By ranveer singh | 8-10 min. read
Something interesting is happening in contemporary Sikh discourse. We’re increasingly seeing the language of Sikh leadership, Sikh governance, Sikh entrepreneurship, Sikh education, Sikh media and Sikh approaches to almost every established field of modern life. At first glance, this appears encouraging because Sikhs are thinking seriously about institutions and asking how Sikhi might inform the way we lead, teach, govern, trade and organise ourselves. After decades in which Sikh thought has often been confined to the category of religion, this apparent expansion into other areas of life might even look like intellectual recovery.
But quite often, nothing beneath the prefix has actually changed.
In my previous article, Is Modernity Kaljug?, I approached modernity not simply as another word for the present, but in its broader sense as a particular historical order with its own assumptions about knowledge, authority, economy, progress and human life. From there, I asked what happens when that order is examined through the Sikh conception of Kaljug. One consequence of living within modernity is that its categories can become so familiar that we cease to recognise them as categories at all. They begin to appear neutral, universal and simply descriptive of the world as it is. What happens, then, when Sikhs attempt to recover Sikh thought while continuing to think through those categories?
Take the example of leadership, where much of the discourse remains inherited from contemporary management theory. Similarly, the model of business remains the corporation, economic assumptions remain those of capitalism, and political categories remain those of the modern state. Education too, in many respects, continues to be organised around modern assumptions about knowledge, qualification and success, but we simply place the word Sikh in front.
I want to call this phenomenon Sikh Prefixing: the practice of taking an already constituted political, economic, social or institutional model and presenting it as Sikh through the addition of Sikh terminology, personalities, symbolism or ethical language, without reconstructing its underlying assumptions through Gurmat. There is, admittedly, an irony in the term Sikh Prefixing, since the term itself places “Sikh” before an existing English word. But the argument here is not against prefixes, borrowing or the use of concepts that originate elsewhere. The problem arises when the addition of Sikh terminology is taken to mean that the underlying framework has itself been derived from Sikhi. Sikh Prefixing is an attempt to name that process; it does not suggest that everything carrying the Sikh prefix is necessarily an example of it.
Representation and reconstruction
As a dispersed population operating within states and institutions largely constructed by others, Sikhs have understandably sought representation within them. We celebrate Sikh politicians, CEOs, academics, entrepreneurs, athletes, journalists and professionals. Representation can open doors, challenge discrimination and demonstrate that Sikhs need not disappear in order to participate in wider society.
But representation within an institution does not necessarily alter its intellectual architecture. A Sikh becoming the chief executive of a corporation does not make the corporation Sikh, any more than Sikh representation within parliament creates a Sikh theory of governance. Likewise, the success of Sikh entrepreneurs within capitalism should not be confused with the development of Sikh economic thought. The distinction becomes harder to see when Sikh language is introduced. A corporate leadership seminar may speak about seva, a business network might invoke dasvandh, a political organisation may appeal to sarbat da bhala, while a management framework incorporates quotations from Gurbani. Some of these uses may be sincere and beneficial, and so the question is not whether Sikh concepts can be used in new contexts, but whether those concepts have actually shaped the framework or have simply been inserted into one whose fundamental assumptions were already settled.
This is where Sikh Prefixing becomes more than a question of branding. It reveals something about where we locate intellectual authority. Consider the questions we have learned to ask. What does Sikhi say about democracy? What is the Sikh approach to capitalism? What does Sikhi teach us about leadership? What are Sikh business ethics? How might Sikh values improve modern education? These appear to be questions about Sikhi, but their categories have already been supplied. Democracy, capitalism, leadership, business and modern education arrive as established objects, and Sikhi is subsequently invited to comment upon them. The direction of travel is almost always from the established modern category towards its Sikh adaptation.
In other words, we ask modern questions and provide Sikh answers, rather than allowing Sikhi to determine the questions. Reversing that direction changes the enquiry because rather than beginning with what “Sikh leadership” should look like, we might ask what account of authority emerges from the Guru’s Darbar. Instead of determining whether Sikhi is democratic, we might first examine how Gurmat understands collective authority, deliberation and responsibility. Rather than searching Gurbani for an economic position somewhere between capitalism and socialism, perhaps we should begin with Sikh understandings of wealth, labour, possession, obligation and distribution.
Who supplies the categories?
This question cannot be separated from colonialism. Colonial power did not simply occupy territory and extract resources; it also reorganised knowledge. In Patshahi Mehima, I examined how the British annexation of the Sikh kingdom in 1849 was not merely a transfer of political power from Lahore to the East India Company, but how colonial institutions classified and reorganised Panjabi life through categories that had emerged from a very different intellectual and historical world.
