"The historiography of the Sikh experience in the nineteenth century is based on two principles, one of silence and the other of negation. The principle of silence is commonly found in most historiographies. For instance, official Soviet historiography has long drawn a curtain over state terror under Stalin. Similarly, elitist models of the Indian national movement contain no references to popular struggles for freedom, particularly when these grassroots movements differ in their socio-economic objectives from the aims of the pan-Indian Congress party. In the Sikh case, historical texts are virtually silent about religious diversity, sectarian conflicts, nature worship, witchcraft, sorcery, spirits, magical healing, omens, wizards, miracle saints, goddesses, ancestral spirits, festivals, exorcism, astrology, divination, and village deities. When, occasionally, some of these are mentioned in historical texts, they serve to dress up an argument about how Sikhism was rapidly relapsing into Hinduism in the nineteenth century, how its adherents deviated from the ‘true’ articles of faith and subscribed to ‘superstitious’ and ‘primitive’ beliefs. Ultimately, this argument in official Sikh historiography goes on to establish that Sikhs were delivered from the bondage of un-Sikh beliefs by the intervention of the late-nineteenth-century Singh Sabha movement. Scholars who favour such inter- pretation are backing what I call the principle of negation. They are of the view that Singh Sabha reformers werein line with traditional Sikh doctrines when they opposed a large terrain of Sikh beliefs and practices in the nineteenth century. One asks why these two concepts, absence and negation, have come to exercise such a powerful influence on Sikh historiography. There are, I think, two major reasons for this.First, European observers of the Sikhs in the nineteenth century were often far more concerned with what Sikhism ought to be like rather than whatit was. Men like Ernest Trumpp, John Gordon, and Max Macauliffe, following the conventions established by Orientalist scholarship on India, showed far greater interest in recording the ideals of the faith rather than the actual behaviour of its practitioners. This preoccupation with texts led them to essentialist formulations of tradition that generally ignored a vast array of forms and religious practices among the Sikhs.“ Occasionally, when compelled to take note of these practices in their accounts, they treated them with disdain, dismissing them as corrupt accretions resulting from the moral lassitude of the Khalsa, the decline in the political fortunes of the Sikhs, and the boa-like advances of Hinduism."