Sat Sri Akal!
In this post I am going to briefly lay out my plans for this blog. For those of you who know me from Twitter, this is going to be a space where I explore themes in Sikh history in greater depth, as a supplement to what I share there. For those who do not, I can summarise my exploration of Sikh history as mapped along a binary framework of investigations into bibliographies and historiographies
To put it simply, I obsessively collect and collate sources, books, papers, etc. on Sikh history, primarily from the Internet. And, I investigate how Sikh history has been studied and written about. I do this from personal interest, but I am also motivated by a sense of frustration due to what I call the erasure of the Sikh experience from mainstream history writing, especially modern Indian history.
While this is true for all periods of Sikhi, which has always faced ‘epistemic attacks’ even during the age of the gurus (note: the problem of ‘sachi’ v ‘kachi’ bani), let me give the example of the history of the 18th century.
This is a source I shared yesterday, from James Rennell:
The history of the Sikh liberation of northern India, beginning from Banda Singh Bahadur’s campaigns, from 1708, to the conquest of all territories from the Indus to the Yamuna, is from a purely geopolitical perspective, a vital aspect of not just Indian but world history. The importance of the 18th century for Sikh history is something I will explore in an upcoming (almost ready!) essay. But returning to the point.
I recently dug into some correspondence of East India Company military officers deployed in north Indian nawabdoms. These papers, as you can see below, reveal Sikh operations in the Ganga River Valley. In fact, the threat of Sikh expansion was among the key factors motivating the East India Company’s counter expansion into northern India. This is again something you will struggle to find in most ‘history’ books.
The implication is not that there is a conspiracy of silence, but there is definitely a complicity of ignorance - a lot of it our own. Sikh history is important, it is important to know, to engage, and to inform. This will be the goal I hope to work towards here.