Colonial and Post-colonial Objects of Memory and Politics: The Guru’s Weapons

Anne Murphy, 

University of British Columbia, 

(Canada)

Sikh objects are powerful in multiple ways. Unlike relic objects in many other religious traditions,[1] the embodiment of religious presence is not a central aspect of the power articulated through the Sikh object.   Instead, one of the most central powers they hold is the power to represent the Sikh past.[2] In doing so, these objects also narrate the relationships that constitute the community, both with the Guru and his followers, and among these followers (or “Sikhs,” literally meaning the “students”) of the Guru. This paper will examine the biography of a set of objects associated with the Sikh tradition and investigate their “powers” in religious as well as political terms, in relation to their representation of Sikh past(s) and the relationships they express in colonial and post-colonial contexts. The overall goal of the paper is to hold the religious and political meanings for these objects in productive conversation, and to understand the work of these objects within a political field determined by simultaneously divergent and convergent colonial and post-colonial power formations.

The story of the objects in question begins with the downfall of the independent Sikh state founded by Maharaja Ranjit Singh at the hands of the British East India Company, under the direction of the Marquis of Dalhousie, then Governor-General of India, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dalhousie exhibited a particular interest in a set of objects said to have belonged to Guru Gobind Singh, the last of the ten Sikh Gurus, who died in 1708. In particular, Dalhousie perceived a dangerous metonymic relationship between these objects and Sikh sovereignty—drawing simultaneously upon pre-existing Sikh ideological formations around objects associated with sovereignty and British forms of material representation of empire.[3] The objects in question were captured and dispersed by the British, defining a new sovereign relation between Punjab and Britain that had continuing significance, in particular, in relation to the career of the son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Dalip Singh, in both India and Britain.[4]

After the dissolution of the Sikh State and the integration of the Punjab into East India Company territory, six objects of the Guru were taken by the Governor-General and integrated into his extensive private collections. There they remained, through the end of colonial rule and the formation, through Partition of Punjab into the post-colonial states of Pakistan and India. The story of the objects continues, however, with the search for lost objects related to the Gurus in Britain in the 1960s (and after), and the unresolved longing for these objects in the present and the rhetoric of search, discovery, and “right” to property for both the post-colonial state and a transnational religious community with political aspirations. The metonymic formulation of object and sovereignty articulated by Dalhousie thus informed the later life of these objects as well, within a post-colonial frame, allowing these objects to provide a vision of alternative (and contested) notions of Sikh sovereignty through the colonial and post-colonial periods, and into the present, in religious as well as political terms.

Abstracts

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