Bhai Vir Singh's Sundri: A semiotic reclamation of native meanings and imagination

ABSTRACT

This paper backtracks many commentaries on Bhai Vir Singh's master piece novel Sundri, enunciated by scholars of Punjab studies, feminist studies, and critical theory. While contesting that these exegetical commentaries rendered by the scholars of aforesaid domains have displaced and decentered the spirit of the text, the paper presents a fresh lens that endeavors to redeem this important text and its spiritual essence. In doing so, we grapple to decolonize a subaltern voice, that we feel, has been reduced to a feeble murmur in the aura of assertive contestations and many interpretations dissecting the textual body of Sundri. The paper will also be published by Naad Pargaas as an introduction to Bhai Vir Singh's 'Sundri' that was translated from its 16th Punjabi edition by Prof. Puran Singh.

KEYWORDS:

• Bhai Vir Singh
• Sundri
• Sikh feminism
• Punjab Studies
• Feminism
• Identity Politics
• Translation

History many a times arrives at an age where the meaning of being’s existence and nature of her essence finds itself at crossroads of an implied ‘de-centerment’.¹ Not only does this de-centerment dislocate historical forms of ‘Being-in-the-World’ – rendering contextual [in]coherence to Being’s meanings, signs, symbols, and collective imagination – but also dislocates the content of historicism into [un]intelligible binaries and assumed antagonisms. At such junctures, the outcome of many scholarly disclosures begs for, what Salvoj Žižek notes in a different context, ‘authentic articulation of life-world experiences’,² while simultaneously questioning the structuring principles of historicism that rupture the spirit of a text through critical exegesis. This is where we find our point of entry into the introduction of this book, Sundri, by Bhai Vir Singh (hereafter BVS, or Bhai Sahib) being reproduced with an original translation by Prof. Puran Singh on the pages ahead. While we find ourselves in a state of double binding, both as gendered subjects and Sikhs, we also explore the possibility to approach the text from a clean slate.

Much has been said, refreshed, and discarded about Sundri since its first publication in Gurmukhi in 1898. However, with subsequent ‘re-emergence’ of this text, we look forward to an open possibility that allows us to enunciate the undertones of what has been left behind, remained inaccessible, or even buried under ossified ideological conceptualizations in different historical conditions. Taking these factors into account, we are reminded of Judith Butler’s reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s idea of soul, regarding which she notes, ‘The soul is not to which I can have transparent relation of knowledge: it is partially disclosed, or obscure, precisely because its origins lie elsewhere’ (Butler 2015, 50). Butler’s reminder forces us to re-engage with the knowledge constructions while approaching the ‘soul of the text’ from a point that renders an opportunity to ‘look for its origins elsewhere’ while thinking outside the set modes of understandings and framings put forward in dominant discourses since its first publication. Therefore, without producing remanences of discourses from a ‘traditionalist’ perspective, it is compelling for us to discern and ‘free-up’ the text from ideological barriers that delineate structural obstructions to approach Sundri while revisiting it from a fresh perspective revealing its interpretive openness from a (meta) historical perspective.³

Before we contextualize our understanding with conceptual underpinning culled from a close reading of Sundri, let us layout some notable narratives that came to our attention while we were working through editing this seminal work. Here we must mention that what interests us is not to excavate a binary between modernity and tradition that delineates, persists, and redefines relationships in epistemic discourses of post-colonial studies. Rather we want to acquire a deeper understanding of how historicism and hermeneutics get intertwined while contextualizing the spirit of a literary text. Another undertaking in this introduction is a revisitation of the question of being and how an understanding of the being gets both implanted and rejected in symbolic forms while rendering systematic coherence and distortion within the domain of knowledge production. Alongside that we also present our reflections that enable us to recover the kernel of conceptual frameworks that hold the possibilities to extricate Sikh imagination, particularly that of Sikh womanhood from captivities of dominant discourses, thereby introducing a fresh perspective in its undercurrents. This we will do by articulating an ‘unspoken’ relationship with the text without any subjective pre-set convictions. We are also compelled to explore the frameworks of knowledge production while deliberating on narratives and understanding their underlying conceptual ideas that remain dominant in discourses around Sundri.

Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundri: narrative, ideology, and implied conceptualization

Most commentaries that we have come across on Sundri discuss the modes of expression, the plot in the novel, BVS’s approach towards Sikh ideals, historical conditions including that of Singh Sabha Reform movement during which Sundri was written, and author’s ideological motivations that led him to write Sundri, etc. For example, Kirpal Singh notes, ‘Dr. Bhai Vir Singh’s method of history writing was to make history alive, and he clothed the skeleton of facts with flesh and blood. By his creative imagination, he has weaved together the dry historical facts in order to make them interesting’. (Singh 2002, 75–76). Mentioning about BVS’s approach towards Sikh ideals, Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh offers a detailed exegetical commentary on the plot in Sundri while adding ‘Bhāī Vīr Singh’s Suṅdarī is a living embodiment of the ethical ideals espoused by Guru Nanak’ (Kaur Singh 1993, 202). She further notes, ‘She possesses the strength of goddess, of a lioness, of lightning: in Bhāī Vīr Singh’s artistic realm, there is no hierarchy amongst the Divine, the terrestrial, and the celestial. Images come together from these different worlds to her vitality and strength’ (Kaur Singh 1993, 204). Besides these Sikh scholars, post-colonial scholars have also taken interest in examining the plot of Sundri from a feminist lens (Fair 2010; Jakobsh 2003; 2023; Malhotra 2023). Farina Mir in her recent article titled, Innovation in Punjabi Literature, focuses on BVS’s commitment to produce ‘Punjabi literature’ (Mir 2023). Anne Murphy, Doris R. Jakobsh, Anshu Malhotra, and C. Christina Fair have also argued for prevalence of an ideological fantasy in the author’s mind through which he grapples to establish a resolute Sikh/Punjabi identity (Fair 2010; Jakobsh 2003; Murphy 2012, Malhotra and Murphy 2023).

Applying diverse forms of representation and logic, Sundri, in the context of these commentaries, gets settled primarily in frameworks of Sikh feminism, Punjab Studies, and post-colonialism. Although the ordering of the text into these ‘silos of frameworks’ renders intelligible analysis of different shades of content of the text, they are also purposive in at least two other ways. First, these framings create a demand to look at the text through a sense of alterity and strangeness subtly asking the reader to be attentive to interpretation of its heterogeneous content. Second, paraphrasing Sundri into these frameworks introduces a traumatic conflict within the reader, rendering a necessary foreground to internalize an ideological and symbolic problem within the text and through it problematize the belief system that it reflects. We argue that at the heart of many of these commentaries is a political project to spur re-calibration of being, womanhood, and self-identity. The new symbolic order thus produced allows these frameworks to implant a sense of tension with the text and its subject while producing a sense of anxiety in Sikh readers.

While the onslaught of contextual framing of Sundri continues in diverse domains, we shall nonetheless accept the contributions of these works in bringing the discourse forward from the perspective of ideology, history, and literature that we examine further in this introduction. However, we must clarify that our approach relative to power dynamics of knowledge production remains neutral. Our interest is primarily focused on the hermeneutical approach of understanding Sundri and its re-contextualization in (meta) historical modes of representation. Moving away from many settling boundaries around Sundri, we believe that it is impossible to grasp the work without employing, what Prof. Jagdish Singh has termed as, Anubhavi Dupakhta, broadly translated as two planes of experience (Singh 2023, xv). Before we employ this lens, let us foreground our understanding into hermeneutic logic employed thus far.

The exegetical projects undertaken by scholars on Sundri, can be organized in the ‘polarity of’, what Hans-Georg Gadamer argues, as ‘familiarity and strangeness’ (Gadamer 2013, 306). A familiarity with Sundri becomes available through an understanding of relationality with the Sikh ethos in which the text is primarily being enunciated. For post-colonial scholars, this familiarity gets transcended into a community’s struggle to articulate its meaning through an ideological desire of ethnic/colonial forms of ‘identity making’.⁴ Nonetheless, the strangeness with the text is attributed to the complexity of the narrative that scholars have often grappled to foreground in the (im)possibilities of historical formulations that keep the text ‘incomplete and open’ (Murphy 2012, 145) or keeping the question of identity ‘unresolved’ (Malhotra 2023, 66). Perhaps the complexity in approaching Sundri can also be discovered through its constant mediation in both past and present modes of cajoling Sikh imagination transmitting a ‘timeless continuity of meaning’. Despite some critical evaluations that emphasize temporal motivations of ‘identity/ideological politics’ that some scholars believe this text has offered, it is indeed interesting to note that such scholars have conceded that the text shatters a sectarian meaning defined through historical and metaphysical attachments. Take for example, despite her ‘reference to the sectarian imagination’ that she finds ‘nodal in the novel’, Anshu Malhotra also recognizes that ‘BVS displays an ambivalent attitude toward Hindus, one that seems to concede a degree of kinship between Hindus and Sikhs’ while in parallel she suggests that ‘on matters of conversion, he wished to underscore the difference between the two’ (Malhotra 2023, 72–82). Malhotra’s remarks enunciate a dilemma while concluding that ‘The novella Sundarī defies easy characterization’ (Malhotra 2023, 84).

We disagree with the recognition of the text as a source of identity construction and its perceived strangeness. At this point, we raise a follow-up question. What makes Sundri so complex in scholarly discourses despite being so easy for Sikhs to relate with her experience? A similar question is raised and gets partially addressed by Malhotra as she notes, ‘despite the belabored nature of the narrative, it achieved the success it did: never going out of print’, as she was ‘reading its 49th edition (2016)’ (Malhotra 2023, 65). Reconsidering the theoretical structure in which Sundri can be approached, we suggest paying attention to the dynamics in which a text becomes accessible in different times and spaces. Gadamer reminds, ‘when we call something classical there is a consciousness of something enduring of significance that cannot be lost and that is independent of all the circumstances of time – a kind of timeless present that is contemporaneous with every other present’ (Gadamer 2013, 299). He further notes, ‘The classical is something that resists historical criticism because its historical dominion, the binding power of the validity that is preserved and handed down, precedes all historical reflection and continues in it’ (Gadamer 2013, 299).

Gadamer’s reflection on a literary classical points towards revisiting the approaches that become normative in historical discourses on Sundri.⁵ We argue that the inertia of colonialism in post-colonial studies has intervened and misplaced the coherence with which Sikh imagination perceives Sundri. Without applying any ‘supra-historical value’ to understand ‘the making of Sundri’ and simultaneously avoiding any pre-existing frameworks of representation that render a lens to evaluate the text in historical, ontological, or ideological pre-conditions, it is indeed vital to remain independent of any teleological or phenomenological backdrops while reading through this important text. This is not to contest that Sundri has no binding with historical conditions of its age, especially because its first publication was released during the Singh Sabha reform movement, but to add that many pre-mediations may severely dent and stifle the imaginations in which the approach towards the text becomes fixated from a certain corner. Such an approach convinces scholars to have explicitly decoded the context of a complete plot from its historical backdrop that many times renders a suboptimal hermeneutical inquiry. In many ways this entails exerting external pressure over the text and on the subjectivity of stakeholders, making it impossible to be aware of the subjectivities that often remain unnoticed and unprobed while evaluating the text. But how then can a text become intelligible within the multitudes of historical conditions and consciousnesses?

No doubt interpretation adds weight to recovery and intellectualization of text on different horizons. Understandably the dialectical process, working silently in many interpretations allows for a viewpoint that many times frees up the text from being appropriated to different forms of idealizations. Nonetheless it is also important to expand the vision and consider reflections of an interpreter from the other side. This ‘reverse’ reflection from the text to the interpreter creates an opportunity to remain open while the meaning of the text, as a life form, makes it possible to discover its new meanings being unfolded through internal contemplation triggered by the text itself. In other words, the transparency and opaqueness of the text and its interpretations cannot remain one-sided in the spirit of a living expression that the text divulges. It requires a production of coherence and meaning that facilitates a stimulation of thought into a process allowing for communicability with the text. This is perhaps the reason Gadamer notes, ‘Hermeneutics is an art and not a mechanical process’ (Gadamer 2013, 197). Therefore, it is vital to penetrate into the process of decoding the underlying meanings from a universal perspective, while being open to new learnings that can potentially rectify one’s own stance towards the text if needed.

Considering the diverse understanding that has developed around Sundri, it is imperative to find a ground of shared meaning that not only allows for the possibility of conversation but also takes account of its uniqueness in reflective processes. To undertake such meaning, we raise a few questions. Does the text get actualized only through an understanding of its plot or from decoding of its meaning in retrospection that allows for its reading in set frameworks like colonialism/post-colonialism? Are there any blind spots in such theoretical underpinnings that foreclose the possibilities to look beyond the patterns of such frameworks? Are there any opportunities to look back at the wholeness that dominates the understanding of present age rendering an inaccessible gap to the text while scholars continue to persist for an excavation of ideological underpinning within the text?

To answer these questions, we will plunge into many representations, imageries, and influences that account for structuring principles to approach history, history making, and identity formations being drawn into the post-colonial narratives about Sundri. This understanding, we later contest, impedes an open access into text while making demands from its borrowed principles that are guided by many representations and influences. The symbolic meaning of being a Punjabi, or a feminist/Sikh feminist, or a person with religious identity, renders meanings that allow for unity of consciousness into a metaphysical whole underpinning the subjective understandings that remain dominant in our age. Let us delve into few of these common narratives.

Highlighting an underlying sense of revolt embedded in Sundri, Doris Jakbosh notes, ‘Sundri was essentially a counter-attack on many of the major points propounded in Jyotirudde’⁶ (Jakobsh 2003, 162). Expounding upon her arguments she further notes ‘Sundri played an extraordinarily important role in the construction of religious gender identity during the Singh Sabha period (Jakobsh 2003), of which Vir Singh was the primary spokesperson’ (Jakobsh 2003, 215). C. Christine Fair takes a critical and realistic stance to note, ‘While Vir Singh, in this novel evinces disgust with the behavior of female contemporaries, Vir Singh did advocate social reform with respect to women’ (Fair 2010, 120). Anne Murphy takes a little complex stance to convey, ‘The vision of the novel – and the nation and people it constructs imaginatively – is at times sectarian. Crucially, at times it is not. The text speaks in multiple registers about government and religion, people and community’ (Murphy 2012, 139). Anshu Malhotra notes, ‘Fidelity to religious practices is emphasized, as is subordination to husbands, but also the fear of slide back into Hinduism’ (Malhotra 2023, 82). And later she concludes, ‘It was written primarily to accomplish two tasks: create a resolute Sikhī with firm boundaries through glimpses of Sikhs’ glorious past and shape a new Sikh woman taking charge of instilling Sikh ideals in herself and in Sikh men through exemplary self-discipline and investment in her own purity’ (Malhotra 2023, 84). Lastly, Farina Mir suggests, ‘Indeed, most scholars identify the arrival of modernity in Punjabi literature with the introduction of the Punjabi novel in 1898, and particularly Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundari’ (Mir 2023, 31). She continues, ‘Sundari is a didactic novel that undoubtedly serves Singh Sabha ends’ (Mir 2023, 32). To this she adds, ‘Change and newness in modern Punjabi literary culture need not hinge on the introduction of the novel, or the historical context of religious reform in which Sundari was produced by Bhai Vir Singh’ (Mir 2023, 41).

