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Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2021

Rajbir Singh Judge Open the ORCID record for Rajbir Singh Judge [Opens in a new window]
Rajbir Singh Judge*
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Department of History, California State University, Long Beach, California, United States of America
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Abstract

This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

Keywords

SikhismreformsovereigntyPunjaborthodoxy
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , July 2022 , pp. 1125 - 1152
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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References

1 Harbans Singh, The Heritage of the Sikhs (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), p. 210. For Christian missionaries and conversions in Panjab, see Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); John C. Webster, A Social History of Christianity: North-West India Since 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Christopher Harding, Religious Transformation in South Asia: The Meanings of Conversion in Colonial Punjab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

2 Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 109. The emergence of these movements had led to numerous attacks on the Sikh Gurus and the boundaries of the Sikh tradition, especially from the Arya Samaj.

3 Jagjit Singh, Singh Sabha Lahir (Amritsar: Guru Ramdas Printing Press, 1941), p. 13. Translation is mine.

4 Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 296.

5 Norman Gerald Barrier, The Sikhs and their Literature: A Guide to Tracts, Books and Periodicals, 1849–1919 (Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1970), p. xxv. For example, The Tribune, 16 February 1881 reported, ‘It is said that the Singh Sabha at Umritsur has been split into different sections on account of the religious difference which exists among its Sikh Members.’

6 Teja Singh, ‘The Singh Sabha Movement’, in The Singh Sabha and Other Socio-Religious Movements in the Punjab, 1850–1925, (ed.) Ganda Singh (Patiala: Publication Bureau Punjabi University, Patiala, 1997), p. 32. Murphy argues similarly. She writes: the ‘Singh Sabha Movement was thus the site of the articulation of multiple visions of what it meant to be Sikh in the period’: see Murphy, Anne, ‘The Formation of the Ethical Sikh Subject in the Era of British Colonial Reform’, Sikh Formations, vol. 11, nos. 1–2, 2015, p. 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The literature on Duleep Singh is vast. See Brian Keith Axel, The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh ‘Diaspora’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Christy Campbell, The Maharajah's Box: An Imperial Story of Conspiracy, Love, and a Guru's Prophecy (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000); Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

8 From 1469–1675 there were ten Sikh Gurus in human form, before the inauguration of the eleventh Sikh Guru, embodied in textual form known as the Guru Granth Sahib.

9 Sirdar Attar Singh, Sakhee Book: The Description of Gooroo Gobind Singh's Religion and Doctrines. Translated from Gooroo Mukhi into Hindi and Afterwards into English (Benares: Medical Hall Press: 1873). There is no consensus on the authenticity of the sakhis.

10 It is, of course, as Partha Chatterjee writes, ‘hardly surprising to discover that the ideology which shaped and gave meaning to the various collective acts of the peasantry was fundamentally religious’: Partha Chatterjee, ‘Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–1935’, in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, (ed.) Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 9–38; p. 31.

11 The literature is vast. For example, see Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements; Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, in his An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–254.

12 For a heterogenous past in Panjab, see Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Timothy S. Dobe, Hindu Christian Faqir: Modern Monks, Global Christianity, and Indian Sainthood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Anshu Malhotra, Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect, and Society in Punjab (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). For an important critique of heterogeneity as an essentialism, see David Scott, Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and D. Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

13 Writing on a later period and on internationalism, Manu Goswami notes this how ‘the preponderant focus on the presumptively primary narrative of nationalism’ produces all anti-imperial struggles as ‘a staging ground for the modular developmental endpoint of a sovereign nation-state rather than an open-ended constellation of contending political futures’: Goswami, Manu, ‘Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms’, The American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5, 2012, pp. 1461–1485CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p. 1462. This is a broader problem in history. See Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History: For A Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), pp. 53 and 137.

14 Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries, p. 375. Tony Ballantyne is an exception, arguing we need to pay attention to the debates and contestations around Duleep Singh. But, he concludes, ‘a more detailed assessment of the response to Dalip Singh's life and death could be assembled’. This is an attempt towards this assessment. See Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora, p. 100.

15 For example, see the Akali agitations that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century about what constituted the relation between miri and piri (spiritual and temporal). In other words, self-governance central to the Akali movement, too, has a long presence within the Sikh tradition as questions of reform in gurdwara management and education remained central to considering the relation between the Sikh tradition (Sikhi) and the state, the relation between miri and piri. For a counter reading, see Richard Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 182. Fox argues it was British colonialism that ‘set in motion confrontation over cultural meanings and religious organizations between temple managers and Singh reformers, which led reformers to look for coverts in the rural areas.’ I am grateful to the first anonymous reviewer for this insight.

16 Scott, Formations of Ritual, p. xviii.

17 Pandian, Anand, ‘Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms and Fractures in the Ethics of South India’, American Ethnologist, vol. 35, no. 3, 2008, p. 470CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 210.

19 Kapur Singh, ‘The Church and The State’, in Pārāśarapraśna: An Enquiry into the Genesis and Unique Character of the Order of the Khalsa with an Exposition of the Sikh Tenets, (eds) Piar Singh and Madanjit Kaur (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University, 1989), pp. 192–201.

20 Norbert Peabody, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Precolonial India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 8.

21 Purnima Dhavan, When Sparrows Became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699–1799 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 9 and 176. My goal, however, is not to demonstrate how the Khalsa itself is fragmented, but how it troubles historical context. That is, rather than context inflecting the Khalsa looking to resolve tensions, the Khalsa inflects context, thereby rerouting our very understanding of contradiction.

22 For example, see Milinda Banerjee, The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Caleb Simmons, Devotional Sovereignty: Kingship and Religion in India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).

23 Sen, Sudipta, ‘Unfinished Conquest: Residual Sovereignty and the Legal Foundations of the British Empire in India’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, vol. 9, no. 2, 2013, p. 233CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Banerjee, The Mortal God, p. 7.

25 Priya Atwal, Royal and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 34.

26 See Atwal, Royal and Rebels, pp. 35–36, 167–169. Atwal brilliantly demonstrates how Ranjit Singh and his family become dominant political players, working through these tensions which became exacerbated with Ranjit Singh's death. For an earlier time period and these negotiations, see Dhavan, When Sparrows Became Hawks, pp. 99–148 and Karamjit K. Malhotra, The Eighteenth Century in Sikh History: Political Resurgence, Religious and Social Life, and Cultural Articulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 69–94.

27 C. S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 47. On this shift of tradition in South Asia, see Fox, Lions of the Punjab; Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Banaras (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and The Mystic East (New York: Routledge, 1999); Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Teena Purohit, The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For an excellent challenge to this understanding of reform, see Patel, Shruti, ‘Beyond the Lens of Reform: Religious Culture in Modern Gujarat’, The Journal of Hindu Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017, pp. 47–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an account on how an earlier Sikh past was conceptualized through the trope of reform which collapsed Sikhism into Hinduism within colonial logics, see Brian Hatcher, ‘Situating the Swaminarayan Tradition in the Historiography of Modern Hindu Reform’, in Swaminarayan Hinduism: Tradition, Adaptation and Identity, (eds) Raymond Brady Williams and Yogi Trivedi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 6–37.

28 See Singh, The Heritage of the Sikhs. Also see Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, ‘Origin and Development of the Singh Sabha Movement: Constitutional Aspects’, in The Singh Sabha, (ed.) Singh, pp. 45–58. Reform implies this very notion. As Brian Pennington argues, ‘the idea of reform functions by means of an idiom of return or correction. Reform implies a tradition gone astray, one that must be directed back into the channels of its original inspiration’: Brian Pennington, ‘Reform and Revival, Innovation and Enterprise. A Tale of Modern Hinduism’, in The Protestant Reformation in a Context of Global History: Religious Reforms and World Civilizations, (eds) Heinz Schilling and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2017), pp. 149–169; p. 155.

29 Oberoi, Construction of Religious Boundaries. Arvind-Pal Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press 2013).

30 Though perfectibility is located in a now past Sikhi, the goal remains to accelerate towards a future expectation broken from present experience—put differently, a temporality without limit, a promise of rupture. See Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, (trans.) Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). This desire to recover what is now lost to provide an authentic historical representation remains a central historiographical thrust in Sikh studies. My concern is with the very impossibility of such authenticity.

31 As Samira Haj writes in relation to reform in the Islamic tradition: ‘various actors failed to carry out their “prescribed” roles as reformers or as traditionalists’ because ‘the actors involved in responding to day-to-day realities on the ground found themselves shifting positions that in many ways defied simply causal explanations’: Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 186–187. In a contrasting theoretical approach, Murphy argues, ‘Reform as a whole was also a colonial project’: Murphy, ‘The Formation of the Ethical Sikh Subject’, p. 151.

32 Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 95. James Laidlaw, in relation to the Jain tradition, too, notes how people ‘hold values which are in irreducible conflict’, making the task of easily identifying ‘logical consistency’ difficult since it ‘takes work to create, reproduce, and maintain’: James Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy and Society Among the Jains (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 22.

33 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, p. 210.

34 Pandian, Anand, ‘Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms and Fractures in the Ethics of South India’, American Ethnologist, vol. 35, no. 3, 2008, p. 470CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In relation to Islam, SherAli Tareen astutely rejects the utility of such binary constructions that are the products of Western scholarship on Islam. Instead, he argues for a conceptual approach that views rival narratives on the boundaries of religion as ‘competing rationalities of tradition and reform’: SherAli Tareen, ‘The Limits of Tradition: Competing Logics of Authenticity in South Asian Islam’, PhD thesis, Duke University, 2012, p. 260.

35 On learning, I follow Gil Anidjar who writes: ‘learning—the deceptively simple task of taking a step toward a knowledge of self or other—does mean exposing oneself to an enormous mass of unknowns. To uncertainty and to incompleteness. Or to denial, and to the possibility of failure. Is there, in fact, a self? And is it ours? Can we really know ourselves?’ We should recall that here ‘Sikh’ means ‘learner’. See Gil Anidjar, ‘Sapientia’, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 14 April 2020, https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/announcement/view/36, [accessed 1 October 2021].

36 Gil Anidjar, ‘Homo Discens’, Critical Times, vol. 3, no. 3, 2020, pp. 443–449.

37 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams [Second Part] and On Dreams’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 5, (trans. and ed.) James Strachey (1900–1901; London: Hogarth, 1953), p. 525. Noting the limits of interpretation, Freud writes, ‘This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.’ Said otherwise, there is no final interpretation, no final word to determine an objective essence to a dream. A mushroom does not have a seed from where we can trace an origin and, therefore, teleology.

38 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 50 and 137.

39 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 467.

40 Asad, Talal, ‘Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 42, no. 1, 2015, p. 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Though there are similarities with J. Barton Scott's notion of a ‘reform assemblage’, which he defines as ‘an open-ended network of unstable elements’ that ‘operated according to principles of connection, heterogeneity, and multiplicity’, my concern is with how this heterogeneity was a struggle that created order and orthodoxy through encounters—encounters of learning. J. Barton Scott, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 90.

42 I borrow ‘framework of inquiry’ from Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition, pp. 4–5.

43 Singh, ‘The Church and The State’, pp. 192–201.

44 Ibid., p. 194.

45 For more on Ranjit Singh, see J. S. Grewal, The Reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh: Structure of Power, Economy and Society (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1981) and, more recently, Sunit Singh, ‘The Sikh Kingdom’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies, (eds) Pashaura Singh and Louis Fenech (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 59–69. For the difficulties in maintaining the Khalsa Raj and conflicts that arose within it, see Atwal, Royals and Rebels, p. 74. The problem is a broader one. As Partha Chatterjee writes, ‘… the same set of ethical norms or religious practices which justify existing relations of domination also contain, in a single dialectical unity, the justification for legitimate revolt’: Partha Chatterjee, ‘More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry’, in Subaltern Studies II: Writing on South Asian History and Society, (ed.) Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 311–349; p. 338.

46 I borrow from Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2’, in Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, (ed.) Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 55.

47 Though I am translating Khalsa Raj as Sikh rule, this might obfuscate more than it clarifies. For a historical outline of the shifts in understanding of Khalsa Raj, see Karamjit K. Malhotra, ‘The Khalsa Raj (1765–99)’, in The Eighteenth Century in Sikh History: Political Resurgence, Religious and Social Life, and Cultural Articulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 60–94. One of the problems is, as Malhotra writes, ‘The doctrine of Guru Panth, with its inbuilt equality and collective authority, was not institutionalized, though individual Sikh chiefs ruled in the name of the Khalsa’ (p. 67).

48 I am grateful to the first anonymous reviewer for this important reminder.

49 Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 14.

50 The debate around the influence and continuation of Mughal imperial custom is vast and contentious. See Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in his An Anthropologist Among the Historians, pp. 632–682; Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007); Jon Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

51 Sen, Distant Sovereignty, pp. xii–xiv.

52 The India Office Records, British Library, London (henceforth IOR) L/P&S/18/D152.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid. The archival records oscillate between multiple transliterations of the name ‘Duleep’, including ‘Dalip’ and ‘Dhuleep’.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid. On the question of insecurity and fanaticism, see Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Wagner, Kim, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past and Present, vol. 218, no. 1, 2013, pp. 159–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephens, Julia, ‘The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatic in Mid-Victorian India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 22–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephens, Julia, ‘The Politics of Muslim Rage: Secular Law and Religious Sentiment in Late Colonial India’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 77, no. 1 (2014), pp. 45–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolsky, Elizabeth, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, The American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1218–1246CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harald Fischer-Tine (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Chandra Mallampalli, A Muslim Conspiracy in British India? Politics and Paranoia in the Early Nineteenth-Century Deccan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

57 IOR R/1/1/62.

58 Hatcher, ‘Situating the Swaminarayan Tradition’, p. 19. In relation to how martial theory oscillated between loyalty and sedition in relation to Sikhs, see Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

59 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 The literature on the paradoxes of the policy on non-interference is vast; as scholars have noted, its rhetorical force rarely matched its application. For example, Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: The Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Adcock, Limits of Tolerance; Mitra Sharafi, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

63 Condos, The Insecurity State, p. 102. For how this was gendered, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

64 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

65 Ibid.

66 On the imaginary threat, see Mallampalli, A Muslim Conspiracy in British India? and Condos, The Insecurity State. The recent focus on the colonial state's anxiety, however, has removed the possibility of a subaltern resistance since the overwrought focus, following C. A. Bayly, is on how religion, rumours, and threats were ‘more often reflections of the weakness and ignorance of the colonisers than a gauge of hegemony’. This reading can reduce attempts to organize against colonial rule as apparitions in colonial minds. See Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 143. Instead, I accord with Gyan Prakash in considering how even though these efforts did not radically change ‘the relations of power that is no reason to conclude that these challenges were insignificant’: Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 225.

67 Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in Subaltern Studies II, pp. 1–42. Yet this inseparability of religion and politics cannot be reduced to the coupling of the religious to the modern state form, which is, after all, a distinct historical formation. See Haj, Reconfiguring the Islamic Tradition, p. 18.

68 IOR R/1/1/62.

69 Sindhanwalia, for example, would mark his letters with a seal bearing the inscription ‘Akal Sahai’ following Maharaja Ranjit Singh's days.

70 For Trumpp, see Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West.

71 IOR R/1/1/95.

72 The secular forces us into this logic since, as Hussein Ali Agrama argues, ‘it is secularism itself that makes religion into an object of politics’. Once made into an object of politics, religious claims only produce suspicion, existing as a potential deception for both the scholar and the state. Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 33.

73 Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 6.

74 For the individual bourgeois self and determining authentic religious meaning in a tradition, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Brian Hatcher, Bourgeois Hinduism, or, The Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourse from Early Colonial Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). This produced the religious elites as untrustworthy figures which coalesced in the figure of the Brahman and mullah in colonial India. See Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions. The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Robert Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Liberalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Scott, Spiritual Despots.

75 IOR R/1/1/68.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid.

78 Dhavan, When Sparrows Became Hawks, p. 176.

79 IOR R/1/1/68.

80 Ibid. The colonial state recorded the names of: 1. Bhagat Singh, Garanthi of Golden Temple, Amritsar; 2. Narang Singh, Garanthi of Golden Temple, Amritsar; 3. Hira Singh, Garanthi of Golden Temple, Amritsar; 4. Choti Sarkar Sodhi of Anandpur; 5. Majhli Sarkar; 6. Gulab Singh, Garanthi of Patna; 7. Bhagat Singh, Garanthi of Patna; 8. Nann Singh, Garanthi of Nander, Deccan; 9. Gian Singh, Akali, Fakir of Nander.

81 For cosmopolitan networks in relation to Duleep Singh, see Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

82 Chatterjee, ‘Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal’, p. 31.

83 IOR R/1/1/66.

84 IOR R/1/1/62.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid.

87 Khalsa Akhbar, 1 June 1887.

88 Rachel Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women's Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 204. For Oberoi, this technological shift explains the hegemony of Khalsa normative values. See Oberoi, Construction of Religious Boundaries.

89 Also known as ‘Kukas’. The Namdhari movement can also be considered as a contestation over orthodoxy within the Sikh tradition as it worked within the parameters of the tradition even if it was more distant from normative Sikh understandings as we understand them today. For more, see Condos, The Insecurity State; Fauja Singh, Kuka Movement: An Important Phase in Punjab's Role in India's Struggle for Freedom (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1965); Oberoi, Harjot, ‘Brotherhood of the Pure: The Poetics and Politics of Cultural Transgression’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, 157–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joginder Singh, The Namdhari Sikhs: Their Changing Social and Cultural Landscape (Delhi: Manohar, 2013).

90 National Archives of India (NAI), Foreign Department Secret I, June 1886, Nos. 12–196.

91 Ibid.

92 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid.

96 NAI, Foreign Department Secret I, June 1886, Nos. 12–196.

97 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

98 NAI, Foreign Department Secret I, June 1886, Nos. 12–196.

99 Ibid.

100 IOR L/P&S/18/D152. Also see Khalsa Akhbar, 16 April 1887.

101 NAI, Foreign Department Secret I, June 1886, Nos. 12–196.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid.

104 The Pioneer, 20 May 1886.

105 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid.

108 If the Khalsa panth is a unity, as a sangat, alhidā reminds us that one can become disjointed from within.

109 A copy of the hukamnama is printed in Singh, Singh Sabha Lahir, p. 35.

110 Dhavan notes this tension, as does Kapur Singh. See Dhavan, When Sparrows Became Hawks and Singh, ‘The Church and State’.

111 Khalsa Akhbar, 16 April 1887.

112 Ibid.

113 IOR R/1/1/62.

114 Ibid.

115 Ibid.

116 Ibid.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid.

119 David Arnold, ‘Bureaucratic Recruitment and Subordination in Colonial India: The Madras Constabulary, 1857–1947’, in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, (ed.) Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 2.

120 Dusenbury, Verne, ‘The Word as Guru: Sikh Scripture and the Translation Controversy’, History of Religions, vol. 31, no. 4, 1992, p. 401Google Scholar.

121 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (eds) Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 284.

122 Ibid., p. 297.

123 Kleinberg, Haunting History, p. 1.

124 I further discuss antagonism in relation to Sikh history in Judge, Rajbir Singh, ‘There Is No Colonial Relationship: Antagonism, Sikhism and South Asian Studies’, History and Theory, vol. 57, no. 2, 2018, pp. 195–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

125 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies I, p. 4.

126 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

127 IOR R/1/1/62.

128 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid.

131 Ibid.

132 Ibid.

133 The literature on rumours is vast. See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999 [1983]); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Homi Bhabha, ‘By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in his Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).

134 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

135 Ibid.

136 Oberoi, Construction of Religious Boundaries, p. 303.

137 Ibid., p. 298.

138 Ibid. For another work that takes the Khalsa Akhbar at face value, see Fenech, Louis, Martyrdom in the Sikh Tradition: Playing the ‘Game of Love’ (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

139 Ranajit Guha contends that the pressures of insurgency required both the colonial state and elite discourse to ‘reduce the semantic range of many words and expressions, and assign to them specialized meanings in order to identify peasants as rebels and their attempt to turn the world upside down as crime’: Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, p. 17. The British, however, did try to limit the possible meaning of Duleep Singh, designing a specific role for him to play, as Atwal explains—a meaning that shifted as geopolitical concerns changed. See Atwal, Royal and Rebels, p. 198.

140 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

141 Ibid.

142 Ibid.

143 Ibid.

144 Oberoi, Construction of Religious Boundaries, p. 298.

145 The Arya Samaj too deployed this logic. See Adcock, Limits of Tolerance, p. 107.

146 IOR L/P&S/18/D152.

147 Ibid.

148 For example, when examining ethics and lived aspects of reform, Anne Murphy claims that ‘the terrain for this exploration of the ethical is the flourishing new print environment of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Punjab’. She then highlights the importance of one text by Mohan Singh Vaid. See Murphy, ‘The Formation of the Ethical Sikh Subject’, p. 152.

149 Mallon, Florenica, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

150 Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries, p. 33.