Wesleyan University
History in the Sikh Past
Author(s): Anne Murphy
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Oct., 2007), pp. 345-365
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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History and Theory46 (October2007), 345-365
C Wesleyan University 2007 ISSN: 0018-2656
HISTORY IN THE SIKH PAST'
ANNE MURPHY
ABSTRACT
This article offers a reading of an early eighteenth-centuryPunjabitext-Gur Sobha or
"The Splendor of the Guru"-as a form of historical representation,suggesting reasons
for the importanceof the representationof the past as history within Sikh discursivecontexts. The text in question provides an account of the life, death, and teachings of the last
of the ten living Sikh Gurus or teachers,Guru Gobind Singh. The article argues that the
constructionof history in this text is linked to the transitionof the Sikh communityat the
deathof the last living Guruwherebyauthoritywas invested in the canonicaltext (granth)
and community (panth). As such a particularrationalefor history was produced within
Sikh religious thoughtandintellectualproductionaroundthe discursiveconstructionof the
communityin relationto the past and as a continuingpresence.As such, the text provides
an alternativeto modernEuropeanforms of historicalrepresentation,while sharingsome
features of the "historical"as defined in that context. The essay relates this phenomenon
to a broaderexplorationof history in South Asian contexts, to notions of historicalitythat
are plural, and to issues particularto the intersectionof history and religion. Later texts,
through the middle of the nineteenthcentury, are briefly considered, to provide a sense
of the significance of Gur Sobha within a broader,historicallyand religiously constituted
Sikh imaginationof the past.
I. INTRODUCTION
The specter of history looms large within academic as well as popular discourse
about the Sikhs, a religious community centered in the Indian state of Punjab but
with a global diaspora. This haunting has taken many forms, but is particularly
dominant in relation to the separatist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which
sought an independent Sikh state in the Punjab under the name "Khalistan." As
1. Versionsof partsor all of this essay were presentedat the AmericanAcademy of Religion Annual
Meeting, the Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, The
New School for Social Research and Lang College/The New School, and the University of British
Columbia;thankyou to those who providedinsightfulcommentsand dialogue.Facultywriting
groups at The New School and UBC were particularlyvaluable. Special thanks to VaruniBhatia,
PurnimaDhavan,Sam Haselby,TaviaNyong'o, ChristianNovetzke, Paul Ross, andAdheesh Sathaye;
members of my dissertationcommittee (Elizabeth Castelli, ParthaChatterjee,Nicholas Dirks, J. S.
Hawley, and Rachel McDermott);and the generous anonymousreadersand editors from the journal.
Translationsfrom Punjabiare my own, as of course are all errorsand omissions.
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346
ANNEMURPHY
anthropologistVeena Das has noted, the modem struggle for an independent
state has been "framedin a language which immediatelyplaces it in the context
of modem nation states," while also being "representedas a continuationof a
series of struggles that Sikhs have historically had to wage in order to preserve
their identity,"such that a "normativemodel of Khalistanihistoriographicaldiscourse,"2in the words of Brian Axel, has been formed. The productionof Sikh
history has thus been mobilized for the political present in the last twenty-five
years, particularlywithin a nationalistframe, and even in the currentlandscape,
history shows no indication of losing a privileged discursive position in representationsof and by the community.3The Sikh case in this sense is not unusual;4
the past has been mobilized in this example in keeping with the typical ways that
historyhas providedthe locus for the nationalimaginaryin SouthAsia more generally, namely, to serve the cause of the coming-into-beingof the nation as state
in the nationalistand post-independenceperiods.5The phenomenonis of course
more general than this: history and the nation, many have argued,are both born
of modernity-conjoined twins one might say, simultaneouslyco-producedand
co-productiveof each other.6
2. Veena Das, Critical Events: An AnthropologicalPerspective on ContemporaryIndia (Delhi
and New York: OxfordUniversityPress, 1995), 121; Brian Axel, "DiasporicSublime:Sikh Martyrs,
InternetMediations, and the Question of the Unimaginable,"Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture,
Theory 1:1 (June 2005), 129. Robin Jeffrey, Mark Juergensmeyer,and Harjot Oberoi have made
observations similar to Das's: Robin Jeffrey, "Grapplingwith the Past: Sikh Politicians and the
Past,"Pacific Affairs 60 (1987); Mark Juergensmeyer,"The Logic of Religious Violence," Journal
of Strategic Studies 10 (1987), 176ff; Harjot Oberoi, "Sikh Fundamentalism:TranslatingHistory
into Theory,"in Fundamentalismsand the State: RemakingPolities, Economies, and Militance, ed.
MartinE. Martyand Scott Appleby (Chicago and London:University of Chicago Press, 1993), 278.
Jeffrey noted his astonishmentat "the way in which Sikh politicians found it especially necessary
to invoke the past-and to portraypast events in a way that did not correspondto any documentary
evidence I had seen" (Jeffrey,"Grapplingwith the Past,"59).
3. Controversiesover alternativeaccounts of Sikh history within academic and non-academic
circles have provedacerbic,as describedin W. H. McLeod's recentessay, andreflect a greatertension
regardingthe multipleuses of history in relationto the Sikh past (W. H. McLeod, "Criesof Outrage:
History versus Traditionin the Study of the Sikh Community,"in ExploringSikhism:Aspects of Sikh
Identity, Culture, and Thought [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000], 267-279. Originally
publishedin SouthAsia Research 14:2 [1994]).
4. As Das ultimatelyargues, Sikh militantdiscourseexists in directrelationto Hindu militantand
conservativediscourses (Das, Critical Events, 136). Any accountof the productionof Sikh history in
a militantmode cannot be consideredoutside of that context. See ParthaChatterjee,The Nation and
Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1993),
110ff. and Juergensmeyer,"The Logic of Religious Violence," 173. See below.
5. As history itself came to be essential to the maintenanceof British control, the writing of a
history for India and Indiansbecame a hotly contested political field throughthe productionof both
rationalist and "imaginary"histories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Indian authors
intent to write a past for a nation, and a nation out of the past (see Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy
Consciousness:BankimchandraChattopadhyayand the Formationof NationalistDiscourse in India
[Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 107ff.). This is at the same time that many
of the presuppositionsof colonialist historiographyhave been replicatedwholesale within nationalist
historiography.See Chatterjee,The Nation and Its Fragments, 95ff. and RanajitGuha, Dominance
withoutHegemony:Historyand Power in Colonial India (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversityPress,
1997), 152ff.
6. See, for example, Nicholas Dirks, "Historyas a Sign of the Modern,"Public Culture2:2 (1990),
25-32, and more recently, Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2003), 1-2. For Chakrabarty'spassionate argument
regardingthe inherent collusion between "history"and the nation-state, see Dipesh Chakrabarty,
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HISTORYIN THE SIKH PAST
347
But it is a mistaketo view historyin general,or Sikh history in particular,only
within this modem and national frame. History is richer and more varied than
exclusive use of this frame envisions. In this essay I will examine history-making in a Sikh context outside of it, with attentionto a wider definition of what
constitutes history in the precolonial, early modern period. In doing so, I take
up the concern voiced by Dipesh Chakrabartyfor a kind of history that does not
elide difference into a global, universal, and necessarily secular narrative,7and
that allows for an understandingof historicalnarrationthat might "entailsubject
thesubject
of memorythatchallengeandundermine
positionsandconfigurations
that [generally] speaks in the name of history."8I thus hope to provide a means
forunderstanding
thatdo notpresupposethe
multipleSikhhistoricalimaginaries
Sikhs as a "nation"(the preoccupationof much recent discourse), but that allow
for alternativerepresentationsof collective representationand organizationthat
are deterritorializedand not necessarily statist. Here the notion of the panth or
"community"takes shape as a Sikh form of collective organizationthat is not
reducible to statist forms of sovereignty.9 In this I take up the concerns of both
C. A. Bayly and ParthaChatterjeein the formationsof political imaginariesin
the precolonial era, which Bayly and Chatterjeethen relate to a considerationof
colonial and post-colonial forms.10
In particular,the essay will explore the representationof the past within one
eighteenth-century
Punjabitext,withreferenceto othersfromthesameperiod,to
consider briefly what writing the life of the Guru (teacher)and the panth (community) representswithin these texts, both as historical products and as forms
of historical narration."The text in question-Gur Sobha, or "Splendorof the
Habitationsof Modernity:Essays in the Wakeof SubalternStudies (Chicago and London:University
of Chicago Press, 2002), 40-41, and elsewhere.
7. Dipesh Chakrabarty,ProvincializingEurope: Postcolonial Thoughtand Historical Difference
(Princetonand Oxford:PrincetonUniversityPress, 2000), 72ff.
8. Ibid., 37.
9. The panth has been explored at length as the locus of the imaginationof the Sikh community; I cannot do justice to this body of literaturehere. On the term and its translation,see: W. H.
