There are somewhere between twenty-five and thirty million Sikhs worldwide, which makes Sikhi roughly the fifth largest organised religion and one of the youngest, at a little over five hundred years.
More than eight in ten are in India and about three quarters of those are in Punjab, where Sikhs are around fifty-eight per cent of the population. Substantial populations are in Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Outside India the largest communities are in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Gulf.
Canada has the largest Sikh population outside India. The United Kingdom's is the oldest large one outside the subcontinent.
The community in Pakistan, in the country that holds most of Sikhi's founding sites, is very small.
A religion founded in one district of one province is now practised on every continent, and the electorate of its central gurdwara committee is confined to Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh.
The Sikh share of Punjab's population has slipped slightly across recent censuses, on a birth rate below the national average and on continued emigration, while the absolute number has kept rising.
No two countries count it the same way. Britain has asked about it under religion since 2001 and Canada asks as well, while the United States does not ask about religion at all, so the American figure is an estimate built from surname and gurdwara counts.
The count is complicated by who is included. Sahajdhari Sikhs, the Sikligar and Vanjara communities, and families who identify by practice rather than by census category, are counted differently in different exercises.