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The Nation's Tortured Body

Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh "Diaspora"

Duke University Press

the maharaja's glorious body

We wish to remember a period of history common to us both [Sikhs and British] which saw a sovereign, independent Sikh Nation signing a treaty of friendship with the British Government, and to highlight the significant contributions of the Maharajah [Duleep Singh] and his family to Suffolk and Norfolk. –Nanaksar That Isher Darbar, Maharaja Duleep Singh Century Festival, 1993

How can we break that wish and vow to our beloved Maharaja? Having expressed his resolve before his grave to achieve and fight to the last, no Sikh can turn back. [We] will keep this vow. "We go into the fight, come what may to achieve our beloved Sikh Homeland KHALISTAN." The lesson we learn from our history is that disunity, jealousy and greed ruin a brave and respectable community, and illustrates the old proverb: "United we stand, divided we fall." –Khalistani Commando Force, 1993

Of Surrender and Visibility

Maharaja Duleep Singh (1838-93) is remembered by Sikhs all over the world as the last Sikh ruler of Punjab. He was the youngest of the seven sons of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whom Sikhs memorialized even more than Duleep Singh. Maharaja Ranjit Singh was the "Lion of Punjab" and the great leader who, for the only time in Sikh history, established the Khalsa Raj, a Sikh empire. Between 1799 and 1839, Maharaja Runjeet Singh consolidated a territory that, before him, had been a "cockpit for foreign armies contending for the sovereignty of Hindustan" (Khushwant Singh [1989] 1991, 3). On one side of his territory, he fought off the Afghans, and, on the other side, he signed treaties of friendship with the British. After Maharaja Ranjit Singh's death in 1839, however, there followed a series of disputes in which one contender after another emerged claiming the throne. The seriously weakened polity was made more so by the threat of invasion from the formerly friendly British. In 1843, an extremely anxious time for the Sikh polity, Duleep Singh ascended to the throne at the age of five: several different Sikh armies, aligned with other claimants to the throne, were already at war, and the British had already begun their plans to invade.

Sikh men had come to be known as extremely courageous soldiers and the strongest challenge to the British. On 24 March 1849, when the East India Company, taking advantage of the weakened Sikh Empire, finally conquered Punjab–the last of the great territories to resist colonial rule–the battle was hailed as one of the empire's greatest triumphs. By this time, colonial acts of appropriation had taken on a unique character; indeed, they were often orchestrated as grand spectacles. The ensuing scene of surrender, on 24 March 1849 in Ferozpore, was perhaps the most spectacular the British had witnessed in India. Governor-General Dalhousie, the director of the spectacle, wrote to Queen Victoria, describing the event in order to include the absent monarch in the "experience" of taking possession:

All the prisoners were brought safe into our camp. Forty-one pieces of artillery were given up. Chuttur Singh and Shere Singh, with all the Sirdars, delivered their swords to General Gilbert in the presence of his officers and the remains of the Sikh army, 16,000 strong, were marched into camp, by 1000 at a time, and laid down their arms as they passed between the lines of the British troops. Your majesty may well imagine the pride with which the British Officers looked on such a scene, and witnessed this absolute subjection and humiliation of so powerful an enemy.... Many of [the Sikhs] ... exclaimed as they threw their arms down upon the heap: "This day Runjeet Singh has died!" (emphasis added; Benson and Esher 1907,257-58)

The colonial scene of surrender contains certain elements of "the examination," about which Foucault (1977) has written. Foucault directs us to the military review of Louis XIV, on 15 March 1666, a ceremony of discipline in which the examination reaches its ultimate expression. Fifteen thousand men are held at attention, presenting arms, for one hour–a crucial moment, Foucault claims, in the history of disciplinary power. The ostentatious and compulsory visibility of the subjects, now presented as objects, is met with the all too palpable power of a sovereignty that is exercised through its invisibility: "They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only felt its effects–in replica, as it were–on their bodies, which had become precisely legible and docile" (p. 188). This ritual of objectification is accompanied by other rituals that capture and fix those bodies and relate them to new formations of knowledge. Situated within a network of visual representation, writing, registration, and archival documentation, these "legible and docile" bodies, for Foucault, give birth to that celebrated sign of modernity, the individual.

The colonial scene of surrender, however, contains certain elements that the Foucauldian examination lacks. Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) argue that "colonialism has been as much a matter of the politics of perception and experience as it has been an exercise in formal governance" (p. 5). In this meeting of perception, experience, and governance, colonial domination enlists and transforms both visibility and recognition in the dialectical production of an "us" and "them." Constituted between the invisibility of the sovereign, the visibility of British troops, and the distinctive visibility of the bodies of the conquered, the surrender, this celebration of colonial discipline, turns upon what I will call an enchantment of absolute humiliation. In this case, brought into the relations of surrender, Sikhs are at once transformed into prisoners and liberated as new colonial subjects. The enchantment of humiliation, with the liberal project of enlightenment, opens the way, one might argue, for the "generosity" and "respect" accorded the ideal colonial subject: "a class of persons," in Macaulay's famous words, "Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect" (Macaulay quoted in de Bary 1958, 49). And, around this humiliation, the old interest in bodies, documentary techniques, and visual representation is renewed, or perhaps reconstituted, in a new form of governmentality. As a historically specific act of domination, the colonial scene of surrender outlines new demands of both seeing and being seen.

