After Macauliffe: the wondrous liberty of Puran Singh

Belonging to the generation after Macauliffe, one of the first Sikhs who sought to spread the message of the Gurus in English was Professor Puran Singh (1881-1931). In his unusual life, he combined the practice of his profession with a passionate search for the expression of all-embracing spiritual realities. This drew him to the poetic interpretation of the message of the Sikh Gurus, in part inspired by his strong identification with the poetry of Walt Whitman, and resulting in a very different approach from Macauliffe's to translating the Sikh scriptures. The paper includes some discussion of the broad context of the complex interweaving of literary and religious trends across different parts of the British empire in the early twentieth century, paying particular attention to parallels between India and Ireland

Representing Sikhism: Essays in memory of the Irish scholar Max Arthur Macauliffe

This is an introduction, by the guest editors, to the special issue of JISASR (Vol 4, 2017) entitled 'Representing Sikhism: Essays in Memory of the Irish Scholar Max Arthur Macauliffe'. The genesis of this special issue lies in pioneering work on Macauliffe's Irish identity and personal and scholarly life undertaken by Professor Tadhg Foley (Galway). The active interest and support of members of the Sikh community in Ireland led to a conference, hosted by the Study of Religions Department at University College Cork, held to mark the centennial of Macauliffe's death on 15 March 1913. After some brief comments on past and present trends in the study of Ireland-Asia connections in the field of religions, we discuss Macauliffe's significance for modern representations of Sikhism and offer some contextual observations on each of the four papers. The article concludes with a brief resumé of the 2013 conference at which the papers were originally presented