ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently a great deal of discussion in modern Sikh studies tended to fall into an impasse between two seemingly opposed modes of organizing knowledge: historicism and traditionalism. This is exemplified by the wars of scholarship between two different approaches to history. On the one hand are “traditionalist” historians who trust traditional source materials and view them with the certainty of religious belief. On the other hand are “critical” historians who view traditionalist sources with scepticism. As I have argued elsewhere, the distinction between these two modes of doing history—often presented as a difference in cognitive attitude that can in turn be reduced to an ontological difference between modernity and tradition, or between secular critique and religious belief—is exaggerated if not false. In fact, given that those who attempt to retrieve Sikh tradition do so through an intellectual framework established by the reformist (modernist nationalist) Singh Sabha movement, both modes of knowledge are intrinsically modern. That is to say, they both present a break with pre-modern sources. Furthermore, both modes of knowledge subscribe to an understanding of religion as sui generis—an understanding of religion centred around the repetition of an origin or an original event.