McLeod, "Onthe WordPanth:A Problemof Terminologyand Definition,"in Contributionsto Indian
Sociology 12:2 (1979). The issue is fundamentallytied to the issue of Sikh identity;see, for example,
W. H. McLeod, Who is a Sikh: The Problem of Sikh Identity(Oxford:ClarendonPress; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), and J. S. Grewal, Historical Perspectives of Sikh Identity(Patiala,
Punjab:PunjabiUniversity, 1997).
10. I take particularinspirationhere from ParthaChatterjee'spaperat the "A SingularModernity?"
conference at Columbia University, March 2006; see also the opening chapters of C. A. Bayly,
Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Governmentin the Making of Modern
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Bayly and Chatterjeeare at odds in their estimation
of how precolonialpolitical formationscarriedthroughinto the colonial and post-colonial periodsBayly tracescontinuities,whereasChatterjeeis more concernedwith what was lost and changed-but
the concerns of both with the pre-colonial and its imaginationof political and other forms of sovereignty within it are at the heartof this essay. Ratherthan positing an unbrokenlineage of the historical (and associated notions of sovereignty) in Sikh contexts from the early eighteenthcenturyto the
present, I argue for significant changes over the period, with attentionto what it was that changed.
(The concepts of change and ruptureindeed requirean object to undergosuch transformations.)Tony
Ballantyne'srecent work proceeds in a similarvein in relationto other Sikh culturalforms: see Tony
Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World
(Durhamand London:Duke UniversityPress, 2006).
11. For this argumentin a broadercontext, see Anne Murphy, "The Materialof Sikh History,"
Ph.D. diss., ColumbiaUniversity, 2005.
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348
ANNE MURPHY
Guru,"by Sainapati--was producedin the early eighteenth century as the Sikh
communitytransitionedfrom the period of living Gurushipto the articulationof
ultimateauthoritywithin the sacredcanon (the Adi Granthor GuruGranthSahib)
and the community--the paired principles of granth (text) and panth (community) articulatedby the tenthand final living Guru,GuruGobindSingh.12The text
underexaminationprovidesa narrativedescriptionin poetryof the life of the final
living Guruandthe formationof the Sikh communityin this period.In examining
this text, I hope to explicate the terms underwhich "history"has been produced
in this case, and to suggest the multiple visions of the past that must inform our
understandingof the productionof historicalrepresentations,both in general and
specifically among the Sikhs and in SouthAsia.
The term "Sikh"literally means "student":the Sikhs are the studentsor disciples of ten Gurusor teachers from Guru Nanak (1469-1539) to Guru Gobind
Singh (1666-1708, Guru1675-1708). The office of the Guruis now located within the canon,The Adi Granth,which containsthe poetryof some of the Gurusand
other saints.13The Adi Granth,in general, describes the natureof existence and
the ultimate, and practicesthat constitutethe properorientationto both.14These
writings, as described by Shackle and Mandair,"are not cast as philosophical
treatises or as legal codes to be silently read, but as poetry with a strong devotional emphasis, which is designed to be sung or recited."'5The ideas, practices,
and behaviorsdescribedin the text constitutethe methods for achieving personal
transformationand absoluteorientationtowardthe Guruor God (the achievement
of being gurmukh,or facing the Guru).The Sikhs are thus a religious community,
organizedarounda centralcanonicaltext thatdelineatesa soteriologicalideology
and program.However, if we take seriously recent critiques of the concept of
"religion"--thatthey reflect a modem and European-derivedset of assumptions
regardinga secular-religiousdichotomy--then the status of this communityand
this text as "religious"must be treatedwith caution.16 Nevertheless,I do not wish
12. For discussion of the authorityinvested in granth andpanth, see HarjotOberoi,"FromPunjab
to 'Khalistan':Territorialityand Metacommentary"in Pacific Affairs 60:1 (1987), 26-41, 33ff.
13. See Teachings of the Sikh Gurus: Selections from the Sikh Scriptures, ed. and transl.
ChristopherShackle and Arvind-pal Singh Mandair (London: Routledge, 2005); Gurinder Singh
Mann, The Making of Sikh Scripture(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and
PashauraSingh, The GuruGranthSahib: Canon,Meaning and Authority(New Delhi and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
14. See the work of Arvind Mandairon how to characterizethe content of the Adi Granthin
theological and other terms: Arvind Mandair,"The Politics of Non-duality: Reassessing the Work
of Transcendencein Modem Sikh Theology," in Journal of the AmericanAcademyof Religion 74:3
(September2006), 646-673.
15. Shackle and Mandair,eds., Teachingsof the Sikh Gurus,xx.
16. Timothy Fitzgerald,The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000); Will Sweetman, "'Hinduism'and the History of 'Religion': ProtestantPresuppositionsin the
Critiqueof the Concept of Hinduism,"Method & Theoryin the Studyof Religion 15:4 (2003), 329353; Talal Asad, "Religion as an AnthropologicalCategory,"in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline
and Reasons of Power in Christianityand Islam (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1993).
Ronald Inden, who has with others undertakenhistoriographicalexplorationsparallel to what I propose here, has advocatedbracketingthe term "religion"in its use with referenceto the past, offering
alternativedefinitions of it and other terms, such as "Bhakti,"usually seen as religious in orientation.
Indenrefers to "religion"as "ways of life." Ronald Inden,JonathanWalters,and Daud Ali, Querying
the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (Oxford and New York: Oxford
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HISTORYIN THE SIKHPAST
349
altogetherto avoid "religion"as a category,and indeed I will focus here on the
articulationof "Sikhness"or "being Sikh"that is describedin the text underexaminationin relationto the constructionof the collectivity of thepanth in relation
to the Guruand throughthe narrationof the past. As GaryShaw has noted in this
journal, history and religion are both formed in the constitutionof the group."
Here I explore the representationof the past in relationto Sikhness, to consider
the dynamicsof communitarianand theological formationthatconstitutethe con-
ditionsof possibilityfor suchrepresentations.
II. HISTORYIN SOUTH ASIA
It is not just the historyof the Sikhs thathas generateddebate;the statusand content of historiographyin SouthAsia is a contestedquestion.Accordingto the conventional formulation,the writing of history did not truly arise in South Asian
intellectual traditionsuntil the introductionof Europeanhistoriographyby the
British and other Europeanpowers duringthe colonial period, with some debate
over whether or not the presence of Islamic intellectualtraditionsintroduceda
form of historiography."'
This position has been counteredby attemptsto write
back
into
South
Asian
intellectualtraditions,outsideof and priorto the cohistory
lonial context,following uponthe earlyworkof RomilaThapar,and laterNicholas
Dirks, who called for an appreciationof the ways in which the past is constructed
within "indigenous"texts "in terms and categories that are consonant with the
particularmodes of 'historical'understandingposited by the texts and traditions
Recent argumentsregardingthe role of history within SouthAsian
themselves."'19
traditionshave taken a numberof differentbut relatedforms; importantly,most
are as centrallyconcernedwith the political location of history as with its form
and content.20For example, withinthe work of RanajitGuha,the quest for a South
UniversityPress, 2000), 22. See a relevantdiscussion in William Pinch, WarriorAscetics and Indian
Empires(Cambridge,Eng. and New York:CambridgeUniversityPress, 2006), 11ff.
17. David Gary Shaw, "Modernitybetween Us and Them: The Place of Religion within History,"
History and Theory,ThemeIssue 45 (December2006), 1.
18. For discussion, see Nicholas B. Dirks, TheHollow Crown:Ethnohistoryof an IndianKingdom
(Cambridge,Eng. and New York:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1987), 55; Romila Thapar,"Timeas a
Metaphorof History:Early India,"in History and Beyond (Delhi and New York:Oxford University
Press, 2000), 3ff. Such a formulationinformsdiverse work, from Marx to Dumont, as well as that of
more recent theorists:see RichardKing, Orientalismand Religion: Post-colonial Theory,India and
the Mystic East (New York and London: Routledge, 1999) and Ashis Nandy, "History's Forgotten
Doubles," History and Theory34:2 (1995), 44-66.
19. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 57. See, for example, Sheldon Pollock, "Mimamsa and the
Problem of History in TraditionalIndia," Journal of the American Oriental Society 109 (1989),
603-610; Romila Thapar, "Society and Historical Consciousness: The Itihasa-Purana Tradition,"
in InterpretingEarly India [1986] (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137-173;
Thapar,"Time as a Metaphorof History";Dirks, TheHollow Crown;V. NarayanaRao, D. Shulman,
and S. Subrahmanyam,Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (Delhi:
PermanentBlack, 2001); RanajitGuha, History at the Limitof World-History(New York:Columbia
University Press, 2002); Inden et al., Queryingthe Medieval;Invokingthe Past: The Uses of History
in South Asia, ed. Daud Ali (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also the recent article
in this journal: RanjanGhosh, "India,Itihasa, and Inter-HistoriographicalDiscourse," History and
Theory46 (May 2007), 210-217.
