The Source Book On Sikhism

FINAL WORD

The purpose of this article was to show that the theme of Eurocentrism runs through the writings of McLeod, Pashaura Singh, and Oberoi. It is very clear that they got their “research inspirations” from E. Trumpp, who came to India in 1869 to write a book about Sikhs for the benefit of the colonizers. I feel that E. Trumpp’s colonial mentality and “Occidental” reality was picked up by consciously or unconsciously by the historians in a hurry - trained in social science methodology with European traditions. “The other kind seeing” of Khalsacentric research where the place, time and nature of the community being studied and the role, the role models played, does not fit into their egocentric - repression - projection paradigms.

When some of these scholars write about Sikh Gurus as “political personalities”, they open windows for others to see the pathology they are suffering from. The mystification of producing and "impressing" people with their writings without introspection and retrospection, has caused in the Sikh community a great deal of hurt and stress. Their zeal to bring "sociological respectively" to Sikhism has made them arrogant and dehumanizing.

If they could have read the reactions of the First Nations of North America, women and blacks about the Eurocentric research done on them by the “well meaning researchers of the 60s”, they would have not gone the direction they had taken. The cover of academic freedom will not shelter them for a long time. Their instrumental, non-believing personalities that takes sadist pleasure in trampling over the subjective faith of a troubled minority, have to be challenged and exposed. May Sat Guru forgive them for the hurt they are causing. Perhaps “they do not know what they are doing”, because of the acute academic neurosis which has made them linear, non-intuitive, convergent, and myopically pathological.