Table Of Content

Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] History and Theory 57, no. 2 (June 2018), 195-217 © Wesleyan University 2018 ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.12057 THERE IS NO COLONIAL RELATIONSHIP: ANTAGONISM, SIKHISM, AND SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES1 RAJBIR SINGH JUDGE ABSTRACT This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article fore- grounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reality that remains unable to be demarcated, this article examines the generative principles of Sikh practices and concepts that both structure Sikhism’s institutions and productively conceptualize this antagonism. Examining these concepts and practices, I consider the possibility of different modes of both historical being and becoming not bound within our current conceptual rubrics. These different possibilities culled through Sikh concepts and theories demand we reflect upon the rabble: those unable to be contained within colonial civil society or within attempts by the colonized for self-determination in political societies. This void then fractured Sikh reform organizations historically, providing multiple avenues for politics unaccountable within our bifurcated and asymmetrical understandings of civil society and political societies and colonizer and colonized. Keywords: Sikhism, postcolonial theory, Khalsa, South Asia, Punjab, subaltern studies, colonialism, empire INTRODUCTION The continual protests by Sikhs in order to articulate political demands both within and outside the structure of the colonial and Indian state reveal what Alain Badiou terms “an unnoticed possibility of the situation” by drawing our attention to what liberal politics seeks to resolve and, thus, annihilate: the dynamic nature of antagonism.2 But by antagonism, this article does not refer to a mere conflict between two poles, such as the conceptual binary that present-day scholars draw 1. I am indebted to those at the Naad Pargaas Institute in Amritsar for their encouragement and care while I was writing this article. I would specifically like to thank Jagdish Singh, Jaswinder Singh, and Sukhwinder Singh. For their feedback on previous versions of this essay, I am grateful to Reema Cherian, Omnia El Shakry, Elliott Harwell, Edward Pluth, Muneeza Rizvi, as well as History and Theory’s editors and anonymous reviewers. Financial support for my research came from the American Institute of Indian Studies. 2. Alain Badiou, “Seminar on Plato at the ENS,” February 13, 2008 (unpublished), cited in Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 27. Sikh protests did not begin in the twentieth century, but have been a continual historical occurrence as, for example, Sikhism’s relationship to state power—whether Mughal, British, or Indian—reveals. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] 196 RAJBIR SINGH JUDGE between tradition and modernity. In contrast, following the work of Slavoj Žižek, this article examines antagonism as constitutive of reality itself.3 Antagonism is not simply an oppositional conflict between two poles in which colonial modernity is an obstacle to the true expression of tradition. Nor is religion a retrograde remnant preventing modernity from achieving homeostasis, nor can scholars domesticate antagonism by resolving, settling, or comprehending the relation between tradition and modernity from a neutral standpoint, revealing the symbolic richness and/or multiplicity of history. Instead, antagonism is an enduring presence within social reality, a third originary point structuring the very form that both tradition and coloniality inhabit, while rendering the entire structure of that reality an impossibility. This enduring presence signals that there is no such thing as a colonial relationship.4 A relationship does not exist between two points as complementary, parallel, or conflictual; instead, an inaccessible and resistant impediment is knot- ted within the relationship, which not only renders impossible their premised bifurcations, but also opens a terrain for what difference will entail.5 This is not to say there are no colonial effects that inflect religion or that colonial structures have no effect in the global South, an obviously fallacious claim if we think of the world-historical relations of capitalism. Rather, I argue that we cannot organize colonial relationships in a manner that is not bound to fail, for antagonism is the very impossibility of achieving a structure that can render such relations between two poles resolvable. Or, as Joan Copjec argues, “the generative principle of a society [that is, antagonism] is never statable as such, the way the contents of that society are,” and, therefore, conflict, Copjec continues, “does not result from the clash between two different positions but from the fact that no position defines a 3. I posit that Žižek’s theoretical form is of great use, even though Žižek’s content is, as numer- ous scholars have noted, Orientalist and Eurocentric, upholding both Christianity and Europe as key sites for resistance, which denies, as Arvind-Pal Mandair notes, “the full consequences of [Žižek’s] own insights,” especially for post-colonial peoples. See Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press 2013), 405. 