20. I intentionallydraw out the connections among these efforts, ratherthan the distinctions.Rao
et al., Texturesof Time, 12ff., for example, distinguishtheir efforts from Dirks's "ethnohistory,"but
the overall aims, if not the vocabularyused to describe them, are parallel.
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350
ANNEMURPHY
Asian historicalimaginationrepresentsa call to action to recovera historiography
outside of the state by looking at alternativegenres and forms of literaturefor a
real "worldhistory,"a "historicality"thatis distinctfrom history-as-state.21
V. NarayanaRao andhis colleagues take an allied approach:to demonstratethatthe "assertion ('History is a post-RenaissanceWesterngenre') can only be sustainedby
willfully ignoringa vast body of materialsavailablefrom SouthAsia."22Narayana
Rao et al., like others, thus separate"history"from a distinct historiographical
genre--arguing that history is "not a matterof strict adherenceto formal characAt
teristicsandtypes,"and also, not a particularset of modernpoliticalrelations.23
the same time, NarayanaRao and his colleagues arguefor the formationof South
Indianhistoriographywithina rangeof primarilypoliticalandmilitarysourcesthat
relateto a rangeof political entities. In doing so, they envision a deep connection
between historicalrepresentationand state-formation.
These inquiriesinto the categoryof "history"in SouthAsia representan attempt
to "provincialize"the Europeanhistoricaltraditionwithin a wider definition,and
to challengethe idea thathistoryis a single genrethatreflectsa finite set of modern
A universal"history"is formulatedby strippingit of
political and social relations.24
literaryand sociopoliticalparticularities--auniversalof a differenttype than one
that assumes the constructionof the modernsubject and/ornation-state.The role
of history within the Sikh discursivecontext I explore here--an early eighteenthcenturytext in Punjabi,with brief referenceto otherworks-thus can take its place
alongside the examples I have mentioned:yet anotherregionally and culturally
specific case of a transitionin the makingof historyin late medieval/earlymodem
SouthAsia.25 Reconstructingsuch a historicalvision is valuablein itself as a part
of a more generaleffort-identified by DaudAli, who has contributedmuchto this
debate-to construct"a historyof conceptionsof the past, or a historyof regimes
of historicity,in SouthAsia" thatis not simply identicalto Europeanforms.26
21. Guha, History at the Limit, 5. Guha's efforts thus seek to stop "history"in South Asia, in
Chakrabarty'swords,fromlooking "likeyet anotherepisode in the universaland ... the ultimatelyvictorious ... marchof citizenship,of the nation-state,and of themes of humanemancipationspelled out
in the course of the EuropeanEnlightenmentand after"(Chakrabarty,ProvincializingEurope, 39).
22. NarayanaRao et al., Texturesof Time,xi.
23. Ibid., 3.
24. The reference,of course, is to Chakrabarty'sProvincializingEurope.
25. This time period,in particular,parallelsthat exploredby Rao and his colleagues. They address
the general problematicof the historical within a highly particularand local frame (in South India),
but note thatthereare parallelphenomenaelsewhere in South Asia. They describea shifting historical
consciousness that, they argue, comes into being in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuriesin the south
with the ascendancyof karanamculture,representing"a new elite, dedicatedto the writtentransmission of recordsandeager to organizehistoricalmemoryin termsof its own analysis of power, politics,
and the state"(NarayanaRao et al., Texturesof Time, 129; see also 264).
26. Ali, ed., Invoking the Past, 4. This is allied with the historical anthropologicalapproach
recently outlinedby Eric Hirsch and CharlesStewart,which seeks to pursue"ethnographiesof historicity" to take account of a broadersense of historicality,ratherthan the narrowconfines of history.
See Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart, "Ethnographiesof Historicity:An Introduction,"History and
Anthropology16:3 (2005), 261-274. Thereare no easy coincidences or correspondenceshere between
Indian and Europeanforms of historical thinking; according to Pollock, for example, historicity in
India "took place according to a special modality, and subject to categories, ideas, and constraints
peculiarto traditionalIndia, with the result thatthe 'historiographical'end-productsoften differ from
what else we encounterelsewhere in antiquity"(Pollock, "Mimamsaand the Problem of History in
TraditionalIndia,"603-610).
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HISTORYIN THE SIKHPAST
351
But it is in considerationof the role of history in relationto social formations
both religious and political that the Sikh case becomes particularlyinteresting.
The Sikh "historical"takes place within an explicitly religious frame-that is, it
is organized aroundthe soteriological teachings of the Gurusand the formation
of the community as a centralinstitutionof authorityin relationto the Guru.Its
connection to state-formationis ambiguous,as I will show. At the very least, this
case does not follow the same state-centeredorientationassumed by many conventionalformulationsof the historical-even in the handsof those rethinkingthe
forms of history in SouthAsia--and it therebyallows us to considerwhat can be
at stake in the narrationof the past in an alternativecontext to thatof state-formation, and enrich the terms with which we speak of the historicaland the religious
more generally.
III. A SIKH HISTORY?
Here I will briefly examine the constructionof the past in textual form within
Sainapati's Gur Sobha, written in Bikrami 1768 or 1711 of the Common Era,
with reference to a broadercontext.27The author opens his text by stating its
purpose-"to describe the praise of the Guru"28--creditingthe true Gurufor the
inspirationand ability to write the text: "Then into the mind of this sinner ...
The authorthen clearcame the compassionof the Guru,and a way was found."29
defines
the
date
the
of
the
the
of
of
creation
text,
ly
lineage Sikh Gurus,and then
the formation of the panth.30The past in this text is thereafterchronologically
orderedand concerned with specific, narratedevents-the Guru within history.
27. For this articleI referto Kavi SainapatiRacit Sri Gur Sobha, ed. GandaSingh [1967] (Patiala:
Publications Bureau, Punjabi University, 1988). HereafterGur Sobha. The third edition of Ganda
Singh's version was published in 1988. The date as given is generally accepted but is debated;it is
representedin two ways in the existing manuscriptversions. For discussion, see GandaSingh's introductionin Sainapati,5 ff, 63-4, note 1; Jeevan Deol, "EighteenthCenturyKhalsaIdentity:Discourse,
Praxis, and Narrative,"in Sikh Religion, Culture,and Ethnicity,ed. ChristopherShackle, Gurharpal
Singh, and Arvind-pal Singh Mandair(Surrey, Eng.: Curzon Press, 2001), 40, note 1; and W. H.
McLeod, Who is a Sikh? The Problem of Sikh Identity (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1989), 35. See
also PurnimaDhavan, "The Warrior'sWay: The making of the Eighteenth-CenturyKhalsa Panth,"
Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2003, 32ff. and passim. On the text in general, see Surjit Hans,
A Reconstructionof Sikh Historyfrom Sikh Literature(Jalandhar,Punjab:ABS Publications,1988),
245ff. and J. S. Grewal, "Praisingthe Khalsa: Sainapat'sGursobha,"in The Khalsa: Sikh and nonSikhPerspectives (New Delhi: Manohar,2004), 35-45. The text was first publishedin printin 1925 by
Akali KaurSingh Ji Nihang. It is composed of twenty chaptersand featuresa range of poetic types.
28. Gur Sobha, 63.
29. Ibid., 64.
30. Ibid., 63-65. Throughoutthe text, the location and durationof events is emphasized;see ibid.,
69 and 74. The authorplaces himself as narratorthroughoutthe text, in relation to the Guru who
inspires the text (as has been noted earlier)but also in relationto events. Ibid., 74. The typical invocation of the Guru at the beginning of a text, followed by a conventionallist of the Gurus as accepted
by orthodox Sikh tradition,clearly places the text within that tradition.Thus the text positions itself
outside of the splintergroups that existed in the eighteenthcenturyand can be seen as a way to stake
claims aboutthe orthodoxlineage, and thereforethe panth organizedaroundit. See Grewal, Sikhs of
the Punjab, 77. This presentationof the lineage of Gurusinvites comparisonwith othertraditionssuch as Vaishnava representationsof devotees and lineage. Such lineages have been discussed by
Thapar,Dirks, NarayanaRao, et al., and Waltersin Indenet al., Queryingthe Medieval. Gurpranalis,
anotherform of lineage, were writtenin the eighteenthcenturyand later, reflecting the same kind of
historicalinterest(Deol, "EighteenthCenturyKhalsa Identity,"27-28).
