This empirical study of the religious beliefs and practices of the Sikhs represents the first major effort in this direction. It encompasses the major religious beliefs and practices of the Sikhs and some aspects of the Sikh world view, such as the beliefs and attitudes concerning their history, caste and community, nature of the world and purpose of life. Any possible correlation between such variables as sex, age, education and caste and the above beliefs, practices and attitudes has also been investigated.

Five hundred Sikhs from six villages in Gurdaspur district in the Punjab were interviewed to collect data for this study. This was done during the two years prior to Operation Bluestar in the Golden Temple, Amritsar in 1984. A similar study done now would quite possibly present different results, for the beliefs, practices and attitudes of a religious community in times of acute crisis are likely to differ from those held during normal times. But generalizations need to be based on "normal times." The Sikhs, like most other religious communities, have evolved through numerous bouts of acute crisis. They all passed; it is our hope that this crisis too will pass and nor-mal times will be back again, generally validating the data presented in this study. It would be interesting to conduct a comparative study after a few years.

The present troubled times have had the unfortunate effect that the general public tends to associate the entire Sikh community with terrorism in the Punjab. This study, we hope, will, to some extent help to correct this unwarranted impression. It should be amply clear from this study that the Sikh religious ethos emphasizes equality, service and universal brotherhood and the Sikhs take their religion seriously. During more than twenty years of our association with the Sikhs, and especially during the field work for this study, we found the Sikhs to be extremely generous, hospitable, helpful and large hearted a people whom we hold in high esteem.

Religious beliefs and practices, at least in theory, are considered to be central to any religious system, though religion is much more than a set of beliefs and practices. Theologically, a religion may be reduced to the study and discussion of the value, nature, origin and validity of its beliefs and practices. From a sociological perspective, however, religion and society have a dialectical relationship, and religious beliefs and practices are social facts. The present study of the Sikh religious community attempts to investigate the location of religious beliefs and practices in that people's social life, their bio-social correlates and their centrality in creating a world view and religious communities.

The normative beliefs and practices of a religion are distinct from its operative aspects, although this distinction is not generally made. A religion, generally, is studied and understood in terms of its normative beliefs and practices and inferences are drawn on the basis of this understanding and interpretation. This can be misleading or at least incomplete.

This study concerns itself with the operative beliefs and practices of the Sikhs and is exploratory in nature. In the absence of empirical work in this domain, there has been no hypothesis to test. The study is based on published theoretical works and research in religion in general and in sociology of religion in particular, and our own observation of Sikh religiosity during almost twenty years in the Punjab, the homeland of the Sikhs. The issue has been studied within a sociological framework.

Religion has always been a primary concern of sociology. In ex-plaining the relationship between a people's intellectual development and their social organization, Comte, the father of sociology, tried to explain society and its evolution in religious terms and con-tended that any firm basis for social groupings must be found in religion. Michael Hill pointed out that, in the early growth of sociology religion was a central issue; indeed it can be argued that it was the central issue. The significance of religion for understanding the theoretical contribution of 'classical' sociologists like Durkheim, Weber and Pareto is now a generally accepted part of the sociological tradition. In Davis' words, "so universal. permanent and pervasive is religion in society that unless we understand it thoroughly we shall fail to understand society. In Marxian, Durkheimian and Weberian thought religion has a major place though for different reasons and in different perspectives. All three of them have emphasized the dependency of religious ideas on the variation in the structures of society. For Durkheim, religion is an expression of man's sociality, for Marx, it is an expression of material conditions devoid of this sociality and of which man is theoretically capable.

In the observance of religious phenomena one can adopt three distinct positions. Firstly, religion can be considered as an autonomous, self-regulating aspect of human experience that is beyond the influence of material and social environment a purely transcendental phenomenon. But this would put religion outside the scope of sociology. Secondly, one may take the position that economic and social environment are the real and only components of religion and through them it can be fully and completely explained. This position, rather than studying religion, would dispense with it and explain it away. The third and the sociological perspective recognizes religion as a social phenomenon and religious beliefs and religious experience as social facts and considers the question of the "reality" or "unreality of religion outside its scope. For "the sociological perspective is based on a recognition that the meaningful reality of the adherents to a particular set of religious beliefs forms an integral part of the field of study."

Although the sociological perspective and methodology have been extensively used for the study of the various aspects of religions all over the world, for some reason the Sikh religion remains virtually virgin territory for the sociology of religion. It would be expected that "due to its manageable size and relatively brief history," the Sikh tradition "would be especially useful for the students of his-tory of religion, as a compact and accessible case study of the way in which traditions emerge, become established and evolve. Yet "Sikhism is arguably the most neglected of India's religious traditions. A Survey of Research in Sociology and Social Anthropology by the Indian Council of Social Science Research documents only two works on Sikhs using a sociological perspective."