A talk by Rajbir Judge (CSU, Long Beach) on his new book,
Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia
Time: 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Location: Room 208 Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont
Discussant: Hafsa Kanjwal (Lafayette College)
How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab.
Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British annexed the Sikh kingdom and, eventually, exiled its child maharaja, Duleep Singh, to England. In the 1880s, Singh embarked on an abortive attempt to restore the lost Sikh kingdom. Judge explores not only Singh’s efforts but also the Sikh people’s responses—the dreams, fantasies, and hopes that became attached to the Khalsa Raj. He shows how a community engaged military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice in order to contest colonial politics. This book argues that Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not simply looking to recuperate the past but to remake it—and to dwell within loss instead of transcending it—and in so doing opened new possibilities.
Bringing together Sikh tradition, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought, Prophetic Maharaja provides bracing insights into concepts of sovereignty and the writing of history.
Rajbir Singh Judge is an Assistant Professor of History and Associate Member of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. He specializes in intellectual and cultural history of South Asia with a particular emphasis on Punjab and the Sikh tradition. He received a PhD in History at University of California, Davis, and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University (2018-2020) In the 24-25 Academic Year, he is at the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His first book, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia, was published in September 2024 by Columbia University Press.
Hafsa Kanjwal is Associate Professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench a colonial occupation of Kashmir by India in the aftermath of Partition. Prof. Kanjwal has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including the Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC.
