Both loss and the alleviating responses to loss raise profound and inter related questions about time, attachment, ethics, and politics. Today there is a prevailing and forceful demand which dictates that loss requires recovery or restoration, that gaps produced by loss need to be filled in.
Consider, for example, the attempts to recover lost harmonious forms of life or the attempt to restore agency lost in the historical record. These approaches reverberate across our destroyed world. Looking to heal wounds left in the wake of loss, there is an insistence that both scholars and the communities they analyze catalogue losses as well as bind the past with the present as a way to secure against further losses. But this reparative turn to history may limit possibilities rather than reinstate them. Examining different forms of life and different traditions, in contrast, can reveal relations to loss that challenge our theoretical presuppositions that losses must be redressed by recovery and restoration. In the pages that follow, I think with both the Sikh tradition and psychoanalysis to reconsider varied assumptions about loss as well as to continue to question what loss entails.
This book asks: What happens when a tradition encounters the possibility of its loss, especially when that loss-not unlike the present-day losses that mount in the wake of environmental, political, and social disasters-exceeds the very possibility of narration, reflection, and redemption? How do traditions and peoples occupy and contend with loss even in the wake of destruction? I consider such questions by turning to Sikhs at the end of the nineteenth century, and in particular to Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle, during the 1880s, to restore Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan. The book explores Singh's efforts, and the responses of the Sikh community to those efforts, in order to highlight how a people articulated loss (military, political, and psychological). Through theological debate, literary production, bodily dis cipline, and the cultivation of ethical practice, Sikhs undid the colonial politics that sought to conquer, secure, and map the world. I show how a people responded to loss not solely by seeking to recover the past but also by seeking to remake the past and create change. Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not seeking to recover the past. They engaged loss by remaking it. They show that the past was not-and is not-an inert object awaiting reclamation.
If, however, the past is not a static object awaiting scholarly analysis, then the task cannot be mere recovery of an indigenous theory of loss. My examination of Duleep Singh and his attempted revolt against British colonial rule highlights the ambiguities that emerge in both Singh himself and the images of Singh that circulated as Sikhs contested and challenged representations of Singh as well as of the colonial state. There is, I argue, no ""real"" Duleep Singh nor an authentic story to tell.
My goal is not to historicize Duleep Singh and the politics that sur-rounded him by uncovering how he aligned with ""cosmopolitan net-works,"" ""messianic politics,"" or wider global formations that we can trace in the subcontinent-other scholars have already done this. Nor is it to locate historical exclusivity or to find historical exceptions. Indeed, my goal is not to provide historical explanation at all; ""there is no history lesson, one might translate: no lesson learned, not from the victors."" The book is thus, perhaps strangely, a historical narrative that refuses to historicize: Duleep Singh, suspended, exceeds placement.
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