Blog

Global Currents article

Racialized Asylum, Moral Inversion, and the Erosion of Refugee Norms: The Case of White Afrikaner Resettlement in the United States


Displaced Palestinians during their journey back to Gaza and the north via Al-Rasheed Street. © 2025 UNRWA Photo by Ashraf Amra. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In contemporary South Africa the legacy of apartheid remains inscribed in the social, economic, and political fabric of everyday life. Apartheid was not merely a system of governance; it was a legal and theological order meticulously constructed to secure and maintain White economic exploitation. Racial domination was characterized by White supremacy and paired with the apparatuses of structural, cultural, and institutional violence. These apparatuses served as instruments to sustain and legitimize an economy that enriched a White minority at the direct expense of the Black majority. This racist and oppressive regime received support from successive United States political administrations of the time, often justified using the strategic imperatives of Cold War geopolitics. A notable example was the Reagan administration’s policy of “constructive engagement,” which resisted sanctions and provided both rhetorical and material support to the apartheid regime. The administration advocated for quiet diplomacy despite growing evidence of systemic human rights abuses. Such policies served to reinforce the apartheid state’s resilience and perpetuate its oppression.

Apartheid was not merely a system of governance; it was a legal and theological order meticulously constructed to secure and maintain White economic exploitation.

It is against this historical backdrop that the Trump administration’s decision to designate White Afrikaners as refugees eligible for US resettlement takes place. Some of these Afrikaners were either too young to have actively contributed to the apartheid-era economy before 1990, or were born after its formal end. Yet they still continue to materially and politically benefit from its enduring legacy. Such a resettlement policy represents a staggering inversion of justice. This policy reframes historical beneficiaries of racial domination as victims of persecution, and in doing so, distorts the very foundations of international refugee norms.

White Victimhood as Policy

The narrative of White South African victimhood has circulated in far-right and White nationalist circles since the dismantling of apartheid in 1994. What once was fringe rhetoric has now been granted the imprimatur of US state policy. The result is a deeply racialized moral economy in which whiteness is centered as the locus of vulnerability, deservingness, and innocence. Centering White people in this way stands in stark contrast to the marginalization of racialized communities facing direct, structural, and institutional violence, such as besieged Palestinians in Gaza or Black and Brown asylum seekers at the US border. Their suffering is minimized, dismissed, or outright denied. This policy shift is not just morally suspect, it is a legal and humanitarian distortion.

The international definition of a refugee, codified in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, hinges on a credible, well-founded fear of persecution, typically by the state or by actors the state cannot or will not control. By these criteria, there is no evidence to support the classification of Afrikaners as a persecuted minority. Farm attacks in South Africa, while tragic, are part of broader social crises that affect all South Africans and are not evidence of state-sanctioned or systemic persecution of Afrikaners. Granting refugee status to Afrikaners in this context stretches the legal definition of “refugee” beyond recognition. It suggests that ideological motives, rather than legal merit or factual grounding, are driving this policy.

What once was fringe rhetoric has now been granted the imprimatur of US state policy. The result is a deeply racialized moral economy in which whiteness is centered as the locus of vulnerability, deservingness, and innocence.

The narrative that Afrikaners are the targets of a genocidal campaign lacks credible empirical support and has been propagated primarily by far-right and White nationalist networks, both within South Africa and internationally. This narrative has gained political currency through repetition rather than through legal or factual merit. According to the South African Police Service (SAPS), the vast majority of victims of violent crime in the country are Black South Africans, who make up over 80% of the population. For example, in the 2022–2023 reporting period, over 25,000 murder victims were recorded, the overwhelming majority of whom were Black, while farm-related murders, including White farmers, accounted for fewer than 1% of total homicides. The disproportionate emphasis on White farmer victimhood obscures this broader and far more deadly reality. When refugee policy is manipulated to selectively highlight the grievances of White populations while ignoring the systemic and ongoing victimization of Black communities, it not only distorts humanitarian priorities but also erodes the moral legitimacy of asylum law itself. In effect, such policies weaponize the language of compassion and entrench racial hierarchies, while simultaneously undermining global commitments to justice and protection for the truly persecuted. This is not merely a failure of implementation, it is symptomatic of a deeper structural condition.

The Architecture of Racialized Humanitarianism

The global refugee situation today does not operate as a neutral apparatus guided solely by need or vulnerability. Instead, it is shaped by what scholars such as Didier Fassin calls “humanitarian reason,” a form of moral reasoning that is profoundly influenced by histories of race, power, and cultural proximity to dominant geopolitical actors. This uneven moral calculus is not a theoretical abstraction, it manifests in the stark disparities in how refugee claims are received, evaluated, and acted upon across different racial and national contexts. For instance, Haitian and central American migrants fleeing endemic violence are often summarily expelled from US borders; Muslims escaping war zones endure “extreme vetting” that treats them with suspicion rather than compassion; and Black and Brown asylum seekers are routinely framed not as vulnerable human beings, but as potential threats to national security. These responses are not simply failures of policy but reflect a deeper ethical crisis in our collective capacity to recognize the full humanity of the “Other.” In such a context, the call to justice requires more than legal reform; it demands a reorientation of moral vision, one that foregrounds empathy, equity, and our shared responsibility to the displaced.

Afrikaner  horsemen celebrating the centenary of the Great Trek, an important event for Afrikaner nationalism, in 1938. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In this light, the recent embrace under the banner of humanitarian protection of White South Africans—who are descendants of a settler-colonial elite—is not merely curious, it is telling. It signals how the global refugee apparatus, far from being a disinterested sanctuary for the vulnerable, often operates as an instrument for reaffirming longstanding racial and civilizational hierarchies. This phenomenon is reinforced by what Sara Ahmed terms “the politics of white innocence,” a discursive formation that constructs whiteness as intrinsically virtuous, perpetually endangered, and inherently worthy of care and protection. Within this framework, the suffering of racialized “Others” must be made exceptional, spectacular, and legible according to dominant sensibilities to warrant even minimal compassion. Even then, recognition remains precarious and conditional.

What humankind witnesses, then, is not a failure to uphold humanitarian ideals, but the presence of a deeply embedded ideology of racialized gatekeeping. As Didier Fassin and Ilana Feldman have shown, humanitarian reasoning frequently privileges White suffering, extending empathy and protection in ways that mirror existing geopolitical alignments and racial logics.

The contrast is stark: while Latinx, Haitian, Muslim, and African asylum seekers are met with walls, vetting, and suspicion, White South African farmers are offered expedited refuge, and their claims are amplified through narratives of persecution that resonate with western anxieties. This is not the impartial operation of international law, it is a selective moral economy masquerading as compassion, demanding a deeper reckoning with the structural injustices that shape who is seen, who is saved, and who is sacrificed. This selective empathy becomes even more glaring when placed in the context of South Africa’s recent legal and moral stand at the International Court of Justice.

Context: Gaza and South Africa’s ICJ Case

South Africa’s position has been criticized in western political discourse due to its principled advocacy on behalf of Palestinian civilians. Rather than being acknowledged as a legitimate appeal to international norms, this advocacy has been framed as extremist or ideologically motivated. Instead of supporting South Africa’s moral stand, the United States has responded punitively. At the same time, the US extends refuge to members of South Africa’s former White elite, thereby reinforcing a racialized narrative of victimhood that undermines the foundations of international justice and amplifies settler-colonial grievance.

In this inversion, Palestinians facing exterminatory violence are denied recognition as victims, while Afrikaners with economic power and global mobility are cast as refugees, hollowing out the meaning of this legal and ethical category. This is not neutrality, it is ideological violence masked as policy. It is not humanitarianism, it is the racial management of refuge, calibrated to preserve geopolitical alliances and US domestic White grievances rather than to uphold international law or moral consistency.

The Trump administration’s decision to extend refugee status to White Afrikaners cannot be viewed as an isolated humanitarian gesture. Rather, it reads as a politically motivated maneuver designed to undermine and delegitimize South Africa’s standing on the global stage. The symbolic gesture of offering sanctuary to members of a former settler-colonial elite, at the precise moment South Africa invokes international law on behalf of a besieged and dehumanized population, amounts to an act of moral deflection. It is an attempt to reframe South Africa’s pursuit of justice as ideologically suspect, while displacing the language of victimhood onto a racialized and geopolitically convenient constituency. In doing so, the United States not only obfuscates the genocidal reality in Gaza but reinforces a global double standard in the application of humanitarian norms and legal accountability.

The symbolic gesture of offering sanctuary to members of a former settler-colonial elite, at the precise moment South Africa invokes international law on behalf of a besieged and dehumanized population, amounts to an act of moral deflection.

Nowhere is this moral dissonance more visible than in the simultaneous disregard for the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. As thousands of Palestinian civilians are subjected to indiscriminate bombardment, displacement, and widespread destruction, their appeals for international protection are met with silence or skepticism. In stark contrast, White Afrikaners, who face no comparable threat of persecution, are granted sanctuary and framed as victims. This juxtaposition underscores the extent to which global refugee policy is shaped not by legal consistency or human rights commitments, but by a racialized logic that stratifies suffering and selectively dispenses empathy.

The Trump administration’s amplification of an unfounded narrative of “White genocide” in South Africa, while simultaneously ignoring or obfuscating credible evidence of genocidal violence in Gaza, exemplifies what scholars describe as moral inversion, a process in which the oppressor is rendered innocent and the oppressed are rendered suspect.

Such selective outrage is not merely hypocritical; it enacts what Gayatri Spivak terms epistemic violence: the active erasure of the subaltern’s suffering through institutional denial, deflection, and distraction. This is not a failure of the system to protect; it is the success of a system calibrated to defend racial and geopolitical dominance under the guise of universal humanitarianism. Against this backdrop of systemic erasure and moral distortion, acts of resistance that reclaim international legal and ethical standards are not only necessary, they are urgent.

South Africa’s Stand: Reasserting Moral Authority

Within this broader context of moral and legal distortion, South Africa’s decision to initiate proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) represents a notable reassertion of international legal norms and ethical responsibility. This intervention is not merely a procedural invocation of the Genocide Convention; it is a political act rooted in the nation’s historical consciousness. Having experienced the institutionalized brutality of apartheid, South Africa possesses a unique moral authority and an acute sensitivity to the mechanisms of racialized state violence. Its legal challenge reflects both a principled commitment to international accountability and a refusal to remain complicit through silence.

This stance has not been without consequences. It has provoked diplomatic backlash, subjected South Africa to economic pressure, and triggered efforts to delegitimize its position through various media and political narratives. Nonetheless, the clarity with which South Africa has articulated its case signals a rare consistency between lived historical experience and contemporary foreign policy. It affirms the foundational principle that international law must be applied impartially, that human rights protections cannot be reserved for the geopolitically expedient or racially proximate. The irony, therefore, is profound. The United States, once a defender of apartheid South Africa, now extends refuge to some of that regime’s historical beneficiaries, while simultaneously targeting and discrediting a democratic nation acting in defense of an occupied and besieged people in Gaza. This juxtaposition exemplifies the selective application of moral concern and highlights the urgent need for a more consistent and equitable global human rights framework.

Having experienced the institutionalized brutality of apartheid, South Africa possesses a unique moral authority and an acute sensitivity to the mechanisms of racialized state violence.

This paradox reflects the operation of what critical scholars have termed differential humanity, a system in which recognition of suffering is unevenly distributed according to geopolitical interests and racialized hierarchies. It exemplifies how global humanitarian norms continue to be shaped by colonial inheritances, strategic silences, and epistemic exclusions. In this light, the selective legitimization of certain asylum claims over others demands not only legal critique but an ethical reckoning with the racialized architecture of international protection.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Moral Center

The contradictions in today’s refugee regime are not mere policy failures, they reflect a deeper moral disorder. When humanitarianism is co-opted to privilege the powerful and abandon the oppressed, we are not simply misapplying asylum law, we are dismantling its ethical foundation.

