Upcoming Event: Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia Book Talk

On behalf of the Departments of Sociology, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and History, you and your students are invited to a book talk by Assistant Professor of History Dr. Rajbir Singh Judge, titled: Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia on 9/16 from 5-7pm @ Anatol Center (AS-119). There will be a discussion with Dr. Judge, University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Randeep Singh Hothi and American Studies Assistant Professor, Dr. Preeti Sharma. Light refreshments will be served.

What: Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia (a talk by Dr. Rajbir Singh Judge, discussion by Dr. Randeep Singh Hothi and Dr. Preeti Sharma)

When: 9/16/2024 5-7pm

Where: Anatol Center (AS 119) / CSULB

Event Description: How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? In Prophetic Maharaja, Dr. 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. Rajbir 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. Rajbir 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.