The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora” - Softcover

Axel, Brian Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822326159 ISBN 13: 9780822326151

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

In The Nation's Tortured Body Brian Keith Axel explores the formation of the Sikh diaspora and, in so doing, offers a powerful inquiry into conditions of peoplehood, colonialism, and postcoloniality. Demonstrating a new direction for historical anthropology, he focuses on the position of violence between 1849 and 1998 in the emergence of a transnational fight for Khalistan (an independent Sikh state). Axel argues that, rather than the homeland creating the diaspora, it has been the diaspora, or histories of displacement, that have created particular kinds of places-homelands.
Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted by Axel at several sites in India, England, and the United States, the text delineates a theoretical trajectory for thinking about the proliferation of diaspora studies and area studies in America and England. After discussing this trajectory in relation to the colonial and postcolonial movement of Sikhs, Axel analyzes the production and circulation of images of Sikhs around the world, beginning with visual representations of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last Sikh ruler of Punjab, who died in 1893. He argues that imagery of particular male Sikh bodies has situated-at different times and in different ways-points of mediation between various populations of Sikhs around the world. Most crucially, he describes the torture of Sikhs by Indian police between 1983 and the present and discusses the images of tortured Sikh bodies that have been circulating on the Internet since 1996. Finally, he returns to questions of the homeland, reflecting on what the issues discussed in The Nation's Tortured Body might mean for the ongoing fight for Khalistan.
Specialists in anthropology, history, cultural studies, diaspora studies, and Sikh studies will find much of interest in this important work.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brian Keith Axel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Swarthmore College. He is the editor of From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, also published by Duke University Press.

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"Historical anthropology at its best, "The Nation's Tortured Body" explores the history and politics of the Sikhs in a complex, and contested, transnational context. Axel's book evocatively charts the ways in which the crossing and marking of boundaries have shaped the foundational identities of a diasporic community, providing a graphic illustration of the multiple meanings of the idea of 'homeland' in our contemporary postcolonial world."--Nicholas B. Dirks, Columbia University

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The Nation's Tortured Body

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

By Brian Keith Axel

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-2615-1

Contents

list of figures, 
acknowledgments, 
introduction: promise and threat, 
1: the maharaja's glorious body, 
2: the restricted zone, 
3: the tortured body, 
4: glassy junction, 
5: the homeland, 
conclusion, 
notes, 
bibliography, 
index, 

CHAPTER 1

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822326159
• ISBN 13: 9780822326151
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 310
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande