Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood's Fighting for Faith and Nation, Dialogues with Sikh Militants, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1996, is an academic ethnography built on direct interviews Mahmood conducted with Sikh militants, including a member of the Panthic Committee involved in the 1986 Sarbat Khalsa, presenting their own accounts of religious motivation and political violence during the Punjab insurgency. Its strength is direct access few researchers achieved, letting militants' own self-understanding of their actions reach the scholarly record in their own words rather than only through state or journalistic characterization. Its limit is exactly that vantage point: it presents militants' own self-justifying accounts, which Mahmood herself frames critically as testimony to be read rather than accepted at face value, so a claim about the historical facts of specific violent events needs independent corroboration rather than this interview material alone.