What makes a scholar? And what goes into the making of a Sikh scholar?
This series on sikhchic.com explores these very questions by looking closely at the life of one particular Sikh scholar. The subject selected for the purpose of this examination is Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair.
The following is Part IV in the series.
CHAPTER IV - TEACHING 'SIKH STUDIES'
sikhchic.com: What sort of courses do you teach? Can you perhaps tell us a little bit about the content of these courses?
I teach a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses. My department is great because it allows me to go well beyond the run-of-the-mill Sikh Studies courses.
I teach “Warrior Saints”, which is basically my intro to the Sikhi course. It continues to be very successful.
I also teach two graduate courses: “Sikhism and Modernity”, and “Philosophy of the Sikh Gurus”.
I also teach a course called “Gurbani Vichar and Viakhya“, which is basically an introduction to the language of the Sikh texts, but I reserve that for graduate students specializing in that area.
But the courses that pull in most students and which I’m really fond of teaching include “Violence and Religion in a Secular Age” (that’s a hot topic course, and we have some real lively debates in that class, as you can imagine); “What is Religion” which is basically about contemporary theory of religion.
Another is “Postcolonial Theory” which I’ve taught several times, and a particularly successful one was “Indian Religions and Western Thought”.
Next year I’m planning to teach “Ethics: Asian and Western”.
As you can see from the titles of these courses, I do a lot of crossing between ‘East and West’, which is also one of my main research interests.
I think it would take too long for me to give course outlines but your readers can find out more by checking out my website - arvindmandair.com/
sikhchic.com: What motivates you re Sikhi and Sikh studies?
Well, as you know, Sikhi and Sikh studies are two very different things.
In regard to Sikhi, lots of things grab me but I think that’s a conversation for another time. But if I had to pin-point one or two, what really motivates me is a desire to see the educational level of the community elevated by a significant degree.
By ‘educational’, I don’t mean professional education. The Sikh community churns out plenty of doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc, And that’s surely a good thing as its important for the community to improve its financial and professional base.
But what I have in mind is greater investment in individuals who are thoroughly grounded in their own culture but at the same time are able to make trenchant critical analyses and interventions of the dominant cultures that we live in, whether that be Eastern or Western culture.
Our gurdwaras are primarily reliant on prabhandaks imported from Punjab (how many of them are actually gyanis in the true sense of the term?) whose job it is merely to tend to day-to-day gurdwara protocol.
If you compare them with Jewish and Christian counterparts, the biggest difference is that the latter are trained not only in things like scripture, etc, but to be able to move easily between the different worlds that ordinary people (especially our children) live in.
One option is to better train a new generation of gyanis who can move fluently between the Anglophone and Punjabi universes, but another option is also to invest in an educational infra-structure that doesn’t just perpetuate the problem.
At the moment we tend to think that Punjabi classes and gurmat camps will solve the problem, but in my humble opinion, if these aren’t run with an eye on the outside world that Sikhs encounter everyday, they end up producing closed minds.
So I guess that that is what really motivates me – the need to avoid a closed mindset.
I experienced this in my younger days and I see it happening to young Sikh kids all the time. People don’t seem to understand that it’s not a question of giving the child or teenager little nuggets of information or to simply moralize them into submission. What we need to give them is a framework to make sense of the discrepancy between what they are taught about Sikhi and the results of actually applying it to the real world.
More often than not there remains a disconnect between the two worlds. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t people who can fill this gap. A good example of a truly modern gyani would be Bhai Gurdarshan Singh of Maryland who left Punjab with a strong knowledge of the indigenous tradition but then went on to study theology at a Western university, in New Zealand I think.
With regard to Sikh studies, I want to say first of all that as a legitimate scholarly field of research and teaching, it has really grown in the last decade or so. The field is not what it used to be. It is now more diverse intellectually and attracts a wider scholarly base. It has its own unit in the American Academy of Religion, which is no small achievement.
And for all this we have to thank all the scholars, who despite all the negative propaganda from certain quarters and attempts to close chairs of Sikh studies (especially by one or two individuals based in Southern California), have continued to do their research and to help grow the field for younger scholars.
And that is what is so exciting – we are seeing a younger generation of scholars who bring a real diversity of interests and will add much to the field.
As far as my own scholarly work is concerned, what motivates me is the desire to situate Sikh subjectivity at the center of contemporary thinking in the humanities and social sciences.
sikhchic.com: Can you explain what do you mean by ‘subjectivity’? Or ‘Sikh subjectivity’?
Certainly. Subjectivity is just another word for agency … it points to whatever makes me a thinking and acting agent as opposed to being manipulated by some dominant power.
The way I use the term, it’s related in some way to what you might also call ‘sovereignty’ but not state sovereignty as it’s defined in the West.
There is another layer of meaning associated with subjectivity, which might be ‘lived experience’. And it’s not identity as understood in the simplistic sense of an unchanging essence … that would be a mistake. Rather, subjectivity signals towards one’s own sense of self-difference, how one differs from oneself, it’s what makes one become rather than simply be.
And for me, this sense of difference from oneself is the most authentic form of identity. In fact identity is secondary to it … I’m not sure if I’m getting my point across …
sikhchic.com: It makes sense … but why is it so important for you?
For the simple reason that when I consider my own subjectivity, it is multiple … or, if I can borrow a phrase, a better term might be ‘singular plural’.
In fact all subjectivity is ‘singular plural’. For those of us who have grown up in the diaspora, we can vouch for that in terms of the fact that we are neither South Asian, nor Western, yet our subjectivities combine both aspects often to form a chiasma, a fluent crossing, although one cultural strand is usually interdicted (it is forbidden from manifesting itself in its authentic aspect) because of the fact that we are forced to speak in a dominant language (English for example), or we have to accede to a dominant form of global consciousness, especially in public (this is how secularism works, for example), etc., etc..
For me the nature of this subjectivity (its singular plurality) changes everything.
Once I acknowledged this, I could never take the rules of dominant culture seriously. I feel the need to contest it at every stage … and this comes out very strongly in my research, in the way I teach, in the way I approach the humanities and social sciences … and of course in the way I approach Sikh studies.
It partly for these reasons that my own work has been moving for some time towards the development of my take on Sikh philosophy.
For me, to live as a Sikh is not to isolate oneself and one’s tradition into a secluded “Sikh domain” (as if such a thing could even exist) but to be constantly in encounter with the world around us.
For me it is encounter that really describes the contemporary Sikh context.
So while most of us have an intuitive understanding of what it means to be a Sikh, i.e., we inherit the memory of a certain tradition, that inheritance is constantly in encounter with dominant cultural forms, dominant language, dominant global consciousness which asks more complicated questions than the demand for an external identity.
What I’m trying to suggest is that in order to deal effectively with our encounters with the world around us we need to develop more complex answers than the clichéd ones that we tend to represent ourselves by.
To do that we need to develop the concepts and ideas that are latent in Sikh literature and in its cultural inheritance. We need to explicate them and to reinterpret them in relation to these encounters.
And most important of all, we need to allow Sikh concepts to circulate and contest global consciousness, to encounter others and to affect the ideas and concepts of global culture. Otherwise Sikhs simply become puppets of more dominant cultures, both Western and Indian.
We have developed a nice protective bubble, i.e., we know how to refute ideas and identities we’re not comfortable with, but our own internal exploration has become stultified, at the level of stereotype.
We stereotype ourselves and allow others to stereotype us.
So the way that I try to solve this problem is that I try to situate the Sikh as the subject rather than solely as the object of study. These two things go hand in hand for me.
The need to do this comes partly from the discipline that I work with (which, broadly speaking, is philosophy) and partly due to the main political problem that faces Sikhs everywhere, which is one of extreme marginality.
So I am not content for Sikhs and Sikh culture to become providers of raw data for others to manipulate. This is only one aspect of research as far as I am concerned. There is a lot of very good solid empirical work being done right now in Sikh studies.
But I have always had a suspicion that the humanities and social sciences can never be truly neutral. And those of us involved in Sikh studies need to be much more aware of that, otherwise we simply follow the gaze of the dominant culture and its intellectual requirements, one of which is to reduce the ‘difference’ of other cultures into a sameness.
This happens primarily because we have no option but to write and express ourselves in the dominant language (English). So what I would like to see in Sikh studies is a greater sensitivity on the part of scholars towards the categories and concepts that we inherit from the humanities and social sciences and which we then use to think about Sikhs and Sikh culture.
This means that you often have to reinterpret the rules of the disciplines that we are situated in. For example, those of us working in the field of religion can no longer regard ‘religion’ as a kind of culturally neutral domain. Because of its deep connection to the history of Western intellectual and cultural history of ideas, religion cannot be separated from the secular or the political.
Once you start acknowledging this, it has major implications for the way that Sikhs are able to make the case for themselves in the public domain. It is here that Sikh studies can truly fulfill its potential to work on behalf of the Sikhs rather than simply placing them in the harsh glare of a spotlight.
To be continued …
--------------------------------
To read Part I, please CLICK here.To read Part II, please CLICK here.
To read Part III, please CLICK here.