Considering the diverse scholarly backgrounds, the point of convergence is in the construction of the rhetoric that highlights literary aspects of Sundri, ideological motivations like pursuing patriarchy, constructing religious boundaries etc., of the author- Bhai Vir Singh, and in some cases, as we will discuss further, the negation of Sikh doctrines. Many contestations/counter-contestations can be made to these narrations. However, our interest remains past offering any dialectical modes of arguments. We investigate the possibilities of alternative accentuations foregrounding the possibility for open space of history to tease out ‘subaltern’ conceptual narratives that remain outside the frameworks of these establishing orders. In other words, we look forward to possibilities of epistemological openness that allows a so-called spectral presence of the Other, without any presetting or predominance of wider narrations. For us the question of space becomes more compelling to probe into the literary landscape where an author tries to enunciate the voice of Sikhi through Sundri that many would believe is a ‘constellation’ of drama, narration, and storytelling in historical framework relished deeply in Sikh imagination. This constellation, if that is how such readers would consider, ruptures the coherence in modern-secular flow of history that has remained essential for ‘smooth and proper’ functioning of its dominant machinery of knowledge production of which evaluation of texts remains an essential part.

For many scholars, it is essential to implant skepticism in author’s intentions through a critical examination of texts by employing, what Doris Jakobsh calls, ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Jakobsh 2003, 18). With this presetting, the scholar grants herself authoritative and hegemonic access to present the insights accessible through a so-called ‘honest empirical investigation’. However, we contest that any overenthusiasm to dig out background motivations and psychological patterns, without considering the complexities of semiotic structures, distorts the very nature of the text and its implied meanings. In other words, setting up recalcitrant frameworks in critical investigations stifles the true spirit of the text while making it impossible to offer any authentic discourse beyond the dissonance of misleading narratives. Presetting such demarcations render undulating pressure of contestations, deformations, and struggles for dominance, eventually forcing the text towards its death. This demise results from a careful conscription of the text as ‘The Other’ within its home space. But how is it possible to ensure a proper death and subsequent burial of a text, in this case Sundri, from a heritage and imagination? To ensure success of this wider project, we believe there is production of a thick counter-constellation of narratives prudently built around Sundri that promulgate that the text is – filled with ideological motivations, loaded with agendas of identity politics, making direct calls to women to observe fidelity towards cultural and religious value systems, leading women towards subordination to patriarchal value system of Sikhs, and so forth. Therefore, Sundri renders an opportunity to be critically analyzed, contested, problematized, and eventually forced to expose its internal nature as a spectral other within its home turf, Sikhi. Let us take a closer look at some of these said frameworks.

Two groups of scholars have broadly offered serious analysis delimiting structural configuration to Sundri in post-colonial studies. First group pertains to the domain of Punjab and Punjabi studies and includes scholars like Farina Mir and Anne Murphy, etc., while second is that of feminist scholars such as Doris R. Jakobsh, Nikki-Guninder Kaur Singh, and C. Christine Fair, etc. Anshu Malhotra approaches Sundri from both feminist and Punjab studies perspective. Notably, apart from Kaur Singh, not many scholars have remained sympathetic towards conceptual understanding of Sundri from a nativist perspective, nor have they tried to retain its normative content from a Sikh perspective. On the contrary, citations from Kaur Singh’s works are often recontextualized through the gaps in her argument many times critiqued, debilitated, and extrapolated from original essence of Sundri’s connotations. Scholars of Punjab studies by and large render anthropological frameworks of interpretations to Sundri as a Punjabi subject and approach it as a piece of Punjabi literature. Readers are consistently reminded of Punjab and Punjabi identity that sometimes gets marked up as Sikh identity constituted through colonial imagination. For example, Malhotra and Murphy have maintained such position in their recent work, while noting ‘Vir Singh’s subsequent choice of Punjabi as a vehicle for his writings and for development as a language of print, besides his family’s influence, was also shaped by the emerging identity politics of colonial Punjab’ (Malhotra and Murphy 2023, 3). They add, ‘Sundari in particular has often been hailed as the ‘first modern Punjabi novel’ … ’ (Malhotra and Murphy 2023, 7). Representing Sundri as a Punjabi subject renders an ethnic subjectivity to its textual interpretation thereby suturing the geography of Punjab with its literary form. With this binding, the spirit of the text gets appropriated into power struggle marked by the process of Punjabi/Sikh identity making. ‘Vir Singh’s diverse work across genres was so directly linked to his work in Punjab’s burgeoning ephemeral and periodical print culture is testimony to the importance of this domain in shaping Punjabi language intellectual life. The versatility of this work in terms of genre and content reflected BVS’s commitment to Sikh identity-making: … ’ (Malhotra and Murphy 2023, 7). Similar undertones of inherent subjectification of Sundri as a Punjabi novel are also available in Farina Mir’s exegesis.

The commentaries above, in our opinion, offset the premise of a nativist theoretical approach towards the text while offering a more specific reading of Sundri – a Punjabi subject that fosters efforts to formulate Sikh identity – while simultaneously being inhibited to offer any universal value. But, what exactly are the background motivations that postulate Sundri as a Punjabi literary text, which Mir, Malhotra and Murphy have continued to imply? At this moment, we would leave this question open for further exploration. Meanwhile, we submit that scholars of Punjab Studies have often missed the point that Sundri defies any exclusive symbolic meaning that Punjabi literary imagination would want to grant it. By stressing on ethnicity, these scholars consider human consciousness to remain in a state of permanent pause and therefore, remain static in the being of a Punjabi. Sundri on the contrary represents the higher ideal in Punjabi folk imagination that seeks for a vertical upliftment beyond the stage of ethnic permanence. Such seeking does not assimilate, appropriate, or colonize the particularity of language, ethnicity, or culture, but enunciates a spiritual striving of a being. It is a call for an infinite possibility that at certain occasions is enunciated directly by the author, producing an echo in the human heart for upliftment of being’s spiritual consciousness. As a Sikh subject, Sundri produces deep meaning in Sikh realization while remaining nonchalant from the possibility of being a Punjabi literary construct that draws upon the romantic Qissa folk lore like that of Hir Ranjha. It reminds that any ethnic spirit, regardless of its origin, does not hold strong for cultivating higher ethics or any fundamental ideals that uplift human life. It is only through realization of a spiritual essence that human consciousness stands steadfast in extreme hardships while inspiring an elevation of life towards its cosmic realization.

Working within the global cultural paradigm, scholars elide to recognize this difference and continue to bind Sikhi and Sikh subjects with ethnic modes of Punjabi culturalism. Scholars of Punjab Studies persist in drawing semantic meanings from an anthropological reading of Sundri and Sikhi as a geo-political construct. Perhaps the onto-theological constructions that guide such understanding allow for dovetailing religious experience into ethnic subjectivities that render, what Derrida calls in another context, a ‘disorder of identity’.⁷ The two bodies of being – a Sikh (spiritual) and a Punjabi (lingual/socio-cultural/ethnic) – gets sutured with theoretical constructions of identity politics while delimiting and denying diverse modes of their metaphysical disassociation. Such constructions, in many ways, call upon a devaluation of the universality of religion into an ethnic spirit of A-people and A-space something that gets equated with constructions of religio-ethnic identity like being a Muslim to be same as being a Middle Eastern and so forth. This identity, as Arvind-Pal Mandair has rightly argued, gets embedded into G.W.F. Hegel’s onto-theo-logical matrix that gets constituted into ‘an order of things … to order the religions of different nations or ethnicities’. ‘At stake here’, Mandair further argues is, ‘not simply the idea of beginning, an origin, the original condition of religion, but the identity of that origin’ (Mandair 2009, 128). Representation in that regard is not only an act of imagining oneself in relation to the other but also an ordering of such imaginary that allows for representation into a symbolic system of one’s belonging (into language, ethnicity, or gendered body, etc.). Pivotal to continuity of these representations is their settlement into a process of history, developed by invoking historical consciousness that Mandair and notably even Murphy have argued remains central to identity constructions.⁸ Such representations provide a determinate essence to one’s Being envisioned as a knowledge system – as a subject of history – a source of pure episteme that fosters the assemblage of different elements into a complete whole. In other words, ontological belonging of diverse identities gets reconfigured and organized into an epistemological system of History determinately idealized by its theological underpinnings. This has allowed for restructuration and evolution of ontotheological matrix into diverse forms of representations while simultaneously maintaining a sense of fidelity in knowledge construction.

Sundri in many ways dismantles metaphysical constructions while refusing to remain incorporable into ontotheological formulations. To substantiate this claim, let us take a deeper plunge into the epistemic understanding of history that runs in the mind of the author, Bhai Vir Singh, and gets reflected in the narrations about Sundri.

Many scholars discussed thus far grapple with the blending of history with fiction in Sundri, while broadly, we believe, they would agree upon its classification as a work of ‘historical fiction’. Let us examine a few comments that posit Sundri as a discourse of history. Anne Murphy notes, ‘It is a fiction, but through it BVS also tells a history’ (Murphy 2012, 134). She further notes, ‘This is a cry for history, indeed. Such history writing was effective on multiple levels … ’ (Malhotra 2012, 137). Anshu Malhotra while commenting on the form of the novel notes, ‘The use of history and historical texts in Sundarī is salient’ (Malhotra 2023, 70). She adds, ‘The recourse to history (tavārikh) and the historical (itihāsik) is insistently made in Sundarī particularly history as available in the written form’ (Malhotra 2012, 70–71). While she remarks in conclusion, ‘The circularity of the text, its polyphony, allows for multiple readings, and different audiences apprehend the text in their own specific ways … For a novelistic attempt that is a little over a hundred pages, Sundarī has created quite a storm in the many interpretations offered by scholars over a period of time, not to mention the readers picking up the book to learn myriad life-lessons’ (Malhotra 2012, 84).

Although some may find it enigmatic, nonetheless, BVS’s reflection on history is not fully compatible with secular historical understanding of our age. Rather the very context of narration makes Sundri ineligible for a conversation within the set canons of modern secular historicity and historicism that calls for linear chronological narration of history. This is perhaps the reason that Malhotra and Murphy note, ‘In BVS’s case, his novels cultivated an imaginative space for the playing out of history … – history as a past that feeds the present – and the historical consciousness his novels deployed drew in complex ways on Sikh precedents, within also a colonial frame (Murphy 2012, ch. 4). Through his novels, he blurred the line between historical fact and creative fiction to find a springboard for a desired Sikh future’ (Malhotra and Murphy 2020, 3).

These comments encourage us to ask if there is something more in the form of presentation of Sundri or in any other theoretical discourses on BVS that has not been discussed in scholarly debates above? This question entails positing an explanation on the structuring principle that produces historical coherence within the text and how does the semiotics in a literary tradition (if any) become available through a close reading of Sundri. For that, let us trace BVS’s approach towards history that he discusses in great length in his introduction to Sri Gur Partap Suraj Granth, authored by Bhai Santokh Singh. In this introduction, BVS lays out a detailed discourse on history and historicism while offering heterogeneous relationships to historical content. This heterogeneity, we propose, pushes against the structuring principles of secular understandings of history while also offering new correspondences with Sundri through a multi-layered engagement with the text.

According to Bhai Sahib, three types of undercurrents play a role in the formation of history – Literary (Sahitak), Narrative (Vartantik), and Spiritual (Adhyatmak). It is the spiritual undercurrent that remains pivotal in BVS’s reflection on history. He states that even if these are not overtly stated in the historical works, they are certainly prevalent to varying degrees in a covert form. In composing historical works, writers describe facts, occurrences, and incidences. Bhai Sahib terms such descriptions as ‘Bartantik’ which apply to the domain of the manifested physical world. Those that apply to beyond the physical world, he terms as ‘Alaukik’ (BVS 2011, 31)

Bhai Vir Singh expounds two types of historiographic styles. First, what he calls as Saaransh style of history, that per him enlists history in the form of distilled facts, key characteristics, and specific properties of the transpired time. Second, what he calls the Savistharik style of history, that he defines as the one that documents events and occurrences in a chronological order of happening and zooms into as vivid a detail as possible. Bhai Sahib posits that the Savistharik style of history writing is essentially of two types – Scientific (Vigyanik) and Fine Art (Komal Unri). He contends that the scientific style is more prevalent in the western world (Arabia and Europe) and discerns that in this style while the correctness of events is firmly entrenched, literary shades nonetheless inadvertently do remain existent in the writing. In the fine art type of history writing, much alike the scientific type of history writing, while events are picked up, preserved, and detailed – the accuracy and completeness of such details are neither enforced nor mandated. In this case dates and time details, even though are present and are acknowledged, are not deemed key in the process of history formulation. He recognizes this history style as poetic, musical, the one that is sought for entrenching in bliss by an ennobled human character imbued in literature and the one who harbors an ideal mind for knowledge seeking but does not fully accord care and attention to scientific technique. The creative elements in fine art history render productive possibilities to expand its horizons into a popular history that BVS terms as Sarv Priya itehas.

While taking into account the nature, directionality, and expanse of scientific and fine art types of history, Bhai Sahib propounds for unveiling of spiritual essence of history. He notes, ‘in the third (i.e. spiritual) undercurrent, history presents glimpses of everlasting eternal spiritual principles’.⁹ (Parenthesis and Translation our) (Singh 2011, 32). To this he adds, ‘despite being descriptively documented in World’s history, a principle that can be culled from historical writing, would contain the spiritual essence’.¹⁰ (Translation our) (Singh 2011, 32). Underlining the importance of spiritual essence of history he notes, ‘In purview of its third undercurrent, history cannot remain detached from shared experiences entrenched in humanity’s history’¹¹ (Translation our) (Singh 2011, 32) Therefore, any reference to events of history is for discovering the underlying principles that can be culled from these events revealing a reflective meaning within their occurrence.

Explaining his stance on history as a form of knowledge, he notes, ‘We cannot accept the argument put forward by some who consider history as an embodiment of pure episteme. History is some faction of knowledge, one may call it a knowledgeable faction or knowledge abound faction, but History is not the pure episteme’¹² (Translation our) (Singh 2011, 32). To clarify his position from a Sikh context he notes, ‘In Sikh context, history holds a status lower than Gurbani (Guru’s Śabda) and Guru’s Hukum’¹³ (Parenthesis Translation our) (Singh 2011, 35).