This epistemic dimension of the colonial encounter has been explored extensively by academics. In his work on Sikh philosophy and colonial modernity, Dr. Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair examines how gurmat and sikhi came to be organised through the modern category of “religion”, and consequently located within wider divisions between the religious and secular, religion and politics, theology and philosophy. The significance was not merely terminological; it altered the terms upon which Sikh thought became intelligible within the modern world. This has been described in terms of a transfer of epistemic sovereignty from the Sikh lifeworld to the modern Western knowledge system.
An important point to note here is that colonial categories do not simply disappear when colonial rule ends. Once internalised, they can continue to organise thought without an external colonial authority imposing them. Dr. Mandair notes that Sikh elites themselves came to internalise the classification of gurmat as religion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The colonial encounter therefore leaves behind more than institutions; it can leave behind the conceptual architecture through which a people subsequently understand themselves. This is where Frantz Fanon’s warning about the deeper residues of colonialism becomes relevant. His reference to the “germs of rot” points towards the problem of political decolonisation failing to remove what colonial rule has implanted within the intellectual and cultural life of the colonised.
This question of conceptual inheritance extends beyond the immediate subject of this article and is one I explore more fully in a forthcoming book. Part of that enquiry concerns what happens when intellectual traditions encounter modernity on terms that have already been established for them: when their concepts are translated, classified and made legible through categories whose histories lie elsewhere. In a nutshell, the problem is not intellectual exchange itself, but the unequal terms upon which that exchange can occur. A tradition may continue speaking in its own vocabulary while gradually losing the authority to determine what its vocabulary means.
Sikh Prefixing offers one contemporary expression of this wider problem.
Borrowing and derivation
None of this should be taken as an argument for intellectual isolation or some imagined Sikh purity. Sikhs have never existed within a sealed conceptual world, nor should we aspire to one. Panjab itself has long been a place of intellectual encounter, movement and exchange. Ideas travel, languages borrow and concepts cross political and cultural boundaries. The question is not whether Sikh thought should encounter ideas produced elsewhere, but from what position that encounter takes place. An intellectually sovereign tradition does not need to fear encounter; it needs to be capable of entering that encounter without surrendering the terms upon which it understands itself.
There should be nothing uncomfortable about acknowledging that an idea has been developed elsewhere and that Sikhs find it useful. The difficulty arises when an established framework acquires Sikh terminology and is subsequently presented as though it emerged from Sikhi itself. Capitalist enterprise accompanied by dasvandh is not therefore Sikh economics, just as liberal democracy containing Sikh representatives is not Sikh governance. These combinations may sometimes be productive, but we should be intellectually clear about what we are doing. This matters because the Sikh experience of the last century has understandably been dominated by questions of survival and participation. Sikhs migrated, established businesses, entered universities, fought discrimination, sought political representation and built organisations within societies whose institutions they did not control. There is immense achievement within that history, but as I’ve written elsewhere, participation produces a different set of questions from sovereignty.
Participation asks how Sikhs can succeed within the institutions that exist. A more sovereign intellectual enquiry asks what institutions we might create if we began from our own account of the world. That requires recovering concepts before translating them and allowing them to generate questions whose answers have not already been decided. Patshahi, Panth, Guru, darbar, sangat, seva, hukam, miri-piri, gurmata and sarbat khalsa cannot simply function as Sikh equivalents for concepts that we already possess. They must be approached on their own terms, as concepts capable of reorganising how we understand authority, knowledge, economy and collective life through our own vishav-drishti, or worldview.
Some of what emerges may resemble institutions that already exist, just as different manifestations of Sikh Raj drew upon, adapted and transformed institutions encountered in their own historical contexts. Some may not, and we cannot know beforehand. But if we already assume that the destination is democracy, capitalism, corporate leadership or the modern university, then the task given to Sikhi is merely to provide a Sikh lexicon.
Beyond the prefix
There is an understandable desire today to demonstrate that Sikhi has something to say about leadership, governance, economics, education, business, media and public life – and it undoubtedly does. But we should resist proving Sikhi’s relevance by demonstrating that it can produce a Sikh version of every category modernity has already produced. The deeper challenge is whether we are prepared to allow Sikhi to speak before those categories have been decided. Recovering Sikh epistemic sovereignty does not require withdrawal from intellectual exchange; it means recovering the capacity to determine which questions are worth asking and through which concepts we understand the world.
Without that work, Sikh participation may increase enormously while the conceptual architecture remains largely untouched. That is the danger of the Sikh Prefix; it gives the appearance of intellectual recovery because Sikh language is everywhere, even as the structures beneath that language remain unexamined.
Adding the prefix is relatively easy. The more difficult task is to ask what we might build if Sikhi were allowed to generate the architecture itself.
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