Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Dr. Harpreet Singh is a scholar of Sikh textual traditions at Harvard University whose research reveals how religious communities in Mughal Punjab built political authority through cultural production. He is also a co-founder of the Sikh Coalition—now North America's largest Sikh civil rights organization—and the founder of the Harvard Sikh Center, bridging rigorous scholarship with institutional advocacy for the communities whose traditions he studies.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Singh's first book, <strong><em>The Zafarnama of Guru Gobind Singh: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary</em></strong> (Harvard Oriental Series, 2025), with a preface by Wheeler M. Thackston, establishes the first reliable text of the tenth Sikh Guru's famous Persian epistle to Emperor Aurangzeb. Drawing on five years of archival research across 38 manuscripts in both Perso-Arabic and Gurmukhi scripts, the critical edition recovers the <em>Zafarnama</em>'s original power—arguing that the letter is not a petition from a subject, as often portrayed, but a masterful act of sovereign judgment in which Guru Gobind Singh turns the empire's own literary conventions against itself. The project also pioneers a new method in material philology, using evidence from early Gurmukhi-script manuscripts to recover the pronunciation of Mughal-era Persian, challenging the dominance of modern Iranian norms in classical Persian studies.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">His forthcoming book, <em><strong>Vernacular Authority: Language, Script, and Political Imagination in Mughal Panjab</strong></em>, broadens this inquiry to a comparative study of how three religious communities constituted authority in the absence of state patronage. It contrasts the Sikh project of building a parallel constitutional order with the Hindu strategy of securing autonomy through imperial law and the Sufi model of building deterritorialized spiritual networks. Working across Persian, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Brajbhasha sources, Singh treats sacred texts as constitutional documents and vernacular literature as technologies of political imagination. His current research includes a critical edition of the <strong><em>Param Marg Granth</em></strong> (c. 1700), a foundational text of Sikh political thought composed at Guru Gobind Singh's court in Anandpur, which he approaches as constitutional theory articulated during the formative period of the Khalsa.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Singh's published scholarship includes articles and chapters on authority, love, and the concept of Sikh sovereignty (in the Springer encyclopedia <strong><em>Sikhism</em></strong>, 2017), on Western writers and the Sikhs (in <strong><em>The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies</em></strong>, 2013), and a critical study advancing the textual understanding of the <em>Zafarnama</em> through manuscript analysis (<em>Journal of Sikh and Punjab Studies</em>, 2024).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">He received his Ph.D. and A.M. from Harvard's Committee on the Study of Religion (2012), his M.T.S. in South Asian Religions from Harvard Divinity School (2005), and his B.S. in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1997). At Harvard, he received the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center in multiple years. His courses include Sikh Traditions and Scriptures, Vernacular Literary Cultures of the Panjab, Introduction to South Asian Religions, and Religious Nationalism in South Asia.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Singh helped establish the Sikh Coalition to protect the Sikh-American community from hate crimes and discrimination. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the Coalition's Board of Trustees. He is also Chair of the Board of Nishkam Media, which produces educational content showcasing Sikhs in public life, and a Trustee of the Parliament of the World's Religions. Additional service includes Harvard's Board of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life, the Steering Committee of the American Academy of Religion's Sikh Studies Unit, and advisory roles at the Royal Ontario Museum (Sikh Gallery), the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, the Pluralism Project at Harvard, and the Institute for Asian American Studies. He established the Harvard Sikh Center in 2024 to serve Sikh students across New England with academic coursework, chaplaincy, and community programming.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">His public-facing HarvardX course, <strong><em>Sikhism Through Its Scriptures</em></strong>, has reached over 54,000 learners from 180 countries. In recognition of his civil rights work, he received the Heritage Heroes Community Award from The Asian American Foundation (2023) and the James Park Morton Interfaith Tribute from the Interfaith Center of New York (2003).</p>

Critical Edition of the Param Mārg Granth (c. 1700): His current project presents the first critical edition, translation, and analysis of the Param Mārg Granth (Book of the Supreme Path), also known as the Prem Sumārag (Book of the Righteous Path of Love), composed at Guru Gobind Singh’s court in Anandpur around 1700. More than a religious text, this work represents a foundational moment in Sikh political thought—a comprehensive constitutional vision articulated from within a community actively building the institutions to realize it.