Clearly, Bhai Sahib refuses to consider history as a source of pure Sikh episteme. In a way, he relieves the domain of history from many burdens of claims of morality and prospects of judgement that are expected from it. Considering history as a source of pure episteme accords it a normative power and a canonship to construe the world only as a ‘matter of fact’. This approach renders transcendental powers to history that enables it to overstep its inherent limits beyond being a subject of study that contributes in knowledge production. Employing history in critical theory, philosophy, or religious studies catapults its stature to a Master subject, which armed with subjective reasoning, enables it to assume ideological value greater than other sources of episteme. BVS dismantles all such claims through his creatively fluid modes of knowledge construction. This becomes noticeable to scholars like Arti Minocha, who while quoting Homi Bhabha notes, ‘Bhai Vir Singh’s oeuvre allows us to look for the “in-between spaces”, “innovative sites of collaboration, and conversation, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (Bhabha 1994, 1)’ (Minocha 2023, 62). An important insight that can be drawn from BVS’s commentary is that linear history is not endowed with the ability to reflect the wider dimensions of Sikh Spirit and also that the status of history is under the aegis of Sabda and Sakhi.

Scholars who evince Sikh Spirit endorse Bhai Vir Singh’s views in a similar vein. Prof Himat Singh while theorizing the Sikh perspective of History through Shabda Philosophy (Meta meta philosophy) states that, ‘Meta – history would not repeat but recreate its creativity, it is evaporational than elemental, the philosophy of meta – history (i.e. meta-philosophy of meta-history). But the Sikh way gives us sense not only of meta-history … but a philosophical knowledge of meta-history too. A Sikh never remains a ‘personal’ … to relinquish history (or historical), out of any disgust or discard, but opportunes himself into a supra-mentality not beyond but within the periphery of ‘history’, christened as surte (surt) remained in-touch never more to the spiritual ‘persona’ but to ‘Sabda’ the imperishable ultra persona’ (Singh 1999, 39).

Sundri in that background etches vivid forms of inspired text as distinct from crafting a chronological account of history that provides information like a spokesperson of rationalism, science, and events. From the author’s standpoint, we think Sundri can be categorized as a blend of Saranshik, Komal-Unri and Sarv Priya forms of history devoted to understanding of Gurbani (Guru’s Śabda) and Guru’s Hukum (order). Perhaps a reason that Sundri becomes relatable within Sikh imagination is that it is full of Sikh spirit. Incidentally scholars have tied it to all kinds of ideological connotation like that of an effort to resurrect identity politics, attempts to proselytize believers into Sikhism, efforts to safeguard Sikh community from getting lured into other religions, especially Hinduism and Christianity, fostering a sense of disgust against the Muslims, and most importantly a desperate effort by the author to subjugate women into a patriarchal setup.

To better access the dynamics of historicism in BVS’s accounts, we must go closer to the epistemic foundations on which the idea of ‘the Truth’ becomes enunciated from Bhai Sahib’s lens. He notes, ‘In my opinion, “The Truth” becomes obscure during the process of its historical excavation and as time unfolds, there is a greater certainty of it becoming blurred. So, to endorse the elements of integrity in truth, it is vital to draw attention towards the veracious element that remains unshakable despite transformations in history’¹⁴ (Translation our) (BVS 2011, 33). Minocha observes a similar undertone in Bhai Sahib’s idea of history, as she notes, ‘Bhai Vir Singh critiques as inadequate the purely scientific notion of history, which believes in material truth and is suspicious of metaphysics’ (Minocha 2023, 59). This calls for an opportunity to consider a dual understanding of the truth – ‘prevalent truth’ and ‘cornered truth’ that gets articulated in a state of perpetual tension. Prevalent truth represents a sectional view of the world commonly accepted by most in society and is governed by forces of captured imagination, popular rhetoric, and outwardly manifestation of material reality. This understanding may or may not assimilate the body of holistic perspective that exists around a particular occurrence or historical event, and when it does not, it surfaces a skewed version of the total reality. On the contrary, cornered truth represents an account of reality which may have been sidelined owing to the socio-political, cultural, or humanistic constraints. Such formulation of truth is an outcome of, what Foucault calls application of ‘pastoral power’, necessitating historical manipulation to suppress an individual, a whole culture, a race, or a people in particular time and space. Perhaps the reason that Bhai Sahib does not consider history to be a source of pure episteme is because it may be exposing only the section of prevalent truth while eliminating the cornered truth from its annals. Therefore, his calling for reliance on Gurbani as a source of pure Sikh episteme is to excavate cornered truth that many times gets omitted in the tracks of historiography. In that background, the true nature of Sundri requires to be teased out from historical fortifications of prevalent understanding of truth that have reified in absolutization of ideological barriers.

With that let us turn to reflecting upon Sundri as work of fiction.

Fiction operates within the forces of tensions that endure within the psychology of characters and unveils a form of representation of truth – a ‘desired truth’. ‘Desired truth’ is an aspiration, a longing for unfolding of time in a certain manner that assuages the psychological seeking of the author and/or a society in a particular time and space or beyond. Leveraging this tension, fiction uses the techniques and underpinnings of psychology and subjectivity to construct the narration of the ‘desired truth’ that operates within the forces of this tension. The psychology of an individual gets replete in many balances and counterbalances produced in forces of duality, antagonisms, and individual temperaments. This often gives rise to an incessant monologue that orchestrates a world of dreams, aspirations, fears, and flights. Through this mode of psychological interceptions, fiction leverages to construct the ‘desired truth’ while chiseling through its creative expanse. In either case, it draws its content and form from social or individual psychology. However, this truth does not operate in the plane beyond self and society – i.e. the meta plane. Sundri, a work that expounds Sikh spirit and is anchored in the constructs of the meta planes of Sabda and Sakhi, is not formulated by the workings of psychological undercurrents. Therefore, it defies being a work of fiction.

While scholars prefer to place the contents of Sundri as ‘historical fiction’ that allows the author to switch between history and fiction, Sundri, truly ruptures modern-secular understanding of both history and fiction. It is neither complete history nor a total work of fiction. Rather, from the discussion above, it appears that Bhai Vir Singh’s experiences draw their reasoning and awareness from the meta plane. He does not derive creative meaning through the devices of either of these forms of psychology, and therefore, does not utilize them as a tool of his writing. Creative act for Bhai Sahib is what Nicolas Berdyaev would call ‘at its highest’ where ‘culture arrives at self-abnegation’. Such creative act responds to ‘creativity in art, in philosophy, in morals, in social life, would exceed the limits of its own sphere, is not to be contained in any classic norm, reveals an impulse towards transcendental’ (Berdayaev 2009, 121). This self-abnegation is the creative non-dialectical unfolding of human consciousness that uplifts history from its inner obstacles. The sociological and ideological context of this unfolding of creative act is enigmatically promulgated as an act of proselytizing in several discourses. For instance, the creative realization deeply entrenched in Saraswati or Surasti’s journey into Sundri that many scholars have uniformly decided to charge BVS for his attempt to promulgate ‘conversion’ and for instilling ideological barrier through a disgust with Muslim ruler is widely misrecognized, if not misconstrued. Talking about the plot where Surasti is kidnapped by local Muslim leader, Malhotra notes,

Such portrayals also anticipate the future acts of abduction, or insinuations of the same, during periods of communal hostility in India. The kidnapping of women (or such an accusation) and the “other” religion’s men’s rapaciousness (read Muslim), came to be played out in situations of riots and pogroms at various times in Indian history: whether colonial India, during India’s Partition, in post-colonial India, or the charges of “love-jihād” today (Datta 1999; Gupta 2016). Further, what made conversion acceptable in the novel (to Sikhism), and what not (to Islam), was because the Muslims (Mughals/Turaks) as a community (qaum) were portrayed as not indigenous, and therefore not belonging. BVS can be said to have participated fully in constructing the myth of Muslim rapacity. Surasti/Sundari’s kidnapping, enacted four times in the novel, or the Khatri woman Dharam Kaur’s abduction, adds to this mythmaking (Malhotra 2023, 78).

Malhotra has drawn a full circle of theoretical constructions to charge BVS as the mastermind of a full-blown plot while ‘participating fully in constructing the myth of Muslim rapacity’. With this ‘participation’, she signals towards some kind of covert approval by BVS for kidnapping of women of ‘other’ religion. It appears that she has dismissed that Bhai Vir Singh has not minced words while enunciating an open relationship with Muslims during a conversation between Pandit Ji and Sardar Sham Singh available within the very plot of Sundri from which she draws her antithetical arguments. Through this conversation, noted in chapter seven of Sundri, Sardar Sham Singh declares ‘our creed has no biases. We have no enemies. To us, Hindus and Mussalmans are equally our fellow beings’ and therefore he is ‘not pitched against Mussalman because of their being Mussalmans’. Further, not only is this perspective a theoretical argument, but Bhai Sahib’s living experiences also enunciates examples of fluid relationships with fellow humans irrespective of their religious backgrounds. Looking past communal identities, on the similar note, Rajbir Singh Judge argues, allowed BVS to have an open and warm relationship with renowned Muslim painter, Abdur Rahman Chughtai, who painted the front piece for Bhai Vir Singh’s Nargas: Song of a Sikh (1924), while being appreciative of Bhai Sahib’s works (Judge 2022, 603).

Ignoring many such evidence, Sundri in the hands of scholars like Malhotra is ideologically motivated text filled with a teleological force, moving towards actualization of history in construction of religious identity for Sikhs. In contrast, as we have learned and would continue to learn while reading this text, BVS’s understanding of identity is rather ontologically open, not only towards the Other but towards its own death – ‘a self-abnegation’, using Berdyaev’s term, accentuated with the death of Sundri’s character in the novel. Through this death, the underlying force of history becomes ideologically emptied making it lose any element of its own metaphysics. Even the idea of pain of Sundri’s death is transcended into an episteme of higher consciousness, as a continuity of meaning of life that can be realized in its transcendental and infinite creativity. At this climax, Sundri appeals to sense of continuity of life and death in natural unfolding of eternal Hukum, besides underlining the glory of living experience that lacks any desire or fantasy to enunciate historical connotations. History and historical fiction are both liberated in this experience of Sundri.

Rather than proving any immaturity of speculation or deliberate misrepresentation, that renders a rude shock to Sikh spirit, let us step back and reflect upon the background assumptions that make Malhotra’s arguments plausible in the first place. It is notable that usurping of the context, like how Surasti’s kidnapping can be short-circuited into an acquisition of fostering ‘love- jehad’, is deeply embedded in the binary between the transcendental and immanent sphere of understanding that invokes a sense of dualism in the interpretation of text. This dualism remains central to the making of a speculation while producing a sense of charm and ugliness central to its construction. On close reading the transcendence in Sundri is not into any otherworldliness (or into an Otherness, as many have argued), but one that is within the immanent, actively engaging with the forces of time and space. Focusing the attention primarily on uncovering the ideological motivations of the author makes the work unrecoverable from its incoherence within its many misrepresentations. These ideological barriers, on the contrary, are frequently demolished within the text itself and in many ways through the fruition of concept of Seva that invokes a sense of ‘self-abnegation and togetherness’. While remaining actively engaged in the immanent world, the character of Sundri is forged with generosity and altruism, rendering a new meaning to living relations through her very existence. Her character consistently provides an opportunity to engage differently with elements of life. As Gillian Howie and J’annine Jobling say, ‘The truly “radical” move is not to flatten all elements onto a plane of consistency but to reveal and engage with the theological strains that resonate through our secular modernity; perhaps to rethink the modernist-postmodernist doublet itself’ (Howie and Jobling 2009, 4). As an author, Bhai Sahib does not use the character of Sundri to influence the construction of a perception of truth. He is a writer of Naam Rasa¹⁵ aspects of Shabda Philosophy and crafts the work of Sundri using the paradigm of spirit as his writing device.

In many ways, the commentary above signals towards the production of narratives that forces us to recognize an inherent undercurrent in the text filled with ideological motivations and suggestibly considering moving past Sundri. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that these narratives have allowed for setting a spotlight on Sundri within the academic domain, besides also onsetting a dialectical process for its deeper understanding in unfolding of history. However, for us this renders an opportunity to relocate the spirit of the text in its true nature.

Without going into further evaluations, let us take a turn here to move closer to Sundri, especially from a feminist perspective.

Sundri in a feminist perspective

In the discussion above, we have so far argued that the interpretations on Sundri cannot be relapsed into a common genre of history, fiction, or ‘historical-fiction’. An unavoidable outcome of contextualizing Sundri as history or historical fiction presets the context in which history becomes imaginable with construction of ideological boundaries or historical communities as can be imagined in the idea of a Qaum. The sense of self-abnegation and togetherness of humanity gets lost in such detouring of context. The spirit of Sundri reflecting the creative experience of a Panth (spiritual path) becomes evasive against this backdrop. In other words, the idea of linear history when applied to Sundri makes the text unintelligible while foregrounding History as a signifier that remains out of the subject as it becomes a representation of the ‘past that influences the present’. Sundri, on the contrary, is a living moment at every nodal point pulsating vividly in expressions of Sikh spirit.

Let us now take a closer look at contextualization of Sundri from a feminist perspective affirmed through modern-secular frameworks of understanding. In the past two decades, feminist scholars have broadly described the interactions and entanglements that finetune the question of Sikh womanhood culled from the binary between colonial modernity initiated by the Singh Sabha movement and tradition. ‘Given the Tat Khalsa’s singularly derisive attitude towards Sikh women at the time, Vir Singh created unattainable and untenable representation to the aid of Singh Sabha constructions of ‘true’ Sikh womanhood’, notes Doris R. Jakobsh (Jakobsh 2003, 167). A similar argument is made by C. Christine Fair as she notes a ‘contempt for his female contemporaries whom Vir Singh posits as the root of corruption’ was undertaken through ‘Sundri’s heroism’ that ‘is manifest at the expense of the very women she is supposedly inspiring’ (Fair 2010, 120). Moving past the arguments made by other scholars, she draws a speculative trajectory to link Sundri and other novels by Bhai Vir Singh with violence of Khalistan movement. The coherence within these constructions is primarily settled on the sexualized form of human body that becomes the site of Sikh identity and religious reformation foregrounded within the feminist narrative. ‘Thus, gendered sexual politics was at the heart of Sundarī’s polyphonous articulations, disaggregated and analyzed here. The centrality of gender imaginings to colonial power, reformist diatribes and declamations, and nationalist reworkings of history and futurist politics has been demonstrated by generations of South Asian feminist historians’, notes Malhotra (Malhotra 2023, 66).