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352
ANNEMURPHY
Moreover,as I will show, this text is not only a form of "history"as a biography
of the Guru, but also seeks to narratethe Sikh community itself as a historical
process. In highlightingthis process, I'll presentthe terms of a Sikh rationalefor
the particularkind of historicalityexpressed throughnarration.31
Sainapati'stext is generally consideredto be a particularlyimportantearly example of a genre of literaturecomposed from the beginning of the eighteenth
century on, called gurbilas: the "sport"or "play"of the Guru.32Generally these
begin with writings attributedto the tenth and final living Guruof the normative
Sikh tradition,particularlyhis Bachittar Natak. According to Surjit Hans, who
has writtenextensively on these materials,the BachittarNatak (like all Gurbilas
literature)is singularly concerned with history: "this is a work of nascent history,"he writes, "which underthe stress of circumstances,is more faithful to the
demandsof the futurethan the quiet details of the present."33
Gur Sobha concentrateson the life of the final living Guru,GuruGobind Singh, althoughmention
the chronologicallydriven narration
is made of his father,GuruTegh Bahadur;34
ends with Guru Gobind Singh's death.35Rupert Snell has described the goal of
hagiography-as which this text might be seen-to be "to locate the life-stories of
its subjectsin a sweep of time knowing no boundariesbetween the contemporary
and the ahistorical."36
Such a descriptiondoes not hold in this case: the past here
is chronologically and geographicallyorderedand located, and concerned with
specific, chronologicallynarratedevents-the Guruwithin history,and the community aroundthe Guruwithin time and space. The period portrayedrepresents
one of great importancein the history of Sikh traditions:the transitionfrom the
period of living Gurushipin the beginning of the eighteenthcentury,to the postliving-Guruperiod. Guru Gobind Singh is credited with the decision to discontinue the office of the living Guru,and to locate authorityfrom that time forward
31. As GandaSingh (the editorof the publishedversion I rely upon) points out in his introduction,
there are places where Sainapati's text provides "historicalinformation,"and places where it does
not. (Gur Sobha, 7ff.) This is how Sainapati'stext has been generally dealt with in scholarly terms:
as corroborating--ornot doing so-historical events known throughother sources, "traditional"and
historical.This is not my goal here, but instead to assess the historicalityexpressed within the text.
32. On the genre and the majortexts associatedwith it, see Dhavan,"TheWarrior'sWay," 13, 15,
90ff., 141, chapter4, passim; Louis Fenech, Martyrdomin the Sikh Tradition:Playing the "Game
of Love" (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 123ff; W. H. McLeod, "The Hagiographyof
the Sikhs," in According to Tradition:Hagiographical Writingin India, ed. Winand M. Callewaert
and Rupert Snell (Wiesbaden:HarrassowitzVerlag, 1994), 33ff.; Textual Sourcesfor the Study of
Sikhism,ed.W. H. McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 11ff., and McLeod, Who
is a Sikh?, 51. Texts in the genre are strongly intertextuallyrelated. "Bilas" is in this context often
translatedas "splendor,"but the core meaning of bilas or vilas is as noted. The use of bilas in this
way parallelsthe common usage of the term lila, such as in Vaishnavatraditions;for uses of the term
"lila" in this text, see Gur Sobha, 69, 77. However, this usage should not be too strongly associated
with Vaishnavism;such terms and concepts were used in a fluid mannerwithin differentcontexts and
should not be seen as particularto one.
33. Hans, A Reconstructionof SikhHistory, 233-234.
34. It follows the tenth Guru's life throughhis residency at Anandpur,throughnumerousbattles
with kings of the PunjabHills and with Mughalforces, to his exile from Anandpurand eventualmeeting with the Mughal emperorBahadurShah. For events of the period, see J. S. Grewal, Sikhs of the
Punjab (Cambridge,Eng. and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990), 72-79.
35. The Gurudied at Nander,in present-dayMaharastra.
36. Rupert Snell, "Introduction:Themes in Indian Hagiography,"in Callewaertand Snell, eds.,
According to Tradition,1.
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HISTORYIN THE SIKH PAST
353
in the community(panth)and sacredcanon (granth).The periodis also crucialto
the history of the northof the subcontinentmore generally,as it was in these key
years thatcentralizedimperialMughalpower began to fractureat the peripheries,
at the end of the ruleof the MughalemperorAurangzeb,and successorgroups
began to vie for power.This process was only beginningat the time of the writing
of this text, but by the end of the eighteenthcentury,the politicallandscapeacross
the subcontinentwas transformedinto a range of post-Mughalpolities (many of
which still paid nominal allegiance to the Mughal state) and the eventual estabThe transformations
lishment of a sovereign state in Punjabundera Sikh ruler.37
evident within this text, therefore,stand at a crossroadsof many kinds, political
and religious, and the conflicts describedreflect the growing statureof the Sikh
communityin an unstablepolitical field.
First,a few wordsto situatethis text withinbroaderliteraryandintellectual
traditions.The literaryhistory of northIndia is the result of a complex interplay
between westernAsian and southernAsian intellectuallegacies and literarytraditions, and this is particularlyso for Sikh intellectualproduction- located (for the
most part)in Punjab,at a meeting point in northwesternIndiathathas seen intensive interactionwith culturesto the west.38In the Sikh case, a particularorientation towardhistory within Punjabilanguage and literature(such as the text I am
examining) is framedin the eighteenthcenturyin relationto Persiantraditions.39
MuzaffarAlam has shown that these traditionswere well established in literary
and administrativeterms in the region by the eleventh century,when Lahorewas
known as "Little Ghazna,"clearly linking Punjab with political centers to the
west.40 Other referents were located solidly within the Sanskritand vernacular
Indo-Aryanlinguistic universe. Indeed, GuruGobind Singh wrote compositions
in Persian,and many of the Gurus'writings are influencedby or in Braj, a devo37. This in turn was just priorto the increasinginterventionof the British in Punjabin the nineteenth century,culminatingwith annexationby the East India Companyin the middle of the century.
The classic account of this is MuzaffarAlam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh
and the Punjab, 1707-1748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). See also Chetan Singh, Region
and Empire:Punjab in the SeventeenthCentury(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991); and, on the
broadertransitionstaking place with the waning of Mughal power, Peter Marshall,"Introduction"to
The EighteenthCenturyin Indian History: Evolutionor Revolution?,ed. Peter Marshall(New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
38. Of particularinterest on this interaction,besides works cited elsewhere, see Sudipta Sen,
"ImperialOrdersof the Past: The Semantics of History and Time in the Medieval Indo-Persianate
Cultureof North India,"in Ali, ed., Invokingthe Past, 231-257; FarinaMir, "Genreand Devotion in
PunjabiPopularNarratives:RethinkingCulturaland Religious Syncretism,"ComparativeStudies in
Society and History 48:3 (2006), 727-758.
39. Persiantexts of the period hail from two main sources: the Mughal administrationand elites,
and later the Sikh rulerswho establishedthemselves in Punjabin the late eighteenthcentury.Persian
dominatedthe court of the Sikh and otherrulers of the post-MughaldominatedPunjab,just as it did
the courts of the Mughal administratorsof the suba or province. For an overview of sources for the
period, see Dhavan, "The Warrior'sWay," 16ff. See in particularJ. S. Grewal and IrfanHabib,Sikh
Historyfrom Persian Sources: Translationsof Major Texts (New Delhi: Tulika, 2001). Many of the
authorsof Persianaccountsof the Khalsain the mid-nineteenthcenturyhad bureaucraticroles within
RanjitSingh's kingdom and, later, within the British administration(Dhavan,"The Warrior'sWay,"
8; also discussed in Murphy,"The Materialof Sikh History").
40. MuzaffarAlam, "The Cultureand Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan,"in Literary
Cultures in History: Reconstructionsfrom South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (New Delhi and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 133.
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ANNEMURPHY
tional andliterarylanguageinfluentialacrossnorthIndia.The literaryandlinguistic field was furthercomplicatedwith the acquisitionof political power by Sikh
elites by the middleto the end of the eighteenthcentury,afterthe date attributedto
Sainapati'stext, andthe writingof historyin both PersianandPunjabiwithin Sikh
courts establishedat that time.41 These court contexts of literaryproductionalso
standalongside historicallyorientedpracticesin otherdevotionaltraditionsof the
period.42Historicalrepresentationsin Punjabwere thus producedand inscribedin
complex ways in relationto various literaryand linguistic (as well as religious)
subjectivitiesin the eighteenthand early nineteenthcenturies.
In broad structuralterms, Gur Sobha features the repeated interweaving of
threekey narrativemodes, within an overarchingchronologicallydrivennarrative
frame set up within the firstchapterof the work.The firstmajorrecurringelement
is the descriptionof the Guru and events related to his Guruship.These events
are essential to the maintenanceof the overall narrativeframe. They describe
the actions of the Guru,and particularlythe armedconflict that accompaniedthe
formationof the Guru's community as a challenge to both smaller polities (for
example, in the PunjabHills) and Mughal political formationsin the Punjab.43
The text identifieskey individualactors,at the same time thatit describesgeneral
characters--soldiers,brave and cowardly,strongand weak, as "types."A second
recurringelement consists of the theological and doctrinal pronouncementsof
the Guru;at times these pronouncementstake on such a central role in the text
that they almost-but not quite-overwhelm reference to a particularplace and
time of utterance.A third major element consists of descriptionsof interactions
between the Guru and his followers and, later, descriptionsof these followers.
