The middle decades of the nineteenth century in Punjab were a time of the disintegrating Sikh empire and an emerging colonial one. Situating her study in this turbulent time, Anshu Malhotra delves into the tumultuous life of a hitherto unknown woman, Piro, and her little-known sect, the Gulabdasis. Piro's forceful autobiographical narrative knits a fanciful tale of abduction and redemption, while also claiming agency over her life. Piro's is the extraordinary voice of a low-caste Muslim and a former prostitute, who reinvents her life as an acolyte in a heterodox sect. Malhotra argues for the relevance of such a voice for our cultural anchoring and empowering politics. Piro's remarkable poetry deploys bhakti imaginary in exceptional ways, demonstrating how it enriched the lives of women and low castes. Malhotra's work is also a pioneering study of the afterlife of Piro and the Gulabdasis, highlighting the cultural scripts that inform the stories that we tell and the templates that renew the tales we fabricate.

Conquest and Community, by prize-winning historian Shahid Amin, is a kaleidoscopic look into one of the most divisive issues in South Asian history: the Turkic conquest of the subcontinent and the subsequent spread of Muslim rule. Covering more than eight hundred years of history, the book centers around the enduringly popular saint Ghazi Miyan, the youthful and lovable soldier of Islam to whom shrines have been erected all over the country. After detailing the warrior saint s supposed exploits, Amin charts the various ways he has been remembered throughout the last millennium. As he shows, the charming stories, ballads, and proverbs that grew up around him domesticated the bloody conquest and made it appear both virtuous and familial. Amin brings the story of Ghazi Miyan s long afterlife into the contemporary period through his ethnographic analysis of the still-active shrines as sites of interreligious public piety. What is at first glance a story of just one mythical figure becomes through Amin s thoughtful treatment an allegory for the history of Hindu-Muslim relations over an astonishingly long period of time. As the Muslim conquest of India is being mobilized for dangerously polarizing political ends in India today, this nonsectarian account of religious strife will be a timely and sane contribution to the vexed historical debate."

This book explores the complex assemblage of biopolitics, citizenship, ethics and human rights concerns in South Asia focusing specifically on women poets, writers and artists and their explorations on marginalisation, violence and protest. The book traces the origins, varied historiographies and socio-political consequences of women’s protests and feminist discourses. Bringing together narratives of the Landais from Afghanistan, voices from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Miya women poets writing from Assam, and stories of Dalit and queer women across the region, it analyses the diverse modes of women’s protests and their ethical and humanitarian cartographies. The volume highlights the reconfiguration of female voices of protest in contemporary literature and popular culture in South Asia and the formation of closely-knit female communities of solidarity, cooperation and collective political action. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of gender studies, literature, cultural studies, sociology, minority and indigenous studies, and South Asian studies.

Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with borders and subalternity, Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan suggests new frameworks for understanding religious boundaries in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which social categories and structures constitute the bordering logics inherent within enactments of these boundaries, and positions hegemony and resistance through popular religion as an important indication of wider developments of political and social change. The book also shows how borders are continually being maintained through violence at national, community and individual levels. By exploring selected sites and expressions of piety including shrines, texts, practices and movements, Virinder S. Kalra and Navtej K. Purewal argue that the popular religion of Punjab should neither be limited to a polarised picture between formal, institutional religion, nor the 'enchanted universe' of rituals, saints, shrines and village deities. Instead, the book presents a picture of 'religion' as a realm of movement, mobilization, resistance and power in which gender and caste are connate of what comes to be known as 'religious'. Through extensive ethnographic research, the authors explore the reality of the complex, dynamic and contested relations that characterize everyday material and religious lives on the ground. Ultimately, the book highlights how popular religion challenges the borders and boundaries of religious and communal categories, nationalism and theological frameworks while simultaneously reflecting gender/caste society.

Many consider the autobiography to be a Western genre that represents the self as fully autonomous. The contributors to Speaking of the Self challenge this presumption by examining a wide range of women&'s autobiographical writing from South Asia. Expanding the definition of what kinds of writing can be considered autobiographical, the contributors analyze everything from poetry, songs, mystical experiences, and diaries to prose, fiction, architecture, and religious treatises. The authors they study are just as diverse: a Mughal princess, an eighteenth-century courtesan from Hyderabad, a nineteenth-century Muslim prostitute in Punjab, a housewife in colonial Bengal, a Muslim Gandhian devotee of Krishna, several female Indian and Pakistani novelists, and two male actors who worked as female impersonators. The contributors find that in these autobiographies the authors construct their gendered selves in relational terms. Throughout, they show how autobiographical writing—in whatever form it takes—provides the means toward more fully understanding the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which the author performs herself and creates her subjectivity. Contributors: Asiya Alam, Afshan Bokhari, Uma Chakravarti, Kathryn Hansen, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Anshu Malhotra, Ritu Menon, Shubhra Ray, Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Sylvia Vatuk

How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British annexed the Sikh kingdom and, eventually, exiled its child maharaja, Duleep Singh, to England. In the 1880s, Singh embarked on an abortive attempt to restore the lost Sikh kingdom. Judge explores not only Singh’s efforts but also the Sikh people’s responses—the dreams, fantasies, and hopes that became attached to the Khalsa Raj. He shows how a community engaged military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice in order to contest colonial politics. This book argues that Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not simply looking to recuperate the past but to remake it—and to dwell within loss instead of transcending it—and in so doing opened new possibilities. Bringing together Sikh tradition, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought, Prophetic Maharaja provides bracing insights into concepts of sovereignty and the writing of history.

"This book explores a number of modern Tamil texts featuring men and women who do not always conform to established notions of masculinity and femininity. It also engages with the creative possibilities of a desire that is neither limited to nor exhausted by the sexual act."--Page [4] of cover.