Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="35:3-35:862;753-1612">Puninder Singh is the Community Lecturer in Sikh Studies in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A linguistic anthropologist, he studies how language and ideas about language mediate religious experience, with particular attention to the Sikh tradition and the development of its interpretive practices from the first colonial encounters of the late eighteenth century through the present. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology (2024) and an M.A. in Anthropology (2021) from the University of Michigan, an earlier M.A. in South Asian Studies from Michigan (2010), and a B.A. in International Studies from the University of New Orleans (2006). His research draws on Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Braj Bhasha, Hindi, and Urdu, alongside Gurbani and the primary textual sources of the tradition.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="37:3-37:901;1617-2515">His doctoral dissertation, "Linguistic Encounters: Language and Experience in Sikh Devotional Practice," examines the Sikh community's relationship with Gurbani — the language of the Sikh scripture — and traces how Sikh interpretive practices developed through changing ideas about language, especially the arrival of globalized "scientific" understandings such as the standardized grammar. The project asks how these developments in turn reshaped Sikh religious practice and Sikh self-understanding. Methodologically it brings together historical anthropology, disciplinary linguistics, archival inquiry, and long-term ethnographic fieldwork to study how systems of knowledge within the Sikh tradition came into being and changed over time. His current work examines the emergence of a new Sikh intellectual formation between 1920 and 1940, in the period following the Singh Sabha reform movement.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="39:3-39:910;2520-3427">Singh's published scholarship centers on Sikh scripture, its grammar, and its interpretive traditions. His essay "Sikh Interpretive Traditions" appears in <strong><em>The Sikh World</em></strong> (Routledge, 2023), edited by Pashaura Singh and Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair, and he contributes three entries — "Grammar of the Guru Granth Sahib," "Major Exegetical Figures and Schools," and "Siddh Goṣṭ" — to <strong><em>The Routledge Companion to the Guru Granth Sahib</em> </strong>(edited by the same scholars). With Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair he co-authored "Translating Sikh Scripture and Sikh Lifeworlds" in <strong><em>Religion and Translation</em></strong> (Routledge, 2023). His earlier article "Translation between Linguistic Worlds: Poetic Parallelism in Sikh Gurbani and Ordinary Language" appeared in <strong><em>Sikh Formations</em></strong> (2014), and his reflection on the 2012 Oak Creek gurdwara shooting, "Thoughts about the Creation of 'Enemies Within,'" appeared in the same journal (2013).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="41:3-41:854;3432-4283">His research extends to the comparative and dialogic relations between the Sikh tradition and neighboring intellectual currents, including Panjabi Sufism, the Nath yogis, South Asian Buddhism, and Vedanta. He has published numerous reviews in <strong><em>Sikh Formations</em></strong>, including of works by Michael Brunner, Kim A. Wagner, Amandeep Sandhu, and Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal" data-sourcepos="43:3-43:1077;4288-5362">Singh has presented his research widely, including at the Dr. Jasbir Singh Chair in Sikh Studies conferences at UC Riverside, the World Sanskrit Conference, the Conference on South Asia at Madison, and conferences at the University of Michigan and Hofstra University, as well as at institutions in Panjab and Kashmir. His fieldwork and language training have been supported by an American Institute of Indian Studies Dissertation Research Fellowship (2017–2018), a Fulbright-IIE Dissertation Research Award (2014–2015), an AIIS Sanskrit fellowship, and multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships in Panjabi, Urdu, and Hindi. He received an Innovative Teaching Award and an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award from the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology, and has taught courses on the anthropology of religion, language in society, and the comparative study of culture, including a self-designed course on the anthropology of mysticism, meditation, and mindfulness. He has served as an Editorial Assistant at <strong><em>Sikh Formations</em></strong> since 2019.</p>

Linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of religion, with emphasis on language ideologies and how ideas about language mediate religious experience. The grammar, translation, and interpretation of the Guru Granth Sahib, and the development of Sikh exegetical traditions from the colonial encounter to the present. The formation of modern Sikh intellectual and interpretive practice, particularly in the decades after the Singh Sabha movement. Guru Nanak's philosophy of language, including the Siddh Goṣṭ and the concept of ek onkar.