To preserve even a shred of legitimacy, the category of “refugee” must remain tethered to verifiable need and grounded in objective, universally consistent implementation of refugee criteria. It must not be wielded as a political instrument, nor hoarded as a racial entitlement. When refuge becomes the privilege of the powerful rather than the shield of the vulnerable, we are not merely distorting the ideals of humanitarianism, we are dismantling them.

November 4, 2023. London’s Trafalgar Square protest in solidarity with Palestinians. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The selective valorization of White suffering, while Palestinians in Gaza face annihilation and Black asylum seekers are met with suspicion, reveals a system calibrated to preserve global hierarchies under the guise of humanitarian concern.

In a world increasingly desensitized to the inversion of truth, the acts of speaking honestly, naming injustice, and defending the truly persecuted are not no longer optional; they are moral imperatives. And ultimately, they are spiritual imperatives. Every sacred tradition calls upon us to bear witness to truth, to stand with the marginalized, and to resist the desecration of human dignity. In the face of modernity’s dislocations and moral confusion, such clarity is not only a prophetic responsibility but a deeply spiritual calling, a sacred act of devotion rooted in justice

Leave a Comment on Racialized Asylum, Moral Inversion, and the Erosion of Refugee Norms: The Case of White Afrikaner Resettlement in the United States Array
A. Rashied Omar
A. Rashied Omar is associate teaching professor of Islamic studies and peacebuilding in the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He also is a fellow of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and a trustee of the Institute for the Healing of Memories in South Africa
Theorizing Modernities article

A Transnational Feminist Reflection on “Doing Religion” and “Knowing Religion”


The Sunlit Center postcards: Part of the I Am Okay project, combining interview excerpts with women who experienced camptown prostitution and images from the peripheries of their lives. Image by author.

I write this essay as a Christian social ethicist specializing in transnational feminist ethics. Although I do not produce exclusively confessional or non-descriptive scholarship on religion, interreligious dialogue, or peacebuilding, I still approach religion through a normative frame. As a normative ethicist, I grapple with the complexities of peace activism, framing justice, peace, and love not only as telos but also as guiding moral principles, praxis, embodied knowledge, hope, and imagination for an alternative world.

Atalia Omer’s Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding invites readers to critically reflect on their assumptions about interreligious peacebuilding. More specifically, it asks: What if we viewed interreligious dialogue and peacebuilding through the lens of hermeneutical and theological disobedience, incorporating ecofeminist, queer, decolonial, and Indigenous resurgent perspectives? Omer’s fieldwork in Kenya and the Philippines, and the critical conversations she fostered with her interlocutors there, present a compelling case. She argues that many international organizations, religious and non-religious, have co-opted the efforts of local religious actors for their own neoliberal agenda—for example, international development—while maintaining the political and economic hierarchies within those local communities. This often results in the disempowerment of marginalized local actors, whose gendered and raced bodies hold critical knowledge of survival in times of violence and challenge the heteropatriarchal interpretation of sacred texts.

If we, scholars of religion, consider the way that the majority of global armed conflicts concentrated in the postcolonial world are carried out, we would agree with Omer that peace must be decolonized—epistemologically, hermeneutically, and physically. We must ask, then: Where does decolonization happen in religious peacebuilding? It first begins with a critical awareness of the intimate, historical relationship between the Christian religion and European colonialism. Unfortunately, interreligious dialogue often fails to help stakeholders comprehend this dynamic. Omer raises a critical awareness of the “harmony business”—the commodified and depoliticized religious peacebuilding practices often promoted by “religiocrats” in today’s neoliberal world that erase the historical entanglement of European Christianity and colonialism. The book offers vital theoretical and moral checkpoints for scholars and activists, urging us to critically examine whether our work perpetuates a neoliberal or neocolonial status quo rather than advancing a decolonial vision of long-lasting peace with justice in which sexually, racially, and economically marginalized people find liberation.

In the remainder of this post, I raise some questions to further the conversation on decolonizing peacebuilding and interreligious dialogue. These questions are driven by my respect for Omer’s scholarship and activism. I specifically focus on Omer’s distinction between “doing” and “knowing” religion, syncretism, and the ethics of knowledge production. Tying these together is an abiding concern with the way we carry out religious peacebuilding.

“Doing Religion” and “Knowing Religion”

Omer shows that “doing of religion” does not necessarily enhance religious literacy or critical knowledge of religion, particularly if religion becomes a utilitarian tool for peacebuilding. The doing of religion refers to “putting religion to work to promote various objectives” such as the absence of armed conflict in society (3). As a result, the prophetic is turned into what Omer calls the “prophetic lite,” embodied by “an actor who is neither iconoclastic nor disruptive but rather useful and conforming to the NGO-ized deployment of religion as a peacebuilding technology” (3). This globally widespread practice relies on a neoliberal model seeking to include religious people in political peacebuilding by celebrating diversity and eliciting mutual recognition of rituals and spiritual practices. While “doing religion” typically consists of a series of workshops and events in which many religious agents participate, in most cases, the participants do not engage with “difficult questions” that challenge the heteropatriarchal ethno-nation building that is ideologically promoted by their own and other religious traditions. They hardly engage with social justice issues such as gender-based violence, land disputes, child soldiery, marriage, and more from religious perspectives. The danger of “doing religion” is to treat religion and religious people as a monolithic body. Therefore, instead of asking what works in interreligious peacebuilding, Omer accentuates that we must ask “what we can do better” to decolonize and liberate the world for peace with justice. As Omer argues multiple times, decolonizing religion and peacebuilding is “a theological and hermeneutical practice that recovers resources within traditions that are emancipatory rather than oppressive and imperial” (279).

I find it essential to interrogate the relationship between “doing” and “knowing.” Just as “doing religion” does not necessarily enhance “knowing religion,” “knowing religion” as “a discursive tradition or as a living form of historical arguments and interpretations” (4) does not automatically contribute to “doing religion” in the context of peacebuilding. From my disciplinary perspective, “doing religion,” or more precisely “doing theology,” emphasizes that theology is not merely engaging in God-talk but generating actions that will foster much deeper reflection on God. Doing can be a different way of expressing knowing: a religious doer may not articulate the critical knowledge gained through “doing religion” but rely on heteropatriarchal religious symbols and languages to explain their (decolonial) knowledge.

‘Doing theology’ emphasizes that theology is not merely engaging in God-talk but generating actions that will foster much deeper reflection on God.

For instance, I find it challenging to decipher ordinary people’s everyday religious languages and experiences while researching women’s peace activism in prostitution industries around U.S. military bases in South Korea. The Sunlit Center, a grassroots organization adjacent to Camp Humphrey’s, the headquarters of the U.S. Armed Forces in South Korea, has advocated human rights for the senior female citizens who used to work in prostitution for American soldiers. The center does not identify it with feminism or Christianity but only with peace activism. However, the organization often utilizes Christian feminist theology or Minjung theology (a Korean version of liberation theology). Every Tuesday, the Sunlit Center women gather for a short prayer meeting or a Bible study, followed by a lecture or critical conversation about the history of and state-sanctioned violence in militarized prostitution industries in South Korea. After educational sessions, they share meals and snacks. One day, I observed the women’s Bible study, where they shared reflections on the New Testament text. When the Bible study leader invited the women to share their interpretations of the text they read, they answered, “O! Thank you, Jesus!,” :I have no idea,” “I don’t know. I’m uneducated,” “Thank you, Father!”

These women’s refusal to share their interpretation of the biblical text reminded me of the conversation between Topsy and Ms. Ophelia in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ms. Ophelia, a “good” Christian woman, asks Topsy, an enslaved Black teenage girl, how she has lived. Giggling, Topsy answers, “I don’t know” to all the questions from Ms. Ophelia. Topsy’s ignorance, childlike innocence, and dirty appearance arouse deep sympathy in Ms. Ophelia, who would later educate and convert Topsy to Christianity (read as White civilization). However, womanist ethicist Emilie Townes interprets Topsy as a strong-willed girl full of survival knowledge who refuses to share her knowledge with White enslavers. Like Topsy in Townes’s interpretation, the Sunlit Center women’s refusal to share their religious and spiritual knowledge can be seen as a form of resistance. Just as Topsy refused to share her knowledge with her White enslavers, these women, through their silence, may be resisting the imposition of a particular interpretation of their faith.

In fact, the older women who used to work in the prostitution industry requested the Sunlit Center to have a Christian prayer meeting because they had fond memories of going to church with their G.I. lovers. They also remembered how the local Korean church ostracized them. The Sunlit Center’s recordings show some of the women’s critical views on Christian teachings of sin related to sexual purity or the prosperity gospel. They exercised hermeneutics of suspicion in an informal and private setting. Although the Sunlit Center women call themselves peace activists unaffiliated with Christianity, they are spiritually empowered enough to go outside to share their stories and protest state-sanctioned violence. Elsewhere, I have discussed their performative bodies as a form of spiritual activism and interfaith dialogue. In the margins of peacebuilding, grassroots women’s inter- and intra-faith dialogue and activism may demonstrate emancipatory, decolonial peacebuilding and religious talk, although their voices are not loud in realpolitik.

Like Topsy in Townes’s interpretation [of Uncle Tom’s Cabin], the Sunlit Center women’s refusal to share their religious and spiritual knowledge can be seen as a form of resistance.

I share Omer’s critique that “doing religion” in the neoliberal and neocolonial space reduces religion to mere functionality, curtailing its profoundly prophetic role in faith-based popular movements. How can “knowing religion” and “doing religion” synergize within interreligious peacebuilding? In other words, how can we hijack “doing religion” from neoliberal political and religious authorities? How can we recognize the intimate connection between knowing and doing? The unity of knowing and doing is the core of spiritual activism illuminated by womanist and feminist scholars such as Layli Maparyan, M. Jacqui Alexander,  and Gloria Anzaldúa. In this case, “knowing religion” requires a different form of hermeneutics and an alternative way of thinking about spirituality and religion, as Alexander criticizes heteropatriarchal religion for delimiting people’s imagination of spirituality. Omer’s critical reflection on “doing and knowing religion” underscores hermeneutical competency to decolonize both “doing and knowing religion.” This reflection inspires religious actors in peacebuilding to play “critical caretaking” roles in interpreting religion and building peace.

Marcella Althaus-Reid’s critique of Latin American liberation theology can help us reimagine a decolonial theology. Althaus-Reid criticized Latin American liberation theology for cooperating with a heteropatriarchal neoliberal market economy to attract Euro-American consumers. As a result, Latin American liberation theology depicts the poor as a monolithic group, and thus, a closed hermeneutical body, whose racial, gender, and sexual identities are erased. Their desires are also devalued. The poor in Latin American liberation theology become detached from the realities of the oppressed. Likewise, without critical analysis of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized asymmetry of power among international organizations, nation-states, religious organizations, and stakeholders in peacebuilding, interreligious peacebuilding serves only a heteropatriarchal neocolonialism that keeps the marginalized in their precarious situations for the sake of global peace and security. Omer’s critique of “doing religion” in international peacebuilding elicits Althaus-Reid’s queer feminist theological critique of commodified Latin American liberation theology.