After the firstchaptersets up the frame,events in subsequentchaptersare related
in chronological order,with each chapterfocusing on one or two of these three
narrativeelements.44The final two chaptersturnprimarilyto praise of the Guru,
and a reiterationof his teachings.
41. See Dhavan, "The Warrior's Way," and "Redemptive Pasts and Imperiled Futures: The
Writingof a Sikh History,"unpublishedpaperdelivered at the Association of Asian Studies meeting,
Boston, MA, March2007.
42. In a discussion of historical vs. mythical saints within hagiographicalpoetry, for example,
David Lorenzen has noted the distinctive way in which bhakti or devotional traditions highlight
historical personal authorityin the form of famous saints and devotees, in contrastto shastrik and
Vedic Hinduism:"Whenthe authorsof hagiographicalsongs make an appealto the examples of these
and other saints," he argues, "they are groundingtheir texts on the historical authorityand witness
of those who discovered the Truth for themselves" (David Lorenzen, Praises to a Formless God:
Nirguni Textsfrom North India [New Delhi: Sri SatguruPublications, 1996], 156). Along parallel
lines, ChristianNovetzke has shown how through"oralperformance,handwrittendocumentation,and
printedliterature,the Namdev traditionhas maintaineda sense of historiographicagency centeredon
the subject of Namdev"(ChristianNovetzke, "The Tongue Makes a Good Book: History, Religion,
and Performancein the Namdev Traditionin Maharastra,"Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2003,
24).
43. For a general accountof the period, see Grewal, Sikhs of the Punjab.
44. The chaptersup to and includingthe fourthare short and concise, describingparticularevents
(mainly battles). From the fifth chapter,we see a transitionto longer chaptersthat provide theological/doctrinalcontent, within a weak narrativeframe. After the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters,the
overall chronological and event-orientednarrativeframe takes over again. Although later chapters
provide interludesfor both discussion of the community and its members and theological and doctrinalexplication, they do so without challenging the strongoverall narrativeframe of the work until
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HISTORYIN THE SIKH PAST
355
The ways in which these different modes- event narration,theological and
doctrinal explication, and description of community and followers--are organized reveal how the text conceives the past as a territorywithin which it is necessary to locate the Guruin action and ideology. The narrationof the Guru'sactions
in the world fully integratestheological and doctrinalconcernswith the particular
events associatedwith the Guru.
This patterncan be seen, for example, in the descriptionof GuruGobindSingh
at Anandpur,which had been established as the seat of the Guru's authorityby
the ninth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh's father.The historical natureof the text is
clear at the several junctureswhen the authoremphasizes the location and time
of events, such as the events at Anandpurassociated with the founding of the
Khalsa.45Although Sainapati'sdescriptionof the foundingof the Khalsadoes not
include featureskey to later portrayals,the account does carefully delineate the
context and natureof the event.46Alongside a descriptionof the time and place
of action, the words of the Guru are recordedas events, and are tied to a larger
narrationof his actions:
Now thepoetdescribesGuruGobindSinghatAnandpur
Withtheimpassable
mountains
theauspicious
around,
placeonthebankof theSatluj(1)
The monthof Chetpassedandall hadgatheredfor a mela [festivalgathering]unmatched.
Forthelessonof BaisakhithetrueGurudeliberated
(2)
TheSangatfromall cities[came]fordarshan["sacred
viewing"]
He wascompassionate
andgavedarshan,thatdoerandcreatorof theworld(3)
GobindSinghwasmadehappyandtheSangatwasmaderapturous
He revealedtheKhalsaandliftedup all difficulties(4)
All thecollectedcommunity
gatheredon thebankof theSatluj...47
This chapterthus provides specific situationalinformation,and narratesevents
as a series of unfoldinghappenings.The text and communityareboth constructed
aroundthe words of the Guru,as "event,"and in relationto a largernarrationof
the Guru'sactions. The teachingsof the Guru-in particular,his definitionof the
Sikh communityandthe meaningof the "Khalsa,"the orderof the Sikh community thatwas foundedby the tenthGuru-are also situatedwithin particularevents,
when the Guru addresseshis followers, or when followers engage in dialogue.
Indeed,the entirechapterconcludes with the frame"Thusthe Guruspoke,"andin
the lines thatfollow, the injunctionsdescribedin the previouslines of the chapter
arepresentedin summation.48
The event of the Guru'sspeakingto his followers is
remembered,and doctrinalteachings are subsumedstructurallywithin it.
One might separateout these two -the descriptionof a series of battleswithin a
chronologicalframe,and a series of teachingsand injunctionsfor a religiouscommunity- and place them in different"modes"- a historicalnarrativemode, and a
religious or doctrinalone-as has often been done in the past for distinctionsbethe last two chapters.
45. For examples, see Gur Sobha, 69 and Gur Sobha, 74.
46. See discussion, McLeod, Whois a Sikh?, 29.
47. Gur Sobha, 78.
48. Gur Sobha, 87.
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ANNEMURPHY
tween mythologicalandhistoricalcontentsin work on the Puranas,for example.49
This distinctiondoes work here. Regardingthe possible "mythic"aspects of Guru
Gobind Singh's person-that is, references that relate to a larger mythological
traditionas explicated within the Puranasand other texts--it is indeed useful to
consider two modes of engagement,one that is historicalin concern,and one that
provides a mythologicalbackgroundto or an overarchingcontext for this history.
Mythological references are peripheralto it.50 However, the doctrinaland theological concerns in this text are not so, and the designationof separatedoctrinal/
religious and historicalmodes here would detractfrom both the inner coherence
of the text and the possible meaningsof these sections of the text as one piece.
By the later chaptersthe reportageof events takes over, and comments on the
Khalsa and the Singhs are placed within the overwhelminglychronologicalnarrative of the story, one that points toward the culmination in chapter 18 of the
deathof the Guru.51Thatevent signals the end of the reportagepartof the text, to
be replacedby a more general mode of praise and descriptionof the Guruand a
furtherexplicationof his message:
I havegiventheKhalsamy robe
TheKhalsais my form,I amneartheKhalsa
In thebeginningandtheend,shiningin theKhalsa.52
These final two chaptersare of a differentorderfrom chapters2-4, and 8-17,
and do not constitutethe same kind of historicalnarrative.Their role in the text,
however, may be understoodin relationto the whole of the work-the culmination of a descriptionof the Guru's place in the world, and a discussion of the
significanceof his worldly presence.
The above referenceto khillat,or ritualgift-giving of a robe of honoras a way of
expressingauthority,with its simultaneouslypoliticalandreligiouscommunitarian
referentsin Islamic as well as Sikh contexts, contributesto the overall logic that
is centralto the story Sainapatiseeks to tell.53As is clear in these referencesto the
formationof the Guru'scommunity,the Khalsa,thereis more thanbiography/hagiographyat work in this text. The simultaneouslyreligious and historicalnature
of the text lies not only in the more obvious sense of the religious-in, as Surjit
49. NarayanaRao et al. provide a recent example, separatingmythological and historical content
within the historical representationsthey explore from South India; see, for example, Rao et al.,
Texturesof Time, 112. They argue that mythological references can be seen as a foregroundfor historical content and "arecompletely distinct from the cosmological and pre-historicalsequences that
we find in the puranas themselves, where the present loses its concrete specificity and is absorbed
by the frame-or, one might say, where the present functions as a timeless mode, perhaps 'mythic'
but in any case programmedto recurrituallyor in other ways." Rao et al., Texturesof Time,245. See
Sen, "ImperialOrdersof the Past,"255.
50. As discussed below, mythologicalreferencesin other Gurbilastexts, such as Koer Singh's late
eighteenth/earlynineteenth-centurytext, are much more ubiquitousand fundamentalto the description of the identity of the Guru.I do not addresshere a common argumentthat the use of Vaishnava
referenceswithin Sikh texts of this period and laterreflect either a "hybrid"religious culturein which
"Hindu"and "Sikh"are not discretecategories. Deol's discussion of Khalsa metanarrativein relation
to these kinds of mythological referencesis more convincing; see below.
51. Gur Sobha, 169.
52. Ibid., 170.
53. Robes of Honor: TheMedieval Worldof Investiture,ed. StewartGordon(New York:Palgrave,
2001); Stewart Gordon, Robes of Honor: Khil'at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2003).
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HISTORYIN THE SIKH PAST
357
Hans put it, the fact that "Godentersinto historywith GuruGobind Singh"54-or
in the historicalityof the centralfigureof the narrative,but in the structureof the
narrativeof Gur Sobha overall. In this structurethe theological and the historicalnarrativeare interlinked.Further,the discursiveformationof thepanth aroundthe
Guruis centralto the functionof Sainapati'stext as a history,in keeping with the
Guru'smessage thathereafterSikh identitywould be formedaroundGuruGranth
(the canon) and GuruPanth(the community).We can see this particularlyin the
fifth chapterof the text, which narratesevents associated with the foundationof
the Khalsaandthe speeches of the Guruthatemphasizethe formationof thepanth:
"All the community(sangat) from beginningto end is my Khalsa,"the Gurudeclares in Sainapati'stext, "who obeys my orderwill be a true Sikh."55Both these
elements- the events andthe speeches- workto definethe communityin relation
to othersandwith the Guru(for example,to "Makethe Masands[earlycommunity
representativesof the Guru]far from you ... ,"56 and "Donateto the Guruand do
not give into the handsof others"57).