4. Here I follow Jacques Lacan, who argues “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship,” and Žižek, who argues “there is no class relationship.” Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 57, and Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 126. For Lacan, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” does not mean there are no sexual relations. Rather, with his provocative statement, Lacan signals how, as Žižek explains, “sexual difference is not a firm set of ‘static’ symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions, but the name of a deadlock, a trauma, an open question—something that resists every attempt at its symbolizations,” thereby rendering relationships, based on symbolic complementary or conflictual oppositions, failures (61). See Slavoj Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 5. For example, in relation to sexual difference, Žižek argues, “Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean.” Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference,” 61. See also Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, eds., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 111. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] ANTAGONISM, SIKHISM, AND SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 197 resolute identity.”6 Antagonism thus signals an impossibility, rather than a resolvable or comprehensible conflict between binary classifications.7 Highlighting the constitutive nature of antagonism through the injunction that “there is no such thing as a colonial relationship,” this article begins to conceptualize the impossibility of fully demarcating historical parameters and horizons, thereby revealing an unaccountable and heterogeneous excess that creates continuous possibilities, rather than deferrals, that can shift the normative coordinates of closure that demarcate our historical analyses. More specifically, this article examines the absence and dislocation of antagonism in studies of the Sikh tradition and South Asian studies more broadly. Rerouting the coordinates of antagonism, I center the impossibility that structured, and structures, both colonialism and Sikhism by emphasizing the importance of Sikhism’s founda- tional interpretive principles, which productively elaborate in the present, and elaborated historically, a way to grapple with antagonism and the inherent limita- tions of a given historical moment’s symbolic registers. In other words, the generative principles of Sikhism, by theorizing the impossibility and incoherence of society as such, continually articulate and have historically demonstrated the possibility of acts that cannot be assimilated into colonial structures, including history. In this article, I foreground these Sikh theories and concepts and their interplay with Sikhism’s practices and institutions in order to consider the possibility of different modes of both Sikh being and becoming that remain irreducible to historical context. I then explore Sikhism’s conceptual form by examining relationships among Sikhs, colonial civil society, and their political institutions in the twentieth century, considering the impossible voice of the rabble, the constitutive void, embedded within the necessarily fractured Sikh political societies. By reconsidering the theoretical structure of Sikhism as antagonistic and tracing this recalcitrant surplus conceptual logic of Sikhi,8 this article emphasizes the multiple destabilizing and transformative dynamics of tradition historically in order to disclose the radically unaccountable (im)possibilities for politics in the present. DISLOCATING ANTAGONISM Scholars have astutely noted the tension between tradition and colonialism in Sikh studies, but they locate antagonism as occurring largely between these two particular poles. By demarcating antagonism as occurring between coloniality and Sikhism, scholars have then looked to resolve, or at the very least compre- hend, this antagonism by: (1) conceptualizing the traumatic encounter as one that led to the formation of an aporetic “Sikhi-sm” that needs deconstruction; (2) revealing an authentic Sikhism’s resistance to colonialism by emphasizing a singular Sikh identity’s historical victories over nefarious Western, Muslim, Hindu, 6. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 10, 18. 7. For more on Copjec and Žižek in postcolonial thought, see Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 8. I use the term Sikhi to highlight the tension in the attempt to conscript Sikhi into a religion as Sikhism. Sikhi remains the common signifier for Sikhs to refer to the corpus of ideas and practices that constitute the Sikh tradition. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] 198 RAJBIR SINGH JUDGE and “deviant” Sikh forces; (3) disclosing the transformation of a fluid Sikh tradition into a Western episteme that constructed a Khalsa orthodoxy; or (4) uncov- ering excess content (Punjabiyat) within this divide that challenges the rigidity of both poles.9 Scholars have continued to locate antagonism between colonial modernity and Sikhi in the present by observing how the tension is reproduced in Sikh relationships with the modern Indian nation-state. This relationship is stitched into the partition of the South Asian subcontinent in 1947 and Operation Blue Star, in which the Indian state desecrated one of the holiest Sikh spaces, Darbar Sahib, in 1984. Work on precolonial Sikh history and literature also locates antagonism between modernity and tradition as scholars seek to recover Sikhism within a prior fluid affective community, in order to avert the discrete rigidity of a modern tradition.10 Scholars have noted how this fluidity persists as a continuous presence within modernity, thereby conceptually reinforcing the historical bifurcation between tradition and modernity. For example, scholars have described the inter- actions between colonial modernity and tradition as producing entanglements and hybrid formations through, as Anne Murphy writes, the “dynamic interaction of colonial interests and administration and the preexisting Sikh commitment to the commemoration of the Sikh past.”11 Highlighting the “complex” dynamism of entanglements, Murphy looks to overcome the colonizer–colonized binary with still more hybrid classifications, attempting to delineate the antagonistic element that makes the relation between the two impossible through continual refine- ment and excavation of the originary binary between colonial modernity and tradition. Through this persistent fine-tuning of the presumed relation between modernity and tradition, Sikh institutions and sites remain ordered, for historians can inscribe Sikh movements and relationships within an episteme, permanently settled in between two poles, though perhaps unevenly distributed, and rendered symbolically coherent and understandable. The principles of Sikhi are one example, however, that demands we reject the coherent and settled construction of historical reality and its hollow promise of a symbolic world that enables us to recover the true (decolonial or authentic) kernel of tradition through our historical categories of analysis. Rather, in contrast to privileging these utopias recovered or discovered, by coupling Sikhi’s conceptual form manifested within the continued practices of the population, we can instead revel in possibilities brought forth by tradition’s irresolvable form, its governing principles, which, in Sikhi’s case, productively foreground antagonism. In other words, once we reject this relationship between colonial officials (armed with their technologies of governance such as translation alongside the 9. For example, see Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West; Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, Insights into Sikh Religion and History (Chandigarh: Singh & Singh, 1992); Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, and Practice, ed. Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). 10. Purnima Dhavan, When Sparrows Became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699–1799 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 11. Anne Murphy, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] ANTAGONISM, SIKHISM, AND SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 199 conceptual framework it entailed) contra the Sikh population (reordered through interpellation, resisting its hailing, or outside its very logic) as the location of antagonism, then within this impossible gap, outside absolute knowledge and utter loss, there emerges the antagonistic and incorporable voice of Sikhi, the “rabble” that reveals the incoherence and failure of ideological fantasy and desire.12 Indeed, just as Hegel encounters his impossibility, as Frank Ruda reveals, in the particularity of the rabble who disclose a latent potential universality that Marx locates within the proletariat, historiography about Sikhism and South Asia encounters its limits in the unaccountable conceptual principles of Sikhism and the politics of antagonism it continuously brings forth.13 This impossibility that structures politics, the space of indeterminacy that Hegel provides within his productive inability to categorize the rabble within the West, is precisely what the Subaltern Studies Collective pinpoints about colonial civil society highlighting this double failure in the colony.14 With and against Marx, the collective then provides us with a potent methodology to eschew modular formations of the political. The collective has shown how these modular forms not only impoverish the political, but also continually eradicate their own impossibility through the reproduction, for example, of dichotomous histories and politics centered around coloniality and its game of appropriation and coun- ter-appropriation, which compels us to enjoy, for example, postcolonial politics and its nativist past.15 The danger of subaltern studies then lies not in producing historical narrative while riding two horses (Marxism and deconstruction) at once, as Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook intimate, but the collective’s simple “I would prefer not to” to the very question of riding—rendering incoher- ent the very structure of riding, historiography, itself.16 By locating their analysis within this negative excess element located outside the very categorization and coordinates of conventional historiography based on continuities and ruptures, subaltern studies, under the name of the “subaltern,” confronts us, as Ruda writes about the Hegelian rabble, “with a logic of (a different) politics which bursts [below] the philosophical frame of its description.”17 12. As Žižek writes, “Fantasy is basically a scenario filling out the empty space of a fundamental impossibility, a screen masking a void,” masking antagonism. Therefore, fantasy is a necessary corollary to antagonism for “fantasy is precisely the way the antagonistic fissure is masked.” Fantasy thus creates a vision of society that is not marked by antagonism, creating “a society in which the relation between its parts is organic, complementary” (Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 126). Indeed, the four logics of the colonial relationship create such complementary relations, existing as fantasies masking antagonism. For more, see Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology. 13. Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (New York: Continuum, 2011). 14. The Subaltern Studies Collective refers to both the intellectual project and editorial collective of the Subaltern Studies series. For an excellent overview on the breadth and influence of subaltern studies, see Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994), 1475-1490. 15. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambiridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 16. Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (Jan. 1992), 167. 17. Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble, 168. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] 200 RAJBIR SINGH JUDGE However, though providing a name for this indeterminate logic, which—following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—is trapped between the white savior and nativist pride and thus cannot speak, subaltern studies at times does not properly attend to its consequences.18 Christian Novetzke, in his compelling article “The Subaltern Numen,” argues that this flaw emerges due to the “antagonistic dialectic in modern historiography between religion and history” in which religion functions as a mode of rationality that is an antithesis to modern historical thinking.19 Novetzke posits that though this antagonism between religion and history enables the collective to critique modernity by using the antithetical nature of religion within their historical analyses, it also signals a weakness in their theorization because of, Novetzke argues, religion’s “indeterminacy, its ‘emptiness’ as a category in theorizing about the subaltern, linked with the difficulty for modern history to incorporate a narrative of supernatural agency into historical explanation.”20 I think Novetzke is asking us to consider how subaltern studies’ flaws emerge because the collective locates antagonism strictly between the two poles of religion and modernity. In doing so, the collective is not able to properly conceptualize tradition because modern historical writing cannot acknowledge the constitutive nature of antagonism within tradition’s form. Since absence within tradition’s form is dislocated, religion is then reduced to cultural heritage located within the historical content of the subaltern that is placed as oppositional to modernity, absenting antagonism and its attendant lack within tradition. Once this absence, or lack, is rendered as a stable cultural heritage, which exists as antithetical to modernity, religion is domesticated into modern historical form. In other words, this heritage becomes an object of desire for the historian that covers the inherent lack revealed by the subaltern. This production of historical coherence and meaning—through, for example, cultural heritage—cultivates an enjoyment that both stifles and assimilates the openness that undergirds the historical process into currently available frameworks, such as the antagonism between tradition and modernity. However, the fact that the void of subalternity is still there, precisely as an absence and resistant to historical form, renders impossible this very binary, continuously revealing the unintelligibility and failure of history and context, rather than their panoptical reach. It would be quite negligent to ignore that the collective has continuously and brilliantly articulated this very dilemma over the course of the past thirty years. Spivak famously demonstrates this subaltern lack, demanding that we consider “the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject” and its “irretrievable consciousness,” which becomes doubled in relation to sexual difference.21 Gyan Prakash too posits that subalternity signals a lack. He adeptly argues, “we should understand subalternity as an abstraction used in order to identify the intractability that sur- faces inside the dominant system—it signifies that which the dominant discourse 18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. 19. Christian Lee Novetzke, “The Subaltern Numen: Making History in the Name of God,” History of Religions 46, no. 2 (2006), 102. 20. Ibid., 122. 21. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 287. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] ANTAGONISM, SIKHISM, AND SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 201 cannot appropriate completely, an otherness that resists containment.”22 Though this intractability, Prakash continues, “fail[s] to satisfy the discipline’s desire for completeness and positivist reconstruction,” it “opens possibilities for history- writing as a critical practice.”23 Thus, in the collective’s work, though subalternity does indeed remain a site for pure heterogeneity, the subaltern, the rabble, also emerges existing as an antagonism itself, for the (im)possible voice of the subaltern exists as a void unable to be adjudicated into modern historical form. As a consequence, what emerges in the subaltern’s indeterminacy is not simply different content, in which the past continuously overlaps, as Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, “in taste, in practices of embodiment, in the cultural training the senses have received over generations”24 that can then lead to what Spivak describes as “the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized spaces.”25 Neither does subalternity reveal only, as Chakrabarty writes, a signpost revealing “the limits of the discourse of history.”26 Indeed, subaltern pasts are not simply the numinous, functioning, Novetzske argues, as a “limit point, a vista on the immense space of lifeworlds inaccessible to scholarly inquiry and hence a compelling destination.”27 Instead, rather than simply dwelling in history’s heterogeneity and limits, the deadlock signaled by the rabble, this antagonism offers an opportunity to radically transform the structuring principles of historicity itself. The affirmation of subalternity, the rabble, demands that we both construct and examine a different mode of subaltern history—a mode in which the form (gurmat) of Sikhi can no longer be absented in favor of either secular historicity and its overvaluation of historical context or a numinous history that reveals the limits of understanding.28 In contrast, this conceptual subaltern history requires us to include and examine such a formal structure of a tradition. For traditions do not simply render antagonism governing social reality as a threshold, leaving it indeterminate, unable to be articulated or analyzed abstractly.29 Nor do traditions, as Renata Salecl reminds us, simply repeat corresponding parallel understandings of impossibility, for cultural forms deal with and render antagonism in dissimilar ways.30 Therefore, instead of strictly delineating limits and heterogeneity in relation to historical content, we also need to explore: what constitutes the formal level of a tradition? What are its internal consistencies and logics (such as its 22. Gyan Prakash, “The Impossibility of Subaltern History,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 2 (2000), 288. 23. Ibid., 294. 24. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 251. 25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 310. 26. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 110. 27. Novetzke, “The Subaltern Numen,” 125. 28. For the colonial genealogy that inflects into the concept of gurmat through the term “theology,” see Arvind Mandair, “The Politics of Nonduality: Reassessing the Work of Transcendence in Modern Sikh Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 3 (2006), 646-673. 29. Achille Mbembe, for example, argues, “Fluctuations and indeterminacy do not necessarily amount to lack of order. Every representation of an unstable world cannot automatically be subsumed under the heading ‘chaos’.” See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8. 30. Renata Salecl, (Per)Versions of Love and Hate (New York: Verso, 1998), 134. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] 202 RAJBIR SINGH JUDGE own rendering of heterogeneity and limit)? How does this form that tradition constructs and inhabits continually articulate and efface the point of its own impossibility, oscillating between its plenitude and loss? Talal Asad’s work productively grapples with these questions by reconsidering the very form of the Islamic tradition, tracing it genealogically through its founding principles.31 Following Asad, though in the South Asian context, Anand Pandian’s work also demands that we couple the persistent conceptual vitality of tradition with the impossibility of coherence while remaining attentive to the continuities of conflict within tradition.32 In that vein, this article argues that the Sikh tradition considers and provides an opportunity to consider the traumatic presence of antagonism without recourse to our current historical bifurcations. The abstract principles within the Sikh tradition, the parameters of Sikhi, provide concepts to theorize “lack” in a manner that does not fill the inaccessible gap introduced by the subaltern with content (cultural heritage) a necessary corollary of secular historicity, nor is it simply numinous, unable to be rendered intelligible. In contrast, these principles—Sikh concepts (which are conjuncturally embodied)—overflow our current historical categories of analysis rather than simply functioning within the parameters of our understanding. Or, to rephrase, Sikh principles, though displaced from the social whole, provide us interpretive tools through which we can conceptualize lack and alterity against heterogeneous content, unspeakable limits, and intelligible wholeness that dominate historical analysis in the present.33 This conceptual excess, therefore, reveals there are not only two types of histories, as Chakrabarty details, in which the universality of History 1, “histories posited by capital,” is deferred by various History 2s, histories that do not belong to capital’s “life process,” interrupting its totalizing thrusts and providing an opportunity to claim historical difference. Amy Hollywood asks us a