Syncretism

Althaus-Reid’s book, The Queer God, elaborates on decolonial hermeneutics. By queering hermeneutics, Althaus-Reid searches for “God in the closet.” Her notion of libertine hermeneutics is meant to contemplate God metaphorically and symbolically by reading the Bible in conjunction with libertine literature such as that produced by the Marquis de Sade. Libertine hermeneutics reads biblical texts intentionally through a sexual lens in opposition to the Christian colonialist “decent” interpretation of the sexual moral code. To be certain, Christian colonizers used their closed hermeneutics of biblical sexual ethics to subjugate and demonize Indigenous populations who were not subscribed to monogamous heteropatriarchal sexual morality or the binary gender system. Althaus-Reid’s hermeneutics expand to reclaim and renew Indigenous oral traditions, folktales, rituals, and ceremonies. Her queer theology is a syncretic way of doing Christian theology—or, as she claims, a queer theologian is a Christian diaspora.

Without critical analysis of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized asymmetry of power . . . interreligious peacebuilding serves only a heteropatriarchal neocolonialism. 

One example of queer theology as a syncretic theology is Althaus-Reid’s theologizing of zemis found among the Taíno people of the Caribbean in the 15th–16th century. Zemis are not gods or goddesses but human-made objects where divine or ancestral spirits reside. Unable to comprehend zemis, Christopher Columbus was only interested in their function. By calling zemis idols, Columbus contradicted his discovery about the natives of the Caribbean islands’ worship of the celestial beings. Althaus-Reid provocatively analogizes thinking about God in postcolonial Latin America to sodomizing God with zemis. In other words, instead of using Christianity to interpret zemis or native traditions, zemis challenged the system of monopoly perpetuated by the God of the empire even in knowledge production and the spiritual market. In order to challenge this monopoly, religious syncretism or a syncretic understanding of hermeneutics can be as much sexual as material, spiritual, and metaphorical.

Is there a place for syncretism in interreligious peacebuilding? As Omer suggests, instead of another source of oppression, religion can be understood as a category complicatedly intersecting with race, gender, class, and other systems of power. Based on this framing of religion, Omer accentuates the importance of critical hermeneutics, particularly developed from feminist, queer, indigenous, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist perspectives, including Althaus-Reid’s. If so, I wonder whether critical hermeneutics, such as feminist and queer theology, and their roles in interreligious dialogue, can be understood and formed better through a syncretic frame? Furthermore, since religious syncretism happens on a more ground level, ordinary people’s everyday survivability can be understood better through the syncretic lens. A critical hermeneutic needs to trace the everydayness of interreligious engagement and dialogue, as well as everyday materiality in religious peacebuilding, namely, embodied peacebuilding.

An Ethic of Knowledge Production

Finally, taking peace activists in Kenya and the Philippines as “interlocutors,” Omer showcases how to produce transnational and intercultural knowledge. As transnational feminist scholars  M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Chapter 1) argue, transnational knowledge producers should wrestle with the links between the politics of location (e.g., the spatiality of power) and knowledge production; have a sharper focus on the ethics of the cross-cultural production of knowledge; and foreground questions of intersubjectivity, connectivity, collective responsibility, and mutual accountability as fundamental markers of a radical praxis. Alexander and Mohanty’s points of scrutiny constitute a transnational feminist ethics on how we live our lives as scholars, teachers, and organizers, and our relations to labor and practices of consumption in an age of privatization and hegemonic imperial projects. I read Alexander and Mohanty’s ethics of transnational feminism in Omer’s book—especially her conscious practice of relational ethics and friendship—not only as ethics of interreligious dialogue but also as her ethics of field research. I hope this book will inspire many readers to live as scholars, teachers, theologians, and organizers who scrutinize the consumption of decolonization, interreligious dialogue, and peacebuilding in an age of neoliberalism.

Leave a Comment on A Transnational Feminist Reflection on “Doing Religion” and “Knowing Religion” Array
Keunjoo Christine Pae
Keunjoo Christine Pae is professor of religion/ethics and women's and gender studies and chair of the Religion Department at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. As a Christian social ethicist, she specializes in transnational feminist ethics, ethics of peace and war, spiritual activism, sexual ethics, and Asian/Asian American feminist theologies. Many of her publications take U.S. military prostitution in South Korea as a critical site for producing feminist knowledge concerning militarized violence, faith-based popular resistance, and a theology of peace. She has authored A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and edited with Boyung Lee, Embodying Antiracist Christianity: Asian American Theological Resources for Just Racial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her edited volume with Kathleen Talvacchia, Searching for the Future in the Past: Renewing Feminist Theological Voices was published in 2024. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding


In academic work on and among the organizations that carry out peacebuilding across the globe, there is a common refrain one hears about the opposition between “theory” and “practice” in addressing conflict. For practitioners seeking to build peace in difficult circumstances, theories about the causes of conflict can appear as a luxury of scholars who conduct their work without having to bear the consequences of it among real people. For theorists, those who practice peacebuilding in the field without engaging in theoretical reflection on it risk unwittingly supporting institutions and systems of knowledge that maintain the oppression of marginalized groups.

Atalia Omer’s Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding disrupts this binary. Focusing on the pitfalls of theory without practice and practice without theory, she makes the case that reframing religious peacebuilding as a decolonial praxis which confronts the realities faced by those on the ground is the best path forward. For Omer, decolonial theory offers resources for thinking through how colonial structures—including neoliberalism, secularism, and the “world religions” paradigm—continue to operate in the background of many well-intended peacebuilding projects. This risk of continuing peacebuilding without challenging these structures is that peacebuilding practices will be co-opted by neocolonial forces and people’s suffering will continue. On the other hand, however, Omer worries that decolonial theory risks obscuring the agency of on-the-ground peacebuilders who might have no other choice than to engage with a peacebuilding industry constructed by colonizing powers.

In fieldwork in the Philippines and in Kenya, Omer documents the intersection of the peacebuilding industry with the challenges faced by those who have suffered the recent scars of communal conflict and the longer scars left by colonialism. What she finds is that it is necessary for those invested in decolonial visions of justice, as Omer herself is, to listen to those on the ground. The result of such listening, she says, is that “something more” than what neoliberal and colonial paradigms would predict results from peacebuilding (20). This something more, Omer later refers to “decolonial openings.” Here, in spite of being born out of the hegemonic forces of colonialism and empire, peacebuilders find ways of connecting that exceed those boundaries: “Such openings include the love and friendships generated through relational but also intra subjective peace islands where people overcome hate, mistrust, and suspicion” (253).

In his response to Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, Robert Orsi goes to the heart of the philosophical, theological, and ethical challenges that Omer’s book raises. Orsi contends that the decolonial openings Omer references betray a kind of secular vision of religious peacebuilding that the book otherwise resists. By naming this decolonial opening as indicative of an ethics, religion is reincorporated into a secular/Enlightenment worldview. Orsi argues that global warming and other worldwide crises are likely to increase migration to the US and Europe, places which have built their wealth via colonial enterprises in the now developing world. To meet these people where they are, he contends, will require more than a welcoming ethics, but a willingness by those in the Global North to welcome new gods.

K. Christine Pae, meanwhile, explores Omer’s distinction between “doing religion”—i.e. instrumentalizing it for advancing specific peacebuilding goals—vs. “knowing religion”—i.e. having a deep understanding of historical religious traditions and their interpretations. She does so by reflecting on how these conceptualizations fit into her own work among a peacebuilding group of former sex workers in South Korea. She explores how their understanding of Christianity was shaped by their ostracization by Korean Christian churches and how this shapes their peacebuilding praxis. She also reflects on the role of syncretism in religious peacebuilding and the potential for Omer’s project to be part of the construction of transnational feminist knowledge.

J. P. Reed considers the conceptualization of agency with which Omer works in the book. He wonders, in particular, about how the possibility of revolutionary change fits into Omer’s understanding of agency. He then turns to a consideration of Omer’s treatment of intersectionality along with her relationship to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. In putting the latter into conversation with Omer’s argument, Reed seeks to excavate what he sees as the philosophical assumptions that guide Omer’s thinking.

Finally, Emma Tomalin lays out key takeaways from Omer’s book for those working in Faith Based Organizations (FBOs). For Tomalin, Omer’s findings suggest a renewed focus on listening to on-the-ground-faith actors and critically reflecting on the structure and assumptions that guide FBOs. Tomalin’s essay is a helpful reminder that theory and practice are indeed necessary partners in advancing religious peacebuilding.

Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding asks the peacebuilding industry to look inward about the assumptions it makes about religion and its broader location within the ideological contours that shape modernity. The latter include neoliberal economic policies, secular assumptions about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of religion, and colonial political and epistemological structures. By grounding this inward reflection in fieldwork where NGOs are actively engaged in peacebuilding practices, Omer threads the needle between theory and practice that challenges narratives that seek to treat either as pure and/or untouched by the other.

Leave a Comment on Introduction to Symposium on Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding Array
Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Abundant Religious Pluralism


A man scoops candy at a sweets stall during Festino di santa Rosalia in Palmero, Italy. Photo Credit: Flickr User Rino Porrovecchio. CC BY -SA 2.0.

In Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, Atalia Omer documents how international peace-and-development agencies in Kenya and the Philippines repurpose “religion” for their own ends. Omer’s tone throughout the book is fierce, ironic, and dialectical; it is also always compassionate and ethically engaged. In her recent book on Palestine, novelist Isabel Hammad extols “a humanism that holds the practice of criticism close to heart” (5). Omer is such a humanist. Although Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding is about many things, religion itself is one of its central subjects. The book invites serious considerations about the future of “religion” as the subject of critical inquiry in the academy, as a disciplinary technology of resurgent authoritarian nationalisms around the globe, and as a potential source of resistance, hope, and solidarity amid the multiplying crises of the 21st century.

The fundamental position of “the harmony business,” as Omer refers to the global network of interreligious peacebuilding NGOs, is that bad religion is the root cause of “underdevelopment” and local violence around the globe; the solution then, it follows, is good religion. The long shadow of 9/11 is evident here. “Religiocrats”—as Omer calls NGO officials functioning as secular theologians—elevate certain moral and theological ideas in different religious traditions by selective proof-texting in order to affirm that “good” religion is essentially and authentically about “peace, harmony, love and self-lessness” (184). Omer refers to this as a form of  hermeneutical closure. Flattening the subversive possibilities embedded within these richly polyvalent religious inheritances, religion is purified to a “generic morality” that can be efficiently operationalized (177). Deeper knowledge about particular lived religious worlds is not just an irrelevant distraction, it is an impediment to peacebuilding. All that NGOs want from “religion” is that it “facilitate people’s resilience in the face of their present conditions.” The discourse of interreligious peacebuilding repackages “structural, cultural, and historical violence” as a spiritual or religious imperative for individual and communal conversion from hate to friendship, love, and cooperation (62).

Omer did extensive fieldwork over several years in Kenya and the Philippines. She participated in meetings; shared meals; and listened to accounts of horrors. In the cross-religious friendships she observed taking shape under the imperatives of NGOized (good) religion, Omer says, she began to discern “decolonial openings to love as the refusal of hate and division” (224). She writes movingly of “a love that persists over-against and beyond the colonial gaze…[shaping] liberationist horizons even if the love emerging from interreligious relationality does not resonate with the revolutionary critique of empire” (235). She came to see that the practice of decolonial love exceeded the limits and expectations of both normative neoliberal discourses about peace and decolonial theories of religion. Decolonial love had the capacity to transcend religious differences and the memories of religious hatreds.

In all her work, beginning with When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks About Religion (2013), Omer tracks back and forth between critique and fieldwork, between theoretical analysis and intersubjective engagement with the men and women she is theorizing—and immediately, this awful locution, “theorizing the other,” is negated, because now the objects of theory have become subjects of their own experience. This intersubjective methodology is itself a decolonizing move. The love and friendship she sees among her interlocutors brings Omer up against the fault line between critical theory, on the one side, and, on the other, the experiential more of decolonial love which exceeds theory’s interpretive reach just as it exceeds the neoliberal constraints within which it arises. Decolonial love does not obviate theoretical analysis; rather, it challenges it with a view to enlarging it.

