Introduction

For many Punjabis in India, as well as scholars of Punjab, the name Bhai Vir Singh is synonymous with modern Punjabi literary production and Sikh religious reform. Vir Singh was a major force in shaping Sikh and Punjabi culture, language, and politics in the undivided Punjab, prior to the partition of the province in 1947, and his influence endured in the postcolonial period. He was a prominent exegete and scholar of Sikh scriptures and literatures and inaugurated new genres, modes of production, and themes in Punjabi periodical and literary production. He played a central role in shaping the contours of modern Sikh identity and self-representation, and in that sense his religious, literary, and heuristic work can be seen to represent a major contribution to an on-going epistemological turn at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. His intellectual labor and literary and scholarly production thus had a far-reaching impact, making legible what modern Sikhism might be to his varied interlocutors in an evolving Punjabi and Sikh public. This introduction provides a basic overview of this author's life and impact and provides synthetic overview of the essays in the volume and how they come together to explicate the complicated contribution of this important figure in the late colonial, early postcolonial periods.