Cultivating Sikh Culture and Identity

For any one interested in finding new frameworks to understand Sikhs, Punjab and British Raj this is a must have book. Cultivating Sikh Culture and Identity is a magnificent, multifaceted and conceptually inspiring text that is destined to become a key work for our understanding of Sikhism in the twenty-first century. By fusing philology, arts, music and culture the book opens new frontiers in thought and praxis that reveal a remarkably complex world, one that would have remained invisible to us without this pioneering intervention. Surely, this text will ignite a million new conversations both within and beyond the academy.

Harjot Oberoi, University of British Columbia, Canada

A unique exegesis of key texts and visuals from Sikh religious and musical histories in the modern period.

Radha Kapuria, Durham University, UK

Rejecting simplistic arguments about imperial domination, van der Linden shows how Sikh political agency became intertwined with Sikh cultural life. Against this backdrop, he examines Sikh music, Macauliffe’s scholarly contributions, and Emily de Klerk’s sketches, while boldly noting Punjab’s “undeserved negligence in historiography.” The observation that this region “was anything but a backwater to the development of ‘Hindustani’ music” throws down the gauntlet to future research on North Indian music—no longer can it sidestep Punjab.

Gurminder K Bhogal, Wellesley College, USA

Bob van der Linden studies modern South Asian cultural history in a global context. His previous publications include Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab: The Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyahs (2008), Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (2013), Arnold Bake: A Life with South Asian Music (2018) and Romantic Nationalism in India: Cultivation of Culture and the Global Circulation of Ideas (2024).