Secular Critique and Decolonial Love

The underlying question here is whether critique is secular. In his discussion of the salience of Judaism in the early Frankfurt School, for example, intellectual historian Peter Gordon declares axiomatically, “We have no sources for our critical leverage against the social world we inhabit other than the resources that belong to this same world” (14). Secularism is critique’s foundational principle. Just how difficult it is to reject the sufficiency of theory is ironically indicated by the number of times Omer herself qualifies her conclusion about the force of decolonial love with some version of “even if,” as in, “even if” decolonial love is “unwoke” (which is itself a nod to the authority of theory), still, it may be oppositional. These hesitations indicate the intellectual prestige and authority of theory vis-à-vis lived experience, and this is what Omer wants to contest when she designates decolonial love sacred. Through the force of “concrete friendship and love,” she writes, local peace activists exceeded the limits critique imposes on social and political imaginaries. (235)

Other writers have used the notion of “decolonial love” as a third way that disrupts the dominated/dominator binary of all colonialisms, among them Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Audre Lorde. But Omer goes much further: following her interlocutors, she calls the more of decolonial love a form of sacrality that compels “the analysis of religion and the practice of peace beyond its neoliberal utilitarian agenda, or at the very least, exposing its boundaries” (234). Decolonial love is an experience of the sacred that disrupts neoliberal authority. Omer calls it a “spiritual force.” (254) There is an opening here, I think, for a phenomenology of religion in the ruins of the modern.

Decolonial love is an experience of the sacred that disrupts neoliberal authority.

But it is just at this point that—unfortunately, in my view—Omer pivots to the “ethical.” She describes decolonial love in the neoliberal context as an “ethics from the underside,” quoting critical theorist Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who writes that decolonial love and friendship “constitute the ‘ethical orientation of the self in the conditions of systematic dehumanization’” (in Omer, 239). With this assistance from Maldonado-Torres, Omer repositions decolonial love securely within the boundaries of normative modern religion that since Kant has been seen primarily as a form of ethics. In other words, she substitutes the ethical subaltern for the neoliberal subject, translating the sacrality of decolonial love into another form of good modern religion. But is this as far as decolonizing religion goes? Is there not more to this “authentic spiritual force” than ethics?

Beyond Religion as Ethics

Omer herself offers a way of thinking past this limit. Towards the very end of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding, she discusses the Silsilah Dialogue Movement founded in 1984 in Zamboanga City. Silsilah calls for witnessing “God’s presence in the plurality of cultures and religions,” she writes, “as a habitat and experience that leads to dialogue and peace” (245). With the abrupt appearance here—in Omer’s argument—of the presence of God, the possibility arises that the processes of decolonizing religion and peacebuilding may include other beings in addition to humans, among them gods and spirits, angels, saints, and demons, who are present to the humans in these encounters as the humans are to each other. Decolonial love, from this perspective, is not solely horizontal, as the turn to ethics implies. Rather, such friendships extend between heaven and earth. Their horizontality, in Omer’s language, is inseparable from their verticality. Decolonial love, in other words, is far worse than being “unwoke.” It is an instance of “bad religion.” It is in this that the disruptive power of decolonial love lies.

“Interreligious” has always seemed to me a banal and suffocating term. It masks the enormity of what may transpire for better and for worse when men and women come together across ontological, theological and metaphysical differences whether by choice or compulsion. Humans bring a host of desires, needs, and fears to these encounters, conscious and unconscious. They are intrigued and compelled by each other’s religious practices; at the same time, ontological and metaphysical otherness is terrifying. There is nothing necessarily benign about the encounters among diverse humans and gods really present to each other in interreligious spaces. It may be deeply unsettling to be in the presence of foreign gods whose being is at once somehow familiar and utterly strange. The horrific violence that often erupts at the intersection of ontologies is one way that humans attempt to exorcise the anxiety that arises in proximity to other religious worlds which strikes so deeply at the core of religious subjectivity. The gods are implicated in this violence, too.

Decolonial love . . .  is not solely horizontal, as the turn to ethics implies. Rather, such friendships extend between heaven and earth.

The times in which we find ourselves in 2025 are marked by massive movements of peoples around the planet despite the efforts of authoritarian nationalist governments to halt them. Many, perhaps most, of the migrants and refugees come from places and times outside the normative modern. Among other things, this means that they are often, perhaps always, accompanied on their arduous and dangerous journeys by their gods. Around their necks they wear medals stamped with images of their deities; they tuck tiny three-dimensional representations of them in their backpacks; they tattoo their bodies with images of protective holy figures. The landscapes of contemporary migrations—border crossings, refugee camps, NGO-sponsored peacebuilding centers, and so on—are populated in this way by an ad hoc plurality of real presences from different worlds. This presents an opportunity for cross-religious engagements apart from the imperatives of states and the harmony business.

Living with Spirits

I want to close with an example of what I have in mind here. The city of Palermo, capital of Sicily, has become home in recent years to thousands of Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus fleeing the civil war in their homeland. They brought their gods with them and in Palermo they encountered new gods, among them Santa Rosalia, the city’s patron who is credited with saving Palermo from plague in the 16th century. The refugees say that Santa Rosalia, who they call “the other goddess,” greeted them. In their experience, “Santa Rosalia welcomes everybody.” Tamil Hindus in turn have embraced Santa Rosalia. They place her next to Lakshmi and Vishnu in their home shrines. The secretary of the Hindu temple, his chest adorned with a gorgeous tattoo of Ganesh, tells writers for the New York Times, “Santa Rosalia is our mother.” “I’ve got someone here to pamper me,” a Tamil pilgrim at Santa Rosalia’s shine says, adding that the saint “does not see fair son or Black daughter. For her, everyone is equal.”

A flyer for Festino di santa Rosalia in Brooklyn, NY. Image via Bklynr. Used with permission.

The story of the relationship that has developed between Santa Rosalia and Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu refugees in Palermo speaks to a kind of cosmopolitanism of real presences. The migrants were new to the city, new to Europe and to its languages and customs, but they were fluent in what anthropologist Michael Lambek calls “the art of living with spirits” (6). They were practiced in the behavior of humans and gods really present towards each other in the everyday circumstances of social life and so was Santa Rosalia. This is at once a deeply inculcated and actively practiced competence and it is possessed by very many people living on the planet today, crossing national, racial, and religious differences. Tamil Hindu pilgrims flock to Santa Rosalia’s shrine to ask her assistance with difficult childbirth, for example, or for help finding a spouse, and so do Sicilians; they bend and kiss the steps leading up to her sanctuary, just as Sicilians do; they hold her image in their hands in moments of pain and anxiety as Sicilians hold her in theirs in such times.

Through this shared art of living with the spirits, Sicilian Catholics and Tamil Hindus get glimpses of themselves in the other and of the other in themselves. Santa Rosalia is in this way another kind of “ontological opening.” By her love and care for the refugees, the “other goddess” demonstrates to her Sicilian devout that the Tamil Hindus are not an alien species. I am nearly certain that Sicilians are putting images of Lakshmi and Vishnu on their home altars too, although the article in The New York Times says nothing about it. (I also know that the sight of gods from different worlds standing alongside each raises the issue of cultural appropriation, and while there is often truth to this critique, we should be aware it also reinforces the normative singular of modernity’s ontology). Sometimes there is tension on the island over migration, of course. Secular agencies have also intervened to encourage intercultural relations. But Santa Rosalia and the migrants seem to have found each other by themselves.

When Santa Rosalia takes her place next to Lakshmi and Vishnu, she shows Sicilians that the world is not singular, that the cosmos itself is plural. To quote Isabel Hammad again, “we must eventually be ready to shape-shift, to be decentered, when the light of an other appears on the horizon, in the project of human freedom, which remains undone” (56). In this story about Palermo, two lights appear on the Mediterranean horizon: the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu refugees and Santa Rosalia as the “other goddess.” Secular moderns, even many of those who long for the human to be decentered in a more populous ontology, seem forever doomed to recreate “good religion.” Santa Rosalia’s welcoming of the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu refugees, on the other hand, tells us that the gods, who have their own intentions in their relationships with humans, may be practitioners of decolonial love too. This possibility points away from the thin secular pluralism of interreligious peacebuilding that Omer has so effectively critiqued to an emergent abundant pluralism of contemporary global religions among peoples in movement on the planet.

Leave a Comment on Abundant Religious Pluralism Array
Robert Orsi
Robert Orsi is Grace Craddock Nagle Chair of Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also Professor of Religious Studies, History, and American Studies. His most recent book is History and Presence, which was published in 2016 under the Belknap Imprint of Harvard University Press. Orsi is currently at work on a book called Give Us Boys about the formation of young men at a Jesuit high school in New York City in 1967–1971 as an episode in the broader history of modern Catholic sexuality, class, and urbanism.  
Theorizing Modernities article

Of Hostility and Irrelevance


Nine empty spaces with torn sepia remnants where the earliest photographs of Sikhs and their ruler, Duleep Singh, had once been, by John McCosh, Art Library, ca.1884. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Leave a Comment on Of Hostility and Irrelevance Array
Rajbir Singh Judge
Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of South Asia with a particular emphasis on Punjab and the Sikh tradition. His book, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published by Columbia University Press in 2024.
Theorizing Modernities article

Refusal as Method in Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja


Casualty of War: A Portrait of Maharaja Duleep Singh, by The Singh Twins, poster paint and gold dust on mountboard, 2013. © The Singh Twins:www.singhtwins.co.uk. Used with permission.

Rajbir Singh Judge begins his book by stating that it is a historical narrative that refuses to historicize. Indeed, the book is staged as a series of refusals. On the one hand, Judge probes how a people and a tradition grappled with loss, and on the other hand, he addresses the problem space of history itself through refusal. However, these are not two disparate modes of engagement. Rather they are intertwined throughout the book, ebbing and flowing through the five chapters. As he puts it, “writing a narrative of a historical figure such as Duleep Singh is itself a bid to come to terms with the failure and narrative of history” (183).

Prophetic Maharaja provides an opening to rethink well-worn questions about loss, sovereignty, community, and encounter, through the sophisticated weaving together of critical theory, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and of course, the writing of history. Judge takes Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja of the Sikh kingdom, and his deportation (at age ten) after the British East India Company’s annexation of Punjab in 1849, as his starting point. Singh is forced to give up his title and sovereignty over Punjab, converts to Christianity at age fifteen, and is soon exiled to England. In examining how Sikhs responded to the loss or dissolution of the Khalsa Raj between the mid- to late-19th century, Judge refuses an approach that privileges the restoration of that loss. Key to his reframing, therefore, is a contending with loss as opposed to its recovery. It becomes clear at the outset that this book is resolutely not invested in the historicist desire for closure or to uncover an authentic past, a “real” Duleep Singh. Rather, the conceptual framing of the book unfolds in the tensions, ambiguities, and gaps between the colonizer and colonized, memory and loss, individual consciousness and sangat (community), and importantly, between history writing as we know it, and history as an always incomplete endeavor. In other words, Judge invites us to dwell on the temporality of intellectual traditions (such as psychoanalysis and subaltern studies) and intellectual history more generally. It is precisely this methodological and analytical move that marks Judge’s novel contribution to South Asian history.

There are, nonetheless, certain historical truths that need to be stated before getting to the question of loss, such as the colonial government’s constant thwarting of Duleep’s Singh’s attempts to return to India because they feared a political revolution. Drawing on archival research, the author traces this history clearly. What is more unwieldy, yet a far more absorbing narrative at the core of the book, is the set of desires and fantasies attached to notions of loss, sovereignty, and community. As Judge puts it, he is more interested in dwelling in the various rhythms of loss, than providing a theorization of loss. This is another kind of refusal in the book: “My project refuses the wager of authenticity and continuity, but also, crucially, absolute and transhistorical loss” (22).

