Giorgio Shani's recent work provides a comprehensive account of the Sikh nationalist movement, which has sought an independent state in the Punjab region of India under the name Khalistan. Addressed to the fields of international relations, political science, and Sikh studies, the book accounts for the rise of a Sikh nationalist consciousness, its continuing relevance to some, and the way in which it has waned in recent years, in India and outside of it. Thus, the book also centrally addresses the field of diaspora studies, by explicating the dynamics of support for Khalistan outside India, and the ways in which more recent alternatives to a nationalist and territorialist conception of the Sikh community offer a particularly diasporic mode of imagining the community outside of “the Westphalian conception of territorialized sovereignty” (pp. 10–11). Shani thus challenges the field of international relations to pay attention to the workings of a nonstate actor, such as the Khalistani movement, within a larger state-centered system.

The book first addresses the “dialectical” relationship (pp. 12, 29) between the Sikh tradition and the colonial state, through which a more homogenized and territorialized Sikh identity was formed, such that “although the Sikhs, like Muslim and Hindu communities, may have constituted a panth after the institutionalization of the Khalsa, the development of a quamic [national] dimension to the Sikh faith can be seen as the outcome of a historical process with its origins in the colonial encounter” (p. 20). The book most fully blossoms, however, when it addresses the postcolonial period in chapter 3 and following, where Shani accounts for the rise of the Khalistan movement in India as a “reaction to the increasing fragmentation of the panth [community]” in the aftermath of the Green Revolution and the changes it wrought in the agrarian landscape of Punjab, such that it “cannot be reduced to the interests of any one elite or class” (p. 49). He argues that the eventual waning of the movement in India was a result not just of violent repression, but also the “demise of Congress hegemony [which] afforded Sikh elites an opportunity to articulate Sikh demands to the Indian political system from within the democratic system” (p. 61). With this, a regional identity came to supersede a religious one in state politics in Punjab—what Shani calls a transition “from Khalistan to Punjabiat,” or from a “‘politics of identity’ to a ‘politics of region’” (p. 77)—allowing for an articulation of Sikh interests within a federal Indian model (p. 78).

Chapter 5 highlights not only the history of Sikh diasporic involvement in the movement for Khalistan, but also its continuing forms, exploring the ways in which “the Sikh nationalist discourse in the diaspora … territorializes Sikh identity” (p. 84). Even as this rhetoric focuses on the national forms that Sikh political life ideally should take, it “simultaneously globalizes and localizes Sikh identity through its advocacy of a ‘politics of homeland’” (p. 83) that relies on the proliferation of representation and commemoration of the violence of the 1984 attacks on Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in North India for its power. Thus, “like the Jewish or the American holocaust, or the slave trade for African-Americans, it is this ‘chosen trauma’ that has enabled a Sikh diaspora to be imagined” (p. 98). Shani then contrasts this vision with the promise of an alternative diasporic mode—whereby “both ‘homeland’ and ‘diaspora’ may be regarded as indivisible parts of a global Sikh quam which sees the establishment of an independent sovereign state as merely one strategy used to secure recognition of its cultural and religious particularity” (p. 8) through the “politics of recognition” (p. 100). This is where Shani's work demonstrates its ethical commitments, as he seeks to promote a kind of “self-reflexivity” in the Sikh community (p. xiii) and suggest alternatives to Khalistan that are “better suited to our ‘global age’” (p. 156).

This is an important book, which discerns key shifts in the ways in which Sikh political life has taken shape in the last fifty years, and how the Sikh community has arrived at a particular moment of promise. The book's argument for a fundamental rethinking of assumptions regarding nationalist movements in the present in relation to the larger international system is both intellectually and pragmatically important. There are shortcomings, however: the author is careful, but at times the book employs simplified terms; the statement that “historically, violence as a mode of political discourse in Punjab has been considered legitimate” (p. 56) invites qualification, as does the quick transition from the Ghadar movement to the Khalistan movement (p. 117), given the differences between the two, particularly with reference to the political articulation of the religious. One online survey discussed in chapter 7 provides a welcome balance to the preoccupation of the analysis with elite actors and organizations, suggesting a sense of the audiences and followers of Sikh organizations and leaders. The decision not to include Canada as a location for discussion is a bit surprising, given the prominence of this place in the imaginative project of Khalistan. One can only look forward to Shani's future work, which might address this diasporic location and continue the commendable work he has presented in this book. It adds significantly to the available literature on Sikh politics and the Sikh diaspora.