The Source Book On Sikhism

EUROCENTRISM AND SIKH RESEARCHERS

After giving the above-mentioned examples, a brief introduction to Eurocentrism is in order at this time. Eurocentric Sikh researchers are self-appointed Sikh historians who want to bring "correctness" to Sikh history. Their linear, collective mind treats the Sikhs, Sikh Gurus, and Sikh Scriptures the same way as Marx treated various European religions. These empiricists and logical - positivists use social science methods developed in Europe to understand and evaluate the Mystic writings of the East.

They operate using object-subject duality. They are committed to hard-headed no-nonsense interpretation of mystical realities and lives of cosmocentric Sikh Gurus. Their logical positivism wants to verify the Sikh traditions by recorded documentation. They get their inspirations from such European thinkers as Calvin, Wilden, Habernras, Sartre, Marcuse, Freud, Marx, and Hegel (see Sirdar Kapur Singh’s Sikhism, Institute of Sikh Studies, 1993).

The motivations of Eurocentric Scholars are repression-projection mechanisms. The Eurocentric scholar is uncomfortable with contradiction between the theory and practice in his own religious traditions. By repressing, they project the contradiction to Sikhism (McLeod’s various articles in the Sikh Review, January and April, 1994) are very good examples of this phenomenon).

This psychodynamic interpretation explains why faithless scholars, graduate students in a hurry, the Western and some mystified Eastern Role-Dancing followers, have given such a differential treatment to Sikhism. The present writer is not aware of any article of Dr. McLeod where he has taken Christianity to task for being a very oppressive and colonized religion.

By this ‘repression’, projection mechanism of motivation, these Eurocentric scholars want to bring structure to Sikhism and make it sociologically respectable (Oberoi, 1994). Calvinistic elect and elitist thought has brought the dehumanizing structural necessity, rational efficiency, concentration on self, selfishness and ability to “denature the supernatural” in Eurocentric Scholarship. Eurocentric scholars want "to see" the invisible in the visible or “essential in the appearing”.

An Eurocentric researcher believes or is mystified in believing in the inferiority of Asian religions. The readers are recommended to read: W.L. McGregor (1848); H.H. Wilson (1848); E. Trumpp (1877); R.S. Ellwood (1987); Hopfe (1987); Ward J. Fellows (1979); Geoffrey Parrinder (1965); K.W. Morgan (1953); D.G. Bradley (1963); J.B. Noss (1984); and writings of McLeod, J.S. Grewal, S.S. Hans, Gurinder Mann, Pashaura Singh, and H. Oberoi for understanding the “Culture of the Fitters” of Sikh Religion.

It is a known fact that Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” (1859) gave freedom to the imperialists, colonizers, and fitters to create the culture of the Fitters. Using their linear and colonial mind, these Eurocentric historians are trying to fit Sikh religion to the “Social Science, European, no-nonsense paradigm”. They also operate on the assumption that the researcher is separate from the object of study and in fact seeks to gain as much distance as possible from the object of the study.