The book is staged as a series of refusals. On the one hand, Judge probes how a people and a tradition grappled with loss, and on the other hand, he addresses the problem space of history itself through refusal.

In working through this refusal, the book also hews close to the Sikh tradition itself. In other words, instead of writing a history of the Sikh tradition or of Duleep Singh’s life using the secular categories of professional history, the author uses the Sikh tradition as a conceptual resource—concepts such as hukam (order, command), naam simran (to remember continuously), and amrit (the nectar one imbibes to join the Khalsa), among others—to think with and through the notion of loss. In this way, and following scholars such as Talal Asad, Judge pays close attention to the genealogy of concepts, especially the concept of tradition, and how they might enable and disable our understanding and writing of history. If the Sikh tradition is a singular one that continually strives for coherence through a simultaneous engagement with internal contestations, frictions, and discrepancies, then how does one inhabit such a tradition? And is there a tension here between the tradition’s own internal coherence, or striving for coherence, and the analytical move that the author makes in resisting coherence, if coherence is understood as a hardening of tradition?

One way in which Duleep Singh inhabited the Sikh tradition was by constituting a community, a dislocated community, from afar through his regular letters, what the author refers to as “hidden transcripts” (following James Scott’s definition). This active community-making through the invocation not only of blood and kin-ties, but also the Sikh tradition itself, is an example of how events in the past constantly exceeded the grasp not only of the colonizing power, but also of historians seeking a totalizing narrative of Duleep Singh as person and impending sovereign. He is a prophetic maharaja, Judge argues, because “prophecy refuses to abide by the logic in which past, present, and future proceed sequentially” (19). And this anti-teleological move is one that we see throughout the book.

Inhabiting Tradition

I want to briefly focus on chapter three, which examines Duleep’s Singh’s conversion to Christianity and reversion to Sikhi, since it provides a compelling response to the question of how one inhabits the Sikh tradition, especially in wading through the murkiness of its encounter with colonial modernity. For too long, narratives of conversion have been tied to the question of belief or individual consciousness. The author not only disentangles conversion from its intellectual genealogy that is rooted in Christianity, following scholars such as Talal Asad and Gauri Viswanathan, but argues that it needs to be examined from within the context of Sikh ethical and embodied practices. As he notes, it is not as though individual consciousness is completely absent, but rather, it must “conform to the ethical practices and bodily disciplines prescribed by within the Sikh community in which the experience of learning was valued above individual decisions” (101). In Judge’s analysis, this is neither simply a return to emic concepts nor a complete disavowal of subjective consciousness. Instead, it poses a challenge to the logic of colonial modernity as well as to the Sikh tradition that is itself transformed in its encounter with British colonial rule.

So how do we understand Duleep Singh’s conversion or reversion from within the Sikh fold? In this chapter, we see how Duleep Singh oscillates between the individual self and the sangat, caught in the epistemic murk of colonial rule. Judge borrows the term “epistemic murk” from anthropologist Michael Taussig to refer to the murkiness or uncertainties that accompanied colonial-era policies and decrees. This becomes clear in the example of the colonial state’s policy of noninterference in religious affairs, which ironically requires a colonial officer to be present when Duleep Singh interacts with other Sikhs in Aden for his reversion ritual. This contradiction destabilizes the public/private binary that the colonial state strives to maintain. When Duleep Singh enters the Khalsa, he is neither beholden to his individual self, nor the colonial state, but to the entire body of the Khalsa and the Sikh tradition. In this way, epistemic murk also constitutes a form of resistance as anthropologist Sophia Chao has recently argued: “…a refusal to reduce any particular entity to any singular, static reality, and instead a recognition of any being or body’s positioning with broader systems of power and vulnerability” (41).

When Duleep Singh enters the Khalsa, he is neither beholden to his individual self, nor the colonial state, but to the entire body of the Khalsa and the Sikh tradition.

In closing this chapter, Judge briefly touches on theories of value to further assess the murkiness of Duleep Singh’s tensions and entanglements with colonial rule and the sangat. Take karah prashad, sacred or blessed food that is distributed to all at a gurdwara. Common across sacred sites in India and across different religious traditions, the giving or taking of sacred food is embedded simultaneously within reciprocal ritual relations, capitalist market logics, and the maintenance of social and kin ties. In other words, the efficacy of collective Sikh prayer, karah prashad, and the commodity form are all knotted together. It is this knotting that irritates and confounds colonial administrators, who further intervene and regulate the religious affairs of their subjects, subjects whose practices often exceed presumed boundaries between public and private, religious and political, and individual and collective. And this chapter is a fantastic instantiation of this kind of excess, and the ways in which people act in unexpected ways. As literary theorist Terry Eagleton puts it in his book The Ideology of the Aesthetic, “there is something in the body which can revolt against the power that inscribes it” (28). We see this repeatedly in Duleep Singh’s string of attempts in his adult life to revert to Sikhi, challenging colonial officials’ assumption that his conversion to Christianity at age fifteen and subsequent exile to England would distance him from any plans to overthrow the empire and reclaim the Khalsa Raj.

Ultimately, I find convincing Judge’s refusal to offer a solution or answer to questions that have typically been asked about the past, especially in their tracing of an all-too neat historical narrative about the loss of the Khalsa Raj. And there are lessons to be learned here that apply to other contexts, especially in colonial South Asia. What is particularly engaging about Prophetic Maharaja is the double move that Judge makes: he takes us through how Sikhs contended with loss, but the book is also about Judge’s own contention with the waxing and waning of certain intellectual traditions within the academy, such as subaltern studies and psychoanalysis.

In thinking with Judge’s series of refusals, as an anthropologist, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Audra Simpson’s work on refusal which is tied to questions of sovereignty and indigenous politics in the North American context. On the one hand, refusal is embedded in the everyday acts of people, and on the other hand, it is also a theoretical and methodological move. This “ethnographic refusal,” says Simpson, “acknowledges the asymmetrical power relations that inform the research and writing about native lives and politics” (104). It is therefore an act of resistance against using the theory and methods of a discipline in ways that could compromise tribal sovereignty, but it can also be a decision to not make certain information available for the academy. And this is an ethical intervention. Similarly, I see Judge making an ethical move, both methodologically (the refusal to provide a cathartic end point) and in tracing the ethical projects in which the book’s historical actors are invested. In this way, refusal remains a potent idea across disciplinary silos, and the refusals in Judge’s book offer provocations that scholars of South Asia and beyond will be contending with for some time.

Leave a Comment on Refusal as Method in Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja Array
Harini Kumar
Harini Kumar is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on lived religion, Islam and Muslim societies, gender, ethics, material culture, and migration. Her writings have been published in SAMAJ, Nidān, and Allegra Lab. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, Formations of Tamil Islam: Religion, Mobility, and Placemaking in Asia, which is an ethnographic study of Muslim belonging in the Tamil world. Her new project on transoceanic Muslim mobilities explores the connections between South India, Southeast Asia, and the Americas through the enduring legacy of a 16th century Sufi saint. Kumar's research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and by several programs at the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and Yale University. 

Global Currents article

Costly Solidarity


Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac speaks at the University of Notre Dame on March 25th, 2025.

On March 25, 2025, Palestinian reverend and theologian Dr. Munther Isaac joined the broader community of the University of Notre Dame for a lecture on Christian churches’ prophetic role in the face of the genocide in Gaza and escalating processes of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Rev. Isaac shared reflections from his recent book, Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza, and engaged with the 230-strong audience during a brief Q&A session. The audience comprised students, faculty, families with young children, local religious leaders, and people of faith from as far away as Indianapolis. The event was co-sponsored by the Contending Modernities research initiative, the Department of Theology, and the Mirza Family Chair of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies. 

“It is said of Christ that in the days of his flesh he offered up to God prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death,” opened Fr. Khaled Anatolios, John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology and chair of the Department of Theology at Notre Dame. “This book [Christ in the Rubble] was written with loud cries and tears, and it strives to transform the suffering of Palestinians into prayers to God and supplications to the rest of humanity, prayers and supplications for mercy and for peace and for deliverance from the spectre of genocide.”

During the introduction to Rev. Isaac., the audience heard of the importance of learning first-hand from Palestinian voices in order to challenge dominant western narratives that obscure the system of apartheid and supremacy documented in detail by leading Israeli and international human rights organizations. Rev. Isaac, Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem and the Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour, and academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College, has emerged as a prophetic voice challenging Christian churches’ support of this violence and advocating for justice and peace. His Christmas sermon, “God is Under the Rubble in Gaza” drew global attention to the plight of Gazans and inspired his most recent book.

Highlights from the lecture, lightly edited for clarity, follow below.

 

Christian Support for Erasure

Photo of Christians for a Free Palestine protest against Christians United For Israel on July 29, 2024, used with permission. Photo credit: Ford Fischer.

Reverend Munther expressed his deep pain and frustration at the world’s seeming tolerance and even justification of Palestinian suffering. “I am addressing existential issues for us as Palestinians . . . actually having to defend my faith and my being.” This sentiment is underscored by the Trump administration’s selection of Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has said, “There is really no such thing as a Palestinian,” arguing that Palestinian identity was a “political tool to try to force land away from Israel.” Rev. Isaac contended that western Christian theology has tragically played a role in enabling this genocide, mobilized by coloniality and racism. Early British Christian Zionist Lord Balfour, in fact, supported European Jewish Zionist claims to land in the colonized Ottoman Empire and historic Palestine in order to rid “Western Civilization” of “alien” Jews fleeing Russian pogroms and other violence (11).

Rev. Isaac shared his incredulity at the calls for violence and extermination of his community coming from other Christians: “At the beginning of the war some evangelical pastors celebrated, saying, maybe this will usher in the second coming of Christ . . . . One pastor called for Israel to make Gaza a parking lot within a week.” Rev. Isaac’s lecture came on the heels of a statement by one Christian Zionist group, American Christian Leaders for Israel (ACLI), to President Trump “reaffirm[ing] the Jewish people’s inalienable right to the Biblical Heartland of Israel,” which is a call for the Israeli occupation and takeover of the West Bank. The alliance between Christian Zionists and right-wing politicians in Israel at times obscures the fact that the readings of Christian theology that drive Christian Zionism are deeply antisemitic and assume Jewish conversion or damnation upon the second coming of Christ.

“Do we really have credibility as people of faith or as Christians when never again becomes yet again?” asked Rev. Isaac. “What I tried to argue in the book is that we need to judge Zionism and Christian Zionism by its fruits and its fruits today is the [Jewish] Nation State Law; its fruits today is apartheid.” The 2018 law, which was mentioned several times in the lecture, declares the “state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people” and supports exclusively Jewish immigration and settlement. Its passage was hotly contested as it privileges one ethnic group above others, a hierarchy antithetical to democratic equality.

 

Christ in the Rubble

Cover of book "Christ in the Rubble" by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac.

Many around the world have seen the image of baby Jesus, wrapped in a keffiyeh, cradled by chunks of concrete rubble. Rev. Isaac explained the origins of the nativity scene and his own struggle with reconciling God’s omnipotence and goodness with the existence of terrible suffering.

“The idea began when the church of St Porphyrius in Gaza was attacked and 18 people were killed including nine precious children . . . The same day the attack happened…we held an ecumenical service for a ceasefire in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem praying for a ceasefire and for protection. We go home and we hear about the attack and the first thing I ask myself is, does God actually care?

