Chapter 2 surveys extant theories of the nation and outlines the main positions in the historiographical debate. It begins with the primordial theories first posited by German Romantics, before turning to the “dominant orthodoxy,” modernism. It remains widely accepted that the nation is a distinctly modern type of community, the product of the profound intellectual and structural changes Western Europe underwent from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The chapter draws attention to the role of the state in modernist theories to explain why nations are generally defined as sovereign political communities. Medieval historians for their part have contested the modern dating of the emergence of nations and provided plentiful evidence for the existence of national communities prior to the sixteenth century. Even so, many scholars adhere to a political conception of the nation. The chapter highlights a tendency among medievalists to gauge the presence and cohesion of medieval nations principally by their degree of political institutionalization and discusses the anachronism of previous approaches to nationhood, thus illustrating the historiographical relevance of the study.

This chapter outlines how theories of ethnicity and nationalism have been applied to the Sikhs. It reviews the distinction between primordialists and instrumentalists, the modernist and ethno-symbolic theories of nationalism and discusses the postcolonial approaches. The most recent methodological approaches applied to the Sikhs are evaluated with reference to the literature on diasporas, long-distance nationalism, globalisation and religious nationalism The approach taken in this study is integrative. It draws on theories of ethnicity and nationalism, in particular Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach, to understand the emergence of modern Sikh nationalism. It locates the nation and state-building processes in the colonial and postcolonial world which shaped Sikh destinies as a highly conscious minority in the Punjab up to 1947 and beyond. The diaspora and the politics of the Sikhs in the Punjab as seen as mutually dependent variables. And the literature on religious nationalism is taken as the point of departure for critiques of how the secular Indian state has managed the Sikh question since 1947. Like the Jews, who have struggled with self-identities of religion, nation and an ethnic minority, a reading of modern nationalism among Sikhs is possible if its religious and ethnic roots and character are acknowledged.

It must have been with a mixture of pride and awe that in the latter years of the nineteenth century French children learned from their textbooks about the Battle of Tolbiac; of how Clovis lifted his hands to Heaven, promising God that if he were granted victory he would accept baptism, and how, the divine pact having worked, the Alamanni fled. Had those children delved deeper into their Première année d’histoire de France, their delight would certainly have been compounded when they read about King Pepin and his beheading of a lion and a bull with a single blow of his sword – a deed that, it is easy to suppose, many of those eight- and nine-year-olds mimicked, impersonating their king. No doubt they would have been equally impressed to learn from their textbook that, as her body was burned at the stake, the soul of Joan of Arc was miraculously borne up to Heaven by a white dove – the just reward for the sacrifices she had made for France and the Church.