Relocating gender in Sikh history : transformation, meaning and identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term 'gender' has been defined as an evolutionary, fluid construct; gendered realities are thus open to the vicissitudes of circumstance and time, emerging and developing with the shifting needs of the community within which they unfold. An analysis of gender construction is thus a useful mechanism to interpret the historical process on the whole. This theoretical position forms the framework for a reinterpretation of the Sikh community in the colonial context. The Sikh tradition itself has been part of an evolutionary process. From a primary focus on interior religiosity upon its inception, Sikhism developed into an increasingly militaristic order with highly prescribed exterior symbols and rituals. Accompanying this shift was a 'theology of difference', giving religious, symbolic and ritual sanctioning to a specific gender hierarchy. With a primary focus on male Sikh identity, female religious identity was relegated to a secondary position. Under-girding the annexation of Punjab into the British Empire were Victorian notions of the 'manly Christian', Christianized imperialism and chivalry, alongside rigid female ideals such as the 'helpmate'. The Sikhs came to be highly favoured by their imperial masters for their monotheistic ideals and what was perceived as their 'manly' and militaristic character. This hyper-masculine, militaristic construct, already enshrined within Sikh history through the creation of the Khalsa in 1699 received renewed emphasis by the British administration. The Singh Sabha reform movement initiated in the late-nineteenth century ingeniously accommodated selected aspects of the Victorian worldview into their reform agenda, particularly with regard to gender constructs. Leaders of the Singh Sabha began to actively safeguard Sikh interests in a political milieu increasingly defined by communal rivalry. A Sikh renaissance was born, bringing about a successful focus on linguistic concerns of the Sikhs, education, literature and a highly selective interpretive process of Sikh history and religion. Gender politics were pivotal to virtually all aspects of this endeavour. Novel interpretations and in certain instances 'inventions' of distinct female ritual traditions and symbolism alongside female educational initiatives fostering the 'ideal' Sikh woman were central to the objectives of the Singh Sabha reform movement.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".