Two days later I had to preach, including to someone whose sister was killed in the attack and you ask yourself, what do you say? People were asking, ‘Where was God?’ ‘Why doesn’t God listen?’ People were afraid, ‘Why does he allow this?’ Back then I remember saying that I don’t have any philosophical or theological answer to that question, why would God allow suffering, other than look at at the cross and there see Jesus as the victim of the very same violence of the empire, Jesus crying at the cross: ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ To me that communicates that God actually suffers with us, is the victim of the very same violence, he is in solidarity with us. That’s when I said God is under the rubble in Gaza, he’s in the hospitals, he’s with the bereaved families. God is under the rubble in Gaza.

The Bethlehem Lutheran Church decided to do something different that year for their nativity. “We see the image of Jesus in every child pulled from under the rubble” Rev. Isaac shared. The iconic image of baby Jesus in the rubble was thus born, perhaps inspiring the Vatican’s own nativity a year later. 

 

Solidarity

“What role should Christian theology play in confronting Christian Zionism in academic or church settings in the West?” asked an audience member. Rev. Isaac answered,

I’ll be very honest and blunt: if you ask this question you have to be ready for what I’m calling today or what we call costly solidarity. Solidarity, by the way, by definition is costly, so if you’re genuine about that I want to ask back, are you willing to pay the price especially in the culture of fear and intimidation and cancellation that already exists?

When I talk about apartheid and genocide I was recently asked by someone, ‘Why do you insist on calling it apartheid? Let’s just call it a struggle and discrimination.’ I said no, if it’s a conflict we need mediation, if it’s apartheid we need sanctions and we need boycotts. That’s why I ask back, are you ready for meaningful acts that will make a difference? And I hope I’m not getting anybody in trouble, this entails acts of what we call creative resistance, acts of solidarity, coming together especially as people of faith and saying no, we will not accept or normalize this injustice.

So it’s not just about prayer and sending thoughts or even charity and we need lots of support now to rebuild, I know, but how do we ensure that this does not happen again? How do we look inwardly towards the things that enabled this ideology? The dehumanization of Palestinians did not happen overnight . . . . We need to look at the theologies of supremacies that still exist within our circles. Finally I would like to insist on something. I don’t think there is a Christian solution or a Jewish solution or a Muslim solution. It’s about coming together as people of faith more than ever. If you ask me, ‘What can we do as Christians?’ I’ve been saying this for a while now: find Jewish and Muslim partners and come together to fight this.

We need to…make it an interfaith priority to combat any theology of supremacy and exclusion.

 

Conclusion

Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac speaks at the University of Notre Dame on March 25, 2025.

The event emerged from collaborations between Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish scholars at the University of Notre Dame. Atalia Omer, Co-Director of Contending Modernities, invited the audience to experience these acts of interfaith solidarity not as compassion but rather a more deeply rooted expression of ethical commitments. She closed, “I’m not here personally because of compassion. I’m here because of my ethical outrage and ethical responsibility . . . I have no choice but to show up. I show up for my own situatedness with the responsibility of being Jewish.”

Others echoed Rev. Isaac’s call for solidarity rooted in their faith commitments. ND PhD student Elsa Barron, who attended the lecture, reflected:

Munther Isaac reminded us that by definition, solidarity is a costly endeavor. He encouraged us to act not based on the consequences of solidarity but on our commitment to pursuing justice in all circumstances. As a person of faith, this resonated with me deeply. Following the example of Christ is so clearly a path of sacrifice and persecution, just as it is a walk of great love, joy, and peace. If we say we are followers of this path yet fail to participate in costly solidarity, we need to re-examine our direction.

Leave a Comment on Costly Solidarity Array
Contending Modernities
Theorizing Modernities article

Contention, Dwelling, and the Loss of Loss


Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex, Anandpur Sahib. Image via Flickr User Mathanki Kodavasal. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

The paradox of “loss” is that the notion also makes present its object. Absolute loss is therefore barred by its own trace. The onto-epistemic impossibility, however, becomes an ethical one once that which is lost becomes lure, since even the faintest presence of the faintest loss can seduce an all the more unrelenting desire for it. Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja insists on a relation to loss that is instead out of joint with itself. In what might be called the loss of loss, its turn to creative struggle concerns instead the pragmatic consequences of loss rather than a dyadic relay between it and its recuperation.

That Prophetic Maharaja dwells on the loss of loss might seem counterintuitive, since loss in itself seems so central for Judge’s book. This dwelling is twofold, both an orientation to creation and a drive towards disintegration. The sequential progression of the book’s introduction begins with the problem of loss, but tends to ambivalence, and proceeds on the note of creativity. Its focal analytic metaphor is its chipping away at an image of the absent sovereign, a performative disintegration of that which mediates the object of former attachment. The challenge for readers is that this dwelling is a refusal to resolve these multiple threads into any one coherent whole. This is by design.

Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja insists on a relation to loss that is instead out of joint with itself.

At its most empirical, Prophetic Maharaja pivots to the creative entailments of loss rather than its recuperation by examining different responses to the loss of the Khalsa Raj, a Sikh kingdom whose territorial sovereignty in and around Punjab was ceded upon colonization in 1849. The biographical topic is the child heir Duleep Singh, who is exiled to London in 1854, but who nevertheless organizes long-distance anti-colonial rebellion in Punjab, pens and therein spurs publicly circulating polemics in newspapers across both there and England, and organizes a transnational network of collaborators including in Russia. Sikhs in early anti-colonial agitation, especially those of the Namdhari order, and texts such as Sau Sakhis and Malwa Des Ratan Di Sakhi, prophesize the arrival of a new sovereign, the overthrow colonial rule, and the reinstallation of Khalsa Raj. Imperial intelligence consequently obstructs Duleep Singh from ever arriving in India, since his presence could revive desires for sovereignty, especially amidst rumors of revolt then popular amongst Sikhs.

The argument is that these creative struggles are premised on making whole the otherwise incommensurate demands placed on community. The absent heir convenes many kinds of struggles each organized around their own fantasies. Prophecy therefore fractures community by troubling the seeming wholeness of its mythic totality, coherence, or commonality. It instead convenes a sense of a community, a future that disrupts colonial sovereignty as well as any determinate notion of community that would resolve into either a Khalsa Raj or an India. Fantasy therefore bespeaks the creativity of loss, because any cause of desire cannot be reduced simply to an object (a Khalsa Raj that is yet to come). Its creative work is a suturing of the loss constitutive of social relations.

These transformations instead instantiate mobilizations of loss that are quite different than that of secular historiography. Even amidst the profound poignance of having lost the Khalsa Raj, Sikh responses to the demand for struggle re-make relations with former attachments rather than recuperate any former sovereignty. Prophetic Maharaja argues that this self-fracturing contrasts with the secularist anxieties of historiographical practice, whose struggles to recuperate the fluidity of pre-colonial identities is meant to offer an alternative to religious nationalisms. This recuperation of the pre-colonial misunderstands community, unwittingly resonating with the very targets of ideological critique that secularist historiography characteristically charges for being nostalgic, romantic, and naive. Of course, the practice of secular historiography is premised on its own fantasy that the contingent happenings of the past can be made coherent, a recuperation that would foreclose the creative involvement that loss can demand.

Prophecy convenes a sense of a community, a future that disrupts colonial sovereignty as well as any determinate notion of community that would resolve into either a Khalsa Raj or an India.

Implicit in each the antagonism of contention and the receptivity of dwelling is an atelic principle. Community is inoperative, because its workings are irreducible to determinate purpose and shared quality amongst its constituents. Yet, antagonism drives it. The argument is that Duleep Singh does not become an object of fixation, because the Sikh tradition sensitizes community to a creation of past rather than an attachment to it. At stake is the chance of an unrelenting learning in both the sensuousness of human involvement and the risks of its trappings. So goes for Prophetic Maharaja as well. Its commitment to dwelling seeks a receptivity that might think with a tradition rather than drive any historicization of it. Yet, the book also drives a chipping away at Duleep Singh, a disintegration of any coherent whole that might have been lost. The learning that drives Prophetic Maharaja is in this way responsive to both the capacity for contention and a refusal to satisfy given, in this case secular historiographical, demands for explanation.

The lesson is an orientation to life with loss amidst the play of presence and absence and for that matter loss and recuperation, but also unmoored from any preoccupation with them. From this standpoint, Prophetic Maharaja is an attempt to think with a tradition premised on learning, rather than secular modern investments in racio-religious subjectivity or for that matter post-colonial anxieties about creative repetitions of the past. The caution against fixation is meant to radicalize the possibility of learning, because neither method nor object can be guaranteed by the recuperation of what is lost. Instead, dwelling with loss becomes a more receptive chance for learning, because it sits with the constitutive role of contention in the formation of community. However, an ethic that might put into play both an involvement and an un-attachment which releases itself from the death of fixation is itself difficult to capture. That is, it too cannot be fixed, demanding instead a non-method and non-object. The loss of loss concerns this impossible ethic, which creates with loss yet remains unmoored from any fixation with it.

Leave a Comment on Contention, Dwelling, and the Loss of Loss Array
Randeep Singh Hothi
Randeep Singh Hothi is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2023, he obtained his joint-PhD in Anthropology, with a subfield specialty in Linguistic Anthropology, and Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His current book project asks how media institutions motivate political imagination amongst diasporic Sikhs. Randeep’s work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, American Institute of Indian Studies, and The Institute for Citizens & Scholars. His published work can be found in the journals Cultural Anthropology and the Journal of Legal Anthropology.
Theorizing Modernities article

Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition: India and the World


Kings and devotee Sikhs paying homage to Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images/images@wellcome.ac.uk. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In Prophetic Maharaja, Rajbir Singh Judge has written a stunningly eloquent and conceptually deep account of the late-nineteenth century events surrounding Duleep Singh. Singh was the heir to the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, which was the last major British conquest in South Asia, on the road to India becoming the “jewel in the crown” of that most recent and most global of empires. In the eighteenth century, the Sikhs—more precisely, the Khalsa Sikhs—went from being targets of erasure at the hands of the imperial predecessors of the British to rulers of an area larger than Great Britain. The loss of that kingdom has continued to have a powerful hold on the Sikh imagination into the twenty-first century, and it plays a central role in Judge’s book.

Judge focuses on the relatively immediate aftermath of the fall of the Khalsa kingdom, noting that the “aftermath continues into the present” (11). In this piece, I will offer some thoughts on this aftermath, and how and why it continues into the present. This arc of history includes the independence of India from the British, its partition and the violent displacement of Sikhs, along with Hindus and Muslims, the struggle of Sikhs for security and recognition in the nation-state of India, and a new cycle of violence that has cast a shadow—now become global—over the present. If ethics and justice matter—and they are arguably at the heart of the teachings of the Sikh tradition—then delineating a path that, if actively followed, moves humans toward more ethical and just conditions for all, is worthwhile. Understanding the arc of this particular slice of history may be at least somewhat relevant for defining this path.

Engaging with Loss

Loss is a crucial conceptual driver of Judge’s account of Duleep Singh and his later-life struggles, long after he had been deposed and exiled to Britain as a boy and brought up as a Christian gentleman there, almost as a kind of imperial mascot. As Judge himself states, his goal is to “highlight how a people articulated loss (military, political, and psychological). Through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and the cultivation of ethical practice, Sikhs undid the colonial politics that sought to conquer, secure and map the world.” Further, “Sikhs … were not seeking to recover the past. They engaged loss by remaking it [the past]” (2).

The loss of the Sikh Kingdom has continued to have a powerful hold on the Sikh imagination into the twenty-first century, and it plays a central role in Judge’s book.