Clearly, gender fixation, in the commentary above, is central to identity politics. Once again, the complete narrative rests on an undisclosed binary – the binary between the genders, that allows for construction of boundaries, where the body of woman becomes an undisclosed pawn of a larger picture of a spectral masculine communal Sikh identity. But what happens if the ‘phantom’ of the sexualized male body becomes absent in reference to this construction of (Sikh) womanhood? Is it impossible to discover oneself in thinking and action and more significantly in one’s own being if the specter of a patriarchal masculine subject gets removed from the canvas? In other words does the feminine subject become nullified in the absence of a tension with the masculine subject? The agnostic dialectic that is silently working in these narratives, we contest, has emptied out the subject of womanhood while incorporating a narrative of a spectral agency that constantly guides, motivates, and directs the subject of Sikh womanhood. Such understanding is ingrained within the very motion of the subject from a text to a life form and vice-versa, while displacing both the text and the life from its internal modes of realization that can otherwise remain in a natural state of being. Overcoming such relationality while being deeply ingrained within the idea of Being could potentially derive self-meaning both within and beyond the Being-in-the-World.

In his famous essay, The Hermeneutic Motion, George Steiner discusses four stages of ‘the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning’ (Steiner 2021, 186–190). In the first stage, Steiner argues ‘is the building of an initiative trust in the other, as yet untried, unmapped alterity of statement, concentrates to a philosophically dramatic degree the human bias towards seeing the world as symbolic’ _{(Italic ours)} (Steiner 2021, 186). The second step is the aggression where the attention is on ‘understanding as an act, on the access, inherently appropriative and therefore violent of Erkenntnis to Dasein’ (Steiner 2021, 187). After aggression comes incorporative stage where ‘The import of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in or into a vacuum … There are numerous shadings of assimilation and placement of the newly-acquired, ranging from a complete domestication, an at-homeness at the core of the kind which cultural history ascribes to … all the way to the permanent strangeness and marginality’ (Steiner 2021, 187–188). This step allows for ‘naturalization’ of text into a new meaning through an ‘act of importation that can potentially dislocate and relocate the whole of native structure’ (Steiner 2021, 188). The last step is that of compensation that restores balance. The act of restoring balance counterweighs the enigmatic residue left in the process of enforced invasion into the text causing appropriative rupture and violent transport of its native meanings.

Central to Steiner’s argument is the process of motion of meaning inherently embedded in the process of translation (literal and subjective). Lori Chamberlain (2021) leverages this argument while she observes a production of metaphoric gendered subject enunciated in the process of translation. ‘In the metaphorics of translation’, Chamberlain argues is ‘the struggle for authorial rights’ that can be figured as a ‘literary equivalent of colonization, a means of enriching both language and literature appropriate to the political needs of expanding nations … Because literary success is equated with military success, translation can expand both literary and political borders’ (Chamberlain 2021, 264–265). Following Thomas Francklin’s treatise on translation, Chamberlain expounds for the role of ‘the translator as a male who usurps the role of the author, a usurpation which takes place at the level of grammatical gender and is resolved through sex change’ (Chamberlain 2021, 263). This usurpation, for Chamberlain, of the text as a feminine subject is open to be seduced, dislocated, controlled, and violently silenced by the masculine translator who can enthrall the psychic conditions of his readers through ‘creative misreadings’ (a term that she borrows from Terry Eagleton). Chamberlain further calls for deeper ‘understandings of the word “fidelity” in the context of translation that changes according to the purpose that translation is seen to serve in a larger aesthetic and cultural context’ (Chamberlain 2021, 266). Beyond the dualistic modes of understanding translation like that of masculine/feminine, paternity/maternity, or master/slave or Gavronsky’s ‘pietistic’ (chaste translation that remains faithful to the author)/‘cannibalistic’ (translation that can capture, rape, or incest the original), Chamberlain concludes, that ‘the feminist theory of translation will finally be utopic’ (Chamberlain 2021, 274). Nonetheless, she makes a final suggestion that we find productive in our discussion on Sundri is ‘As women write their own metaphors of cultural production, it may be impossible to consider the acts of authoring, creating, or legitimizing a text outside of the gender binaries’ (Chamberlain 2021, 274).

Juxtaposing Chamberlain and Steiner’s ideas with several quotes and evidence from interpretations of Sundri that we have drawn thus far, point towards a ‘fractured and creative misreading’ undertaken by scholars. Nevertheless, we leave the argument for further research while we turn the page to revisit and interpret this new volume of Sundri from a Sikh as well as Sikh woman’s perspective. In many ways the text on hand provides a possibility of continuous retrieving and revealing new meanings of selfhood that, as we have argued above, gets conveniently stifled and assimilated under the panoptical pressures of different forms of dualism – gendered body, immanent/transcendent, etc. Therefore, it is indispensable to recognize the Being of womanhood realizable in Sundri as an experience that constitutes productive meanings of selfhood, without getting adjudicated into any form of binaries. The resonance of these internal meanings renders semiotic permeability that not only draws upon the conscious mind of Sikh readers – perhaps a vital reason for the success of this novel since its first publication – but simultaneously percolates into embodied relationship that fills human heart with a state of being that belongs to a higher-self.

In other words, our interest is to talk about Sundri and locate its universal essence beyond socio-cultural boundaries that have fixated the text into a domain of identity politics or as a text of cultural studies. This we will do by revisiting what the author has rejected in his writings that ‘had an added imperative: to block the fluidity and porosity between Hindu and Sikh women’s identities, to prevent the program of culling a separate Sikh identity from coming undone’ (Malhotra and Murphy 2023, 15). Second, we question the framework that Sundri ‘is a overlay’ of a ‘shared imaginary with an agenda of shaping Sikh separate identity (which remained fluid here)’ (Malhotra 2023, 65). The argument is further extended to note that ‘Sundarī’s mix of novel-writing, gender and sexual politics, and the locus of community redemption in a historical past were in tune with the larger need of elite high-caste Punjabi men to inhabit modernity, control, and organize gender politics as an aspect of globally calibrated civilizational progress, and imagine a future in which they wielded power, as has been argued for Bengal’ (Malhotra 2023, 65). This argument propels us to access the Sikh sources for ab-original content that gets overlooked in the process of reflecting upon Sikh imagination and also while evaluating Sundri. In other words, we grapple to locate the bedrock sources that capture the imagination of Sikhs but may have remained elusive for accessing Sundri in a scholarly discourse. Third, we highlight some of the concepts, like that of Seva, that provide an opportunity to move in and out of the text into life form making the text a living experience of Sikhs that Sikhs live and breathe in their day-to-day practices. This help to acknowledge Sundri as a ‘living text’ and not a dormant theoretical formulation that can be revered, analyzed, debated, or critiqued via existing frameworks of study. Last, but not least, we want to question the framing of Sikh womanhood in Malhotra’s argument that sutures woman’s fidelity with religious identity achieved through ‘shaming women for’ a ‘historical dilution and loss, but also, paradoxically, encumbering them with the onus of reworking its imagined pristine character’ (Malhotra 2023, 81–84). This we approach by drawing upon Heidegger’s understanding of Being-in-the-World and by ‘re-centering’ the spirit in which Sundri was originally written. For all these reasons we attempt to uncover the universal meaning of Sundri as a body of knowledge both within and beyond Sikhs.

Sundri as it is

Talking about historical ‘textures’, through a hagiographic encounter of Bhagat Namdev with Sultan, Christian Novetzke mentions, ‘Here we have the imperative to provide a theographic account of the past, one that shares the same aim toward inscription and preservation, but that serves a timeless theological truth rather than historically specific recollection of the past’ (Novetzke 2015, 128). Novetzke underlines the heterogeneity within the ‘textures’ of text that allow to go beyond homogenous or monolingual delimitations that get hinged upon its meaning. Textural reading of Sundri, in a similar way, offers diverse contexts that lucidly bind elements of temporal conditions with metaphysical meanings that provide an enriching experience to a reader. Evidently productive meanings of Sundri also operate at a meta level in which free play of imagination, dynamism of history, dualities in time and space, metaphysical tensions in power struggles, affirmations of living experiences, radiance of spiritual meaning, anxieties of human conditions, expressions of free will, risks, and fears of life perpetuating in the shadow of death, etc., get full expression within its plot. The semantic universe retrievable from the plot ruptures the determinate essence of modern secular world contingent upon institutionalization of power structures stabilized through capitalist/historical social formations. It opens the space for alternative imaginations to think beyond aspirations of modern bourgeoise social conditions of what Charles Taylor calls a ‘disenchanted secular world’.¹⁶ Simultaneously it reminds of the heroic dimension and dignity of common life essential for vertical mobility of human subjectivity. The elements of asceticism, acceptance, truthfulness, higher accountability, ethics, Sikh aesthetics, psychological makeups, etc., are postulated in multiple connotations and forces that render a narrative to potentially resolve irresolute tensions between universality and particularity of human relations.

Notwithstanding these multidimensional textures, most available commentaries on Sundri, that we have discussed above, are broadly limited in discussions to focus on the theme of construction of religious boundaries. Almost every scholar has without fail mentioned the scene from the opening part of the novel in which Surasti is abducted by a local Muslim chief and rescued by her brother Balvant Singh. Renamed as Sundri, she later decides to adopt Sikhi and beseech to be a potent symbol of Sikh identity adhering to principles of Sikhism. Many reviewers also talk about the direct appeal made by BVS to Sikhs to uphold moral and spiritual conduct, projected as a solicitation by the author to construe a resolute and concrete Sikh identity. Feminist scholars have added another layer to point out that the author has concentrated on maintaining Sundri’s chastity and preserving her ‘purity’ as a metaphor of superior moral conduct, thereby staunchly advocating a control over femininity. Incidentally, very little attention is paid towards any enriching experience in the story of the novel. There is hardly any reference to study of meanings of any transcendental purpose of life, interplay of mind with nature, free play of imagination, vivid expression of creative archetypes, expansion of mind to explore devotion beyond existential materiality, Sundri’s discourses on doctrinal values of Sikhi, her experience of death, meaning of invocation of Mata Sahib Deywaan in narration, significance of symbols in creative expressions and self-realization, invocation of God and transcending of consciousness in situations of maximum risk while espousing for unfolding of divine meanings, etc. All such modes of theorizations are grossly missing in these rather, new narratives on Sundri. On the contrary, the discourse is rather fixated on two themes – identity construction and feminist meanings. To address these two themes, let us delve further into the postulations of one’s sense of ‘belongingness’ and how the belongingness in BVS’s Sundri is not entirely temporal, reified with historical, lingual, symbolic, cultural, ethnic, or genealogical modes of self-identification.

The idea of anubhavi dupakhta, that we briefly mentioned earlier, is central to decoding Sundri’s multilayered meaning. Anubhavi dupakhta is not simply a paradoxical position of looking through the ‘eye of the other’ or a parallax view of same entity. It is rather a coherence drawn through a correspondence between history and meta-history, self-meaning and higher life. It provides a vantage point to simultaneously experience immanent and transcendent spheres through a transparent relationship between the two. Approaching Sundri through this lens establishes a porous relationship with the text as the meaning of a pulsating life, devotion, and aesthetics flows through human consciousness. Regrettably the production of meanings in most commentaries on Sundri entail cultivating an attitude that remains devoid of anubhavi dupakhta. Therefore, these commentaries reduce the belonginess of Sundri to a political project – designed to reify religious, ethnic, linguistic, or gendered identity. Considering the lack of engagement and failed relationship with the text without employing anubhavi dupakhta, we return to the question of identity from a different perspective.

The idea of oneness in Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other gets echoed in Arvind-Pal Mandair’s arguments against monotheism in Sikh conception of God. In his rather complex thesis, Mandair contests that providing onto-theo-logical proofs of God’s existence was central to Singh Sabha reformers and in Bhai Vir Singh’s theological connotations that was concomitant to the idea of oneness rendering a solid metaphysical identity. Mandair argues that Ernest Trump’s allegation that Sikhism is ‘not entirely a religion’ as there is no concept of One God, was central to inspire Singh Sabha reformers to ascertain and provide proofs of One God as a central tenet to Sikhi. To Mandair, Trump’s translation was pivotal to initiate a dialectical process through which the reformers invested in redefining the central tenant of Sikhi as a monotheistic religion. This translation, according to Mandair, was a source of BVS’s anxiety to redefine Sikhi as a monotheistic religion that allowed him to gain access to a solid Sikh identity.¹⁷

However, a question behooves – Is Sikhi completely devoid of the idea of One God? In other words, is the idea of Oneness and unity completely foreign to Sikh conception? Besides, is there no space within the Sikh doctrines that resonate with the principles of unity, which Mandair would argue, got dialectically implanted from no-thingness to a solid metaphysical entity with the efforts of Singh Sabha reformers in response to colonial sources of knowledge production? While agreeing with Mandair, we submit an add-on. On close reading of many hymns in Guru Granth Sahib, it becomes intelligible that Sikh doctrines accept a determinate essence of God in a monotheistic conception.¹⁸ In a certain way, the element of oneness is always there in Sikhi, although the contestable part has been its application in history.

Post-colonial scholars have fallen short of underlining that Singh Sabha was a movement aimed at resurrecting Sikh spirit according to Sikh doctrines. Apart from responding to Ernest Trump’s translation, the reform movement was an opposition to internal cultural corruption of Sikh society, a defiance against the emergence of priestly class that propagated superstitious rituals amongst Sikhs, a resistance to reconstruction of caste hierarchies and cultural anarchies of tribal psyche, a protest against the rise of feudal consciousness, etc. These practices had emerged and settled in Sikh subjectivity with the rise of political power since the Misl period (i.e. since 1757 AD) that had steered a restructuring of Sikh society according to the raw power struggles. Consolidation of political power was accompanied by subjective, cultural, and social transformations undertaken religiously with dominance of cultural tribes in Sikh politics. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, aspirations to consolidate maximum power were cultivated through cultural consciousness despite the rejection of ego and power according to Gurmat (Guru’s philosophy). This caused a socio-cultural and political drift of Sikh masses from the Sikh principles. In his book, Akal Takht: Revisiting Miri in Political Imagination, Amandeep Singh (2018) gives a brief account of these historical transformations. For Singh Sabha reformers, the construction of strong religious boundaries was secondary to the primary objective of recentering Sikh society around the Sikh doctrines. Borrowing a colonial understanding of monotheism while understanding the reality of socio-historical conditions was practically productive in meeting the middle ground while pushing for this primary objective. Adding a caution to this argument, we submit that the native understanding of monotheism is not a simple reapplication of the theological/scientific temperament of the colonizer’s historical consciousness. Rather monotheism in Sikh doctrines remains within the meta-historical plane drawn from a unity of human consciousness. While being in historical plane its meaning remains open to its meta-historical connotation embarked on by Anubhavi Dupakhta. The Sikh identity is therefore non-partisan as it is also non-historical, non-metaphysical, and certainly non-polarizing. In Sikh doctrines it is expressed as Niarapan i.e. being ‘indifferent’ to historical tensions and not Vakhrapan – which is being ‘distinct’ in ideological imagination. On a being’s level, Niarapan does not involve construction of personal ego, while Vakhrapan renders a sense of personal purpose to remain separate and therefore yields towards an act of personal ego. Engaging with Niarapan has allowed Sikhs to celebrate togetherness, accommodation, and fluid relatability with spirituality in diverse religious forms of Naam Rasa tradition. The Guru invited Bhagats, Bhats, and Saints of diverse traditions, regardless of genealogical inheritance, to participate in the compilation of Guru Granth Sahib. Similarly, Gurmukhi is composite of diverse languages and their colloquial forms expressing devotion in many names and forms of God. This is indeed a vital reason that Sikh Gurus have fostered the formulations of four Panths besides the Khalsa Panth (i.e. Nirmala panth, Sehajdhari Panth, Udasi Panth, and Sevapanthi) constituting a free exchange of diverse experiences to human consciousness.

