Sikhs in the 21st Century: Remembering the Past, Engaging the Future

This project is led by Prof. Nirvikar Singh, who was the inaugural holder of the Sarbjit Singh Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies at UCSC, from 2010 to 2020. The goal of the project is to strengthen the field of Sikh and Punjabi Studies, by creating an academically rigorous digital collection of materials that can be widely shared and disseminated, in academic spaces and beyond them. Five videos were completed in the first year of this three-year project, and are available through the UCSC Teaching and Learning Center, which is responsible for the technical aspects of production. Funding for the project was received from the 5Rivers Foundation, the UCSC Division of Humanities, and The Humanities Institute at UCSC. Although Sikhs have become a global community, they remain a minority almost everywhere, visible but not well understood. The project specifically aims to address gaps between the community’s self-understandings (fully recognizing the diversity of the community) and academic approaches that seek to fit Sikh experience into intellectual frameworks borrowed from other contexts. The project and its outcomes could also provide a model for combining rigor and accessibility of scholarship to other areas within the Humanities, including South Asian Studies. In a 2023 lecture at UCSC, Joy Connolly, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, highlighted the need for a more global and inclusive approach to scholarship in the Humanities. This project seeks to address one small aspect of that need.