Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (review)

Tony Ballantyne’s book indicates and partially demonstrates new directions for work on Sikh cultural forms. Ballantyne brings “the problematics of diaspora and colonialism together” to highlight “the particular cultural challenges posed by the creation of colonial modernity” (x–xi). In doing so, he argues for an understanding of Sikhism direct relation to the two, highlighting “the imperial framework of the Sikh past” (29). Ballantyne thus brings together work on colonialism and diaspora that has for too long remained within separate discursive spheres, and fruitfully complicates and expands existing approaches to the study of the Sikhs.

Ballantyne is careful to situate his own work in relation to existing work in the field of Sikh Studies, although the viability—and desirability—of the field itself is called into question within the work. The bulk of the first chapter provides an overview of the field, providing a contextual frame for the orientation change he advocates. The categorization outlined in this chapter breaks down at times; more useful is Ballantyne’s formulation of his own approach. He achieves full explication of this in the second chapter of the book, which is then followed by two chapters which provide examples of the approach he advocates.

Ballantyne’s work joins a number of recent works that address an ongoing debate in South Asian historiography regarding the relative influence of colonialism in the formation of modernity in South Asia (34). Ballantyne attempts to occupy middle ground among the sides in this debate: a position that takes seriously pre-existing and continuing cultural and social formations, while defining a constitutive role for colonialism. He utilizes the notion of “points of recognition,” to enable him to define how “perceived commensurabilities between colonizer and a particular colonized community provided discourses and practices where colonial policy could gain purchase, creating new institutions and reshaping cultural patterns with the aim of shoring up imperial authority.” (26). This allows him to identify points of connection, while also calling attention to the ways in which “exchanges took place within the highly uneven power relations of developing colonialism,” such that “the ultimate outcome of these processes was to empower one group at the expense of the other” (28–29). Ballantyne is most effective in his qualification of existing ways of understanding how colonialism formed and was formed historically within specific examples, such as his presentation of the complexities of the interaction between colonial and Sikh portraits of Sikhism, and the different forces, including migration as well as reform, defining Sikhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (for example, 48, 166–67). Chapter two is central to the book’s position as a compass for future directions in Sikh Studies, articulating ways of moving “toward a mobile and transnational history of Sikhism” (33). Ballantyne hopes to make three interventions. Firstly, he hopes to expand the temporal frame usually examined in discussion of the Punjabi/British interaction, into the pre- and early annexation periods; secondly, he hopes to reconstruct the engagement of Punjabis and the British colonials, to rematerialize “the diverse sites and methods through which Punjabis and the colonial state engaged with each other” (37). In both cases, he does this very well for the British side, taking account of early British understandings of both Sikhism and religion in general (this latter point constitutes the third of his interventions, attention to the imagination of religion in the colonial contact zone) (41). Analysis of Punjabi and Sikh expressions and positions in this evolving process, however, is a missing piece that is essential to his effort to explicate the “growing investment of a range of Punjabi groups in a very particular vision of ‘religion’” (38) and the fuller dynamics of the Punjabi/British contact zone. Ballantyne’s work here will be fruitfully read alongside others’, such as that of Purnima Dhavan and Arvind Mandair.¹

The third and fourth chapters do an admirable job of explicating two exemplary “points of recognition” that demonstrate the dynamic interchange between colonial...