These specific injunctionsare directlyrelated
to the making of the communityand its relationshipwith the Guru;the Masands
were perceivedto constitutea challenge to the office of the Guruat this time, and
the role was eradicatedat the time of the tenthGuru.
The formationof the community stands at the center of this text, throughthe
detailing of behaviorthat is fundamentalto the panth's constitution,definingthe
boundariesof the community in relation to other communities at the time.58as
exemplifiedby prohibitionsagainstbehaviorsthatmarkparticularculturalandreligious groups(here,the smokingof tobacco, associatedwith culturesto the west,
and ritual requirementsassociated with Hindu traditions).Such assertions and
injunctionsare relatedby means of particularevents, as when the Guruaddresses
his followers, or when followers engage in dialogue59:
AbandontheHukka,andsingthevirtuesof Hari
If youdesirefood,partakeof thenectarof Hari
Abandontheshavingof heads,oh Brother
[TheGuru]saidthisto theSikhs.(21)
"Whoever's
motherorfatherdies
Theyshouldnotshavetheirheads
Gobindis ourmotherand
father..."6
Here, the radicalnatureof GuruGobind Singh's teachings is expoundedfully:
the Guruis identifiedas the motherand father,supplantingthe centralrole of parents, makingunnecessarythe rites and ritualsassociatedwith theirdeaths.Jeevan
Deol has cogently arguedthatthe centralpoint at issue in this teaching regarding
the prohibitionof ritualsassociatedwith the deathof relativeswas to avoid a Mu54. Hans, A Reconstructionof Sikh History, 231.
55. Gur Sobha, 81.
56. Ibid., 79.
57. Ibid., 82.
58. Concern for community is a standardin texts associated with bhakti (devotional) traditions.
Some referencesto communitythus are typical of a broadergenre (see the use of such references,for
example, in Gur Sobha, 83-85, and elsewhere-sati sangat, sant sabha, santjana).
59. Gur Sobha, 87.
60. Gur Sobha, 80.
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358
ANNE MURPHY
ghal tax on this practice,and in so doing to challenge Mughal sovereignty.6'Deol
relates this injunctionto a largerphenomenon,namely, the creation of what he
calls a "metanarrative"
derivedfromthe DasamGranthin which the aspirationsof
the Khalsacommunityto define itself as distinctand sovereignwere placed within
a frameworkbased on Puranicmyth, definingdharmain a mode thatis simultaneously religious and political.62
Within the sweep of the literatureof the period, such a characterizationhas
much in its favor: there are aspects of both political and religious ideologies at
work in the literatureof the period without a doubt.63However, several qualifications need to be introducedto make this characterizationfully persuasive. The
termsof the social formationsat work in the "political"requirefurtherexplication
(as Pinch's work on warriorascetics makes clear).64The sovereigntyproclaimed
within differentSikh-orientedPunjabitexts from the eighteenthcenturydoes not
reflect a single vision. In Sainapati'stext, for instance, this sovereignty is not
singularlyterritorialand bounded.Deol is certainlycorrectthat Sainapatiis centrallyconcernedwith sovereigntyover the city of Anandpurand environs,but the
notion of the panth articulatedoverall in the text is not encompassedby this vision, and the boundariesof the communityare dispersed.65 Thus, the community
in Delhi is a centralconcern, particularlyin descriptionsof the responses of the
communityto the teachings of the Guru,including those of some high-caste followers unwilling to abandoncertaincaste-customs.The communityand its shape
arethus being constantlynegotiated.Moreover,the sense of this communityis not
constructedin relationto a state-formationthat is Sikh, and a simple equivalence
of the sovereigntyof the Guruover the communitywith state-formationis, at the
time of Sainapati,untenable.The Sikh imaginationof the past, at this particular
time in the imaginationof the community,therefore,both is and is not centrally
concerned with political sovereignty; or, rather,the meaning of sovereignty as
political is not always clear (and is certainly not fundamentallyterritorializedor
61. Deol, "EighteenthCenturyKhalsa Identity,"26-27.
62. Ibid., 30ff. "[A]t the centre of Khalsa self-constructionlie the worship of weapons and the
perceptionof partakingin the Guru's mission to reestablishdharma,a mission that is itself embedded in a wider cosmological cycle of battles againstevil thatextends back into mythical time" (Deol,
"Khalsa,"33). See also 38-39.
63. William Pinch's reading of the Vaishnava hagiographicaltext, the Bhaktamalof Nabhadas
(of 1600), reveals a similar vision: the constructionof a community, in social as well as religious
terms, throughthe intersectionof historiographicaland religious concerns. His analysis allows us to
understandhow the past is the groundupon which are constructedmultiple and sometimes conflicting notions of communitythroughexclusion and inclusion (William Pinch, "History, Devotion and
the Search for Nabhadasof Galta"in Ali, ed., Invokingthe Past). Pinch's work on the formationof
warriorascetic groups similarly demonstratesthe multiple political and social formationsthat must
informour understandingof Khalsa mobilization.See William Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British
India (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996); Pinch, WarriorAscetics; and the early work
of Lorenzen on this topic: David Lorenzen, "WarriorAscetics in Indian History,"Journal of the
AmericanOrientalSociety 98:1 (1978), 70-71. See also Dhavan, "The Warrior'sWay."
64. See particularlyPinch, WarriorAscetics.
65. Deol, "EighteenthCentury Khalsa Identity,"33-34. There are other aspects of sovereignty
expressed, such as authorityover local villages, but this is not equatedwith the Sikh community(Gur
Sobha, 116). As Grewal too notes, sovereignty is in question only within larger concerns (Grewal,
"Praisingthe Khalsa,"93).
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HISTORYIN THE SIKHPAST
359
statist).66It is evoked in certain senses-the mantle of authorityof khillat, and
the use of the past, as can be found in other communitiesboth political and religious-but at the center is the formulationof the communityin relationto the
Guru, and the community-the subject of history-is not equivalentto the state.
Deol's contentionthat "the Khalsa notion of dharmavalorizes ideas of rule and
political sovereignty in a way that classical definitionsand others contemporary
to the Khalsa do not" does not quite capturethe deterritorializedsovereigntyand
communitarianorientationof the Khalsa and the communityas conceived within
Sainapati'stext, nor does it account for other modes of social/politicalorganization contemporarywith Sikh activity.67
The formationof thepanth andthe natureof its sovereigntymustbe understood
in multipleterms,both within the conceits of the political and aroundotherimaginative engagementswith community-formation.This providesthe connectionbetween Sainapati'stext and other examples of literaturewith a Sikh orientationin
the eighteenthand early nineteenthcenturies:the RahitNama literature,the earliest example of which hails from the mid eighteenth century,and the later texts
of the Gurbilasgenre in the remainderof that century and the early nineteenth
century.The Rahit literatureattemptsto define Sikh behavior,and throughthis
the formationof the nascent community-later it becomes a central and sometimes overdeterminedlocation for the articulationof Sikh subjectivity--but it is
not structuredas a historical narrative;thus, its form is quite distinct from Gur
Sobha. Other more similar Gurbilastexts include Kesar Singh Chibber's probably late eighteenth-centuryBansavalinamaDasa Patshahia ka, which featuresa
differentorganizationalstructure(based on the lineage of Gurus)but is similarly
chronologicallydriven, and Kuir Singh's probablyearly nineteenth-centuryGurbilas Patshahi Das, which is similar in organizationto Gur Sobha but features
strongmythologicalcontentand a clearersense of political sovereigntyin relation
to the Mughal state and other smallerHindukings from the PunjabHills (as will
be discussed below).68A centralconcernfor all of these texts of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenthcenturies, including the Rahit literature,is the articulation
of connections between the Guruand the panth; in this way the narrationof the
Guru constitutesthe means for the formationof the Sikh community.Sikh concern for the past throughthe eighteenthcentury is fundamentallyshapedby the
redefinitionof sovereign relations within a post-MughalPunjab,building upon
the broader,pre-existing,non-statist,theologically-drivenorientationthat can be
seen in Gur Sobha. In some ways the sovereigntyof the Guruin relationto stateformation and territorializationreflects the complex sovereign relations within
Mughal state-buildingitself, with its system of subsidiaryalliances; in others, it
is clearly located outside of the operationof the state.69This form of the panth in
relationto sovereignty does not map directly to later forms of Sikh imaginations
66. See Oberoi, "FromPunjabto Khalistan,"34.
67. Deol, "EighteenthCenturyKhalsaIdentity,"40.
68. On the dating of these texts, see Hans, A Reconstructionof Sikh History, 266 and 281, and
Dhavan, "RedemptivePasts."