Bhai Vir Singh was indeed (un)consciously aware of the difference between the colonizer’s and nativist sense of monotheism, history, and its implied meaning in construction of historical boundaries. His faith on Gurbani and not history as a source of pure Sikh episteme, undergirds the impossibility of assimilation of Niarapan into history and ideology. The idea of identity in Sundri is distinct from a historical/ethnic/racial form of identity that many scholars have mistook to be so. Therefore, in many ways, Bhai Vir Singh and his works cannot be dovetailed securely into ideological formulations fostered during the Singh Sabha reform movement, although temporally it was impossible for him to overstep the conditions of his age. Besides the idea of unity of consciousness is not very foreign to Sikh understanding. However, monotheism in Sikhi is not the same as imaginable in colonizer’s sense. In many ways the monotheism in colonizer’s sense is drawn from a uniformity in backdrop of history, ethnicity, genealogical inheritance, and language (monolingualism). Sikhi on the contrary remains open to these temporal and metaphysical inclinations and celebrates the sense of togetherness beyond such backdrops. The colonial impact was such that ‘Unity of consciousness’ got kneaded into ‘Uniformity of history and ideology’, that Sri. Aurobindo has discussed in detail. For Aurobindo, the idea of unity sprouts from the unity of life and its spirit that helps ‘possess at once your higher self and the self of all creatures’ (Aurobindo 1971, 239). He notes, ‘ … unless the race, the society, the nation is moved towards the spiritualization of life or move forward led by the light of an ideal, the end must be littleness, weakness and stagnation’ (Aurobindo 1971, 212). This ideal, he cautions, further is not the one that gets produced from a ‘dominating authority whose whole tendency is to introduce rigidity, uniformity, a mechanized and therefore an unprogressive system of life’ (Aurobindo 1971, 384), but on the ‘principle of liberty’ that ‘offers a natural obstacle to the growth of uniformity … ’ (Aurobindo 1971, 385).

The unity of life and its spirit was an important theme touched upon by contemporary thinkers of Bhai Vir Singh including Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore. It is through Creative Unity (Tagore’s term) that the essence of Sundri communicates freely, empathizes, and connects with the world. It remains deeply contestable that the text foments the creation of divisions and factions among religions, which allows reproduction of ideologies that affirm social power and culminate in becoming absolute, outward, or relational. Instead, another way to look at Sundri would be to reflect upon how the author negotiates a balance between two planes of experience (temporal and meta-temporal), i.e. a way Anubhavi Dupakhta remains in direct and free exchange. Therefore, undertaking a synchronic historical engagement with Sundri is a challenge not only for its theoretical underpinning but for reconstruction of our cognizance of temporality. It is rather impossible to relate with Sikh expression of piety voiced in gendered forms without invoking Anubhavi Dupakhta and any attempt to interpret piety through a customary secular understanding would only fall upon its degraded conceptualization replete with ontic and historical disgust. The dynamic exchange through Anubhavi dupakhta, or what Mandair calls a ‘bicameral’ approach (borrowed from William E. Connolly, who in turn follows Deleuze’s Logic of Sense), restores the balance within the text that helps to de-colonize its meaning beyond any ideological or political purposes. Expounding upon this bicameral approach Mandair notes,

The success of the bicameral method hinges on being able to bring a limited philosophical analysis into dialogue with a minimal historical survey, with the aim of holding together contradictory senses of violence and/or time rather than succumbing to conventional dualisms such as historicism/tradition, or insider/outsider. Far from undermining the rich empirical work of historical scholarship, it operates intersectionally across and between disciplines rather than mining the depths of a single discipline, in the hope that scholars might reap the benefits accrued by diversifying the mode of critique, thus outweighing any perceived drawbacks of limited historical survey. (Mandair 2022, 20)

Taking Mandair’s arguments further and closer to its relevance in Sundri, Prof. Jagdish Singh discusses the idea of Sakhi Naem (Divine act in temporal form) that renders productive insights to reflect upon the embodiment of Sundri through a (meta)temporal plane. He notes,

Through a divine touch, Sakhi Naem is inherently equipped to negotiate a balance between the eternal antagonisms of dualities including that of form/formlessness, temporal/meta-temporal, metaphysical/existential truth, Being/non-Being, Immanent/Transcendent, ethical binding/freedom, etc. This is because Sakhi Naem draws upon the divine essence of pure-transparency that encompasses all forms of duality.¹⁹ (Translation our) (Singh 2010, 50)

An in-depth conversation with Sundri entails human mind to realize Sakhi Naem while reflecting upon the nature of the text in its wholeness. Sakhi Naem is bestowed form of living that is transparently hinged to that form of living through which the physical form of the Guru Body engages in temporality. Through Sakhi Naem, the Guru Body maintains an incessant interplay with matter, time, and space around where all occurrences and incidents that the Guru Body dealt with get emancipated and re-constituted in a coded form of meta-epistemology. Sakhi Naem, therefore, primes a path for humanity to decode the codification in its active time-space and unveil new and fresh interpretations of the cosmos around while deriving light from the beacon of the meta-epistemology. Such interpretation with the text may not be completely accessible while undertaking a hermeneutical investigation upon the text, that many scholars have done so far, but would require to engage differently with its textures; both empirically and beyond empiricism. In other words, how does the text talk to the unconscious while retrieving human subjectivities that get internalized with desires, fears, anxieties, aspirations, and dualities of social interactions well entrenched within its plot? Scholars would need to ask this question to themselves while relating with the true essence of Sundri, especially since it has echoed so well in Sikh imagination through its creative power. The plot in the text deeply resonates with the sense of liberation of personal egos, renders openness and freedom from anxieties from materialistic pursuits, spurns antagonism for the Other that helps to stabilize self-image and identity construction, and uplifts human consciousness into experiencing of a divine being. While truly reflecting upon the inner nature of the text, these underlying textures of Sundri are experienced well in Sikh imagination which enables its popular reception. The callings, made to Sikhs by the author, are primarily directed towards such realization of higher self and through which the tensions of duality that permeate in historical conditions get dissolved in meta-historical plane of sublime consciousness. This is indeed a reason to go further in retrieving the source of this binding of text with Sikh imagination.

Talking about ‘textual tradition and social practice’, Purnima Dhavan notes, ‘Early Khalsa literature, the Dasam Granth and the first rahitnamas and gurbilas (celebratory narratives of the last Guru’s life), clearly viewed world power as corrupting’ (Dhavan 2010, 66). Similarly, commenting upon Zafarnama/Hikaitan, Robin Rinehart notes, ‘Taken as a whole, the Dasam Granth may be read as a courtly anthology exploring the dharmic responsibilities of leaders whose rule includes both a spiritual and a worldly political component’ (Reinhart 2015, 143). Scholars like Dhavan and Rinehart have plausibly pointed towards the nature of literary material of Sikhs, particularly the Dasam Granth, that intertwines spiritual and temporal domains while fostering social, ethical, and moral upliftment of individual and society. Discussing the complex ways in which the narratives around the compositions of Dasam Granth are laid down, Rinehart finds some compositions and accounts as ‘important and intriguing’ (Reinhart 2015, 138). Of note, is however, the upholding of dharma that modulates the embodiment of truthfulness and meta-temporal value system in social makeup. She notes, ‘A noteworthy theme that runs through much of the text however is that of dharma on multiple levels. From the maintenance of cosmic order by the gods … ’ (Reinhart 2015, 143).

Similarly, BVS’s idea of history presents reality of physical events and metaphysical events and entails and constructs a whole era of multi-dimensional reality. At the level of physical events, during ‘pariwar vichchoda’ (familial separation), Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth incarnation of Sabda Guru, immersed Dasam Grantha (the revered tome representing the universal anthology of creativity, materiality, and meta-temporality) in the Sirsa river and called upon the Sikhs to unearth the tome. Bhai Mani Singh, on Mata Sundri’s behest, led the mission to retrieve the work. He landed several fragments of it and oversaw the recompilation of the text. The transpiration of the act of Dasam Granth being found under Mata Sundri’s aegis represents the resurrection of Dasam Granth under Sakhi Naem.

In parallel, Sundri creates a profound symbol of elevated folk and in the process of doing so BVS avoids to employ the influences of the psycho, socio-political, historical, and ideological forces that were prevailing during the times of writing of this work. In shaping such symbol and projecting it as the core tenet of this work, he establishes that societal folk paradigm is an inadequate device to capture and illustrate the experience of the spirituality or for, what Rinehart signals, upholding dharma.

Looking through this prism, life on societal plane involves being led under the tenets of social psychology, anthropological evolution, personal psychology, and cultural influences. A life led on this plane, by and large, tunes itself to the expectations and norms outlined by external factors. Right after gaining consciousness to the end of life, one flutters between the ebbs and tides of emotional lows, equilibrium, and highs with life’s vicissitudes and time bound gratifications.

Nonetheless, on meta-societal plane life defines the self and records its contributions such that they outlast temporal conditions. Life lived on this plane is agnostic to presence or absence of physicality. When such life assumes physicality, its inward faculties express outwards and contribute to elevating the stature of physical world – the overt Universe, such that the latter becomes tad bit closer to the state of upholding dharma. When such life travels beyond physicality, it seamlessly unifies with the highest consciousness to then become a part of the covert universe, such that the latter radiates brighter in its inward meta-physical glory. In the novel Sundri, we find the Sikhs living on the cusp of both societal plane and meta-societal plane. They gracefully navigate across the both with poise of a mystic, focus of an ascetic, and jubilation of a sybarite.

The historical conditions accounted in Sundri highlight the subjugation of Punjab’s political landscape under the Mughal dominion and conceivably a suppression of indigenous folklore of Punjab against the political masters. The traditions, beliefs, customs, and stories of the community that were being passed through generations by word of mouth and did not project rulers in a good light were indeed under heavy scrutiny and ostracized by the rulers of the state. Sundri highlights these folk stories including the oppression against women of non-Muslim communities, that remained particularly rampant at that time. Doris R. Jakbosh gives a brief account of this persecution while mentioning the efforts of the Singh Sabha reformers. She notes, ‘The selfless deeds of Sikh women of yore were elucidated in graphic detail. In one such example, when executioners carried out the orders of the Mughal governor Mir Mannu (1748–53) and killed the infants of the captured Sikh women, their ‘gory corpses were thrown into the laps of the latter or suspended from their necks.’ Instead of buckling under the governor’s brutal pressure, these women were grateful for the opportunity they had been given.’ (Doris 2003, 160). The historical period depicted in Sundri when political atrocities abounded in civil society, the emergence of Sikhs as the bulwarks of the divine law should not be construed as the emergence of merely a type of people resurrecting particular identity by rubbing against the Other. It is rather an emergence of a whole time or an era which encapsulated and exhausted the spirit of die-hard sovereignty of life and universal love of humanity. The inspirational message in Sundri showcases how higher consciousness interjects and penetrates into history to change the course of humanity revealing an infinite possibility of vertical upliftment.

Sundri’s text comes replete with powerful character-based symbolism, where characters illustrate lives that demonstrate variegated combinations of spiritual fragments of merit, fragrance, discipline, and prodigy. For instance, Deewaan Kaura Mal is portrayed as a symbol of spirit that is steadfastly anchored in the spirit of Maryada (spiritual restraint) and persistently supports righteousness via spirit, material, and tact regardless of the administrative disposition and pressure of the ruling class. Nawab of Doaba exemplifies a symbol of spirit smitten in love for the beauteous, meritorious, and sublime which transcends the stronghold of orthodoxy and in absence of fulfillment of such love sets out on the path of mysticism. Balvant Singh and his fellow Sikh brothers stood for sovereignty of spirit that blossomed freely under the aegis of love of the Guru.

The character that shines most luminously in the constellation of the characters that Bhai Sahib etches in his work is that of Sundri. Bhai Vir Singh chooses a woman (Saraswati) belonging to the primeval cultural fabric of Punjab as the main character of his work and morphs her into a timeless symbol of universal womanhood. Her womanhood inscribes a cosmic relationship between outward and inward beauty. In the time period represented in the writing of this book, tribal anarchic mindset, regardless of religion, had begun casting its reign in the socio-political landscape of Punjab. Bhai Vir Singh does not grant shades of tribal anarchic mindset in defining the ‘self’ of his protagonist. This is so because the tribal mindset becomes deeply attracted with power relationships instead of cultivating the native spirit of Sikhi resplendent with living nature of association with its people, flora, fauna, and engaged in a deeply personal way with these forces.

Sundri represents a body anchored in high spirit, devotion, kindness, and undaunted love of the One Guru. She does not come under the pull of Mughal aesthetics and transcends the pull of temporal love – even when such love was fully devoted, passionate, entranced, and aching to culminate in her. Sundri perpetually stays in a higher mental realm where any and all love to her singularly implies the love of the One Guru.

To contextualize Sundri, the three principalities of – Mata Sahib Deywaan (the Cosmic Mother, revered as the mother of Khalsa), Dasam Granth, and Saraswati (Sundri’s name prior to being incorporated into the Khalsa and symbolizing the primeval culture of Punjab) – need to be studied in a coherent singular relationship under the aegis of Sakhi Naem. Sundri’s journey in the form of Surasti commences as a noble cultural soul steeped in values of tradition. Her seeking at this stage centers around being a householder and aspiring contentment in being a devout wife. As she undergoes the torrents of abduction, witnesses the apathy of her kith and kin and of her to – be husband, perseveres through the obsessive pursuit of Nawab of Doaba, her consciousness fervently kindles to address a higher call where she experiences an internal beckoning from the higher realms of dharma and spirituality. The Dasam Granth, in the Sikh imagination, is the archetype that expounds narrations, phenomenon, and conducts of these realms using creativity and mysticism as its devices. As Surasti navigates through these realms in her human abode, she incarnates into the Sundri – her being molds from being a pure cultural self to the one that is entrenched in the conduct governed by dharma and submission to the Guru. Blessed with divine grace as she deepens and progresses her journey, serving humanity selflessly and resting her remembrance forever in the Guru, she arrives as a pilgrim to the station where spiritual transparency prevails, whereupon the symbolic incarnation of Mata Sahib Deywaan dawns on her. Sundri – at whose pedestal, the highly able and astute Khalsa brother, Sham Singh bows his head in reverence as she culminates her material journey in temporal world. The novel records the collective interplay of the spirit of these principalities in the realm of history. Therefore, this work even though published more than a century ago, continues to capture and motivate Sikh imagination and strike resonance with Sikhs. The symbolism of Sundri thrives vividly in the imagination of young and old alike and beckons the lively.

