Cultivating Sikh Culture and Identity explores the development of modern Sikh identities through the concept of ‘cultivation of culture’. It investigates diverse, but repeatedly overlapping, Sikh encounters in the fields of art, music and philology, and considers their role in the making of a continuous living tradition.

The volume focuses particularly on the imperial encounter and intellectual interaction between coloniser and colonised. It emphasises the enduring importance of the modern rational approach of the Singh Sabha (Tat Khalsa) reformers in defining a normative Sikh tradition. In so doing, the author reflects on the importance of philological research and the complexity of modern knowledge production in relation to the formation of cultural identities. The chapters offer a critical historical overview of the changes in the performance and reception of Sikh devotional music in the context of the community’s successive encounters with the Mughals, the British and globalisation. They also provide new insights into the life and work of Max Arthur Macauliffe, author of the classic The Sikh Religion (1909), and a contextualised discussion of contemporary Sikh drawings by Emily de Klerk.

Taking a global, interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of religion, South Asian Studies and history.

Bob van der Linden studies modern South Asian cultural history in a global context. His previous publications include Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab: The Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyahs (2008), Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (2013), Arnold Bake: A Life with South Asian Music (2018) and Romantic Nationalism in India: Cultivation of Culture and the Global Circulation of Ideas (2024).