69. See The Mughal State, 1526-1750, ed. MuzaffarAlam and SanjaySubrahmanyam(Delhi and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Marshall,"Introduction"to The EighteenthCentury
in Indian History.
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ANNE MURPHY
of sovereigntyin relationto nation and state. Sainapati'stext writes of the Guru's
life, but also, in relationto it, of Sikhness, of the panth gatheredaroundthe Guru,
and it does so in multiplemodes.
IV. A RATIONALEFOR HISTORY
Authors such as SurjitHans and others have assumed that Gur Sobha and other
texts like it representa Sikh (and therefore,anotherexample of a South Asian)
form of history.However, "historicity,"ratherthan "history,"may be a more appropriateterm, where the formerrefers to an approachto the past that is not defined by a particularset of assumptionsassociatedwith Europeanforms of political order,or formationsof knowledge. In this conception, "history"is a type of
a more generic and possibly universalkind of "historicity."In particular,history
relies upon, in the words of Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart, the "naturalized
assumptionthat 'history'belongs to the domain of the past. The past is separate
from the presentandthis separationallows the recognitionof historyas an object.
History is over and done with--gone forever.""'This is the sense of "history"
in the Europeanmodem conception, as defined by Dipesh Chakrabarty,Hayden
White, and others;history,in Michel de Certeau'swords, "is born in effect from
the rupturethatconstitutesa past distinctfrom its currententerprise."71History so
defined is constitutiveof a historical sense that is distinct from alternativeforms
of historicityfound outside the Europeanand modem.
GurSobha, however,featuresmultiplevisions. In its theological dimensionthe
notion of the separationof the past and presentis of great importancewithin the
text. There is, therefore,a theological sense of completenessto the past expressed
in the text, a sense of rupture,a sense of the formationof the presentin relation
to the past as trulypast and no longer present.72This sense of ruptureis central
to the conceit of the text as "religious"-that is, in defining Sikhness as following the Guru, and in defining the community that gathers aroundhim in terms
of its relationto the death of the tenth Guruand the transferenceof Gurushipto
the granth andpanth. But, at the same time, theologically defining the panth in
this way opens up a sense of the past in which it is not over and done with, but
rathercontinues to operate in the present and on into the future. This happens
because the Guru in Gur Sobha transfersthe notion of Gurushipto the text and
to the community; in this way the presence of the Guru continues beyond his
deathright up to the presentand beyond. This initiates a new relationshipof the
communitywith its past, a new temporality,and thereforea new historicalsense,
one in which the past is in one sense gone, and in anotherever-present.The historical dimension of Gur Sobha is thus predicatednotjust on the pastness of the
70. Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart, "Introduction:Ethnographiesof Historicity,"History and
Anthropology16:3 (2005), 263.
71. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia
UniversityPress, 1988), 46.
72. PurnimaDhavan has also observed this sense of rupture;see her "History, Prophecy, and
Power: The Role of Gurbilas Literaturein Shaping Khalsa Identity,"lecture at the University of
Wisconsin AnnualConferenceon South Asia, October2005. Thankyou to the authorfor participating
in the panel and sharingher paper.
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HISTORYIN THE SIKHPAST
361
Guru,but also on the continuingpresence of the communityin direct relationto
the Guru. Daud Ali has noted that "Justas the nation uses the past to legitimise
and valorise its project, so too . .. medieval polities, castes, bhaktas, and courts
In the case of Gur Sobha, then, the
used the past as a legitimising discourse."73
narrationof religious content within a historical narrativeprovides a means for
relating not only the teachings of the Guruby means of certainpast events, but
for creatingthe communityitself as the continuationof this past into the present.
This is the overarchingnarrativeat the center of history here.
This theologically inflected historical sense associated with the tenth Guru is
furthercomplicated in literaryand other representationsthat follow in the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies. In later examples of the Gur Bilas genre,
mythologicalassociationsof the Guruare furtherdeveloped, and the Guruis seen
to be connected to other religious authorities,particularlybut not exclusively
Ram; as Kuir Singh writes, some see the Guru and call him Ram, and others
see Shankaror Shiva.74I cannot address these associations in detail, but such
broadreferencesare mobilized to position the Guruin relationto a largercosmology, within a vision of the pre-eminenceof the Guru.75In this, Kuir Singh's text
strongly resonates with aspects of the Dasam Granth,which features extensive
mythological references;indeed, a bulk of the Dasam Granthis dedicatedto the
descriptionof the incarnationsof Vishnu.76 In Kuir Singh's text, as I have noted,
there are also clearly state-orientedarticulationsof the meaningsof sovereignty:
the Guruis explicitly called upon to counterrepressivestate powers, GuruTegh
Bahaduris called the "armof the Jat"(a caste groupprominentamongthe Sikhs),
and the Guruis meant to "destroythe Mlechas"or foreigners,just as he destroys
desire and anger in the mind." This vilification of the foreigners or "Turks"is
directlyrelatedto state power and is not necessarily specifically religious, as has
been observed in other texts that articulatethe distinctionbetween Mlecha and
The trappingsof the Guru'sauthoritiesare explicitly royal in form, and the
not."78
vocabularyof state sovereignty runs throughthe text.79As has been noted, this
developmentreflectsthe ascendancyof sovereigntyamong the successorsto Mughal authorityas the eighteenthcenturyprogressed.The sovereigntyof the Guru
here is thereforeclearly statist, and the sense of rupturecomplicated.Returning
to the theological natureof the historical,however,even in Kuir Singh, a sense of
connectednessto the Guruis establishedthroughits narrationas a past event; the
narrationof the Guruin the past providesthe foundinglogic of the community.
73. Ali, ed., Invokingthe Past, 11; "bhakta"can be glossed as "devotee."
74. Kuir Singh, Gurbilas Patshahi Das, ed. ShamsherSingh Alok, introductionby Fauja Singh
(Patiala,Punjab:PublicationsBureau,PunjabiUniversity, 1999). For examples of referencesto Ram,
see 15, 18-20, 50; the referenceto both Ram and Shiva is on 21.
75. See footnote 50 and page 14, above.
76. Sri Dasam GranthSahib, transl.Dr. SurindarSingh Kohli, vols. 1-3 (Birmingham,UK: The
Sikh National HeritageTrust,2003).
77. See Kuir Singh, GurbilasPatshahi Das, 12 and 50.
78. See, for instance, Cynthia Talbot, "Inscribingthe Other, Inscribingthe Self: Hindu-Muslim
Identities in Pre-ColonialIndia,"ComparativeStudies in Society and History 37:4 (1995), 692-722.
Indeed, distinctionsbetween Muslim and non-Muslimshift in the text. There is not room to explore
this furtherhere; see Hans, A Reconstructionof Sikh History, for some discussion.
79. See, for example, Kuir Singh, GurbilasPatshahi Das, chapterfive.
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ANNE MURPHY
Though the sense of temporaldisconnectednessmarks the modem European
sense of history, this was not always the case. It is well known that historicality- with its sense of the connectednessof past, present,and future-developed in
Europeanintellectualtraditionsin relationto Christianideologies and the writing
of sacralhistory.Augustine's notion of Christianhistory is exemplaryof a larger
and complicatedengagementwith the historicalin Christianthought.This interest
in history,of course, was not consistentand singularin orientation.As J. Z. Smith
(following on the earlierwork of Halbwachs)has artfullyshown, concernfor history has experiencedmultipletransformationswithin Christiantraditions:interest
in the earthlylife of ChristtransformedChristianityin the fourthcenturyCE,and
then again in the seventeenth century, with the rejection of this imagination."
Nevertheless,the Christianview of temporalitywas characterizedby a sense that
what was occurringnow was inextricablylinked to what happenedthen (for example, the Crucifixion)and what will happen(for example,The Second Coming).
The modem notion of "history"ultimately rejected the temporalitiesimagined
within the Christiantheological sense of historicality.As ReinhartKoselleck has
argued,it is only when "Christianeschatology shed its constantexpectationof the
imminentarrivalof doomsdaythat a temporalitycould be revealedthat would be
open for the new and without limit.""'Modem history,he claimed, involved the
transformationof notions of temporalityand the future,in tension with Christianconstructednotions of time and futurity.In this case, Sikh temporalitiescontain
elements of both ruptureand continuancethat continue in complicatedways into
modernity.82I suggest that to understandthe intellectualformationof histories in
SouthAsia, andparticularlyin relationto the Sikhs, we must considerthe kinds of
formulationsof time and the past such as we see in the Sikh historicalimagination
I have triedto evoke, and not assume the same distinctionshold here as they do in
the Europeanand Christiancases.