similar question, writing: “if historians pursue alternative histories, taking seriously claims to divine agency within history, to what extent will the emancipatory nar- ratives of what Chakrabarty no doubt too dichotomously refers to as History 1 be disrupted in ways that render it unrecognizable?”34 This disruption becomes clear through this excess that continually bursts through the gap between the asymmetrical, and ultimately failed, relationship between the too dichotomous History 1 and History 2. In other words, by delineating History into two, Chakrabarty’s 31. Talal Asad’s understanding of tradition enables us to consider antagonism productively. See Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986). For more on Asad and his relation to antagonism, see Rajbir Singh Judge, “A Sublime Inheritance?: A Review Essay of Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir’s Punjab Reconsidered” in Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World Review, November 5, 2015. https://sctiw.org/sctiw-review/anshu-malhotra-and-farina-mir-punjab-reconsidered-history-culture-and-practice-reviewed-by-rajbir-singh-judge (accessed March 16, 2018). 32. Anand Pandian, “Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms and Fractures in the Ethics of South India,” American Ethnologist 35, no. 3 (2008), 470. Pandian does, however, in contrast, call our attention to tradition’s plurality. 33. I follow Stefania Pandolfo, who questions “whether to restore intelligibility is necessary to postulate coherence.” Stefania Pandolfo, “‘The Burning’: Finitude and the Politico-Theological Imagination of Illegal Migration,” Anthropological Theory 7, no. 3 (2007), 331. 34. Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 127. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected] ANTAGONISM, SIKHISM, AND SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 203 conceptualization continues the tendencies historians have in which modernity and tradition exist in conflict with each other, revising each other in an unequal war. In contrast, what emerges through the subaltern is not the inflection into History 1 by History 2, enabling us to recover a plural historical content, but a third, unrecognizable nonplace: antagonism. This antagonistic void shifts Chakrabarty’s bifurcation and reveals the structural impossibility of historicity altogether. Indeed, Chakrabarty’s bifurcation between History 1 and its partial object, the cultural heritage embedded within History 2, though subsumed under the history of capital, does not reveal multiplicity of time or, as he writes later, “an irreducible plurality,” but the antagonistic deadlock that structures, sur- rounds, and gives rise to the failed two, not incorporable in secular historicity.35 Rethinking the form of the Sikh tradition through subalternity also requires us to reconsider the recent trend in South Asian studies highlighted by the work of Andrew Sartori, which similarly calls for a return to thinking about historical forms without reproducing the colonizer/colonized binary. Seeking to respect the specificity of the colonial context while still locating “that specificity within a historically determinate form of conceptual universality,” Sartori provides a framework that reveals how tradition and the “continuity of [its] transmission has been necessarily fractured by its incorporation into capitalist structures of social interdependency.”36 This incorporation occurs through an autonomous “singular, broadly pan-European modern culture concept” that is “a historically specific form of semantic universality, contingent upon the operation of capitalist social forms that at once reconstitute the preconditions for the continuance of everyday life.”37 By working within this global cultural concept and its multiple registers, Sartori argues that Bengalis were not “stupid or duped,” rather, they misrecog- nized “the global structures of capitalist society” that rendered “the culturalist imagination meaningful as a lens for thinking about self and society.”38 This culturalist form, however, Sartori argues, does not render historical subjects “abject flotsam of an economic infrastructure,” but led to “distinct and even potentially contradictory political and ethical projects (for example, liberal reform and cultural renewal) that draws upon the potentialities of different moments of the total social process.”39 Though recognizing the importance of form that cannot be divided into a colonizer and colonized binary, Sartori nevertheless eliminates the constitutive role of antagonism that underlies the colonial project and capitalist development. Or, as Žižek diligently reveals, ideological critique is a two-part process. So although Sartori does ably “discern in an apparently universal, unchangeable limitation the ideological ‘reification’ and absolutization of a certain contingent historical constellation,” he neglects to acknowledge the very failure of this absolutization: that there remains something that “cannot be interpreted away as the outcome of ideological manipulation, of the ‘false consciousness’ due to the social situation of 35. Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe, 108. 36. Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 21. 37. Ibid., 47. 38. Ibid., 5. 39. Ibid., 232. Sri Satguru Jagjit Singh Ji eLibrary [email protected]