Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia
"[Prophetic Maharaja] refuses to make sovereignty a lost object. Instead, sovereignty emerges as a struggle of and for history."
Rajbir Singh Judge | @RajbirJudge
History reigns supreme. We listen to and accept that constant injunction: know your history. We cling restlessly to history because we would like to believe it provides a crucial lesson: the truth about a lost object called sovereignty that we can once again possess. Yet in providing truth, it is, perhaps strangely, history—not the Khalsa—that is sovereign. And “History become pure, sovereign science would be for mankind a sort of conclusion of life and a settling of accounts with it,” writes Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet can we settle accounts with life, the debts owed to the Guru? Is sovereignty a conclusion and a settling? Of course, this is not a call to reject history, as if that were possible, but to ask what the appeals to history today accomplish and foreclose for the panth? Does history offer truth? Or perhaps a desire? Prophetic Maharaja reads, and re-reads, the history of Duleep Singh to raise these questions and ask about our desire and fantasies. In so doing, it refuses to make sovereignty a lost object. Instead, sovereignty emerges as a struggle of and for history.
Yet Duleep Singh himself failed and lost sovereignty as our historians would remind us. Indeed, the problems around loss and the transmission of tradition in Punjab post–Ranjit Singh are compounded because the bid to restore Duleep Singh and reestablish the Khalsa Raj failed. Duleep Singh’s abject failure, emplotted as a tragedy, dominates the standard narrative of his resistance. For example, Christy Campbell, in his popular recounting of Duleep Singh’s story, explicitly declares that Singh’s struggle was “the true tragedy of the last King of Lahore.” Failure, the signaling of total loss, endures as authoritative, affirming disappointment that confirms our own certainties about what is and was possible. And this disappointment, reflecting the failure of a sovereign Sikh state, creates particular modes of intelligibility in the present. One mode of fostering such intelligibility today is the repeated enunciation of failure in relation to Duleep Singh: he is, for Campbell and so many, the tragic king of Lahore. Yet by foregrounding Duleep Singh as a tragic king, Sikhs cultivate an attachment to Duleep Singh the person. It is this attachment that then fosters intelligibility for Sikh understandings of sovereignty, rather than vice versa. Put another way, in the process of thinking about the loss of the Khalsa Raj, the body of the sovereign becomes central as a representation of the reality of the community; Duleep Singh becomes the empty vessel in which the blood of community flows—a circulation short-circuited by colonialism.
Rather than foreground a tragic narrative that concludes in failure, thereby upholding Duleep Singh as the historical figure, Prophetic Maharaja highlights the dreams, inventions—the struggle—at a time of crisis, attached to Duleep Singh and sovereignty. This aim to consider dreams is difficult to realize, especially since, in Lauren Berlant’s phrasing, “dreams are seen as easy optimism, while failures seem complex.” Yet an understanding of the other possibilities of Duleep Singh—the inventive and contested dreams surrounding him—dissolves both Singh as an historical actor and his present-day reputation as a secure object that can be easily grasped. By pausing in the ubiquity of disputations surrounding Duleep Singh in Punjab and beyond at the end of the nineteenth century, we can halt and cultivate “lagging and sagging relation to attachment,” which provides an occasion to center a vertigo in relation to sovereignty. This moment, however, does not create opportunity to discover the “truth” behind Duleep Singh, to recognize Duleep Singh “accurately” as confirmed through archival recovery. Misrecognition is inescapable; as Slavoj Žižek insists, we must “fully acknowledge this misrecognition as unavoidable,” since, even in its multiple valences, it provides the very possibility of an ontological consistency. Dwelling in this unavoidability of misrecognition while refusing to enunciate failure or unmask a real Duleep Singh, refusing to triumph over the past, this book aims to rekindle, however briefly, what Berlant terms “a practice of meticulous curiosity” without repair.
This rekindling without repair means that rather than provide a new theorization of loss—which cements a relation to loss—the book endeavors to reckon with the powerful resources that work on loss, such as mourning and melancholia, and what they have already provided. Said differently, I contend with loss instead of transcending it through recovery. But I am also wary of holding loss, which, by securing absence, further cements the past as an object to be recovered. The question arises: Is this book then really about loss? Or is loss simply a thread that is itself lost within the book? My answer is that I am ambivalent about loss, affirming and denying it, resisting it and acknowledging it, working through it and against it, and interrogating its nature, its ground or presuppositions, its form and its failures. I do not tie a thread throughout the text that provides an adequate answer to loss because there might not be any answer to it. In this sense the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss. My goal is not to recognize loss and provide it taxonomic space but to sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the text.
Prophetic Maharaja, thus, foregrounds how the always present failure of fantasy provides opportunity to rethink our appeal to History. It strives to confound the desire to produce a narrative that sanctions a neat, knowable figure of Duleep Singh or sovereignty that we can then catalogue, providing historical satisfaction, a conclusion. This means that learning about the Khalsa Raj, Duleep Singh, the Sikh tradition, and even loss is much more difficult than the accumulative social sciences have it, since, as Gil Anidjar stresses, “learning—the deceptively simple task of taking a step toward a knowledge of self or other—does mean exposing oneself to an enormous mass of unknowns. To uncertainty and to incompleteness. Or to denial, and to the possibility of failure. Is there, in fact, a self? And is it ours? Can we really know ourselves?” That is my attempt here: to learn about loss, the Khalsa Raj, and Duleep Singh without end, without satisfaction, and open to the possibility of failure.
Readers can purchase their copy of Prophetic Maharaja here.