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42 JPS 17:1&2
preparing their catalogues, and making them available in print. For
Ganda Singh’s biography, see Rattan Singh Jaggi, Sikh Panth
Vishavkosh, 1: 714–716. For Randhir Singh, see notes 3, 68, and 81. For
Shamsher Singh Ashok’s monumental works, see his Punjabi Hath
Likhatan di Suchi, 2 vols. (Patiala: Bhasha Vibhag, 1961 and 1963); and
Sikh Reference Library Amritsar dian Hath Likhat Pustakan di Suchi
(Amritsar: Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, 1968). For
Padam’s contribution, see his Rahitname (Amritsar: Singh Brothers,
1995), and notes 2, 3, 8, 36, 44, and 79.
75 It may be useful to mention another position on this issue. In Sikh
Formations 1. 1 (June 2005), Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair writes: “The
study of Sikhs and Sikhism today is at a major turning point. The
conventional frameworks that have dominated the efforts to carve out a
distinct subject area of Sikh Studies over the last four decades appears
increasingly unhelpful, if not irrelevant, against the backdrop of
globalization and the emergence of new theoretical interventions in the
human and social sciences. At the same time as we all, in some measure,
come to terms with a ‘New Age’ in the twenty-first century, when the old
certainties are being reassessed or giving way to new modes of thought,
there is a serious intellectual challenge for those of us engaged with the
study of Sikhs and Sikhism. This challenge is all the more pressing for it
has also come at a juncture when there is generational change talking
place in the academic leadership of the subject, with the towering ‘greats’
of the 1960s and 1970s gradually giving way to a new generation who
now neither share their mindset nor are any longer comfortable with
methodologies that have so long dominated the field.”
Mandair’s claim that “Sikh Studies” need to outgrow the supposedly
“conventional framework” seems reasonable, but how this goal is to be
achieved is the key question. Replacing the model of biblical studies that
McLeod brought to Sikh studies with a new one based on the thinking of
the “towering ‘greats’” like Hegel and Derrida, as Mandair seems to do
in his recently released Religion and the Specter of the West (2010), may
not be much of an answer to this problem.
76 No reference regarding the change of the name appears in Guru Nanak
Dev University: A Profile (1994), a publication produced at the time of
the university’s silver jubilee celebration. It would be interesting to
examine this episode and find out the basis on which the present name
was argued for by its supporters, the nature of their religious affiliation,
and the contribution of the large history and other related departments on
the campus in this discussion. The fact stands, however, that there were