One can see a particular justificationfor the writing of humanhistory within
the Sikh imagination,built upon the humanizationand collectivization of authority with the transformationof the panth in the early eighteenthcentury,after the
death of the last living Guru. This justification does not require a rejection of
religious ideologies as being in opposition to human-derivednotions of temporality.The humancommunity,indeed, becomes the locus of history,as has been
mentioned:its "grandnarrative,"the sovereign producedthroughthe articulation
of history.We might see this in Weberianterms, as aspects of the routinizationor
institutionalizationof charisma,the institutionbuilt upon the leaderwho is gone;
such routinizationencouragesthe writingof this charismaas past in relationto the
80. JonathanZ. Smith, To TakePlace: TowardTheoryin Ritual (Chicago and London:University
of Chicago Press, 1987), 88ff. On Halbwachsand specifically their analysis of his work on collective
memory in Christianity,see discussion in PatrickH. Hutton,History as an Art of Memory(Hanover,
NH and London: University Press of New England, 1993), and Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdomand
Memory:Early ChristianCulture-Making(New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2004).
81. ReinhartKoselleck, Futures Past: On the Semanticsof Historical Time (Cambridge,MA and
London:MIT Press, 1985), 241.
82. This is addressed in my forthcoming book, based on Murphy, "The Material of Sikh
History."
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HISTORYIN THE SIKHPAST
363
present of the community.83One can see Christianhistoriographyin such a vein;
but the differences in theological and soteriologicaltermsbetween Christianand
Sikh notions of temporalityand futurity(both soteriologicaland not) demandthat
we not assume the same articulationof secularityand religiosity in the formation
of a historicalsense in these differentcontexts, nor oppose them to modem forms
of historicalimaginationin the same way.84
This is not to suggest that there is a coincidence of concurrentlyand identically produced forms of history (and modernity), South Asian and European."
However, we must give pause regardingthe seemingly absolute difference between "history"as Europeanand otherkinds of "historicities,"and the modernity
of history within Europe and the "other"of other forms of history, to consider
the genealogies of alternateand convergent particularitiesnow associated with
history and the modern in different locations.86A Sikh historical orientationin
the formationof the community is not centered on otherworldlysoteriology; it
locates the subjectof historywithin a non-statesocial formation:the community,
in multipleterms.
V. CONCLUDINGREMARKS
I have argued here that a particularmode of historical narrationwas formed in
the late medieval/early modern, precolonial period in the Punjabi text of Gur
Sobha at a moment within Sikh thoughtthat allowed for a re-imaginationof the
nature of history by means of locating Sikhness in the community, as articulated in history and as representedthrough connections to the Guru.87Though
the later history of "history"in relationto the Sikhs is defined in relationto the
transitionof political formationsin the late Mughal period, and thus directly in
relation to state-formation,here the particularconcern is with the disjunctureof
83. Max Weber, On Charisma and InstitutionBuilding: Selected Papers, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt
(Chicago and London:Universityof Chicago Press, 1968).
84. I cannot addressthe issue of the secular here, but the formationof a kind of secular space in
relation to the writing of the past as history is a centralconcern of all who attemptto understandthe
history of historiographyin South Asia. See Inden et al., Queryingthe Medieval.
85. Indeed, Bruno Latourhas arguedthat it is not only the formationof a rupturebetween past
and present,but also the oppositionbetween natureand culture,that characterizesthe modem. Bruno
LaTour, We Have Never Been Modern, transl. CatherinePorter(New York and London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993).
86. Ronald Inden has arguedthat even Europeanhistories can be seen to fail to achieve their own
standardsfor determiningwhat is "history"(Inden, "Introduction:From Philological to Dialogical
Texts," in Queryingthe Medieval). There has been a move away from "History"to history/histories
since the 1960s more generally in the Western academy, so the formulationof a singular history
unique to a Western intellectual tradition is untenable. Indeed, German theorist Join Rfisen calls
history simply "time which has gained sense and meaning ... [which] is a process of reflecting the
time orderof humanlife, groundedon experienceand moved by outlooks on the future"(Jrn Riisen,
History: Narration, Interpretation,Orientation[New York and Oxford:BerghahnBooks, 2005], 2).
See JacquesLeGoff, History and Memory,transl.Steven Rendall and ElizabethClaman[1977] (New
York: ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1988), 102ff. Even so, the portrayalof some non-Westerncultures
as "outside of history"persists, among these same critics; see, for example, LeGoff, 37ff.; Pollock,
"Mimamsa,"notes this as well.
87. In assertingthe place of Sikh representationswithin a wider South Asian intellectualand religious context, I am thereforenot arguingfor Sikh exceptionalism.
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ANNE MURPHY
the past, the making of a history of the Guru, and throughthis the productionof
the community of the Guru throughthe narrationof the past. Historical events
(and locations) are a means for the articulationof the Guru's "light"(sobha) to
shine in and throughhis community.A connection is establishedto him through
narratingthe past as history. Inden has arguedthat "History... has always been
importantfor any communitythat tries to make itself a polity, a complex agent
capable of shapingitself and its world"88;in the Sikh case, the sovereigntyof the
communityaroundthe Guru(and not the sovereigntyof the political community)
is the productof history's narrativeimagination.James Sheehan's explorationof
the ways in which sovereigntyoperatesoutside of and alongside the operationof
the state and nation in Europeis suggestive of the productivityof thinking about
multipleforms of sovereigntythatare not directlyconnected (yet) to state-formation in the early modem period in South Asia.89
The panth has occupied a central place in the imagination of Sikh political
modernities;I am not the first to identify this, and cannot here account for the
arrayof positions that exist in relationto this idea.90I would only like to uncover
the possibilities found within alternativeforms of historical narrationsof this
community.Thereis not a simple continuumof "history"in Sikh (or other South
Asian) contexts in relation to religious ideology and community construction,
from past to present,over the last 250 years. "History"has been mobilized within
religious traditionsin the modem period, as it has been more generally in South
Asia, in relationto the colonial interventionand the imposition of new modes of
Claims to historicity are determinedby conflicthistoricityand representation.91
ing notions of history, identity, and rights (propertyand civil) within colonial
and postcolonial contexts, and deeply embedded within contemporarypower
struggles.92None of this can be appreciatedif one claims that South Asians do
(or did) not possess a historicalsense, or fails to grasp the way their sense of the
historical differs from the modem European sense of it. Failure to appreciate
these points can blind us to the natureand role of history in the presentcontext.
As David Scott has noted in a discussion of Sinhalanationalism,debate over the
relative verisimilitudeof claims aboutthe past, upon which identityclaims in the
presentare founded,is largely ill-founded as a tool againstnationalistand exclusionaryideology in the present.That is to say, we do not gain much by claiming
the existence or nonexistence of identities or histories in the past, and the existence of historicalconsciousness in the past does not, regardless,justify violence
88. Inden et al., Queryingthe Medieval, 4.
89. James Sheehan, "The Problem of Sovereignty in European History," American Historical
Review 111:1 (2006), 1-15.
90. See notes 9 and 12.
91. See, for example, Phillip Lutgendorf,"The Quest for the LegendaryTulsidas"in Callewaert
and Snell, eds., According to Tradition,76ff. I explore how this happens in the Sikh case in "The
Materialof Sikh History."
92. Veena Das makes a similar argument: Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological
Perspective on ContemporaryIndia (Delhi and New York:Oxford UniversityPress, 1995), 42, as do
several of the authorsin Anatomyof a Confrontation:The Babri-Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi
Issue, ed.
SarvepalliGopal (New Delhi: Viking Penguin Books India, 1991).
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HISTORYIN THE SIKH PAST
365
in the present. It is most important,instead, to deny "a naturalor necessary link
between past identities and the legitimacy of presentpolitical claims."93
My exploration of the Sikh conception of history in the eighteenth century,
and my contrastingit with other conceptions of history, aims to understandthe
multiplicity of the imaginationof history, in the past as well as the present,as a
way to approacha vision of the alternativehistoriesand social formationsbornof
this multiplicity.GurSobha constitutesthe Sikhpanth throughhistory,organized
aroundthe Guruand in his memory,and in doing so it provides a locus for defining it in relationto the past and presence of the Guru.The historical"texture"of
Sainapati'stext shows that narrationof the Guruwithin the world, and the constructionof the communitythroughthis narration,is deeply connected to doctrinal and theological concerns;it is the particularmoment within which Sainapati
writes- whose task was to form the communityarounda Guruand a past--that
provides the rationale for the constructionof a distinctive kind of history. In
examining the particularways in which history and Sikhness are interdependent,
we can make a concrete gesture towardthe need voiced by Dipesh Chakrabarty
for a non-homogenized,necessarily secular history with a complex understanding of its genealogy. This avoids a simplistic valorizationof the "historical"in
relation to the "religious"in colonialist/nationalistterms, such as can be seen
in some of the Khalistanirepresentationsdiscussed at the outset of this article.
Sikh historiesthemselves, indeed, offer alternativesto the narrownessof both the
modernEuropeanand the Khalistaniconception of history.
Universityof British Columbia
93. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton
UniversityPress, 1999), 103.
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