ABSTRACT
Edward Shils distinguished between the public, civil ties of the modern state and the primordial ties of family, religious and ethnic groups and argued that primordial ties of kinship and religion were integral even to modern secular society. The present global process, apprehended as a homogenizing narrative eroding ethnic, cultural and religious difference, revealed a paradoxical intensification of primordial ties across the world. Sikhism is a religion based on the teachings of its founder Guru Nanak that emerged in Punjab in North India in the fifteenth century. Sikh scholars of various ideological and academic affiliations have been engaged in a debate on Sikhism's claims to being an independent religion, which are, in turn, tied to the political Sikh secessionist movement. The consolidation of a transnational Sikh identity after 9/11 in the diaspora reveals the resignification of a martial or economic diaspora into a religious diaspora imagined after the Jewish model through the myth of persecution.
