"The Sikh literati which emerged under the shadow of the Raj were powerfully influenced by the European discourse on their religion and in due course began to exhibit a similar intolerance towards many aspects of the Sikh tradition. Like the Europeans, this new class began a journey in search of ‘authentic’ texts, so that the ‘correct’ articles of the faith could be established. This quest for a rationalized Sikhism free of ‘spurious additions’, collectively underwritten by the new Sikh elites and the social forces generated by colonial rule, has come to exercise a very powerful influence on Sikh historiography. Much like European scholars, or like late-nineteenth-century Sikh reformers, contemporary scholarship either tends to ignore vast terrains of Sikh life in the nineteenth century or views it as a superfluous addition which has to be negated. There appears equally a failure to recognize the differences between the ideology of a period and a historical explanation. It was Sikh reformers in the nineteenth century who,for the first time, labelled many current practices and certain forms of Sikh identity as unacceptable. Historians are at fault when they simply reproduce these value judgements and employ categories invented by a section of the Sikh elites to discredit specific beliefs and rituals. What needs to be explained is why,at a particular juncture, certain forms of behaviour came to be viewed with suspicion andinvited censure. To suggest, as many have done, that this was because these beliefs were superstitious and without rational basis is to propose a tautological argument that ends up legitimizing the discourse of the modern Sikh intelligentsia. It is time to give up the ideological blinkers imposed by the complex changes in economy,society and politics under the Raj. A firm distinction ought to be made between the way certain beliefs and rituals came to be represented in the rhetoric of socio-religious movements like the Singh Sabha,and their actual place and function in the everyday life of people... In that sense Dhillon’s work is rooted within what I call the principle of negation in Sikh studies: it is not an isolated example... Sikh studies need to fully open up to the gaze of history."