Further let us try to unweave the complex entanglements that suture Seva (service) to secular feminist theory. Few feminist scholars in Sikh studies have discursively postulated a detailed report on normative and operative promulgation of Seva undertaken especially during the Singh Sabha reforms. Doris Jakobsh, for instance, has written a commentary on Seva binding the doctrine into a gendered subject that, according to her, was propagated to affirm patriarchal social conditions during the Singh Sabha reforms. Quoting the stance of reformers on Seva from Khalsa Advocate that states, ‘Service is the root of Sikhism; service is the middle (means) of Sikhism and Service is the end of Sikhism,’, she notes, ‘The notion of service along with that of duty increasingly became the slogan of Singh Sabha reformers in their transformation endeavor of Sikh women’ (Jakobsh 2003, 155). Overarching her viewpoint along with other arguments into a broader framework, she continues, ‘Observers noted that the Sikh guru’s teachings as well as the reformers efforts were beginning to make their mark on debased position of Indian womanhood’ (Italic our) (Jakobsh 2003, 158). Throughout this thesis, there is no mention of Seva being associated with men in Sikh society. Following these arguments closely in their paper titled, Revisiting The Khalsa Samachar (1899–1900) Women’s Issues and Concerns, Parneet Kaur Dhillon and Jaspal Kaur Dhanju note,

The notion of service along with that of duty increasingly became the slogan of the Singh Sabha reformers in their effort to transform Sikh women … With this, a new feminine ideal came to be instituted: one who gave her services to the fledging educational enterprise.’ (Dhillon and Dhanju 2023, 95)

About two decades later, Jakobsh rephrases her argument in context of Sundri to note, ‘In Vir Singh’s novella, daily devotional practices were inculcated into the lives of women, mainly taking the form of readings of particular sections of the Guru Granth Sahib and through acts of service (Seva) to the roving Khalsa warriors’ (Doris 2023, 227).

Ostensibly, in the commentaries above, there is an avoidance of acknowledgment that the constitutive nature of Seva has a nonpartisan connotation regardless of gender. The tactical move makes it possible to fit Seva into a framework of it being a gendered doctrine propagated to extend male control over the society. Such consideration causes deep affliction within Sikh subjectivity as the predicament in the context of the argument displaces Seva from its true essence. Not only is there an incoherent understanding of Seva in these commentaries, but a conscription of its entire structure into an overarching promulgation that posits some kind of inherent problem within the reform movement inspired by Sikh Guru’s teachings. In doing so, a covert suggestion to decode Seva as a phenomenon causing subservience of women while inspiring them to serve Khalsa brotherhood, becomes permissible. The production of historical/sociological meaning of Seva in this context produces fractured meanings positing an inherent lack of understanding of Seva’s constitutive nature. This fractured knowledge causes a violent contraction of an ideal through a sociological inquiry while the inquiry itself remains open to draw unintelligible, antithetical, or skewed interpretations, as may be needed, to foster a warped thesis. Notwithstanding, this contrived thesis about Seva, let us try to reconfigure its essence from a Sikh doctrinal perspective.

In many ways, the doctrine of Seva and its embodiment regardless of any gender constitutes its multi-dimensional meaning in religious practices of Sikhs. Modulating between individual and social subjectivity, Seva derives its practical meaning from the Naam Rasa tradition. It renders an opportunity to materialize higher ideals of human life, making these ideals practicable in human societies, while espousing that man has a higher purpose greater than performing mundane practices of everyday living. Such understanding entails a self-reflection that human form is not merely a self-actualizing entity that has a utilitarian purpose for its own-self, but it also has an onus of fulfilling life by uplifting this given world into a divine realization.

Diffusing across individual and collective consciousness, the Sikh concept of Seva expands into several dimensions of understanding and experience. Although Seva is primarily cognized as bio-physical²⁰ practice that Sikhs are often found undertaking in Gurdwaras, like cleaning, sanitization, Langar (community kitchen), etc., it unfolds its greater purpose in constituting individual and social habits that transcend logocentric hardening of historical imagination thereby fluidly permeating across human hearts through its trans-bodily connections.

Seva constitutes four important dimensions. First, at ontological level of being, it uplifts individual consciousness through embodiment of practices that nurture the values of Halimi (humility) and piety. Second, at ideological level, Seva resists the idea of ‘Otherness’ by struggling against the imagined identities. Third, the biophysical actions performed during Seva are accompanied by repetitive recitation of ‘Satnam-Waheguru’ or only ‘Waheguru’ producing fluid bonds and developing the capacity to envision open communities and thereby creating de-racialized societies. The practices performed in Seva modulate to enunciate living episteme assisting liberation of societies from ideological self-affirmations and assertions of polarizing ideologies. Lastly, at a metaphysical level, Seva derives its higher meaning from Naam Rasa that opens imagination beyond the dualities of mind and world. The practices undertaken render productive possibilities to transcend the stagnations of a symbolic universe. Self-abnegation and sense of togetherness are openly promoted while undertaking Seva.

The Sikh doctrine of Seva, in material temporal practice, fosters organic universality of inspiring values that produce meaning beyond distinctive social order paving way to elevate consciousness in both spiritual and worldly realms. Underlining the universal dimension of Seva undertaken during the COVID-19 crisis in India, when Sikhs were all over the news in international media assisting fellow humans by arranging food, supplies, providing medical assistance, and arranging for funeral pyres, Amandeep Singh notes,

While unsettling the core of secularism that rejects religion over politics and racialism that pivots humans against each other for their religious belongingness, the Sikh alternative, once again demonstrated the internalized embodiment of Seva (Service) erupting as an unbounded universal realization articulating itself beyond unnaturally installed boundaries’. (Singh 2021, lxiii)

In Sikh psyche, the idea of Seva resonates a living experience that is overwhelmingly enshrined in Sikh texts like Sundri freely moving in and out of its textual boundaries. This is perhaps the reason that Sikhs are widely in news across the world performing Seva at refugee camps, natural and political disaster sites, war zones, and in conditions of extreme hardships.

An obvious question begs – why have some feminist scholars covertly associated Sikh doctrines like Seva to gender bias, when the idea of Seva has been available so widely in the open worldly domain that remains neutral of gender connotations?

To answer this question, we try to understand the discourses on Sikh feminism from three dimensions while remaining in close proximity with Sundri –The first is a retrieval of womanhood, particularly Sikh womanhood in its own terms, i.e. without any spectral reference to a masculine entity; second, understanding Sikh feminism in secular-democratic frameworks that draw the meaning of womanhood from conceptions of humanism; third, seeking an understanding of works of a few feminist scholars in the domain of Sikh studies that in some ways reflect an epistemic crisis of this age. Let us start this discussion in reverse order.

Feminist scholars on Sikh studies have by and large focused on a few themes that point towards gender biases leading to control of women in Sikh society. These include – highlighting social issues like dowry, that point towards a degenerate condition of women in Sikh society, marking the extension of patriarchal norms and gender hierarchical roles through stigmatization of sexual habits including chastity, fidelity, etc., idealization of woman into a symbolic space that projects her as a symbol of familial honor/izzat, and calling attention to a limited participation of women in religious rites including performance of Seva and Kirtan at Darbar Sahib, etc.

At the onset, some of these issues certainly require rethinking over social and religious practices being followed that deny open access to certain spaces to women. However, the projection of social/cultural inscriptions as intrinsic failure of Sikh doctrines becomes vertiginous and convoluting in many ways. One scholar that stands out, taking this discussion to a radical level of extremity, is Doris R. Jakobsh. In her many papers and publications, Doris has consistently demanded symbolic decoding of norms, codes, rituals, and moral frameworks that define masculine and feminine behaviors central to respective sexual regulations. However, on a close reading of her exegetical commentary, one may note that these arguments are either too flimsy (for example her comparison of a kitchen utensil of Karad (knife) as feminine with Khanda (Sacred symbol signifying transcendence of duality between temporal and spiritual domain) as masculine), or too skewed in making direct allegations of gender bias on to Sikh authors like Bhai Vir Singh, reformers, activists, Granthis, Sikh society, Sikh institutions, and even Sikh Gurus and Guru Granth Sahib. The chargesheet of her recriminations is too long, many times radically obtuse and sensibly excruciating to Sikh psyche, forcing one to question the underlying dispositions of such framing. For example, in one of her essays she notes, ‘The significance of the “masculine” khanda, as opposed to the karad, a domestic, one edged “feminine” utensil, was indicative of the gendering process involved in creating new versions of being a Sikh. The institution of male panj piare was to have significant gendered implication’ (Doris 2014, 595). Commenting on the role of Singh Sabha reformers she notes, ‘Increasingly, restrictions on women came to occupy a central place in the imagination of reformers’ (Doris 2003, 195). Enduring the momentum of her arguments against the Singh Sabha reformers, she expresses a similar line of thought to make many postulations about Sikh Gurus,

While Guru Nanak’s words have been lauded as the slogans of emancipation for women in the Sikh tradition, they had more to do with the rejection of prevailing notions of ritual purity and support of the social hierarchy of the time. (Jakobsh 2003, 25)

Fostering her charge against Guru Nanak she notes, ‘However, procreation, the procreation of sons specifically, was central to Nanak’s vision of the ideal woman. An oft-quoted verse, supposedly indicative of Guru Nanak’s positive evaluation of womanhood, points to an appreciation of woman only vis-à-vis the procreative process’ (Jakobsh 2003, 24). To this she adds,

He did not re-evaluate social institutions such as marriage and marriage practices to make them more equitable for women … In the final analysis, when it came to the social status of women, Nanak seemed content to leave the prevailing system in place’. (Jakobsh 2003, 26)

Similar commentary consistently runs through her thesis, with explicit and covert undertones to declare that the expression of devotion by Guru Ram Das in Guru Granth Sahib is in ‘utterly profane language.’ (Jakobsh 2003, 32), while offering a conclusion that, ‘A patriarchal value system was firmly established throughout the guru period, and by the end of seventeenth century it had been transformed into an order that gave religious, symbolic and ritual sanctioning to a specific gender hierarchy’ (Jakobsh 2003, 238).

Clearly, Doris charges Gurus to be responsible for establishing patriarchal norms and any efforts made by the Gurus in uplifting the status of women are either downrightly rejected or perhaps not enough. Reading through many of such accusations spread throughout the book at different intervals, one is forced to re-evaluate the entire social construct in history and cosmology of a religion through the prism of ‘women subjugation’. A question gets raised here – Is this a total imbecility of scholarly charge or an obsession to orchestrate anything and everything about the Sikh society, Sikh reformers, prophetic experience, prophethood and Śabda from the lens of gender bias? Further, is it possible that by questioning the debased status of women in a socio-cultural relation, the scholar is clandestinely questioning the entire belief system while simultaneously making an effort to introduce new normative into the subjectivity and consciousness of her readers, by remaining out of the text as an honest scholar who is true to secular facts within the post-colonial constructions? In other words, is this a form of neo-colonialism that starts with dissecting, butchering, and discarding the belief system that could eventually be displaced and replaced by a new subjectivity as a part of four step process of Hermeneutic motion that Steiner has talked about? A follow-up question would be – Is there some kind of anxiety in the scholar’s mind to apply G.W.F. Hegel’s Aufhebung (explained in detail by Arvind-Pal S. Mandair) where in the scholar negates, preserves and wants to elevate a belief system from her own understanding and in her self-image? In simple words, does Doris want to avoid a corruption of influence of an Indic religion into her own imagination of the world by shaming, excruciating, rejecting, and somewhat accommodating the message of Sikh Gurus? Is this marginalization carried out for maintaining an ontological puritanism of a race that as Mandair would argue, effects ‘an exclusion’ of a culture and civilization ‘from a meaningful engagement’ in the scholar’s native space? (Mandair 2009, 152).

Although deeper investigation into such evidences can be rendered to further build this argument, we choose to leave it here for now. Certainly, the desired impact of Doris’s hermeneutic motion is clearly noticeable in the works of a few new scholars who appear to have closely followed her arguments in the domain of Sikh studies, tailored neatly from a so-called Sikh feminist perspective.²¹ For now, let us circumvent the issue and instead question the underlying frameworks of many assumptions that permit the percolation of these charges into subjective spaces while making these palatable in modern secular modes of understanding religion.

We would like to raise a few questions at this point. What defines the normative and the symbolic in the modern secular world? How do the normative and symbolic engage, define, fix, and frame the religious and meta-temporality of the religious in diverse cultural connotations? How does the prophetic experience get unfolded into temporal domain both in religious and secular postulations that many times gets contextualized as a character of a good human or a social reformer and scholar at its best?

With ‘the rise of disciplinary societies’, argues Charles Taylor, there was an increasing focus on God’s immanence than His transcendence. As the duality between the immanent and the transcendent settled in common subjectivity during the renaissance period, ‘there was a greater need to make God fully present in everyday life’ (Taylor 2007, 145). Negating the heroic dimension of life, the modern moral order required ‘the society to dethrone war as the highest human activity and put in its place production’ thereby leveling the old value systems (Taylor 2007, 184). Simultaneously, ‘polite’ manners were deemed necessary for making one more sociable and for ‘conversational exchange for mutual enlightenment or amusement’ (Taylor 2007, 235). With widening gulf between reason and passion, nineteenth century writers like Leslie Stephen, Taylor contests, advocated for ‘Manliness’ as an ‘important quality or a bundle of virtue’ of ‘muscular Christianity’, in contrast to ‘childlike, effeminate, sentimental’ expression of faith that propounds to fight off baser desires in the name of duty. (Taylor 2007, 396). Nevertheless, as new look towards life rationalized with increased reliance on immanent God, it acquired new meanings with upsurge in human productivity, greater investment in economic infrastructure, and growth of ‘materialism’. In due course, the counter-movement to increasing ‘materialism’ was drawn not from ‘religious forms but found atheist expression’ in subsequent unfolding of secular expressions. (Taylor 2007, 407). Tracing the history of ‘disenchantment of world’, a term Taylor borrows from thinkers like Max Weber, from religious to secular, Taylor gives a detailed account of participation of literary writers, political thinkers, artists, poets, and philosophers, who beyond everything else contributed, resisted, or remained neutral to atheistic expression of immanent religion with the unfolding of A Secular Age.

