This edited volume brings together the multidisciplinary work of established and emerging scholars in Punjab studies. Framed as “cultural history,” the book introduces the notion of “Punjabiyat”—Punjabiness—and call attention to the “elision if not erasure of Punjabi identity from academic writing” (p. xvi). While the volume explores Punjabiyat's complex and imagined qualities, it also emphasizes “a shared, cross-religious, cross-caste, cross-class culture” (p. xv) that unsettles assumed boundaries. Taken together, the volume's five sections—on language and literature; Sikhism; “marginal, popular, controversial” religious cultures; colonialism; and cosmopolitanism—demonstrate that the field has moved definitively beyond once-dominant paradigms of primordial, colonially produced, or Partition-haunted communalism.
The volume's interventions are sustained on a number of levels, most importantly through precolonial and colonial continuities that reposition the British period within wider historical arcs. Christopher Shackle's leading essay establishes this theme by taking up the “late classics” of modern Sufi poets—specifically Islamic voices neglected due to nationalist Vedantin appropriation, Hindi-centrism, and notions of Sufi decline—to “construct . . . a fuller picture of the tradition” (p. 4). Shackle's exploration of Punjab's living literary tradition and its distinct sources—Islamic, Sikh, bhakti, Persian, Avadhi, Arabic, Sant Bhasha, Braj, Punjabi, and, especially, Sindhi—suggests the background for the contemporary power of Punjabi in Pakistan highlighted by Alyssa Ayers. Rather than instrumentalist linguistic nationalism, Ayers sees the nostalgic language activism of Punjab's elites and emergent Punjabi-language cinema through Bourdieu's theories of “symbolic domination and the working of the linguistic market” (p. 37) and traces the roots of Punjabi's marginalization in Mughal, Sikh, British, and Pakistani regimes. Three following chapters on Sikhism reveal links between Khalsa Sikh and Mughal (Islamicate) royal idioms, a premodern Sikh sense of “the religious” and the modern category of “religion,” and the historical Nanak and “institution building.” Gurinder Mann's critique of Hew McLeod's view of Sikh hagiography as “lethal” (p. 120), Anne Murphy's reconsideration of the invention of a religion/Sikhism thesis via gurbilas literature (pp. 94–98), and Louis Fenech's linking of the Singh Sabha's “assessment of Sikhism itself” (p. 72) with precolonial Sikh traditions in the Zafar-namah together demonstrate the theoretical implications of detailed textual work on neglected or reconceived sources.
Just as such continuities challenge notions of rupture (e.g., modernization or postcolonial), the volume's emphasis on shared idioms and multiplicity undermines reified notions of religion. Farina Mir's work on the Punjabi qissa, or vernacular verse romance, explores how this originally Persian literary form maintained distinctive Islamic conventions while being adapted by Sufi and non-Muslim poets. The quintessential qissa Hir-Ranjha shows that saint and shrine veneration informed Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu “shared piety” well into the colonial period, challenging notions of “syncretism” (pp. 225–29) that presume antagonistic “great traditions” (p. 245). In continuity but also contrast, Anshu Malhotra rehabilitates syncretism to describe the Gulabdasi sect as seen through the writings of their nineteenth-century, female devotee Piro. Her examination of their complex invocation of Vedanta, Sufi, and bhakti tropes highlights context-specific encounters and “layering of thought” that establish “theological equivalences” (pp. 193–94), complicate singular identities, and contest hierarchical authority. Anna Bigelow's chapter on three Indian Sufi shrines traces just such pluralizing logics in contemporary, everyday practice. Rejecting ideas of endemic Muslim/Punjabi violence, on the one hand, and romantic invocations of Sufism, on the other, Bigelow details specific strategies at the ritual, narrative, and administrative levels that help construct the emergent framework for “stable civil societies” (p. 413). Most surprisingly, multiplicity is also at the heart of colonial religious revival so often seen as being at the root of communalized identities, according to Cassie Adcock's work on Arya Samaj controversialist Dharm Pal. In Adcock's view, the Congress anti-communal narrative of “Hindu Tolerance” fails to consider converts' own goals, obscuring both how they “accumulated multiple identities” (p. 270) and, more importantly, how they challenged untouchability.
Moving beyond communalism, rupture, and antagonistic models of religion thus hardly means denying contestation, resistance, and imperial effects. For Harjot Oberoi, the anthropology of religious purity reveals the Kukas as neither proto-independence fighters nor marginal, religious fanatics but at home within wider Sikh and Hindu cosmologies. By linking their insurgent attack on cow butchers with guru-based, dietary, and devotional traditions of holiness, Oberoi complicates scholarly bifurcations of spectacular, armed revolt and the mundane world of everyday resistance. For David Gilmartin, empire reshaped the Punjabi soil (and thus culture) itself through resettlement and agriculturization. This process undermined pastoralism and genealogical orders mediated by Sufi pirs through individual property rights and a reworked notion of biradari, establishing the rural landholders' Unionist Party and reinforcing local patriarchy. The contributions of Markus Daechsel and William Glover depart from these often-studied rural contexts to explore the emergent topic of urban Punjabis, highlighting middle-class identity construction through consumption and creative negotiations of a colonially transformed public sphere, respectively.
Finally, complementing Bigelow's hopeful study of Sufi shrines, the volume concludes with two darker, similarly contemporary pieces. Simona Sawhney's provocative juxtaposition of Bhagat Singh and today's Pakistani anti-Ahmadiyya terrorists argues for a dynamic “web-like” rereading of the often-appropriated colonial Punjabi martyr. She points towards an existential “political commitment” to “suffer and die for an abstract cause” (p. 382) and a sense of the West's heterogeneity as vital to the “darkly fertility” (p. 402) of hope. Tony Ballantyne's analysis of Sikh “legibility” (p. 437) in Britain suggests the limitations of what otherwise might be seen as success: governmental recognition of Sikh religious rights has come at the cost of marginalizing non-Khalsa Sikhs and of lost interfaith and cross-cultural connections. Together these concluding essays reinforce the volume's argument that complex Punjabi identities are central to theoretically, culturally, and politically living histories.
While the numerous interventions, range, and deeply historicized cultural turn of this volume are impressive, the desire to move beyond the “politics of antagonism” (p. liii) may also have set certain limits. The importance of distinctly “other” Punjabi identities—of (neo-)Hindus, Indian Christians, self-conscious Dalits, Orientalists, and missionaries in the region's history, and of specific diasporic groups at the margins, such as the Black Sisters Southall or the Ravidasis—appears more clearly in emerging Punjab scholarship than they do here. Similarly, the volume's largely historical and textual focus means that emergent approaches, such as ethnographic, transnational, and visual studies, appear as less than central methodologically. Of course, the self-conscious limits of a single volume and the breadth of work suggested by other studies themselves give further evidence of the vibrancy of the field so richly attested by Punjab Reconsidered. The book is essential for scholars and graduate students working in Punjab, diaspora, South Asian, and religious studies, and it is highly recommended for cultural historians and anthropologists.
