Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia(53 Religion, Culture, and Public Life)

How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British annexed the Sikh kingdom and, eventually, exiled its child maharaja, Duleep Singh, to England. In the 1880s, Singh embarked on an abortive attempt to restore the lost Sikh kingdom. Judge explores not only Singh’s efforts but also the Sikh people’s responses—the dreams, fantasies, and hopes that became attached to the Khalsa Raj. He shows how a community engaged military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice in order to contest colonial politics. This book argues that Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not simply looking to recuperate the past but to remake it—and to dwell within loss instead of transcending it—and in so doing opened new possibilities. Bringing together Sikh tradition, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought, Prophetic Maharaja provides bracing insights into concepts of sovereignty and the writing of history.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: Losing Duleep Singh 1. Community 2. The Public 3. Conversion 4. Rumors 5. Reform Conclusion: Failure Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Rajbir Singh Judge is an assistant professor of history at California State University, Long Beach.

Review :
This dazzling work of historical scholarship demonstrates that while history can never be truly and completely narrated, it can be contemplated in ways that open up a space for deeper understanding and insight. Rajbir Singh Judge’s dazzling monograph Prophetic Maharaja presents an argument for “dwelling in loss” rather than seeking the enticing yet entrapping desires for restoration, recovery, and healing. [The book] is in many ways a model and master seminar in bringing together invasive attention to the particularity of an archive and theoretical reflection that paves as well as shifts the terrain of multiple fields of knowledge simultaneously. Instead of a history of Sikh loss, bounded and secured, Prophetic Maharaja opens onto the problematic of loss: where loss itself can be lost, along with the historical horizon. This book is also a remarkable reading of Sikhi, Sikh ethical teachings, which helps frame how we can understand the motivations of Duleep Singh and his supporters, and also the relationship between communities and their pasts. In refusing coherence and recuperation Judge offers glimpses of contingent futures imagined by Duleep Singh’s supporters, plumbing the “epistemic murk” of the colonial archives explored in the book. Instead of a history of Sikh loss, bounded and secured, Prophetic Maharaja opens onto the problematic of loss: where loss itself can be lost, along with the historical horizon. Prophetic Maharaja is a remarkable book. In its treatment of a late nineteenth-century moment in the history of Sikh claims for sovereignty in the Punjab, it refuses conventional historical approaches that fix the identities of colonizers and colonized, instead insisting that things like community, religion, politics, and the boundaries between them are always sites of contest and negotiation. In detailing those conflicted processes as they cohere and destabilize political relationships, Rajbir Singh Judge offers a model of how theorized history can be compellingly and intelligently written. Focusing on the results of the British conquest of the nineteenth-century Sikh kingdom in Punjab, Rajbir Singh Judge provides a thought-provoking discussion of what it means to lose a political-religious tradition. This splendid book should be read not only by those interested in South Asia but also and especially by those open to exploring the potential insights to be gained by the mutual provocations of theology and psychoanalysis. Beautifully written and expertly theorized, Prophetic Maharaja takes up the image of Maharaja Duleep Singh and its position in Sikh memory as a placeholder for lost Sikh sovereignty. Cautioning against a melancholic attachment to a supposedly authentic past, Judge explores the core relationship between loss and sovereignty, centering a distinctively Sikh understanding of sovereignty. What scale of time is necessitated by the emergency of loss? In this scintillating book, Rajbir Singh Judge attends to the rhythms of loss and refigures psychoanalysis as a tradition of the oppressed. With Duleep Singh, he invites us to “the impossibility of history,” better known as prophecy. Meticulously researched and theoretically rich, Prophetic Maharaja is a haunting postcolonial exploration of the Sikh desire for sovereignty. Questioning, informing, gripping: a revelatory history!