Introduction: Toward an old understanding of philology: Exploring the literary construction of place as religious and social commentary in Asia

Cardiff UniversityThere is no doubt that the idea of place matters. Human beings have long been willing to fight and die for rights, symbolic and material, over both tangible and intangible places. However, the types of expression and performance that transmit and adapt ideas of place are less well understood than the brute fact of the enduring power of certain charged locations. That is to say, we know that certain places are significant but we are less sure as to the mechanisms of how and why they are made so. In addition, scholarly work in this area has tended to consider the literary and performative construction of place to always be bound up with these determinate locations rather than a variety of social functions. Literary engagements with the category of place, as this volume will demonstrate, encompass a wide range of uses. A suggestive but by no means exhaustive list of those that reflect the analytic content of this volume would have to include: political and religious legitimation, the construction of the significant past, the expression of agreement and dissent in relation to prevailing and emergent ideologies, and the transmission and adaptation of systems of socially significant knowledge in response to a wide variety of historical circumstances. Literatures of place, then, provide an extraordinarily rich source of information as to the ways in which human beings maintain and transform their understandings of not just the world around them, but themselves

Re-thinking the guru: towards a typology of forms of religious domination in pre-Colonial Punjab

This paper explores the role of hagiographical tradition in the formation of Sikh identity and in shaping the attitude’s of Sikhs to non-Sikhs in eighteenth-century Punjab. The paper focuses on Sikh hagiographical literature. I suggest that, by inserting Nānak and his work in a range of dramatic scenarios, Sikh hagiographies of the early C18th develop a perspective on the Guru and the austere devotional ideals of his verse that considerably widens their social appeal and cosmic scope, and establishes an arena for the formation and adaptation of forms of religious identity amongst Sikhs. The paper suggests that this form of analysis may serve to enrich and broaden the productive scholarly dialogue concerning the social and political life of the suffix ism, the designation ‘religion’ and the development of a wide variety of, by turn, cherished and vilified definitional perspectives in South Asian studies

Re-thinking the guru: Towards a typology of forms of religious domination in pre-Colonial Pañjāb

In this paper, I explore the role of hagiographical tradition in the formation of Sikh identity and in shaping the attitude’s of Sikhs to non-Sikhs in eighteenth-century Pañjāb. I focus on one particular hagiography, the B40 Janam Sākhī, which tells of the life and deeds of Guru Nānak. I suggest that, by inserting Nānak and his work in a range of dramatic scenarios, the B40 develops a perspective on the Guru and the austere devotional ideals of his verse that considerably widens their social appeal and cosmic scope, and establishes an arena for the formation and adaptation of forms of religious identity and domination amongst Sikhs. I suggest that this form of analysis may serve to enrich and broaden the productive scholarly dialogue concerning the social and political life of the suffix ‑ism, the designation ‘religion’ and the development of a wide variety of, by turn, cherished and vilified definitional perspectives in South Asian studies