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170 JPS 17:1&2
as to produce a more comprehensive sense of his project and its
accomplishments.
At the third level, I hope to publish a series of essays on what Gurdas
tells us about life in the early Sikh community, particularly how early
Sikh rituals functioned to create and expand community boundaries. A
strong belief in the eventual ascendance of the community, related to
conceptions of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, emerge from Gurdas’s
works. I would also like to tackle the question, raised in recent Sikh
scholarship, of whether Sikhs had a conception of something like
“religion” in the pre-modern period. This has implications for
understanding early Sikh self-conception and communal boundary
construction.