From ‘overseas Sikhs’ to ‘the Sikh diaspora’ to ‘global Sikhs’: Retrospect and prospects in the study of Sikhs beyond the subcontinent

ABSTRACT

In this slightly revised version of my presentation of 4 September 2019 at the inaugural conference of The Centre for Sikh and Panjabi Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K., I identify and begin to elaborate upon an historical sequence of five frames – ‘overseas Sikhs,’ Punjabi/Sikh ‘migrant communities,’ ‘the Sikh diaspora,’ ‘transnational’ Sikhs, and ‘global Sikhs’ – through which scholars have analyzed the lives of Sikhs living outside the Indian subcontinent.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• diaspora
• transnational
• cosmopolitan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I do not address here the scholarly work on Sikhs settled elsewhere in South Asia, such as Himadri Banerjee’s pathbreaking work on Sikhs in eastern India (2003) and his and others’ subsequent articles on Sikhs elsewhere in India that have been published in Sikh Formations.

2 Today, it would be hard to claim that the ‘religions of the Sikhs’ is an ethno-religion, given non-Punjabi descended and mixed ancestry Sikhs. The criteria of belonging, as per the SGPC’s definition of a Sikh, does not entail Sikh or Punjabi ancestry. See VanderBeek (2020) on challenges and potentiality for ‘deterritorializing Sikhi’ (194).