I am grateful to the readers of Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia, the readings they provide, and the questions they ask. I am indebted to them. This is the type of debt not tied to credit, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write, but one that scatters, escapes, offering refuge from the destruction of reading and the Chancellors, institutions, and contracts that facilitate such disaster. These are questions of loss—not only of loss, but now too the destruction of loss. Yet I remain thankful for this time of learning, undermined as it may be, gifted by my readers here.
My book, too, tries to learn without closure, without conviction, by asking about loss and sovereignty. In particular, I focus on Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle, during the 1880s, to restore Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan. The book explores Singh’s efforts, and the responses of the Sikh community to those efforts, in order to highlight how a people articulated loss (military, political, and psychological). I show how a people responded to loss not by seeking to recover the past but seeking to remake the past. Loss was not loss and the past was not—and is not—an inert object awaiting reclamation. If, however, the past is not a static object awaiting scholarly analysis, then the task cannot be mere recovery of an indigenous theory of loss. My examination of Duleep Singh and his attempted revolt against British colonial rule thus highlights the ambiguities that emerge in both Singh himself and the images of Singh that circulated as Sikhs contested and challenged representations of Singh as well as of the colonial state. There is, I argue, no “real” Duleep Singh nor an authentic story to tell. The book is thus, perhaps strangely, a historical narrative that refuses to historicize: Duleep Singh, suspended, exceeds all placement.
Protest
Since Duleep Singh exceeds placement, the book also troubles linear temporality—a lesson that Nirvikar Singh rightly focuses on. He turns to the “aftermath” in Punjab, an ongoing question of loss and sovereignty that he sees in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution—a list of demands made by the Shiromani Alkali Dal in 1973—but also in the movement for Khalistan, that is a sovereign place for Sikhs. Often enough, such alternative claims are rendered pathological by historians: a failure to understand that key distinction between past and present that drives history as a discipline. Central to this temporality is the entry into national citizenship, which is an entry into political modernity. Any protest or revolt that defies the telos of the nation then becomes a problem. We only have to turn to the media spectacle as well as academic research around the farmer’s protests in Punjab to see the issue. One assumption that has remained sedimented was that the protests were tied to the territorial limits of the nation-state and exhibited a more robust Indian citizenship than typically displayed. When there appeared challenges to that hypothesis, there were accusations that certain segments of the Sikh community were trying to “hijack a protest.”
Consider the raising of the Nishan Sahib (exalted mark, Sikh “flag”) at the Red Fort on Republic Day, January 26th, 2021, during the protest. The questions around what this mark and act signified circulated rapidly, especially as the act became tied to Khalistan and a rejection of the Indian nation-state. For many, however, radical Sikhs were “hijacking” the protest against the ostensible aims of the protest itself that sought to create a better and more inclusive nation. And so, such an attempt to declare sovereignty came to be seen as a violation of the non-violent essence of the protest, what Anshu Malhotra termed, “the path of Gandhian ahimsa or non-violence,” which, as we know, is central in defining Indian national interest at home and abroad. Anti-nationalism, in conclusion, was simply a brand, a false demarcation, created by the government and media to discredit a peaceful protest.
There is, I argue, no “real” Duleep Singh nor an authentic story to tell. The book is thus, perhaps strangely, a historical narrative that refuses to historicize: Duleep Singh, suspended, exceeds all placement.
But when it comes to peasant revolts historically, the limits of the nation are widely understood. The peasant in South Asia has received considerable attention, most formidably by the Subaltern Studies Collective—a tradition of writing central to my book precisely because it has retheorized the emphasis on the nation-form. As Partha Chatterjee writes, there is “the need for a critique of both colonialist and nationalist historiographies by bringing in the peasantry as a subject of history, endowed with its own distinctive forms of consciousness and making sense of an acting upon the world on its own terms” (160). But the peasant’s “own terms” that spilled much historiographical ink are today oddly reduced to national citizenship. It is assumed that the nation has achieved hegemonic status, even though Chatterjee and others have cautioned against such assumptions. To give one example: Chatterjee writes that subaltern “participation in [nationalist politics] seemed to be marked by radical breaks and often reversals” (160). If hegemony is a process of ceaseless contestation, as Stuart Hall contends, then the very form of the nation remains in question; we must continue to remember those breaks and reversals. With this in mind, can we then listen to the “sometimes playful, sometimes rueful” poems that are “oriented toward a collective calamity,” like the ones that Zunaira Komal attends to in a psychiatry ward in Azad Kashmir (556)? Yet such a listening is not possible when the nation-state remains the privileged point for our analysis.
