ABSTRACT
At the beginning of what Harjot Oberoi terms the ‘nation-state phase’ of Sikh history (Oberoi 1987), the Sikhs possessed a coherent, if not homogeneous, ethno-religious identity based on the myths and symbols of the Khalsa as first defined by the Tat Khalsa faction of the Singh Sabha movement and enshrined in the SGPC’s definition of a Sikh. The Sikhs also possessed their own ‘political system’1 (Wallace 1981), centred on the SGPC, an elected organization open to all Sikhs empowered by the Sikh Gurdwara Act to supervise the running of gurdwaras in the Punjab and the SAD, whose role it was to define, articulate and safeguard ‘Sikh’ interests. It could be argued therefore that the Sikhs corresponded to what A.D. Smith has termed a politicized ethnie or nation (A.D. Smith 1999). Unlike any other ethnie, however, the Sikh qaum lacked a territorial base, a Sikh ‘homeland’, and a language they could exclusively call their own. Punjabi was the common language of all who lived in the ‘land of the five rivers’ in which the Sikhs were in a minority. By the end of the Nehruvian period of modern Indian political history, however, the Sikhs had both acquired a homeland within independent India and successfully claimed Punjabi written in Gurmukhi script as their own sacred language.
