Latest Talk: Sikh Studies in an Era of World-Making
Published July 23nd
Dr. Anneeth Kaur Hundle has recently posted an extended piece on chapatimystery.com. Here is an excerpt from the piece. A link to the full article can be found at the bottom of the page.
From Guru Nanak’s perspective, the universal is seen in the particular; the universal highlights the particular, form is Formless and vice versa. It is important that the dialectic is ever alive; otherwise, Guru Nanak’s vision would be misperceived. The Transcendent is not understood as actually residing within, or encapsulated within a form, for then it would become substantialized, reified, reduced to finitude. The transcendent is everywhere without being contained as such…the Ultimate never becomes immanent…[the] vision is a dynamic and joyous one in which a fluid connection between the particulars and the universal is maintained and the entire world pulsates with divine potentiality, every atom vibrating with ultimate possibility.
–N-G. K. Singh (1993:40)
On October 19th-20th, 2019, Professor Arvind-Pal Sing Mandair at the University of Michigan, hosted “Guru Nanak in an Era of Global Thought: A Conference to Celebrate the 550th Anniversary of Guru Nanak’s Birth” in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mandair asked conference participants and presenters to consider the following theme: “For Guru Nanak’s ideas to become legible to intellectual concerns prescient in contemporary academic discourse, they appear to require re-contextualization into a global context. This arena of global thought has been variously defined as comparative thought, world religions, world literatures, world philosophies, etc. Such planes of encounter require Guru Nanak’s thought to be read as ‘universal’ or ‘global’ set against a variety of localized categories. But as many scholars have shown over the past few decades, the demand for the ‘global’ also alienates individuals from their own cultural contexts and experiences. The underpinning question for this conference, however, is whether there are modes of encounter that elide the universal/particular binary that captures non-Western concepts and thought within the complex structures of identity such as ethnicity, race, culture and history? Is it possible (or even necessary) to transplant Guru Nanak’s key concepts and teachings beyond the localized ethnic context in which they continue to be enclosed and taken into the wider arena of global thought? Can this happen without meaningful encounter and engagement with other traditions of thought, and specifically with those of the Western variety?”
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor was an appropriate and celebrated location to work through the possibilities of Guru Nanak’s legacy, commemorate the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak and the Sikh tradition, and to interrogate the encounter between Sikh thought and global thought. The University of Michigan has been a critical institutional site for the development of Sikh Studies as an interdisciplinary field formation in the US and Western academy. The resident Michigan Sikh community organized as the Sikh Foundation of Michigan under the leadership of sangat member Raman Singh and the generous support of the Chatta Family have supported Endowed Chairs in Sikh Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The commitment and dedication of the Sikh community in Michigan and in North America more broadly to help fund and support the development of Sikh Studies, and the commitment of university donor relations to establish Chairs, hire research faculty, and develop Sikh Studies curricula have provided exciting prospects and possibility for the growth of the field in the US academy. The interrelated fields of Punjab and Sikh Studies continue to grow as more academic endowed chairs or centers of study have been established across the US, Canada and the UK in recent years.