Surrender offers one beginning for a historical anthropology of the Sikh diaspora. This is not because Sikhs have a "persecution complex," as some commentators ineloquently muse (I. J. Singh 1994; Khushwant Singh [1989] 1991). Nor is it because the Sikh community is unified in the momentousness of the surrender's mass trauma. And, with the analytic of surrender, I certainly do not intend to counter, or "correct," present-day Khalistani claims that Sikhs have never surrendered (see chaps. 2 and 5). Through the enchantment of absolute humiliation, in its innumerable repetitions, and in its obsessive procedures of knowledge production, the colonial scene of surrender inaugurates a new relation of identification productive of a Sikh "people" (Balibar 1991)–one that has been reconstituted over and again in the vicissitudes of multicultural England, in the changing formations of the Indian nation-state, in practices and representations of torture, and in the discourses of 1990s Khalistanis. The surrender is a historically specific transformative relation that, through violent processes of appropriation, elevates the "individual" into the domain of representation. For my purposes, the colonial surrender points to a complex of processes that figures into the formation of the colonial Sikh subject, the effects of which may now seem a commonplace: the identification of a Sikh subject by the "distinctive," and "distinctively" gendered, image of the male Sikh body. Today, the postcolonial Sikh diaspora is marked with this indelible imprint of coloniality.

This is not to say that the colonial encounter either created a specific way of visualizing Sikh "identity" ex nihilo or invented visuality itself. When the East India Company finally took possession of Punjab in 1849, a series of practices had already been emerging around the visual recognition of the male Sikh body, although this body was in no way a monolithic site of signification, as Oberoi (1994) has clearly demonstrated. One historical precedent, the ceremony of initiation into the "order of the Khalsa," tells of the production of what is known as the amritdhari body. Amritdhari means "one who has taken amrit" (i.e., one who has been initiated into the Khalsa). The founding of this initiation is attributed to the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, in 1699.

Two aspects of the Khalsa initiation ceremony are extremely important for my discussion in this and subsequent chapters: first, the initiation introduces a moment of rupture that, in order to constitute a new Sikh subject, abolishes the relevance of all prior forms of identity or affiliation; second, the ceremony moves through a series of techniques and enunciations that explicitly emphasize "the importance of a visible identity, one which makes it impossible for any Sikh to remain anonymous or concealed" (emphasis added; McLeod 1984,73). The ceremony accomplishes this, on the one hand, by constituting a body as a Sikh body that is whole (devoid of piercings or scarification) and displays certain adornments and, on the other, by immediately connecting that body to a new kinship and lineage structure originating at a specific location in Punjab. In other words, the Khalsa initiation refers to a specific process that transforms the individual into a representative–and the body into a representation–of a Sikh collectivity. One of the most important sources of knowledge production for this initiation ceremony is the Sikh Rahit Maryada, which intends to portray the original initiation created by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699. Composed between 1931 and 1951, the Rahit Maryada continues to be used today and is regarded as the definitive rendition of the Khalsa initiation. Let me quote W. H. McLeod's (1984) translation at length:

Any man or woman who affirms belief in the Sikh faith and vows to live according to its principles may receive initiation, regardless of nationality, previous creed, or caste.... They should bathe and wash their hair, and should present themselves wearing all five Khalsa symbols [see below].... No symbols associated with other faiths may be worn. The head must be covered, but not with a hat or cap. Ear-rings and nose ornaments must not be worn.... One of the five officiants should then address those who are seeking initiation ... : "The Sikh faith requires you to abandon the worship of man-made objects.... [Other requirements are mentioned as well.] ... Do you gladly accept this faith?" [After drinking the sacred water (amrit) and repeating the basic credal statement (mul mantra),] one of the five officiants should then expound the Rahit as follows: "As from today you are 'born to the Guru and freed from rebirth.' You are now a member of the Khalsa. Guru Gobind Singh is your spiritual father and Sahib Kaur your spiritual mother. Your birthplace is Keshgarh Sahib and your home is Anandpur Sahib. Because you are all children of the same father you are spiritual brothers.... You must renounce your former lineage, occupation, and religious affiliation. This means you should put aside all concern for caste, status, birth, country and religion, for you are now exclusively a member of the sublime Khalsa." (emphasis added; pp. 83-84)

