[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Time and History in South Asian Pasts
Organizer & Chair: Anne Murphy, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Anne Murphy, University of British Columbia
This panel will explore the multiple understandings of temporality and historicity that informed the imagination of the past in the early modern period in northern and western South Asia in relation to the formation of religious subjectivities and community formations. Thematically, the papers relate to a wealth of recent scholarly literature on the status of historiography in pre-modern South Asia. They do so, however, with special attention to historiographical and canonical religious literatures and the formation of religious communities. The papers thus address how the past is written in multiple terms both outside of and within state formations and political centers of power. A special focus of the panel is the Sikh tradition. Mandair (University of Michigan) will consider issues around historicity and temporality in theoretical terms, with reference to the writings of the Sikh canonical scripture, the Adi Granth (composed in the 15th – 17th centuries). Dhavan (University of Washington) will focus on 18th century Sikh materials, examining intersections and differences between Punjabi and Persian historiographical orientations in Sikh contexts. Novetzke (University of Pennsylvania) will explore historicity in Namdev traditions, with direct relevance to the Sikh tradition (Namdev’s writings are contained within the Sikh canonical scripture, the Adi Granth). Purohit (Columbia University) will address how temporality in the Ismaili ginan tradition has been shaped by Shia, Tantric, and Vaishnava temporal ideologies. Papers presented in this panel will be published in a dedicated issue of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory in 2007/8.
Repetition Without Origin: Time, Temporality and Task in the Sikh Scriptures
Arvind-pal S. Mandair, University of Michigan
Current discussion about the thematic contents of the Adi Granth and other Sikh scriptures generally falls into two oppositional modes of organizing knowledge: historicism and traditionalism. This distinction is then further reduced to a distinction between modernity and tradition. Yet, both modes of knowledge are in fact intrinsically modern, given that those who attempt to retrieve Sikh tradition do so through a framework established by the reformist (neo-nationalist) Singh Sabha movement. On the other hand, although this is rarely recognized, both modes of knowledge subscribe to an understanding of religion as sui generis, that is to say they represent religion and by implication, tradition, as the repetition of an origin or an original event. In this paper I will explore the possibility of thinking about the question of repetition, and by implication of one’s relation to tradition in a way that avoids the sterile return to origins that is characteristic of nationalist and historicist interpretations. Such an exploration will require an examination of time and temporality based on close readings of the bani the Sikh Gurus. One of the key ideas that emerges from such reading is a theory of experience that simultaneously destroys and constructs tradition; that is, the impossibility of a tradition that returns to an origin or an original moment. If the notion of origin can be dispensed in this way, are there new possibilities for opening the very character of the present and therefore the character of politics itself?
Redemptive Pasts and Imperiled Futures: The Writing of a Sikh History
Purnima Dhavan, University of Washington
By the end of the eighteenth century the Sikh community in Punjab framed its history in two distinctive styles of narratives—gurbilas narratives about the life of the last Sikh Guru written in Punjabi, and court chronicles and documents of the ruling Sikh families written in Persian. On first examination these narrative styles appear to be very different in terms of their audience, themes, and intentions. Gurbilas authors wrote for a wide audience, Sikh and non-Sikh. Their works explored through the story of the life and death of the last Sikh Guru as a redemptive model. Embedded with allusions to a shared mythological culture, these narratives bound together Sikh traditions with a larger, non-Sikh heterogeneous audience. Court histories, on the other hand, were intended for a smaller elite audience and important both in claiming legitimacy, but also as tools of statecraft and diplomacy. This paper will examine how and why these two distinctive genres became more intertwined by the end of eighteenth century as Sikh rulers increasingly saw their power and culture threatened by the growing power of Ranjit Singh’s empire and the East India Company. Increasingly the mythic and prophetic elements of the gurbilas genre and its themes of sacrifice and service would be absorbed into court histories. Similarly, the more linear temporality and examinations of political philosophy began to appear in Punjabi histories as Khalsa Sikhs attempted to re-define the nature of Khalsa identity and reclaim an imperiled position in Punjabi society.
The Historiographic Hallmarks of Hagiography
Christian Lee Novetzke, University of Pennsylvania
The question of historicity often revolves around the way a subject is portrayed in relation to other markers of temporality, such as commonly reported wars or natural disasters, or the copiously documented lives of political/royal figures. The interplay of biography and historical fixity is a central feature of Sikhism and its key figures are well-documented in historical terms by their relationship to political and royal persons from the 16th century to the present. A substratum of Sikhism collects, and connects, several "non-Sikh" figures to the lives and thoughts of the Gurus, and collects the voices of these figures, called "Bhagats," within the canonical Guru Granth Sahib. Ancillary to this text, but important to its historicity, are the worlds of devotional biography and autobiography that also surround the Sikh Bhagats, and much of this material, both inside and outside the Granth Sahib, endeavors to anchor the historicity of a particular Bhagat by reference to important, and well-documented, political and social figures. My paper will investigate one of the oldest of the Sikh Bhagats, Namdev of the 14th century, and endeavor to understand how his historicity is pursued through references to encounters with key political figures of Sultanate India (14th to 15th century) that are produced in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the recurrence of these references in 20th century, particularly in film and around issues of the nation.
Vernacular Messianic Time in the Ismaili Ginan Tradition
Teena Purohit, Columbia University
This paper explores how temporality in the Ismaili ginan poetic tradition was shaped by a re-constellation of Shiite and Vaishnava notions of time. With the specific ginan “Dasavatar” as the subject of inquiry, I show how the Shia doctrine of the Mahdi was synthesized with Indic cyclical understandings of time and reformulated into a particular vernacular messianic theology that represented transformative possibility and a just social order for its devotees. This study is part of larger argument that this notion of messianic time in “Dasavatar” and the ginans generally was particular to the non-sectarian religious history of the khoja community in the early modern period. In the colonial nineteenth century, however, this vernacular religious history officially came to a close, when a series of disputes among a group of khojas and the Aga Khan culminated in the Aga Khan Case of 1866, which declared the khojas’ religious identity as “Ismaili” and the Aga Khan their Imam.