Teaching & Mentorship

When Pakistan opened the Kartarpur Corridor in 2019, my students were rightly skeptical. Why, they asked, would Pakistan’s military establishment suddenly grant this access? And, just months after India’s BJP government revoked Article 370 in Kashmir, why would that same government, which was actively marginalizing minority rights, accept the gesture?

That single event—and their critical questions—launched us into centuries of regional conflict, sacred geography, and state power. This is how I teach: start with what puzzles students today, then build the historical depth and analytical tools to answer those questions seriously.

Making Texts Live

Students read translations, but they shouldn’t miss what made these texts powerful. When we study devotional poetry, I play a recording of a Muslim Rababi—from a lineage of hereditary musicians of Sikh scripture—performing a shabad. This single recording immediately confronts students with a history that defies modern, rigid boundaries: that some of the most prominent designated performers of the Sikh Gurus’ message were Muslims. This fact alone reveals the complex, inter-communal reality of early modern Panjab in a way no footnote ever could.

This focus on performance changes how we read. A refrain structure, easily glossed over in silent reading, is suddenly understood as a technological choice: it’s a mechanism designed for congregational singing, acting as the central line that everyone joins in to sing. The text reveals itself not as poetry for a solitary reader, but as a script for a congregation to perform together. It becomes what it was: an embodied, performed, and public act.

Dismantling Inherited Categories

The most dangerous thing in scholarship is an unexamined category. When students learn about the “bhakti movement” or “Sant tradition,” I show them how nineteenth-century orientalists invented these labels to make South Asian religion legible to Christian theology. Kabir used “sant” to mean any sincere devotee—we turned it into a theological school he never claimed. These aren’t just semantic corrections; they’re lessons in how colonial knowledge still shapes what we think we know.

Research as Living Debate

I teach scholarship not as settled truth, but as an active, living argument. When teaching the history of martyrdom in Sikh tradition, for example, students read a live scholarly debate: Did the concept emerge with Guru Arjan’s execution, or was it a later idea shaped by colonial encounters? They evaluate the competing evidence, identify the core assumptions, and realize that generating knowledge means entering these debates, not just observing them.

Training for Multiple Futures

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art asks whether displaying a gutka (prayer book)—one carried by a Sikh soldier fighting in Italy during World War II—requires visitors to remove shoes, they need scholars who can navigate both manuscript traditions and public communication. My students learn to move between academic precision and public engagement—whether they’re heading to doctoral programs or careers in museums, archives, or cultural organizations.

This isn’t just about imparting knowledge. It’s about forging scholars who can engage complex traditions with both rigor and humility. I want students to leave my classroom equipped to see how religion and politics actually work, and with the intellectual confidence to dismantle the narratives we’ve inherited and begin the hard work of building better ones.