The evidence par excellence that one has undergone initiation into the Khalsa is provided by specific signs that are displayed on the male Sikh body (this despite the possibility that women may also display these signs [cf. Jakobsh 1996; Mahmood 1996; McLeod 1996; Nikky Singh 1993]). These signs (or "symbols") are called the Five Ks (panj kakke or panj kakar), and, conjoining to designate the gendered figure, they delimit the total body of what is called the amritdhari Sikh. In one of many books on Sikh history, W. H. McLeod (1989a) describes these bodily adornments succinctly: "The Five Ks are the five items, each beginning with the letter 'k,' which every initiated member of the Khalsa must wear. Most prominent of the five is the kes or uncut hair. The other four are the comb which is worn in the topknot of the uncut hair (kangha), the steel bangle (kara), the sword or dagger (kirpan), and the distinctive shorts (kacch)" (p. 45).

We may note immediately that the turban–one of the most important signs today constituting the identification of the gendered Sikh body as "distinctive"–is not included among the Five Ks of the amritdhari. For the provenance of this image, we must look to another precolonial historical precedent, one provided by artists from the Kangra and Guler regions who, between the late eighteenth century and the 1830s, were patronized by Sikh sardars (or, as Dalhousie referred to them, "Sirdars") (Archer 1966; Aryan 1977). Their compositions depicted Sikh sardars in a variety of situations: on horseback on the hunt or in the battlefield, sitting surrounded by henchmen in darbar, and carousing with Guler or Kangra women. These sardars invariably bore the signs of their status: highly ornamented turbans, jewels on armbands, hunting birds. They also sat with relaxed posture and gesture on elevated thrones or cushions with people around them sitting on the floor (Archer 1966, pis. 1-99). In the early 1800s, Punjabi artists began to portray Sikh sardars with British administrators (one example is the Jodhpuri artist Jeevan Ram's 1832 piece depicting Ranjit Singh and Governor-General Bentinck) (Aryan 1977, 16).

Since these portraits were displayed in royal courts, the only people who could possibly have viewed them were individuals with access to particular positions of power. It is likely that these visual representations became necessary for the constitution of a certain kind of Sikh subject–the sardar–that had specific characteristics. These representations did not celebrate any notion of a Sikh religion or valorize the Five Ks. Rather, they celebrated the status and political power of different Sikh sardars who bore the iconographic signs of their status: most important, the highly ornamented turban, but also the relaxed posture and gesture, the jewels on armbands, and jeweled swords.

Within Sikh studies, the historical, religious, and symbolic features of the Five Ks, as well as the use of the turban to cover the hair, have been debated continually. Many scholars have argued that the widespread practice of the Khalsa initiation, and the knowledge of its details, is an effect of either the practices of colonial military recruitment (which required that all Sikh soldiers undergo the ceremony) or the Singh Sabha movement (which introduced an attempt to codify the tenets of Sikhism), or both (cf. Barrier 1970, 1979,1986,1989; Cohn 1996; Fox 1985; Kerr 1988; McLeod 1989a, 1989b; Oberoi 1994). According to such widely differing discussions, which are cogently argued, these two late-nineteenth-century trajectories provided a model for present-day religious and military practices in India (e.g., the Indian army has had its own Sikh-only regiments, which are themselves subdivided by caste affiliation [cf. Ali 1988; Cohen 1971; Farwell 1989]).

It is not my intention to detail these very important formulations, which have set a precedent for the present study. They have demonstrated how extremely necessary it is to specify, not only what effects colonialism may have had on the production of a visible form of recognition of the Sikh subject, but also what historical moments affected those productions differently. What these studies have not addressed, however, is telling. Here we may follow the lead of Nikky Singh (1993), who observes: "The male principle has dominated Sikh studies" (p. 243). With only a few very important exceptions (Jakobsh 1996; Mahmood 1996; McLeod 1996; Nikky Singh 1993), scholars of Sikh history deploy the generic terms Sikh and Sikhs to indicate their object of study when, for the most part, their discussions center on the constitutive practices of Sikh men. Conversely, and regardless of any critique of the colonial construction of the Sikh body, they use images of the amritdhari Sikh man, with beard and turban–positioned on book covers, as frontispieces, and within texts–to stand in for all Sikhs. Within a peculiar, yet seemingly quite banal, logic of signification, "Sikh" and "Sikhs" have come to signify "Sikh men" (a form of signification that is itself veiled), and the visual image of the (ideal) Sikh man has come to signify all Sikhs. Here is a powerful practice whereby, in the constitution of the Sikh subject by Sikh studies specialists, the parameters of the analytic procedure simultaneously explode and diminish the parameters of the object of study. This, perhaps it is needless to say, is an act of signification that reiterates what, during the latter part of the twentieth century, have come to be the referential strategies and reproductive commitments of the object of study, the Sikh people.

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Excerpted from The Nation's Tortured Body by Brian Keith Axel. Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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