At the same time, Judge does not offer neat explanations of the past, nor of attempts to remake the past. Drawing on Gil Anidjar, he cautions that there is no lesson to be learned for the present or future, at least at that level, from history. Instead, quoting Stefania Pandolfo, Judge considers “invention at a time of political and cultural crisis” and “the possibility of transmission for a tradition uprooted from its system of reference” (9; in Judge, 11) after the fall of the Khalsa Raj (sovereign rule) and the exercise of British imperial power across all aspects of South Asian societies and cultures. His book is meant to “participate in such uprooted transmission” and grapple with a “fractured inheritance and system of reference” for the case of the Sikhs at this juncture of the past (11).

As noted, Judge focuses on the near aftermath of the fall of the Khalsa Raj, noting in passing that the “aftermath continues into the present.” In the remainder of this essay, I will consider this aftermath, and its continuation into the present. In doing so, I will refer to Judge’s work at various points, although my own inclinations as an empirical social scientist are to look for lessons in the past, or in general, in the data. So, I will not achieve his level of methodological sophistication, although I admire it greatly. Instead, there will be a historical arc, and possible lessons, in my discussion.

Framing the Sikh Tradition

Despite recent attempts to define a medieval “Sant” tradition, and squeeze Nanak—the first Sikh Guru, or spiritual guide—into that relatively modern category, Nanak and—for the most part—the Sikhs, refuse to fit into that compartmentalization.[1] Just based on their writings and how they were conveyed, Nanak and his successors saw themselves as offering something new to their fellow human beings, a path to a “better” life, sought through individual and collective actions. The last human Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, instituted an initiated order of Sikhs, the Khalsa, which has defined the tradition ever since, even when it has been challenged or rejected by some Sikhs. The Khalsa are sometimes considered to be the mystical body of the Guru, the Guru Panth, complementing the teachings of the Sikh Gurus embodied in the sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Beyond these basic characteristics, there have been any number of interpretations, contestations, departures and fragmentations, but there is some “common core,” or perhaps a common thread, in the Sikh tradition that is often neglected by scholars outside the tradition (or those within it who want to conform to academic fashions). Such scholars seek to fit the tradition into conceptual frameworks and categories that they have been trained to accept (see note 1). This does not mean that the common core translates into a unique, eternal, comprehensive blueprint for all human beings: the issue is not one of “scholarship” versus “belief” or “tradition.” In his book, as in his other writings, Judge avoids both kinds of unquestioning acceptance and simple claims of truth or fixity. Judge is not alone in this sophistication: there are other scholars who write in a similar vein, but this is not restricted to contemporary western academia. The late nineteenth century Sikh debates that form part of his narrative are not just polemics, or responses to trauma, or attempts to fit into a new colonial intellectual paradigm, but often nuanced considerations of these issues, and Judge accords them a status often denied to them.

The court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, ascribed to Bishan Singh (died circa 1900), North India, Lahore or Amritsar, dated 1927 V.S. or circa 1870–71 C.E. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The point to be made here is that there are aspects of Sikh tradition that go deeper than desires for territorial sovereignty. Ultimately, the idea of the Khalsa Raj is deeper than the kingdom of Ranjit Singh, which was found wanting in many respects by early nineteenth century Sikh reformers without any connection to Duleep Singh. The idea is an ideal, grounded in interpretations of Sikh tradition that are built on the “common core” of moral or ethical foundations. Indeed, Duleep Singh sought legitimacy by promising to recover and adhere to this ideal. In an 1886 letter addressed to the Khalsa as a collective body, he promised to adhere to the “pure and beautiful tenets” of Guru Nanak, and “obey the commands” of Guru Gobind Singh.[2]

Tracing the Aftermath

Duleep Singh died in 1893, two decades after Sikh leaders began their formal efforts to “remake” the past, though arguably, also to “recover” it—many of the debates revolved around what was authentic, in terms of the message of the Sikh Gurus, with the Guru Granth Sahib and other historical documents providing only incomplete evidence and guidance. Some of those debates continued for decades after. A concerted collective effort to create a comprehensive Sikh code of conduct took almost two decades, but the code finally produced in 1945 has limitations. These efforts were overshadowed by impending political upheaval: at this time the prospect of the British retreating from imperial India became more likely, as did the aim of partitioning it to give Muslims their own separate nation-state. In these circumstances, Sikhs, who lacked any significant territory where they were a majority, almost had no place to go, ultimately throwing in their lot with Hindu-majority India. They did so with vague assurances of autonomy in that aspirationally pluralistic nation.

Sikhs were a significant part of the massive migration that accompanied Partition, and many ended up in Indian cities outside Punjab, especially the capital territory of Delhi. As the new republic of India redrew its administrative boundaries, partly to absorb princely states and partly to align those boundaries with linguistic groupings, Punjab was the last to have the process completed. A Punjabi-majority state was going to be a Sikh-majority state, which raised concerns for India’s leaders in terms of national security and territorial integrity. Much of this anxiety was actually the result of India’s accession of Muslim-majority Kashmir. In a twist of history, the Hindu ruler of Kashmir who made this decision was a descendant of the Dogras who had served in Ranjit Singh’s administration, betrayed his successors to the British, and been rewarded with that prime chunk of the Sikh kingdom.

Another factor in the process of defining—and delaying—a new Indian state of Punjab was Hindu nationalism, with slogans such as “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” epitomizing a majoritarian idea of India quite different from pluralistic aspirations. Again, this phenomenon had clear historical antecedents—the Jana Sangh of the 1950s which opposed a Punjabi linguistic state came from a different strand of Hindu nationalism than the Arya Samaj of the 1870s, but each strand has had difficulty in acknowledging a distinct and distinctive Sikh tradition.

Guru Nanak and Bhai Mardana meeting Bhagat Kabir under a tree, Janamsakhi painting. Punjab Hills. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Partition and accompanying migration inflicted heavy economic costs on the Sikhs, in addition to the political uncertainties and cultural challenges that came with being part of independent India. Just as new water infrastructure during the British colonial period had given Sikh farmers opportunities in areas of Punjab that were now in Pakistan, the post-independence Bhakra-Nangal dam and new canals tapped into Indian Punjab’s remaining rivers, providing one piece of an agricultural renaissance, in what became known as the Green Revolution. New, high yielding varieties of wheat (and later rice), combined with chemical fertilizers and guaranteed purchases by an India government striving for national food security, ushered in an era of prosperity for Indian Punjab. However, this was short-lived and somewhat illusory. The production model came to rely more and more on input subsidies, environmental damage was ignored, and farmers found it difficult to move into alternative crops or occupations. The Green Revolution was ultimately a poisoned chalice for Punjab’s—mainly Sikh—farmers.[3]

Beginning in the early 1970s, access to adequate water to sustain the Green Revolution became a persistent political concern for Punjab’s farmers, especially after a tribunal award that split river water allocations between Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan that many rural Punjabis viewed as unfair. But Sikh politicians also invoked the idea of Khalsa sovereignty and lingering concerns with some of the wording of India’s Constitution—which Sikh representatives had refused to sign when it was finalized in 1949—in an eclectic set of demands known as the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. This document also included a proposal for much greater autonomy for Punjab, a kind of demand which has always served as an alarm signal for India’s national governments, whatever their political ideology. As for the case of Duleep Singh and the British—eloquently described by Judge—the fear is that such invocations may strike a chord with the masses, or be exploited by foreign governments, to destabilize the political order. This fear holds whether that order is based on colonization and imperial rule, or a on modern, centralizing nation-state, and no matter how unrealistic the goals that are articulated.

The Anandpur Sahib Resolution explicitly worries about the loss of Sikh identity because of Hindu nationalism, as well as the economic precarity of Punjab’s Sikh farmers. It also hints at concerns about the erosion of Sikh values in the face of modernity and material prosperity. The original Khalsa Raj of Ranjit Singh had raised its own concerns about adherence to Sikh values, leading to a complex process of “reform”—some combination of recovery and remaking—through much of the nineteenth century. During and soon after Ranjit Singh’s reign, Sikh reform movements arose which sought to shed practices that were considered to depart from the teachings of Nanak and his successors. By the time Duleep Singh reached middle age and sought a return to Punjab and to some kind of sovereignty, a vigorous social and intellectual effort (the “Singh Sabha movement”) supplemented the goal of “religious” reform and recovery. Duleep Singh was, perhaps, just a marginal figure in that process, though Judge uses his story to shed light on this effort of “uprooted transmission,” which was much more than recovery.[4] In the 1970s, another figure, coming from a completely different background than the former prince, might have remained marginal too, if not for a very different set of political maneuvers than the response of the British colonists to Sikh concerns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Anandpur Sahib Resolution explicitly worries about the loss of Sikh identity because of Hindu nationalism, as well as the economic precarity of Punjab’s Sikh farmers. It also hints at concerns about the erosion of Sikh values in the face of modernity and material prosperity.

Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a Sikh preacher who embodied a strong commitment to certain Khalsa traditions, arguably more sincerely than the politicians who drafted the Anandpur Sahib Resolution. But he was no more “mainstream” than the Maharaja-turned-English-gentleman striving to be a leader of the Khalsa, Duleep Singh. Bhindranwale was concerned about the erosion of Sikh values and a distinct Sikh (Khalsa) identity, and he blamed Hindu nationalism, but also the corruption of modernity. After Duleep Singh’s death, the British had somewhat of a two-pronged approach to dealing with potential unrest. On the one hand, Sikh and other revolutionaries were imprisoned, exiled, or executed, and even peaceful protests were initially suppressed. But the British also accommodated demands that did not threaten their rule. In particular, Khalsa Sikhs succeeded in gaining control over all significant Sikh sites of worship, including the Harmandir Sahib (mostly known to westerners as the Golden Temple), the most sacred Sikh site of all. The complex of sacred buildings surrounding the Harmandir Sahib is where Bhindranwale established a fortified presence in 1984. Arguably, the situation could have been de-escalated and diffused, but the national government chose a full-scale military assault by the Indian army, with Bhindrawale and his followers being killed, but also many innocent Sikh pilgrims. This triggered a terrible sequence of events: the assassination of India’s Prime Minister, pogroms against Sikhs in retaliation, a militant uprising in Punjab, and a decade of brutal repression in response. The losses of the Sikh community accumulated anew.

Conclusion

One should not overdraw comparisons between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries in Punjab, but there are recurring themes of dreams or claims of sovereignty, with sites associated with the history of the Khalsa playing a central role. Anandpur (site of the 1973 resolution) is where Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa, and the Khalsa increased the symbolic weight of the Harmandir Sahib complex as a marker of sovereignty during the eighteenth century, though Guru Gobind Singh’s grandfather had built the Akal Takht (Throne of the Timeless) almost a century earlier, as a symbol of temporal sovereignty to complement the spiritual. Colonial rulers ceded a kind of sovereignty over the Harmandir Sahib and other sites to the Khalsa Sikhs. In very different circumstances in the twentieth century, a democratic government made brutally clear the limits of that sovereignty.

If not for the events of 1984 and the decade that followed, Khalistan—the now common term for a future version of the Khalsa Raj that Duleep Singh sought to recover—might have remained what it was in the years after Indian independence: a quixotic goal of a handful of diasporic Sikhs, more unattainable than anything that the erstwhile Maharaja pursued. Instead, it has become a focal point for those who were brutalized, displaced, or diminished by what happened in 1984 and afterward, a focal point for all those new losses. Much of this sentiment is concentrated, or at least has more space to be articulated, in the diaspora, where Sikhs from rural Punjab have continued to seek both refuge and opportunity. All the themes of Judge’s book continue to have new lives in this situation.

Contributors of the scripture present Guru Arjan their writings while Bhai Gurdas scribes the Adi Granth. Via Wikimedia Commons.

