With a population of around 25 million, the Sikhs constitute a small but distinctive religious group in the world today.1 Even though Sikhs do not have a nation-state in which they are in a majority, a large proportion of them live in India where they make for a little less than two per cent of the total population. An interesting aspect of the Sikh demographics is their emergence as a dominant and numerically majority group in the north-western state of Punjab on the Indian side, especially after the partition in 1947, and consequently the Indian Punjab has come to be seen as a ‘homeland’ of the Sikhs. © 2015 Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink.