Publisher's Synopsis
Early period Sikh tradition did not show much concern in establishing distinct religious boundaries. However, a dramatic change is ushered in with the rise of the Khalsa in the eighteenth century; sections of Sikh population now consciously begin to push for a distinct and separate religious fluidity and diversity within Sikh tradition. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Singh Sabha, a wide ranging religious movement began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with great suspicion and hostility. The social and cultural forces unleashed by the Raj helped the Singh Sabha's powerful project to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of all its diversity. It established a highly systematised discourse of what it meant to be a Sikh. This volume is a study of this transitional process: of how one religious world view was replaced by another.
