New Initiatives

Resource Center

Teaching Sikhism

Scholarly Exchange

Community Service

Resource Center

GISS aspires to create a comprehensive digital collection of Sikh art, artifacts, and texts from the start of the tradition in the 1520’s to 1900 or so. Several GISS friends have already made key strides in this direction. Our activity in the near future will focus on the following:

1. Preparing an annotated bibliography of manuscripts and artifacts in the possessions of GISS associates and other private collectors;
    
2. Converting the existing photocopied/film/digital versions of manuscripts at GISS into one standard digital form and filling in gaps in the collection;
    
3. Collecting data about early printed books with an eye to developing an area of research centered on the impact of the printing press on both the formation of the Sikh literary canon, and later Sikh scholarship;
    
4. Gathering archival materials--letters, photographs, autobiographies, oral histories, etc.--related to Sikh experiences of migration and diaspora;
    
5. Making these materials accessible to researchers and educators around the globe.

Several families around the globe have already agreed to make GISS the home for digital versions of their personal collections. These documents range from sixteenth-century scriptural manuscripts to Sikh art, artifacts, and original papers relating to their family migrations from the Punjāb. With one extensive collection comprising over 250 copies of early Sikh texts already in place, GISS is ready to serve scholars, while also preparing for other materials to arrive in the near future.  

  For some early texts: Click Here