of its moral
and affective dimensions), as also (in chapter six) is the motivation of the acts of
philanthropy carried out by overseas Sikhs. Dusenbery untangles philanthropy
as a complex interaction between seva (voluntary service) and dan (giving) in
Sikh religious tradition, Jat notions of izzat and sardari (supremacy of the self)
and the tradition of charitable giving in western societies. Chapter three‟s
discussion of sacred language in a „non-dualistic‟ culture, as the sound
transmitted between Guru and disciple, much as other „substances‟ are, is a
welcome antidote to still persistent „Protestant‟ understandings of the primary
importance of understanding scriptural words.
In chapter after chapter, anthropological reflection on a particular situation
introduces insights of much wider applicability. For example, in chapter two