Commenting upon the unique frontiers of modernity, Taylor notes, the ‘disciplines of civilization’, came to be seen as one ‘denying inspiration, deep feeling, the powerful emotions which gave life its meaning’ (Taylor 2007, 717). He continues,

So deeply has the narrative of human progress become embedded in our world that would indeed be frightening day in which in it was lost. Its embedding is attested in much everyday vocabulary, in which some ideas are described as ‘progressive’, other as ‘backward’; some views are those of today, others are positively ‘medieval’; some thinkers are ahead of their time, others are still in previous century, etc. (Taylor 2007, 717)

The ‘specter of meaninglessness’ that Taylor has diligently exposed, rested on human happiness that could only inspire ‘when we have to fight against the forces which are destroying it; but once realized, it will inspire nothing but ennui, a cosmic yawn’ (Taylor 2007, 717). The special theme of modernity was indeed grounded on an opposition, rebuttal, and rejection of the unprogressive and medieval ideas of the past. The normative and symbolic of the modern age in this sense is somewhere grounded in the subjectivity of duality and a binary that rejects, dismisses, and is inclined towards subjective elimination of the other worldliness/ other. The transcendent in its complete expression is articulated, revealed, realized, and symbolized by fusing into the immanent through its expression into one entity – ‘the Body’. Body, renders a surface to place both epistemic and ontological domains into its very constitution. As a condition of pure biology, the body incorporates desire, ambition, instinct, ego, power, subjectivity, imagination, and materiality of genealogical race. Additionally, it is also a ready text for intellectual and social discourse rendering a surface for activism, psychological subjectification, identity politics and ideological construction etc. In many ways, the constitutive vitality of body, both ontologically and epistemologically, has led to the construction of structures of discourse that draw its value from the spectral presence of the transcendent. Therefore, entities like tradition, modesty, chastity, piety, consciousness, shyness, devotion, silence, subjective virtues, social values, or even prophetic experience, prophetic body, divine word, prayer, cosmic-self, etc. are subject to biological understanding of body being trivialized or idealized according to the subjective positions. The discourse on body is therefore gendered, queered, socialized, hegemonized, ethnicized, aestheticized, racialized, radicalized, colonized, and idealized, in direct or indirect spectral presence of the ‘transcendent’; the otherworldliness of the Sacred; ‘the Other’. Paradoxically, ‘the Sacred’ including sacred space, sacred symbol, sacred institution, sacred life, sacred experience, revelation, prophetic cosmology are all constituted in philosophical, historical, racial, ethnic, literary, or gender discourses of modern age detoured through the body or more specifically through its determinate essence in historical metaphysics. The discourse in this mode of conceptualization is preset in well-defined frameworks of hierarchical dualism in which the immanent defies the transcendent by redefining the transcendent within the immanent. This allows an easy access to the prophetic body to be contextualized as a human body, social body, historical body, or gendered body (depending upon the context) and prophetic revelation to be accessed as an open space of discourse of subjectivities and temporalities within the coordinates of their historical and sociological interpretations that can be discussed, debated, criticized, eulogized, deprecated, or rejected with contextual switching. The meta element in such discourse is preset into the domain of mysticism, esotericism, or occultism remaining beyond the scope of rational empiricism.

One of the central features of modernity, according to Taylor, is actualized through the disciplining of subjectivities as ‘civilized’. For engineering the emotional makeup of modern societies an element of binary between elegant and grotesque aesthetical sensibilities is central to inculcating refined manners of high elite that latently produces an inspiring power. Relying on Darwin’s theory of evolution, modern aesthetics, particularly the horrors of the ‘ugly’, render a teleological undercurrent forcing one to imagine history as a progress into an ideal world, where history comes to its closure in its self-perfection. Interestingly a similar idea is envisioned in Marxist idea of communism and Hegel’s idea of evolution towards ‘absolute spirit’. This idea of progress of history, that many times remains unarticulated, continues to inform modern secular subjectivity with a spectral presence into a perfect world, that could eliminate all imperfections/profanity/ugliness/evil etc., from human existence thereby making human life self-enclosed and complete entity envisioned in a liberal and equitable perfection incorporating a good and ideal world by off-loading the idea of the transcendent.

The Sikh idea resists such stabilization of the world into a perfect order that is energized with teleological force of history. Sikh relation with time and space in history remains outside the dominant structuring into a perfect world that gets foregrounded in modern-secular imagination metaphysically implanted through a spectral presence. Doctrinal understanding of Sikh metaphysics does not entertain such a proposition. Sikh Gurus have constantly reminded of being in a state of realization, particularly in the remembrance of death, by overcoming the syndrome of experiencing life as ‘history in a waiting room’. Simultaneously, life is not postulated as any psychological or metaphysical illusion. It is a real entity that inspires struggle of consciousness with and within the imperfections of the world. Therefore, there is no idea of a future perfection that can be free of all diseases of flesh, both within history and sociology, as there is no idea of life after death. The doctrinal concentration is on one’s ‘being’ not ‘becoming’. Whatever elevation of life is presupposed, like from the state of Manmukh (mind is directed towards ego) towards a Gurmukh (consciousness directed towards the Guru) through Sikh doctrines, it is directed inwards, in the state of being, that manifests itself in history thereby making its own becoming.

Considering the hermeneutical analysis of Sundri in this sense offers a stance to take a pause and step back for undertaking textual reflection through ideological propositions that concentrate diligently on social position of Sikh woman. Approaching the text as a gendered body discourse, contextualized in the frameworks of ethnicity, identity politics and modern feminism, begs for a reconsideration of such interpretive debates. Introducing a refreshing meaning through her life, Sundri affirms the state of being of a Gurmukh. She constantly resists the idea of history, sociology, and understanding of womanhood that is forced and radically implanted on the states of her being. Throughout her life, Sundri stymies the framework of modern-secular subjectivity and that of tribal subjectivity that feeds upon a spectral idea of the Other and idealizes women as a symbol of stigma, or izzat in a masculine understanding of history and world. This is why as we mentioned earlier, Sundri remains higher in the imagination of sikh subjectivity and therefore, cannot be reified as a Punjabi subject. Being both ‘docile and violent’, ‘reliant and autonomous’, etc., she produces horrors in many ways stifling modern secular as well as tribal cultural subjectivity. She escapes being a surface for clash of ideologies, through her benevolence, generosity, and openness by remaining agnostic to religious boundaries. Embodying religious modes of expressing piety and devotion, she remains abysmally unwanted and provocative in secular scholarly discourse. In many ways, she challenges the idea of self-knowledge and free will that modern world has contextualized for itself, while employing both self-knowledge and free will in higher meaning through Seva and Simran (meditation) that infuse a sense of belonginess to a cosmic order. Through this consciousness she ruptures the pervasive and recalcitrant imagination of both the modern world and popular cultural imagination. It is the genius of Bhai Vir Singh, producing a vivifying spirit, that is living, breathing, and rendering meaning across generations as Sundri.

With that, let us turn to the idea of womanhood manifested through Sundri.

‘If we are to formulate our question explicitly and transparently, we must first give proper explication of an entity (Dasein), with regards to its being’ notes Martin Heidegger. (Heidegger 2008, 27). The question of being remains central to Heidegger’s inquiry that is ‘essential in a way entities are discovered’ (Heidegger 2008, 26). To discern the meaning of being, it is in fact formidable for Heidegger, to transparently gain access into its own character by overcoming the ‘presuppositions’ rendered to the idea of being. Such inquiry stipulates a radical revision to the researcher trying to demonstrate the making of the being, transparent to itself, releasing it from its everyday situatedness prevalent in average understanding of Being as a given entity or a fact. He notes, ‘Here what is asked about has an essential pertinence to the inquiry itself, and this belongs to the ownmost meaning [eigensten Sinn] of the question of being’ (Heidegger 2008, 28). Furthering this line of thought he notes,

Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task. (Heidegger 2008, 31)

Heidegger’s disposition productively discloses the conditional foregrounds in which meaning of the being gets informed, produced, cultivated, and reified, giving ‘a report in which we tell about the entities’ rather than ‘grasping the entities in their Being.’ (Heidegger 2008, 63). This is particularly relevant to de-freeze the profusion of narratives that have settled around Sundri, seizing the possibilities of the text’s enunciation beyond fixed sense of theorizing womanhood. Luce Irigaray makes a similar point while discussing the construction of relational identity of genders. This relational identity for Irigaray is not limited to understanding of womanhood as a gender identity against the man, but also a sociological construction emerging in the process of history. Therefore, she questions the framing of womanhood in both relational identity and sociological constructions. She notes, ‘As far as sociology is concerned, my own becoming, as a process that is strange to the history and society in which I am situated, amounts to a mere dream or a utopian view: in fact, a sort of madness or psychosis. In a way, sociology locks up for a second time in a patriarchal tradition. It claims that only that which already exists – or better, existed – can be, or is, true.’ (Irigaray 2009, 15). To escape the foregrounding of the feminine subject from these set standards of understanding, Irigaray advocates for ‘placing and keeping a transcendental dimension between the other and herself, particularly the other who belongs to a different origin, beginning with the masculine other’ (Irigaray 2009, 17).

Irigaray’s suggestions ask us to question the canons of feminism that predefine womanhood in prefixed frameworks that cannot be productive to go beyond both socio-cultural and modern ideological constructions. For example, the idea of ‘silence’ discoursed by feminist scholars and fostered in socio-cultural practices of Punjab draws fresh meanings with Irigaray’s suggestion of reflecting on silence as internalization of divinity, essential for transforming oneself into a higher being. An oversimplified version of feminism adopted through a gendered body differentiation, has misplaced, diverted, or relinquished the essence of such symbolic meanings thereby divesting both socio-cultural practices and theoretical frameworks from their religious sensibility.

In theoretical domain, the self-other dichotomy that transcends into subject-object dichotomy, finds a resonance in the way feminism has fixated womanhood. In this way, as is also available from Irigaray’s account, feminism has abandoned womanhood somewhere while making her body determinate into a theoretical account that cannot enunciate itself without being partisan to organize the idea of emancipation. We ask, ‘emancipation from what?’. Is it an emancipation from the destitute of social attitude towards women or actually an emancipation from ‘womanhood’? This is not to say that emancipation from social control cannot or should not be a cherished dream of feminism. But is it not true that with a cynicism to eliminate the ‘other’, ‘the ugly’ and the spectral devil, one actually is ending in emptying out one’s own self, and in this case one’s meaning and womanhood and therefore, a feminine relationship with the divine. This is particularly relevant when we take a closer look on how the context of feminism gets laid out in feminist studies and particularly Sikh feminist studies. Many times, the context, as we have mentioned earlier, misses to explore its consumption as a study that fosters women empowerment, which is how it is, should be, and could be productive in a philosophical inquiry. On the contrary, we find that critical theory serves as the foundational voice of feminism. Considering the contents of studies that we have discussed above, womanhood in feminism has become [un]relatable with her being, who appears ready-at-hand but has been uprooted from being a Being-in-the-world (applying Heidegger’s terms). Therefore, the underlying themes of these studies abysmally escape the subject of womanhood while undertaking a critical evaluation of newspapers, texts, history, society, and religion. To a certain degree, the idea of a woman gets appropriated as an object of study that belongs to the subject of feminism where the subject acts like a ‘hammer’ that can be used to nail intellectual control over the object. This designing of the context confines the field of study into a making of negative assertions that are fundamentally flawed to highlight the Being what it is not.

But what does Being-in-the-World mean for Sikh woman? How does the Sikh experience transcend both socio-cultural and textual constructions in theory and practice, beyond space and time, while resonating with her womanhood in bodily form?

To be in the world is to understand and relate with the world in which the being becomes relatable. A sociological understanding of womanhood through feminism, in many ways, fixates the world as a presupposed entity through which access to the entities renders the possibility of a deeper access into the world in which the entity get fixated. Heidegger notes,

Neither the ontical depiction of the entities within the world nor the ontological interpretation of their Being is such as to reach the phenomenon of the ‘world’. In both of these ways of access to ‘Objective Being’, the ‘world’ has already been ‘presupposed’, and indeed in various ways. (Heidegger 2008, 92).

So what constitutes the idea of the world in Sundri?

Throughout the main body of the text, there are several sketches of the world of Sundri where she is singing hymns, meditating, or reminiscing about the Guru and Almighty, while performing regular chores of everyday life. Through these scenes, the author underpins the importance of Sangat, Guru Granth Sahib and the Guru Sabda as the nucleus of Sikh world. These scenes postulate an active participation of mind, body, and soul, central to Sikh devotion towards the Guru. The location of forests in many of these scenes fosters the interplay between human mind, body, and nature transcending the limits of polarities casted in historical and sociological constrictions. This world of Sundri makes the entire cosmos porous to one’s self-realization. Resonating with Luce Irigaray’s idea of ‘vertical and horizontal transcendence’, the scenes of Śabda recitation in Sangat, drawn by Bhai Vir Singh, reflect a true Sikh tradition wherein the Sangat continues to perform prayers to Almighty undergoing a vertical transcendence, while the polarities of identities are transcended horizontally by inculcating divine love that flows across human hearts entering into a deeper state of self-enrichment that reverberates with human consciousness, nature, and cosmos. The many adversities and petrifying calamities available in the plot of Sundri, render an opportunity to turn inwards in the moments of crisis that foster uplifting both individual and collective consciousness. With this upliftment of consciousnesses, sensory perceptions are overtaken by meta-sensory perceptions and a state of sublimity dawns upon one’s being. At such junctures, the limits of temporal order in time, space, history, society, race, and other forms of materiality cease to operate. Many times, a reader experiences a calling to internalize these divine moments such that the self of mankind seamlessly sutures new bonds across human hearts while leaping over metaphysical limits and by making deeper accesses into living relations. Helping the needy, caring for the injured, praying to almighty, cultivating humility and humanity are normal traits in this state of regular Sikh living weaved intimately in Sundri’s world. Associating the idea of care with womanhood or being chaste or performing Seva or being a part of the Sangat (congregation in prayer) undeniably do not signal towards any kind of weakness or displacement of her humanity or debasing her social status with respect to men. These traits render a sense of dignity to ‘normal humanity’ in a Sikh mode of Being-in-the-World. Caught over into the loops of their respective commentaries, scholars have failed to provide any such details on these scenes and their symbolic meanings that are available in abundance within the plot.

Nevertheless, to further develop a harmonious understanding, it is indispensable at this stage to also take a closer look and tease out the undercurrents of subjectivities that remain overwhelmingly influential in socio-cultural imagination of Punjabi psyche. Many times, one may feel that a misunderstanding of the world, in which Sikh womanhood gets constituted, has led to a double hammering of the subjective premise through which the subjective world of her being gets constituted and represented. The first stroke is that of tribal subjectivity – an element that is found missing in most of the feminist studies on Sikh womanhood. At a socio-cultural level, women of tribal societies, regardless of their religion, are widely subjected to sociological pressures of tribal orthodoxy through which her womanhood gets conditioned to cultural ethos making her vulnerable to these pressures. Racial attraction in tribal cultural subjectivity has constitutively forced woman’s being into an object of male honor, while her inner world remains suppressed under these pressures. Stimulated by deep rooted psychological fear of losing self-image, tribes often subjugate women by perpetrating masculine force and taking pleasure in inflicting rapaciously wild masculine libidinal instinct during the process of mating, thereby overpowering feminine sensibilities with direct physical coercion. Modulated with attractions of racial power and flamboyance, tribes across spatial and temporal boundaries have historically enforced patriarchal norms outwardly accentuating the ideals of masculine honor and feminine modesty in social discourse, while remaining inwardly trembled by Maryada in mother principle of womanhood.

