ABSTRACT
The development of Sikhism over the five centuries of its history has always been closely tied to its homeland, the Punjab in north-western India (see map on p. 79 below). From an original context in which Hinduism and Islam were the opposed dominant creeds, Sikhism had evolved through one particularly significant internal change of emphasis and organization as the ethnic religion of a significant local minority when it was subjected to the impact of modernity caused by the British conquest of the Punjab in the midnineteenth century. Over the next century this colonial context therefore largely conditioned the pattern of Sikh responses to the modern world. Only more recently has that pattern itself begun to be questioned.
