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

As a highly respected scholar and innovator in transnational and colonial history, Tony Ballantyne is particularly well equipped to write a history of Sikhism. As he is at pains to point out, though, Between Colonialism and Diaspora is not an exhaustive history of Sikhism but an exploration of key issues in Sikhism and how that past has been narrated. The study moves away from the tradition of viewing colonialism and diaspora as discrete analytical fields of research and challenges the scholarship that studies Sikh communities separately at home and abroad in favour of a multi-locational global history.

Many of the limitations of the history of the Sikh diaspora identified in the book are equally applicable to the sociological and anthropological scholarship on South Asian diaspora that has traditionally limited itself almost exclusively to settlers rather than sojourners. Attempts to reconstruct early diaspora Sikh histories have been hampered by lack of archival sources. Ballantyne employs many unconventional historical sources including internet sites, nightclubs, and graveyards rather than focusing exclusively on textual sources and citing liberally from secondary sources.

Chapter 1 contextualises the book within Sikh historiography including internalist, externalist, regional, diasporic, and Khalsacentric. Chapter 2 rehearses Ballantyne's influential "webs of empire" model from his earlier publication Orientalism and Race (2002) but also extends the focus on imperial webs to connect Sikhs with the British imperial world and migrant networks through a simultaneous discussion of nineteenth-century policy towards the Punjab, British understanding and representation of Sikhism as a religion in the Victorian period, and the rise of an early Sikh diaspora. Chapter 3 analyses Maharajah Dalip Singh and the contested nature of how he was claimed and rejected in 1990s Britain. The last substantive chapter before the epilogue examines the postcolonial history of Bhangra in Britain as one of cultural exchange and interaction between two postcolonial diasporic cultures: Punjabi and Afro-Caribbean, resulting in "Black Bhangra." The impact of Paul Gilroy's outstanding Black Atlantic (1993) is clearly discernable throughout the study and in particular within this penultimate chapter, which charts the transformation of Bhangra from a rural spring festival dance to an urban diasporic cultural formation. One wishes, however, that Ballantyne had made more of the dominance of north Indian popular culture, both in the subcontinent through Bollywood and Bhangra and particularly in diaspora where the regional cultures of other South Asians are less prominent.

Both internal and external migration accelerated under imperialism in South Asia. Migration in the colonial period also enabled Sikhs to forge connections with other mobile South Asians such as Sindhis, and it nationalised Sikhs, transforming them into Indians. Nevertheless, despite a reference to the "imperial world" in the book's subtitle and Ballantyne's emphasis on empire and its legacies, Between Colonialism and Diaspora also performs a dual purpose in constructing and representing Sikhism not just in the colonial period, but in relation to the postcolonial world.

Readers of Victorian Studies will be most interested by chapter 2, which ends with World War I, and by Ballantyne's study of the English village of Elveden, former residence of the popular Victorian icon, Maharaja Dalip Singh. In the 1990s, the village became a battleground over definitions of Britishness for both British Sikhs, who viewed it as a centre of religious and historical pilgrimage and community history and the "countryside movement," who saw it as a repository of white rural heritage. Thus these "memory battles" over Britain's Victorian past and Singh's visibility within and erasure from it expose conflicts between rural and urban, diversity and homogeneity. Singh also disrupts the myth of an uniquely urban South Asian presence through his embodiment of Victorian rural masculinity, an image that reveals the cultural parallels between colonial court life in the Punjab and the aristocratic pursuit of blood sports in imperial Britain.

One of the many strengths of the book is its...