Nonetheless, a second blow to Sikh womanhood is rendered through a convoluted epistemic representation that tactically structures negative reasoning around her subjectivity. Attending to an inherent lack of development of personal ego in the traditional religious practices, like through Seva, the nature of discourse gets directed towards toppling religion as an object of desire. Compounding misrepresentation with incoherent ideas, produces estrangement within her own realization of religion and makes womanhood devoid of her higher realization. Through this estrangement her subjectivity is misplaced into the space that interjects ‘nihilism’ into her very sense of belongingness. The symbolic universe, in such conditions, gets debilitated or even lost as her Being submits to the pressures of representation in history and sociology. In the atmosphere of free-floating constructions in dense mist of pseudo constructions, this Being is unhinged from her own sense of belonging while remaining unanchored in religious experience. Inquiring into such ‘covered-up-ness’ asks Heidegger, ‘can the being of entities ever be anything, such that ‘behind it’ stands something else ‘which does not appear’’ (Heidegger 2008, 60). Let us take an example directly from the plot in Sundri that tries to reclaim the essence of symbolic meanings of Being-in-the-world.

One of the scenes that strikes the most in Sikh imagination is the death of Sundri. Deeply moving, the scene fills human heart with excruciating pain reverberating the misfortune of a calamity that flows overwhelmingly from this scene. The scene is so powerful that one forgets the textual form of Sundri. She is a living, breathing, and pulsating reality creating echoes across temporal distances. In fact, the entire environment and cosmos is filled with the gloom of its tragic momentousness. Sardar Sham Singh’s Matha Tekna (bowing in reverence) to Sundri at this moment makes many Sikh hearts skip a beat, as the flow of time gets paused to experience the entire expanse of temporality (Aad Jugad expanse) in this moment.

In the aftermath of this scene two effects transpires. The Moghul Nawab of Doaba realizes the futility of his endeavors. He is deeply moved by Sundri’s death and abdicates his position of power to pursue a life of religious recluse. The paranoia of his desire yields to its paradoxical condition of being an ascetic as soon as the object of love is lost. Through this scene BVS demonstrates the constitutive void embedded within the very meaning of being. This void becomes available and comes to the surface through a sense of meaninglessness as the object of love is lost. The second fallout from this event is an effect on the psychic condition of Balvant Singh, who also wishes to go the same way as the Nawab but gets persuaded to struggle in active life and serve humanity. The author once again reminds that Sikh relationship with life is non-individualistic such that it does not lend to be withdrawn towards being’s denial. It is participatory in open practice of spiritualism through the very materiality of one’s being.

Strangely enough, there is either no mention of this moment of climax in any of the commentaries, or, if there is any, the scene is estranged and becomes completely unrelatable in connotation to Sikh subjectivity. For instance, Anshu Malhotra notes,

In Sundarī, BVS casts Sundari as the guru, in her exemplary pure/virginal life, and her fervent speech-making on her death-bed. This is seen by some scholars as Sundari embodying Sikh ideals, an interpretation that discounts the gender and identity politics of the time. (Singh 1993; Malhotra 2023, 69)

To this she adds,

her idealized conversion to Sikhism as her idealized death, both accomplished in a lyrical setting in the jungles of Punjab, amidst chanting from Guru Granth, a setting that the author compares to heaven (baikunṭh). She dies after addressing the gathering on the ideal behavior behooving Sikh women and men. This Hindu Surasti, BVS suggests, has become the perfect Sikh, Sundari. (Malhotra 2023, 75)

It is rather strange to note that accounts of pain, reverence, diverse conditions of human psyche, collective experience, authors understanding of life that eschews the sense of otherness, revenge or disgust, etc., are all actually appropriated as acts of gender and identity politics in a scholarly discourse. Such subjective violence, as has been discussed on other occasions above, is constricted with an oversight of symbolic meanings like that of Matha Tekna in modern secular frameworks. Through this politics of appropriations, the underlying agnostics of political frameworks continue to eradicate the modular formulations of the truth of Sundri’s Being-in-the-world. Heidegger reminds and cautions, ‘Higher than actuality stands possibility’ (Heidegger 2008).

Symbolic drafting in theoretical constructions remain pervasive, postulating recalcitrant ideas of ideological underpinning through which Sikh woman gets idealized and estranged exposing her to dual modes of constitution and representation. Sundri resists both sides of counter-intuitive concerns in many ways. She is a Sikh woman who refuses to be located in ethnic mindset. Displacing her from the ideals of Sikh womanhood in modern secular frameworks of post-colonial theoretical constructions is indeed a hegemonic political move that perversely dismisses higher being of Sikh womanhood. With these submissions, let us conclude this introduction.

Conclusion

I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education

noted T.B. Macauley in his famous Macauley’s minutes on education published in 1835. Arguing further in support of English literature he notes, ‘It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together.’²²

Talking about the development of literary projects undertaken during the colonial rule as Masks of Conquest, Gauri Viswanathan presents an enriching account of how literature was envisaged as a vehicle of colonial project to catalyze displacement and usurping of native subjectivity. She notes,

The history of education in British India shows that certain humanistic functions traditionally associated with literature – for example, the shaping of character or the development of aesthetic sense or the disciplines of ethical thinking – were considered essential to the processes of sociopolitical control by the guardians of the same tradition. (Viswanathan 1989, 3)

With switching of context and stakeholders in historical roles, the coordination between power relations and systems of control continues to produce new modes of communication. Rationalization of power relations, according to Michael Foucault, continues to recalibrate ‘individualizing and totalizing forms of power’ (Foucault 1997, 332). Colonial modes of knowledge production and self-identification of colonizers and natives overweigh our imagination while subjectivizing literary politics of our age. In many ways, the colonial project continues to inform post-coloniality by being grounded in identity politics while borrowing its premise from language and ethnic studies. Recontextualization of Sundri in Punjab or Punjabi studies deploys an ethnic and lingual spirit to the text that permits a reformulation of identity politics with colonial imagination. Besides feminism has rendered new modes of claiming reflexive neutrality through its innocence of gender justice that eludes its grasp as a political project besides of course rendering productivity in sociological meaningfulness. Expounded to an air-tight comportment that gasps for a breath of fresh air, the core of the subject, is reconfigured to its perpetual reclamation.

Through the commentary above, we have tried to unwind the chains of history, critical theory, and politics that have settled around Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundri. The foremost demand that we have made is to de-suffocate the text from many historical and literary postulations brought out thus far. As Christine Lee Novetzke has pointed out in another context, ‘despite their deep interest in finding history in premodern sources, religion is mostly bypassed as a subject (though religious texts may be used)’ (Novetzke 2015, 118). Of note from the commentaries above is the extrapolation of historical consciousness upon religion, which in our reading is exactly the reverse of the essence in which Sundri is enunciated in her native spirit.

In his famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault draws an ‘outline of attitude of modernity’ (Foucault 1997, 303). In this essay, he discusses how the modern ‘attitude’, including the ways of thinking, feeling, acting and behaving are shaped differently by modern ethos. Underpinning the context from Baudelaire’s understanding of modernity, Foucault recognizes how modernity is not only a movement in time from pre-modern to modern but also a change of understanding of one’s self that constitutes change in attitude, ideas, ideals, symbols, signs, behavioral patterns, arts, aesthetics, and cultures fortified within the idea of enlightenment. One elementary aspect of enlightenment, according to Foucault is, therefore, to move from ‘metaphysical criticism’ towards a ‘genealogical criticism’ (Foucault 1997, 315).

Foucault’s postulations offer an unconventional mode of thinking about and engaging with the subject of Sikh feminism while reflecting on Sundri. The feminist criticism of Sikh society and the Sikh attitude towards woman has continued to focus heavily on symbolic decoding of ethnic and folk materiality, textual prejudices, norms, codes, social practices, religious rituals, and Sikh institutions, while stitching all these with metaphysics of ‘Sikh identity’ constructed within colonial frameworks. Binding women’s plight and destitute in patriarchal society with Sikh modes of identity construction remains a common object of desire for many feminist scholars that we have discussed above. Not much intelligible material is available thus far that takes a closer look at tribal and racial subjectivities prevalent in Punjabi society (both within Punjab and in diaspora) that renders a productive discourse on decoding tribal attractions for racial imagination. Such studies are vital for unlocking the subject especially in the domain of feminism. The question of why woman is idealized and objectified as a symbol of honor both in tribal and racial imaginations, while her social conditions remain debased, has not been appropriately debated in sociological discourses. In many cases, as we have seen above, these issues are deflected into religious domain charging religious doctrines to be a source of sociological and historical humiliation of women. Social issues like domestic violence, dowry, forced marriage, female infanticide, etc. are therefore, hinged into a metaphysical domain of religious symbolizing, that, as Foucault mentions, has initiated ‘the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete processes’, but by silently keeping the subjectivity of the scholar out of any such analysis (Foucault 1997, 319). Feminist study would therefore, require a genealogical analysis both of the colonizer and the colonized to understand sociological relations and gender bias. In fact, the entire area of investigation that Foucault mentions as ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ gets detoured in Sikh feminism, pointing towards an convoluted association of relationship between Sikh womanhood and Sikh identity. Foucault notes ‘It is well known that control over things is mediated by relations with other; and relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice versa’ (Foucault 1997, 318). Kneading gender bias with textual, historical, and philosophical machinery, scholars of Sikh feminism have adeptly demanded a revisitation of patriarchal norms of the society. Directly or indirectly the demand also ascertains an antithetical nature of reform movement and religion into today’s modern world. Problematizing the construction of religious identity, through historico-critical reflections may not be truly ‘enlightening’, from a Foucauldian submission. It is indeed time that Sikh feminism comes out of the shadow of both modern secular and tribal modes of subjectification to find true roads into the being of Sundri.

Lastly, we will want to mention that this translation work undertaken by Prof. Puran Singh is the gift of another important figure of Sikh literary consciousness, who gaged the versatile spiritual aura in which the novel was first written. Prof. Puran Singh’s experience and journey blossomed into creative, intellectual, and spiritual mettle under Bhai Vir Singh’s aegis. As someone who had maintained a close discipleship with Swami Ram Tirath (propounder and practitioner of Sanatani Hinduism) and Okakura Kakuzo (a monk, and also art afficionado who saw the marvelous and holy in Japanese art and culture), Prof. Puran Singh experienced the ultimate culmination of all his creative and mystic spirit in the Guru under the midas touch of Bhai Vir Singh. Prof. Singh first met Bhai Vir Singh in an educational conference in Sialkot in 1912 and from then until the former’s death in 1931 maintained a binding anchorage in Bhai Sahib’s enlightened vision.

Bhai Vir Singh cast a profound influence on Prof. Singh’s mystical understanding. Prof. Puran Singh acknowledges his debt to Bhai Vir Singh as

I received poetry and it was by the favour of that kindly eye. His dulcet, prophetic words touched automatically the source of my own Punjabi vocabulary. The faults of what is learnt are all personal, the merits the gift of the giver. What I am is but a humble being, a beggar walking from door to door, but the fire in my eyes is his. So is the shining, burning jewel within my heart. (Singh 2001, 6)

This translation of Sundri that Prof. Puran Singh rendered, emanates the very aura that radiated from Bhai Vir Singh’s personality. This potent work retained and nurtured the authentic spirit of Bhai Vir Singh’s original text. Prof. Puran Singh’s translation style is symptomatic of the influence that Bhai Vir Singh directly had on him. This work, therefore, holds a special significance – for it came from the very pen of a devout follower in which flowed the ink of the author’s mental aura, vision, and experience. It is a gleaming testimonial of being seeped in the love of one’s beloved, being in tune with him, and acquiring the same form as that of the beloved.

With above words we invite the readers to experience the vivid flow of life and meta-life celebrated on the pages ahead.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We borrow the term decenterment, from Žižek’s discussion on ‘raw’ self-awareness. For further reading refer to The Parallax View, Salvoj Žižek (2006) 213.

2 The Parallax View, Salvoj Žižek (2006) 234.

3 We borrow our understanding of metahistory from Amandeep Singh’s discussion on Akal Takht and Activism in a recent publication The Sikh World. 2023. Editors Pashaura Singh and Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair. NY: Routledge. p. 251.

4 Malhotra, while quoting Murphy in Bhai Vir Singh, 72, addresses the question of territoriality, the nation (desh) Punjab, in BVS’s works that she believes was essential for identity construction of Khalsa. For more on identity construction by Murphy, see The Materiality of the Past, 134–145. Similarly, Farina Mir depicts Sundri as an innovative attempt in Punjabi literature by BVS to achieve ‘Self-conscious subjectivity’ through production of ‘canons in literary modernity’. See Farina Mir, ‘Innovation of Punjabi literature’ Bhai Vir Singh, 25–46.

5 We do not claim Sundri is a classic text in a purely technical sense. However, taking into consideration the success of Sundri since its first publication we demand serious attention towards the text and its many interpretation that have come forward.

6 Jyotirudae was another novel that Doris contests was the earliest novel in Punjabi language that she notes ‘was an attempt to show the superiority of both the West, including Western ideological thought, institutions, and family structures, and Christianity; the latter was sharply and negatively contrasted to religions of the East’. For more info see, Relocating Gender in Sikh History, p. 161.

7 For further reference see, Jacques Derrida. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prothesis of Origin. Trans Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 14

8 For more information see, Murpy, Anne, Introduction in Time, History and Religious Imaginary in South Asia. 2015. NY: Routledge. 

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15 The word Naam Rasa, as we cognize from Sikh doctrinal point, is the spiritual jouissance of religions that flows fluidly among diverse expressions of religious faith.

16 For more information see, Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

17 For further information see, Mandair, Arvind-Pal. 2023 ‘Transcendence and Modern Sikh Subject’, in Bhai Vir Singh.

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20 By ‘Bio-physical’, we mean the practices of Seva involving active usage and participation of human body in activities serving the corporal world. Seva is undertaken with repetitive verbal recitation of ‘Waheguru’ or ‘Satnam- Waheguru’ invoking divine realization in bodily actions.

21 Jakobsh quotes Parvinder Dhariwal’s unpublished MA thesis titled ‘The Heroine in Modern Punjabi Literature and the Politics of Desire’ that propagates a similar argument about Sundri. For more information see, Doris Jakobsh. 2023 ‘The Manifold Lives of Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundri’ in Bhai Vir Singh, p. 215. Similarly, Parneet Kaur Dhillon and Jaspal Kaur Dhanju have closely followed Doris’s work in their paper in the same book.

22 For more information see, Macaulay's Minute on Education, February 2, 1835. Published on http://home.iitk.ac.in/∼hcverma/Article/Macaulay-Minutes.pdf. Accessed on June 08, 2023.