Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia
(Columbia University Press, 2024)
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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. |
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"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."
Joan W. Scott, author of On the Judgment of History "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." Talal Asad, author of Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason "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." Gil Anidjar, author of On the Sovereignty of Mothers |
