Book Talk | ‘Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia’

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Rajbir Singh Judge from California State University, Long Beach; and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? 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. Judge 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. He 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.

This talk is co-sponsored by the History Department and the Department of Religion. 

Rajbir Singh Judge is assistant professor of history at California State University, Long Beach and, during this academic year, a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His first book, “Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia” was published by Columbia University Press in September 2024. His previous publications have appeared in numerous journals including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Modern Asian Studies, Theory & Event, positions: asia critique, Cultural Critique, History & Theory, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality, among others.