But these approaches to loss risk taking the Sikh community down an unproductive path. The material problems of Indian Punjab will not be solved by a Khalsa Raj. Political autonomy will do nothing by itself to shift Punjab’s economy out of a destructive and unsustainable trap of growing wheat and rice for India’s food security. Instead, Punjab, including its farmers, industrialists, and traders, whether Sikhs or others, has to build human capital, attract financial capital, innovate, and strive for sustainability. It is certainly possible that the ethical principles of the Sikh tradition and the Khalsa can provide a foundation for such a transformation, but it would not be an automatic process. The Khalsa Sikh reformers, who began their work before the emergence of Duleep Singh’s aspirations of recovering what he had lost, and who continued for decades after his death, used their remaking of the past to try and shape a productive future. Some of these efforts succeeded, others failed, and some have had mixed consequences.

In my reading of Judge, he cautions against simple notions of history as linear progress, or even as a causal chain of events, but also acknowledges that there are such things as ethics and justice. Delineating a path that, if actively followed, moves humans toward more ethical and just conditions for all is worthwhile. Judge’s book reminds us of the complexities of such delineation and action, and the challenge of carrying the weight of the past, along with the possible wisdom of experience that is part of that load. The current situation of Indian Punjab is dire in many respects, and neither technocratic formulas nor dreams of an idyllic past will change that. Judge’s book, while speaking of events from over a century ago, leads one to reflect on everything in between these two intellectual poles, hopefully with productive consequences—even if that is not his goal. People’s memories and the meanings they assign to them will always matter, and Judge articulates that message clearly and eloquently.

[1] See my 2001 essay for a discussion of the “Sant” category and its problematics. Note that the word “sant” comes from the Sanskrit “sat,” meaning “truth,” and has no relationship to the English/Catholic term “saint.”

[2] These quotes are from the letter, an extract from which is in Judge on page 93.

[3] An overview of this situation can be found in L. Singh et al., Economic Development of Punjab, India: Prospects and Policies (2024) and the references it contains.

[4] At the same time, this process was also not just one of remaking or imitation of the West, as argued by some—see my essay, “Who Owns Religion: Scholars, Sikhs, and the Public Sphere” (2023) for an evaluation of events of the period.

Leave a Comment on Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition: India and the World Array
Nirvikar Singh
Nirvikar Singh is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he held the Sarbjit Singh Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies from 2010 to 2020. His research and published articles in Sikh and Punjabi Studies have included work on analyzing the core doctrines of Sikhism in historical context, Sikh ethics, Sikh literature as an agent of social change in the early 20th century, Guru Nanak and Sikh identity, portraits of the Sikh gurus, Sikhs in California, challenges of translating the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh attitudes toward daily economic life and economic systems, the Punjab economy, healthcare in Punjab, the impact of Covid on Punjab, and comparison of past conflicts in Punjab and Kashmir. He is working on a video project, “Sikhs in the 21st Century: Remembering the Past, Engaging the Future,” supported by the 5Rivers Foundation, and The Humanities Institute and Humanities Division at UCSC.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Limits of Critique and the Horizon of Gender Abolition in the Sikh Tradition


Collage by Tajinder Kaur contesting neat coherence of the Self. Photo Courtesy of Tajinder Kaur (https://tajinderkd.com/)

This blog post draws on Rajbir Singh Judge’s insights in Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition to reflect on Sikh feminist critique and its orientation toward egalitarianism as a horizon. In doing so, it explores how Sikh onto-epistemologies unsettle liberal conceptions of equality, critique, and justice.

Many revolutionary traditions in which my personal investments reside—be they the Sikh tradition or ethnic, feminist, queer or trans studies—were envisioned with the hope that one day they would be unnecessary. Here, the Sikh would submerge into the Guru (“Wisdom”), and ethnic, feminist, queer, and trans studies would become archaic with the end of racial cisheteropatriachy. However, the orientation towards their own dissolution has been subsumed by the demand for stable and essentialized coherence (for example, in the form of identity boundaries). Judge’s monograph resurrects that otherwise receded thread of revolutionary traditions by putting into question the terms and parameters that have arrested us.

One such parameter that I explore in this piece is the claim that Sikhi is egalitarian. Modernity’s demands to make Sikhi intelligible as a “religion” has led to such claiming that egalitarianism is definitive of Sikhi. Here, the distinction between principle and practice become sites on which this claim is defended and contested, animating forms of critique including critiques from Sikhi against systems of power and critiques of Sikhi in its complicities in systems of power. Without becoming stuck in these dualities, Judge’s scholarship extends Talal Asad’s theorization of tradition to offer insights into the limits of critique itself to invite an expansion in our conceptualization of justice.

Sikh Tradition and the Limits of Equality

Sikhi is the learning from the Guru, the struggles that start and end with the Guru, with the in-between space being the Sikh tradition. Judge and Asad claim that tradition is not a static essence marked by authenticity and contained within the grammar of historicity, but a never-ending site of contestation, struggle, and dispute that strives towards an impossible coherence. In other words, the Sikh tradition is always in formation, unfixed, always ever-becoming, and not easily located and contained within specific and essentialized sites like texts, beliefs, and practices. These are the sites around which secularism constructs and constrains religion. Judge’s theorization of tradition, then, troubles both the essentializing claim that Sikhi is egalitarian, and the division between principle and practice upon which the liberatory potential or failings of Sikhi are assessed.

Sikh feminist critiques have powerfully illuminated the persistence of gender inequality in the tradition by exposing the gaps between principles and practices. However, as a non-binary Sikh who finds a home in neither the gender of “man” nor “woman,” the very category and system of gender is a manifestation of dubidhaa (duality). For me, gender is a site of violence and frustration, and not a site upon which I can conceptualize equality and liberation. Gender equality still presupposes the existence of gender as a system of essentialized categories.

Sikhs bowing down to drink from the sarovar, established to transgress casteist gendered boundaries. Photo Courtesy of Tajinder Kaur (https://tajinderkd.com/).

Scholars such as Wendy Brown, Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmood reveal that equality— conceptualized through secular and liberal impulses—universalizes, essentializes, and assigns a permanence to the categories and terms we know today through which parity can be conceptualized. Sikh onto-epistemologies, however, are antagonistic to liberal conceptions of equality. Sikh onto-epistemologies teach the impermanence of the temporal (including categories like gender and caste), that stands in distinction from the stability and permanence of the Divine. Therefore, the Guru stresses that Naam, or Identification with the Divine (as opposed to that which is transient), is the means to liberation. The body, given its impermanence, serves as a transient vehicle towards, but not the source, for liberation. This differs significantly from many strands of feminist thought that emphasizes the body as a site of constitutive performances, subject formation, knowledge production, and accrual (or lack thereof) of freedom and rights.

Beyond Equality and Towards Gender Abolition

Liberation, under Sikh teachings, is not secured through the parity of temporal distinctions, but through Identification with, submission to, and submergence within the Divine. Sikh onto-epistemologies orient one away from procuring and securing a liberal and autonomous Self, which would only further entrench dubidhaa (duality) that marks separation from the Divine, and instead orient towards an un-becoming that seeks the death and dissolution of the Sikh, as identification with the Divine (i.e. Naam, Guru) transes (i.e. transgenders, transitions, transfigures, transmutates, transforms) the Sikh into the Guru. Throughout Bani (“utterance of the Guru”),[1] temporal scripts (including that of gender and caste) are evoked, challenged, destabilized, and redefined, and all temporal significations are re-evaluated, requalified, and redirected through the criterion of whether it leads one towards, or away, from the One Divine. Temporal significations like gender become a means through which one practices a form of subtraction—subtraction of the Self and the set of attachments that define the Self building on Judge’s discussion of community as subtraction. Such an understanding of gender as subtraction, as opposed to a set of accumulations, orients one towards transcending (or transing), as opposed to maintaining and seeking parity and coherence within, existing temporal significations.

Limitations of Critique

Sikhi’s ontological orientation towards subtraction and un-becoming reveals a limitation of critique. Michel Foucault and Judith Butler conceptualize critique as a “practice of freedom” from contemporary onto-epistemological conditions. However, in being bound to historicity, critique also risks further cementing the very limits it seeks to escape. The question, “What about women?” in Sikh feminist critique, for instance, seeks to locate and evaluate the subject of the woman marked by a sexed difference. Such a move risks reifying an essentialized rigidity based in biological determinism. Although the set of critiques produced by this question are generative in inspiring movements and tending to important gaps between principles and practices—a gap of absences and exclusions uncovered and filled by critique—they also risk (1) reproducing the very dualities the project of (Sikh) feminism seeks to transcend; and (2) reducing the always/never/un-becoming of Sikhi into a static repository to mine for answers or evaluate for perceived failures.

Judge’s work invites us to consider the limitations of investigating the gap between principles and practices as a “problem space.” It does so by rethinking the gap as a space of unfolding possibility where the ever-becoming Sikh tradition is being constantly negotiated, shaped, and unsettled. This shift enables a rethinking of critique outside of its reliance on loss and scarcity, towards a heuristic of abundance.

Insisting on Abundance

A few years ago, I created a Twitter (now X) account. One of my first tweets was that the Guru Sahibs were queer. Looking back, I was very naïve to not have expected the huge response and backlash the tweet garnered instantly on Sikh Twitter. This post is not intended to justify my tweet. I share it, rather, as a moment which exemplifies how an unverifiable speculation that evades questions of authenticity, which some would even regard as fiction, can attempt to rewrite a history in mobilizing and propagating a particular understanding of gender, sexuality, and Sikhi.

A Sikh, whom we assume to be a woman, sits at Darbar Sahib with their back to the camera, in refusal of transparency and recognition. hoto Courtesy of Tajinder Kaur (https://tajinderkd.com/).

Such a speculation of Guru Sahibs being queer is not searching for queer and trans people in the Sikh tradition through a question like, “What about queers?” Instead, through destabilizing the attachments that define queerness and transness, or in other words, queering queerness and transing transness, the speculation is an insistence on seeing queer and trans people everywhere in Sikhi. In becoming unstuck from scarcity, absences and exclusions in which critique often operates, the unverifiable speculation is a practice of the heuristic of abundance in the words of Anjali Arondekar, or articulated through Sikh modes, a practice of chardi kala. Such speculations of Guru Sahibs being queer and trans are not only mobilized by different queer and trans Sikhs to affirm themselves or seek inclusion, but lay claim to the dynamic contingencies that define and undefine the Sikh tradition for our own making and shaping. The insistence on seeing queer and trans people everywhere is a refusal of the limits imposed by embodiment, representation, and historicity that Judge’s scholarship foregrounds. The insistence that queerness and transness are everywhere is an insistence that the Divine is everywhere.

What possibilities emerge from insisting on seeing women everywhere too, or even mapping womanhood onto Guru Sahibaan themselves? These provocations build on Sikh feminist critiques to re-examine and move beyond the horizon of gender equality. Judge’s interrogation of the carceral limits that both construct and capture us resurrect the orientation towards the dissolution of those limits—an orientation foundational not only to Sikh onto-epistemologies, but also to resistance traditions like that of ethnic, feminist, queer, and trans studies. Such a project unsettles ideas of justice reliant on liberal conceptions of equality and orient towards Self-annihilation and dissolution as opposed to Self-accumulation, procurity, and security. Such a project serves as a reminder that the path to liberation lies not in security—of Self, identities, and subjectivities—but in their un-becoming altogether.

This post is a modified version of a conference paper presented at Punjabs Symposium at the University of British Columbia, with the full paper forthcoming

[1] Definition indebted to the Guru Granth Sahib Project by the Sikh Research Institute.

Leave a Comment on The Limits of Critique and the Horizon of Gender Abolition in the Sikh Tradition Array
manmit singh
manmit singh (they/them) is a PhD student at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia.