The highly developed field of Punjab (or Sikh) studies is very familiar with socioeconomic interpretations of the separatist movement that peaked during the 1980s and reached a symbolic height with the partial destruction of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by the Indian security forces and the subsequent assassination of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. A vast body of literature, much of it produced by the large and intellectually active Punjabi diaspora, elaborates upon the intrinsic relationship between the changes in patterns of agricultural production as a consequence of the Green Revolution and the resulting distortions in the traditional power equilibrium—a process that resulted in one of the most severe challenges to the authority of the multiethnic postcolonial Indian state.

Purewal draws the reader's attention to the shortcomings of those established socioeconomic explanations for the political crises in Punjab. First, they tend to concentrate on the contradictions in the economic interest of upper-caste Sikh farmers, mainly from the Jat community, and the urban petty bourgeoisie of Punjab, which was mainly made up of Hindu traders. He argues that the Green Revolution and the industrialization of agricultural production vertically divided each of these two groups by producing new classes of landless agricultural laborers (mainly Sikhs) and small and poor urban traders (mainly Hindus), thereby substantially strengthening class cleavages in the socioeconomic structure of Punjab society. In consequence, “the economic conflict was between capitalist farmers and the petty urban bourgeoisie, not between Jat Sikhs and Hindu Khatris” (trading caste) (p. 14).

In the context of this interpretation, Purewal reasons that this new antagonism between these two dominant groups lies at the heart of the “Punjab problem,” and that despite temporary coalitions formed by those competing interest groups against any challenge from below, it was—to use his terminology —the Kulaks who were most successful in using an effective mix of political, religious, economic, and historical resources to defend their political power position and to extract a maximum of material resources from the state through various forms of subsidies.

The book offers a comprehensive narrative of Punjab from the emergence of Sikhism in the sixteenth century to today's complexities of India's coalition politics both at the center and in the federal state of Punjab. Throughout the study, Purewal successfully maintains his analytical perspective. He does so with a high degree of efficiency: 170 pages of main text that include an impressive number of relevant footnotes and an introductory chapter that outlines the analytical framework. While the book provides a well-structured and highly focused analysis, a bit more space could have been devoted to contemporary developments and to the conclusion. Although Purewal puts forward as an explanation for the waning Punjab subnationalism the (momentary?) triumph of the Kulak over the local (and national) bourgeoisie, as well as the forceful repression of separatist groups by the central government in the late 1980s, the dynamics behind these processes often remain the reader's guesswork. As the author, according to the Preface, would like to see his work as a case study in the larger field of ethnonationalism, it would also have been important to learn whether he assigns some general validity to his casespecific findings.

The effective combination of economic, political, historical, and cultural analysis makes the study an interesting read and a notable intervention in the well-developed discourse among regional specialists and, at the same time, an illustrative but case-specific introduction to the democratic dynamics of Indian politics and to the abilities of the dominant political actors to make use of all political resources available, be it history, religion, or, ultimately, ethnic identity. Somewhat ironically, this strength of the study also reflects a certain problematic aspect of the central argument. The manipulative power of the economically and culturally dominant groups, which is at the heart of Purewal's explanatory factors, deprive the subaltern classes of any political agency of their own. An important strand of discourse on pre- and postcolonial Indian politics has, thus, largely been ignored. The political and electoral institutionalization of political interest of India's lower classes and its significance for the power game in Punjab politics play a very marginal role in the author's analysis.

This deficiency brings to light a more fundamental problem in Purewal's approach. There is no systematic attempt to understand how the introduction of a democratic polity in the twentieth century impacted on the socioeconomic fundamentals of Punjab. However, he does not aim at a neoinstitutional explanation and, as mentioned, successfully develops a Marxist interpretation instead.

The referencing and bibliographic work is very systematic; the vast number of references to local and, thus, less familiar material adds substantial value to the study. At the same time, the reviewer was surprised that some of the main authors on India's political economy, such as Pranab Bardhan or Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, have not been given any recognition.

To sum up, Sikh Ethnonationalism and the Political Economy of Punjab offers a valuable contribution to the lively debate on the pros and cons of India's political development model in general, and provides an interesting discussion on Punjab's political history in particular. By translating various indigenous cultural concepts into Marxian terms of analysis, Purewal makes the subject accessible to the non-area expert. The fact that such an application of Western concepts of political discourse to non-Western societies neglects the possible emergence of new non-Western paradigms in the field of comparative politics, however, remains a larger epistemological dilemma with which political scientists have to continue to struggle.