Abstract

Singh examines the complex links that connect the history of the Sikhs in colonial India both to the Khalistani movement and to diasporic politics in multicultural Britain and the United States today. He reviews two books, The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of the Sikh Diaspora by Brian Axel (Duke UP, 2001) and Tony Ballantyne’s Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Duke UP, 2006). Singh praises these texts for breaking “with the trend of producing case studies of individual or highly localized collective experiences in an attempt to grapple with the cultural interconnections that are foundational to the Sikh diaspora” and for highlighting “the effects of the performative enunciation of cultural claims.” But he also argues that the sociohistorical structures that allow for such articulation are less of a concern in these analyses than they should have been. In the course of his rich analysis, Singh argues that both Axel and Ballantyne anachronistically project the current identity concerns of the Sikh diaspora, embodied in the ambivalent figure of Maharajah Duleep Singh, backward onto the history of the colonialism in Punjab as well as onto the subsequent rise of Indian nationalism, to ill effect. He joins Axel in asking what constitutes a diaspora, and he examines the usefulness of Ballantyne’s claim that the continued emphasis on Khalistan in Sikh studies effaces the “politics of the everyday,” the more mundane but equally important cross-cultural dilemmas that confront diasporic Sikhs—an observation that has a more general application in diaspora studies as a whole.

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