Bhai Vir Singh's Puratan Janamsakhi

Im/material and intimate relations: Considering ethnographic methodologies for already-surveilled communities

“…In this context, going ‘with’ or ‘against’ community narrative is not so simple, and in the first place tends towards a colonial understanding of objectivity that has made up existing academic literature on colonized communities since the early 1800s (Mudimbe, 1988). Within Sikh Studies, too, contention around legitimacy of shared community knowledge and oral histories has a long history itself, where the colonial archive and library became foregrounded as the only legible form of knowledge production (Grewal, 2017; McLeod, 1980; Siṅgha, 2004). In response to such epistemic homogenization, newer studies of Sikhs still fail to illustrate the various social and political locations that exist within Sikh communities, producing a colonial Sikh Studies (Kaur and kehal, 2023; Sian and Dhamoon, 2020).…”