Refusal
The problem then is not violent Sikhs hijacking the protest, but rather our inability to refuse the enveloping of the Indian nation-state of our political and historical imagination. It is our inability to refuse the meta-logic of Akhand Bharat. It is Harini Kumar who turns to refusal in her response. If reading and writing are translations, then perhaps the refusal of my book is a refusal to provide a relevant translation. What does it mean to be relevant? This is a problem for scholars of the Sikh tradition. Once the Sikh tradition was standardized as an object of knowledge in the 19th Century, interventions further legitimated and reproduced that very object, delimiting, but also inviting, possible intervention. Yet even though standardization occurred, and the Sikh tradition became an object of knowledge production, this standardization did not ensure relevance. To be relevant was an especially important task in the 19th Century since the search for an enduring truth was replaced “with the search for enduring relevance” in which one had to be adequate to the historical moment. And to be relevant was to be Indic, which is to say, Aryan, and also then Christian.
We must then continue to ask the Christian question. To claim Sikhs are relevant historically, politically, spiritually—the claim that Sikhs are a major world religion—would be to uphold a Christian translation, a “pure translation” between body and spirit, a seamless exchange, between transcendence and immanence. In it, karah prashad—sanctified halva distributed in a gurdwara as a mark of hospitality—would be a transaction between God and the sangat, an offering of mercy that clears the murk. We know to make strange concepts relevant might be “too comforting”, if we follow Talal Asad (275). And that comfort comes from being restrained. For such a relevant translation requires one to deliver oneself “into the grasp of the Christian strategy, bound hand and foot” as Jacques Derrida has it in his extended reading of The Merchant of Venice (199). Perhaps, in contrast to our desire for these controlled connections and transactions, a restricted and bounded economy, we also need room of the irrelevant, the waste, the obscure, the noise—although it is probably wise to refuse to submit one’s work to the American Historical Review since submissions must engage the “common interests of the historical discipline as a whole.” To refuse such common interest—what I want to call relevance—would be to desire without end, without closure—to center the impossible, against relevance in Adam Stern’s pithy phrasing. It would be an attempt to think about a refusal to respond, if we work with Kumar’s brilliant reading.
Hostile Archives
Refusing the refusal, however, Purnima Dhavan centers an important and necessary proposition in her reading of impossibility: perhaps “there is room to embrace the ethics of the vision in this book while still historicizing profusely and even counter-historicizing.” Historicization, Dhavan contends, is not a reduction, but only if we center multiplicity and the “profusion of perspectives” including “multiple smaller Sikh chiefs, soldiers, women, and many non-Sikh communities.” We thus need to consider, Dhavan writes, alternative archives and manuscript traces that are yet unexplored. And the problem is perhaps the archive I consult—a hostile colonial one. “Is this hostile archive the only repository for such questions?” asks Dhavan. Her response is stark: “The subaltern will never speak if the only archives through which we seek to engage with the ‘mute eloquence of [one] who is not heard’[1] is hostile to that voice.” Dhavan’s conclusion is similar to Nile Green’s reply to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s formidable yet oft-mocked question, can the subaltern speak? Green’s response is simple enough: “The answer, of course, is yes, but not necessarily in English,” he writes (851, n. 25).
