The centrality of the Guru Granth Sahib in contemporary orthodox representations of Sikhism, coupled with ongoing debates relating to scriptural interpretation, has generally limited the study of Sikh history and tradition to an engagement with textual sources. By critically engaging with the thus far neglected history of Sikh objects, Anne Murphy’s The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition provides important insights into the material expressions of Sikh history, religious life and identity. In this book, Murphy demonstrates the rich meanings of Sikh objects and examines how the past is experienced, narrated and performed through these objects. Objects are approached as material sites that function to express relationships, past events, cultural heritage and even sovereignty. Indeed, objects and sites are analysed as media through which the Sikh past has been/is represented, constituted and contested. It is important to note here that far from neglecting the importance of the “text”, Murphy attempts to read text and objects in the light of each other.

Approaching texts and objects as part of a similar conceptual field allows for a deeper understanding of how objects function in the Sikh imagination as well as the larger historical imagination they represent. More broadly, Murphy’s analysis of historical objects, historical sites, texts and legislation regulating Sikh sites and objects (such as the Sikh Gurdwara Act of 1925), allows for an understanding of how Sikh forms of materiality both connect with and are distinct from representations and forms of embodiment associated with other religious traditions. While stressing the specificity of Sikh understandings and employment of objects and sites, Murphy is careful to locate the circulation and collection of these objects within broader traditions of gift-giving such as the Mughal khilat. Moreover, the attempts by sections of the Sikh community to gain control over historical sites—namely the Gurdwara Reform Movement—are studied within the context of other socio-political movements that employed religious symbolism. These include the Khilafat Movement and Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement.

In line with her attempts to historise objects and their meanings, Murphy traces a shift in Sikh representational forms with the transition from the pre-colonial to the colonial period. The first section of the book entitled, The Past in the Sikh Imagination, analyses eighteenth century “Sikh” sources such as Sainapati’s Gur Sobha and Chaupa Singh Chibber’s Rahitnama to demonstrate how the telling of the history of the Sikh community was itself imbricated in the project of constructing the community. Essentially, Murphy is here studying the history of history in Sikh tradition and problematizing the relationship between the state/sovereign and the production of history. Attention is drawn to the fact that sovereignty in such works is not singularly territorial and bounded nor is it necessarily political. Rather the notion of sovereignty is ambiguous and historically constituted. Moreover, the boundaries—geographical, social and theological—of the community are dispersed, diverse and in the process of being negotiated.

The way in which the Sikh historical imaginary comes to be reconfigured in the colonial period is discussed in the next section, entitled Possessing the Past. The section successfully demonstrates that the logic of representation shared between object and site breaks down in the colonial period. Object and site now come to embody very different relationships to the writing of Sikh history. More crucially, objects are now relegated to the periphery of community constructions. It is argued that the ushering in of new notions of the nature of property, particularly the view that property is linked to the individual and heritable leads to the Sikh past being linked to territory. Here the emergence of territorialised notions of the Sikh community and conceptions of “soil” and landscape that come to be equated with the Sikh past are studied in detail. This reconfiguration of community consciousness is illustrated through the comparison of the management of Sikh religious sites between the pre-colonial and colonial eras. Murphy’s approach to the study of sites and objects allows her to demonstrate how management practices themselves reflected not just understandings of ownership and property but also historical consciousness.

A major contribution of the book to Sikh history, and I would suggest to the study of modern South Asian religious traditions and the study of the public sphere in colonial India more generally, lies in its detailed analysis of the reconfiguration of the relationship of the Sikh community to land and history. It is shown that colonial conceptions of land ownership and management of the public sphere resulted in the emergence of a territorialised conception of the past and present—as represented by historical sites. Essentially, religious sites now came to be configured as property leading to a territorialisation of Sikh historical consciousness in the form of the gurdwara. The detailed analysis of the Gurdwara Reform Movement’s attempts to wrest control of Sikh sites from mahants illustrates the way in which the gurdwara came to be defined and administered during the colonial period and its relation to reformulations of Sikh identity and history. Debates over the management of Sikh sites were themselves an integral part of the emergence of a legislatively and judicially defined exclusive Sikh identity. This also pushes one to engage with what constitutes a “Sikh” site. In relation to this, the importance that history, particularly a history of territorial possession, comes to acquire is interesting to note. Here apart from drawing upon debates surrounding the management of the sites, Murphy introduces the reader to alternative sources like gurdwara guides that sought to establish a history of possession.

This book makes a welcome and innovative contribution to the study of Sikh history and the development of Sikhism. It is tempting to consider if an analysis of the body, bodily ethics and corporeally experienced/expressed notions of religious authority—all of which are often associated with objects and materiality—could have complimented the discussion on objects and de-territorialised constructions of Sikh identity. It may be worth considering if movements like the Udasis reasserted bodily notions of piety and spiritual experience in the face of challenges posed to their management of Sikh sites and the emphasis placed on territoriality by “orthodox” formulations of Sikh identity.