Cosmopolitanism, millenarianism, and Sikhism in a Persianate India: Some motifs in recent historiography

ABSTRACT

This article, divided into two parts, explores the ramifications of Eaton's India in the Persianate Age for salient topics in Sikh historiography. The first part defines Eaton's arguments and expands on facets of the Persianate dispensation, drawing out relevant features of his biography and previous works. Secularity and universality as well as the approaches adopted to break from reified notions of religious community are underscored. The second part focuses on violence, militancy, and millenarianism in moments of crisis in early Sikh history. The article develops the dialectic of social levels and, in doing so, invokes Clio, the muse of historians.

KEYWORDS:

• cosmopolitanism
• secularity
• Persian
• early Sikhism
• millenarianism
• violence

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Notes

1 Following the poet Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘happiness is . . . what releases the fortunate man from the embroilment of the Fates and from the net of his own fate.’ See ‘Fate and Character’ in Michael W. Jennings et al (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996) 203. Benjamin is likely making reference to Hölderlin’s ‘Hyperions Schiksaalslied’ where ‘Fateless the Heavenly breathe / Like an unweaned infant asleep’ (Shiksaallos, wie der schlafende / Säugling, athmen die Himmlischen). Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin, 1998) 26-27.

2 Richard M. Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufi’s in Medieval India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016 [1978]; Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); for an analysis of Qutb Minar, see Catherine Asher, Delhi’s Qutb Complex, the Minar, Mosque and Mehrauli (Mumbai: Marg Foundation, 2017).

3 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1953) 61. The original French reads: ‘Que le préhistorien – quel historien de l’Inde – ne donnerait-il pas pour disposer d’un Hérodote?’ Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’’histoire ou Métier d’historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974) 60.

4 Voyages into the Past, ‘Richard Eaton: How I Became an Historian.’ YouTube, 14 January, 2021. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkzjjLo7RT4

5 Islam and Bengal Frontier xxv.

6 Ibid.

7 Social History of the Deccan 1-2.

8 Islam and Bengal Frontier 310, passim.

9 Herodotus, The Histories, ed. Walter Blanco (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2013) 3.102.

10 Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age 1000–1765 (London: Penguin, 2019) 6. On India in the imagination of Christendom, see Bernard Cohn, ‘The Transformation of Objects into Artifacts, Antiquities, and Art in Nineteenth-Century India’ in his Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 76-105.

11 Elliot as cited by Eaton Persianate Age 6-7.

12 James Mill, The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817); For general cultural and political contexts, see Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

13 Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.’ The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (February 1998): 6-37.

14 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) 11.

15 Pollock Language of Gods 19.

16 Ibid.

17 Eaton Persianate Age 16, 17.

18 See the special issue of Modern Asian Studies on ‘Sulh-i Kull as an Oath of Peace: Mughal Political Theology in History, Theory, and Comparison’ (Vol. 56, special issue 3, May 2022). For Kabir, see Purushottam Agarwal, Akath Kahani Prem Ki: Kabir ki Kavita aur unka Samay [An Ineffable Tale of Love: Kabir’s Poetry and his Times] (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2010).

19 Eaton Persianate Age 197.

20 Ibid. 45.

21 Ibid. 326.

22 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006 [1922]) 46. ‘Das metaphysische Bild, das sich ein bestimmtes Zeitalter von der Welt macht, hat dieselbe Struktur wie das, was ihr als Form ihrer politischen Organisation ohne weiteres einleuchtet.’ (Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität [Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1934] 59-60.)

23 Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) 28.

24 See Shazad Bashir, Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).

25 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946) 49.

26 Eaton Persianate Age 236.

27 Moin Millennial Sovereign 31.

28 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995 [1969]) 147.

29 Karwaan, ‘Prof. Richard Eaton – India in the Persianate Age.’ YouTube, 13 November, 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z92n2nhA_po&t=444s

30 Eaton Persianate Age 385

31 See Pashaura Singh, ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Exploring Guru Nanak’s Babar-vani in Light of the Baburnama’ Religions 11.328 (2020): 1-19.

32 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harvest Book, 1969) 52.

33 Arvind-pal Mandair, Violence and the Sikhs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 34.

34 Ibid. 4.

35 Hardip Singh Syan, Sikh Militancy in the Seventeenth Century: Religious Violence in Mughal and Early Modern India (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013).

36 Mandair Violence 36.

37 See Louis Fenech, The Sikh Zafar-namah of Guru Gobind Singh: A Discursive Blade in the Heart of the Mughal Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

38 Eaton Persianate Age 360.

39 Ibid. 394-395.

40 Ibid. 396.

41 The scholarship on the key events is fairly extensive, but the most focused accounts can be found in Arvind-pal Singh Mandair, Sikhism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) 47-74; Louis Fenech, The Cherished Five in Sikh History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); and J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs: Ideology, Institutions, and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

42 G.S. Sahota, ‘Guru Nanak and Rational Civil Theology’, Sikh Formations, 7:2 (2011): 131-143.

43 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’’ in Jennings et al, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006) 403.

44 Richard M. Eaton, The Lotus and The Lion: Essays on India’s Sanskritic and Persianate Worlds (Delhi: Primus, 2022) ix.

45 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in Selected Writings, vol. 4 390.