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.