The phrase “mute eloquence of one who is not heard” is from Jacques Rancière’s critique of the Marxist desire for a working-class essence. As he asks, “Is it possible that the quest for the true word compels us to shush so many people? What exactly is the meaning of this evasion that tends to disqualify the verbiage of every proffered message in favor of the mute eloquence of one who is not heard?” (11). Rancière’s important argument dispels the emphasis on “work” as a positive reference, grounded in experience. I tried to learn from Rancière because I was concerned that “impossibility” too came to function as a mute eloquence, as an “essence,” in which the Lacanian real comes to stand outside or inside history itself. As Joan Copjec rightly notes, one must not “make the mistake of imagining the real as an inert void a stark limit. Lacan pictures the real as teeming with emptiness, as a swarming void” (96). The real, the impossible, “has no place of [its] own either outside history, in some eternal realm or waiting room, or within history itself” (97). Instead, we are left with an impossible gap that is kept open, in which the real is a “certain disturbance or dislocation in the order of historical being” (97). And my book attempts to grapple with this uncanny space in which the very question of a speaking or unspeaking subaltern is rendered insignificant, since analysis hinges on an internal alienness in the subject itself. Such alienness, estrangement, demands we be careful, as Spivak reminded us long ago, of how radical critique is marked with the “danger of appropriating the other by assimilation,” especially by historians who promise a pure translation (308).
Archives too host strangers and enemies—a sign of their hospitality. And the hospitality of the archive raises, of course, a question of sovereignty. As Derrida writes, “No hospitality, in the classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home, but since there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence” (55). In what Allen Feldman declares the double bind to hospitality, we find “the conditions of entry can never be allowed to subvert the given laws of habitus, of archival emplacement,” but only furthers the re-mapping of sovereignty (194). Consider Dhavan’s own appeal for more archives alongside the hostile ones. There is indeed power in selecting the guests; it is a form of conditional hospitality which turns hospitality into hostility, though it is better to consider their complicity in which hospitality always harbors hostility.
Archives too host strangers and enemies—a sign of their hospitality.
Perhaps then we can say that all archives are hostile (as are historians, as are peer-reviewers). If so, then the non-hostile archives that Dhavan wants us to explore might appear as such precisely because the condition of entry into them is already delimited. The terms of this delimitation, in their availability to historical inquiry, unsurprisingly uphold the norms of historical practice today; plurality and multiplicity are no remedy to the dominion of History. Or of the archive. “The archive,” Gil Anidjar teaches us, “is hardly remedial, or even a palliative to the ills of loss and the dream of a better, all-inclusive, or more plural archive, which is the very dream of history as total history (and histories), only denies this further” (129). Tell me your stories—even the story of how I conquered you—historians say. Even if we burned the archive that we collect, as Elizabeth Povinelli considered doing, we would still preserve an archival trace. “I would have to burn my own history, never have existed; and theirs as well” (169).
Secular Historiography
Perhaps then the goal is not to determine which archive is the least hostile, but rather to consider the policing that secular historiography performs, as Randeep Singh Hothi directs us to examine. Why do we always need more voices, traces, and archives? What does such inclusion, connection, and assimilation promise? What theological temporalities are left behind in such a historical form, as Basit Kareem Iqbal has asked us (526)? Hothi rightly centers the “secularist anxieties of historiographical practices, whose struggles to recuperate the fluidity of pre-colonial identities is meant to offer an alternative to religious nationalisms.” We can call such anxiety a temporality of Salvation—a history, as Stéphane Mosès writes, that “is defined as a process, a long march from the Incarnation to the Parousia” (57). It is redemptive return, then, that marks secular anxieties, which are elevated Christian ones.
In this Christian anxiety, the native is returned to History and taught, by the historian, how to mourn, how to deal with loss (Anidjar, 158). Which is to say, Anidjar continues, “history is a civilizing mission that refigures mourning by denying it” (158). Yet for a more unconditional hospitality to take place we would, says Derrida, “have to accept the risk of the other coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything or killing everyone” (71). Hospitality then always entails a risk, a risk of even reading, what has been called, the hostile archive—a reading which we can “lead us to judgements that aren’t always rationally defensible” as Joan W. Scott writes (147). It might also entail asking another set of questions, including a question Robert C. Young asked—“for why, after all, ‘History’ at all” (55)? But also Trinh T. Minh Ha’s queries: Why separate history from story? Why indulge in accumulation and facts (119)? And, moreover, we must remember, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has already examined, the ontoepistemological position of homo historicus.
Why do we always need more voices, traces, and archives? What does such inclusion, connection, and assimilation promise?
Against such redemption that seeks to discover the richness of shared life in a past and future to come—the promise of plural and multiple voices of the archive—my book heeds a lesson from my teacher, Omnia El Shakry. She reminds us to preserve a distance in relation to a gap, while “encircling it; highlighting the modalities in which other traditions have brought this abyss, this gap or béance into view,” which after all, El Shakry continues, is “the purview of psychoanalysis, theology, and by extension, one might argue, critical history” (174).
Information
manmit singh asks about critique and relevance as well in their exceptional reading of the book. singh argues that when we inhabit a tradition, we must rethink our desire for a reified “definition” about it such as “the essentializing claim that Sikhi is egalitarian.” Such a move, singh argues, risks reproducing duality in the Sikh tradition while also reducing Sikhi into “a static repository to mine for answers or evaluate perceived failures.” The problem is compounded when it comes to gender and sexuality, as singh explores. Again, this is a problem tied to knowability; as Ali Altaf Mian puts it, “What is modern about sexuality is neither the bodily acts nor the personal inclinations associated with sexual identities but rather how the term ‘sexuality’ is often deployed to render erotic desire as something knowable” (108). Rather than tying critique to the knowable, in my own book, I leaned on a lesson I learned from Talal Asad, for whom critique is a site of persuasion, “learning how to do something properly” (410). And when we are learning, “criticism is an activity rooted in and directed at what binds people to their forms of life, not simply an expression of ‘rational argument’” (410). singh too persuades by turning to speculation and negotiation, rather than rational argument and the knowability of sexuality. For them, “this shift enables a rethinking of critique outside of its reliance on loss and scarcity towards a heuristic of abundance.”
Yet persuasion is difficult, as singh rightly notes—especially when new media, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes, are “crisis machines” in which crises “promise to move users from the banal to the crucial by offering the experience of something like responsibility; something like the consequences and joys of ‘being in touch’” (75). And yet, Chun continues, “the decisions we make…seem to prolong crises rather than end them, trapping us in a never-advancing present” (76). We remain at an impasse although the updates continue; persuasion at a hold as crisis proliferates. It would also do well here to recall that, for Asad, authority is critical, especially for learning proper behavior in a tradition. This is an authority routed through “the unavoidability of human uncertainty,” the unavoidability of irrelevant translations (60). Yet in our world marked by a mode of power that Colin Koopman labels “infopower”—an episteme of data exercised through formats—information, rather than authority and practice, becomes central to a tradition (160). One’s response, in other words, is always bound to information rather than the “sensibilities, habits, and relationships” that constitute a tradition (Asad, 95). Yes, one can refuse to speak, but “we remain captivated by an image of life as insufficient to itself and therefore requiring a scaffolding of argumentation and rational defense,” as Charles Hirschkind has said (472). It is an argumentation and rational defense bound, now, to information.
Conclusion
How does one respond then? How does one assume responsibility? It is to ask a difficult question of inheritance, but one that cannot be answered with appeals to more archives nor to more information. Instead, it might be to persevere rather than fixate or stabilize. Such was the aim of my book: to inhabit a desire in which the goal was not to create intelligible objects by providing an answer to the question “Who am I?” or “Who is Duleep Singh?” through a robust and vigorous methodology. Rather, the book encircled something that is missed but impossible to forget: that which is at the heart of Duleep Singh but also excluded from him. This strangeness, this abyss, represents the possibility of breaking with shared or recovered premises and engaging instead with more difficult questions about justice and ethics.
[1] This error appears in my book. Alas, I failed and “one” was not included.
