The events surrounding the creation of the Khalsa by the tenth guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh, have formed the crux of historical and contemporary notions of Sikh identity. Yet, as Purnima Dhavan notes, knowledge of this “event” is largely based on shaky sources; there are discrepancies surrounding the actual date of the Khalsa's inauguration and what actually took place, according to hagiographic sources. This important volume sheds light upon the historical context within which some of the salient aspects of Sikh identity construction, both before and after the founding of the Khalsa, took place. Dhavan, contrary to most existing scholarship, expands the contours of the Khalsa as an exclusively religious, devotional institution and situates it within broader political, economic, ethnic, and societal forces of the time. In doing so she challenges widely held assumptions that the initiates of Khalsa Sikh brotherhood were a homogenous unit having little agency, beyond their religious devotion to the Guru in following clearly laid out injunctions. Analyzing largely understudied archival sources as well as Sikh prescriptive texts of the time, obvious shortcomings of the “internalized lens” are circumvented, namely, Punjab-centric/Sikh-centric approaches, as Dhavan also explores wider regional developments within eighteenth-century South Asia.
Dhavan's introduction gives an overview of textual resources, central personalities, social movements, and modes of cultural transmission of the eighteenth century. Chapter 2 attends to the origins and transmission of early Khalsa culture, focusing particularly on Sainapati's Gursobha (c. 1708) and the late seventeenth-century autobiographical Bachitra Natak, traditionally attributed to Guru Gobind Singh. These texts offer contrasting elucidations of the Khalsa brotherhood. Sainapati wrote within a Sikh exegetical mode that prioritized ties of faith and loyalty over all others, including kinship, while the author of the Bachitra operated within wider Puranic assumptions vis-à-vis Guru Gobind Singh's royal genealogical, Kshatriya warrior-caste origins in the larger struggle to restore dharam (moral order).
Paying close attention to rifts that had formed among Sikhs as a result of the creation of the Khalsa, Dhavan's third chapter examines Banda Bahadur's leadership of the Khalsa following the death of the Guru, focusing on diverse religio-cultural practices, including kinship ties among lower-caste agrarian communities that formed the backbone of Banda's marauding troops. In their quest to assert their power by occupying lands, these lower-caste adherents competed for resources and confronted the moral order put in place by the older, entrenched Khalsa elite. Chapter 4 challenges historians to move beyond binary conceptualizations of the deep animosity between the Khalsa and Mughal/Afghan forces, to explore ways in which some Khalsa groups actually engaged with their enemies. Dhavan examines two Sikh misals (confederacies) under the leadership of Jassa Singh Ramgarhia and Jassa Singh Ahluwalia. Ramgarhia's shrewd political and diplomatic acumen led him to collaborate with Mughal administrators while still being embraced, though reluctantly at times, by fellow Khalsa chieftains. Ahluwalia, while lauded for his resistance to Mughal authorities, also broke with Sikh prescriptive texts of the time by negotiating with them.
In shifting focus to Alha Singh, a Sikh chief who was granted the title of “Raja” by ruling Afghan authorities, in chapter 5 Dhavan juxtaposes Singh's rise to power with the rigid injunctions of contemporary rahitnamas (Sikh codes of conduct) espousing enmity between the Khalsa and Mughals/Afghans. She examines Alha Singh's political negotiations and shows how kinship ties, the biradari (caste- or clan-based brotherhood), reinforced the warrior identity of the Khalsa. Chapter 6 makes salient connections between Sikh cultural and political structures and those of other “martial” groups, including Rajputs and Marathas, especially their “culture of feuding,” highlighting the often neglected detail that Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus shared religio-cultural norms and origin stories. “Popular notions of honor and loyalty were as important to the Khalsa's sense of honor as the religious strictures in rahitnamas” (pp. 138–39). Turban exchange ceremonies, for instance, important to fraternal unity among Khalsa chiefs, stemmed from the practices of Rajputs and other warrior groups. When feuds took place, against foes or other misals, they were often based on competition for resources, particularly the lucrative military labor market, rather than claims of religious superiority or divine favor.
Chapter 7 challenges “rigid modern categories of religious identity and conversion” (p. 151) often endorsed when examining religion within early-modern communities. Despite the dire warnings of Sikh prescriptive texts calling for adherence only to the Khalsa, fluid notions of devotion, social identity, and courtly love, as evidenced in gurbilas literature (biographies of Guru Gobind Singh), allowed for heterogeneous practices and the creation of novel sociopolitical structures. Statecraft and mulkgiri (conquest) replaced notions of dharamyudh (holy war) as a primary focus of the Khalsa, culminating in the creation of Ranjit Singh's rule in 1799.
Purnima Dhavan offers readers an important historical lens into the development of the fledgling Khalsa. The book's most glaring (and unfortunate) deficiency is a decided lack of gendered perspective. It would appear that the Khalsa in the eighteenth century concerned only males. How did Sikh women fit into these developments?
