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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:29.038)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Rajabir Singh-Judge. And we're here to talk about his book, Prophetic Maharaja, Law, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia. And he is the Assistant Professor of History at UC State University, Long Beach, and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Dr. Judge, wonderful to have you on today.
Rajbir Judge (00:54.924)
Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it.
PJ (00:58.712)
So Dr. Judge, if you don't mind, can you talk to us a little bit about why this book?
Rajbir Judge (01:05.504)
Yes, so, you know, it's very hard to answer the question, but I'm interested in late 19th century Punjab because it's sort of located as a site of great historical transition, transformation, and therefore something, therefore we have to ask a question of loss. What was lost? This lost of a prior form. And, you know, I'll just be honest, I'm a bit suspicious of historians and their tendency to periodize, right? This attempt to say this happened and then
we have a change or a continuity, which itself is a sovereign decision, as numerous scholars like Kathleen Davis have argued, which allows us to cover the lack in the discipline itself. So the Lieb Sings narrative allowed me to explore the writing of history and the making of history and the assumptions historians hold about writing history itself by exploring the loss
of an empire, the loss of a kingdom.
PJ (02:07.342)
If you don't mind, you just tell us a little bit about the leap seeing who he is and why he's important?
Rajbir Judge (02:14.656)
Yes, you know, I'm not sure if he's important. The 19th century sort of is this critical moment for the sect tradition. Ranjit Singh united warring confederacies of Northwest India, Punjab, and he creates sort of a sect stronghold, proclaiming himself Maharaja in 1801. He dies, there's secession battles, and the Khalsa Raj, the empire unravels. And the British, you know, take advantage, and they annex Punjab.
after a series of wars in 1849. The colonial state then exiles the new Maharaja, this child Maharaja, the Leep Singh, to London. There's a series of things that happen in Punjab, especially in relationship to conversion, which the book looks at. But he's in London, he becomes a fixture at the Royal Palace in London, and he's sort of adoringly referred to as the Black Prince by Queen Victoria.
Now, this sort of adoration from the queen starts to dissipate. He's growing older. He's having financial issues. And he's basically also hearing about this lost empire, right?
And he then leads this sort of resistance to basically go and recapture the empire. He defies state orders and travels, tries to travel to Bombay. He stopped in, then arrested. He takes Amrith, reconverts, let's say, just using that language loosely. He goes to Paris from Paris. He goes to Russia. He's trying to meet with the Tsar. He meets with...
the famous al-Afghani and he's trying to organize this sort of transnational revolt, trying to sort of stop the Suez Canal, ally with the Zubair Pasha in Sudan, organize South Asia. He has this whole wide network and it fails miserably. His sort of right-hand man, his cousin, Taker Singh Sandarmalia,
Rajbir Judge (04:38.398)
in Pondicherry, but he dies in Pondicherry as sort of the, what's it called? He's going to be the, I mean, he's a, the word escapes me, but he's a prime minister in exile. And he's sort of spreading the word of the Liebzings return. And yes, it fails. He apologizes to the queen and he dies in 1890.
Now this narrative has been told quite a bit. So he's fascinating figure, especially in the Sikh community, as you can see what kinds of fantasies and attachments he cultivates. And in different sites, I would say, in different diasporic sites, he has different meaning. In England, it's different than in the United States, which is different than in the Punjab. But the narrative has been told.
over and over again. It's something that people know and even like on Facebook memes you'll see it like shared, this is you know he fought etc. But so I was interested more in what kinds of fantasies does the Leap Singh conjure? What kind of desires does he conjure? And what can he teach us? Right? His narrative, what can it teach us about
historical writing more generally and the fantasies historians themselves hold alongside their interlocutors in a
PJ (06:18.85)
There's a lot there. And so I'm trying to figure out which question to ask next. that like that, there's so much that's just full there. and so great answer in a lot of ways to not only who was Duleep Singh, you also have why you chose to leap sing. So it's you're interested not so much in what he accomplished cause he didn't accomplish a lot, but in what, what he was trying to accomplish kind of brings out of people at the time. Am I reading that correctly? And people now.
Rajbir Judge (06:20.246)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (06:32.598)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (06:43.414)
Yes. Yes.
PJ (06:47.203)
And so a lot of this has to do with kind of, you mentioned fantasies and desires, is myth-making kind of part of that as well?
Rajbir Judge (06:55.7)
Yes, so one thing I'm trying, you know, this book does lean heavily into the psychoanalytic tradition. I'm one thing psychoanalysis forces us to do is to like think about sort of in the clinical setting, you have to think about the analyst, the analyst alongside the analyst. You cannot sort of just look at an object, right, as an object to be discovered.
So it's not just myths of the sect community at the time, but what kinds of myths does the historian themselves have when they are writing a narrative? And I mentioned periodization earlier. I think periodization is myth-making, fundamentally. The classic example of this myth-making is what gets to be called feudal, what gets to be called medieval, and what becomes modern.
And in sick historiography, sort of this focus on myth making, think really creates a narrative of redemption in that the community becomes a site to diagnose myths. So there's all kinds of myths that are created. For example, if I'm saying that there's a transition
a colonial Sikh tradition that the 19th century, the late 19th century, is a site of a transformation of the Sikh tradition from a pre-colonial to a colonized form, the historian then by locating this transformation can offer redemption. They can say, look, I've discovered the prior form. And this takes many different guises. It can be
an alternative tradition. Scholars can say, look, in the late 19th century, a myth was made of a rigid kalsa identity, and I've discovered a prior fluid form. We should return to that redemption. A politics is offered by discovering a past. So the reason I'm focusing on myth-making in, and I know you're
Rajbir Judge (09:20.012)
focusing specifically on the question on community there, is because I want to look at how people are constantly creating fantasies. They're working within them. These desires can be inhibiting, of course, but there's also something to owning one's desire, which historians tend to disavow.
PJ (09:48.738)
Can you give me an example of that? Of owning your desire in ways that, or people owning their desires in ways that historians disavow?
Rajbir Judge (09:58.4)
Yeah, so like...
This question of sovereignty, I think, can maybe get us there.
religious reform. Let me like focus on religious reform because I think that's like really an overdetermined site for thinking about transformation.
Rajbir Judge (10:24.054)
When you look to own one's desire, if a historian was going to sort of own it, they couldn't give a transcendent account. They would be within. That makes it really difficult then to sort of locate these kinds of breaks to create certain kinds of diagnoses and pathologies as if one wasn't involved in that diagnosis.
So, okay, I'll just do the sovereignty example, even though it might get me in a little bit of trouble. So a lot of the stuff I would say on sex historiography is tied to certain kind of specter of sex sovereignty, which comes to us from the Kalistan movement, an attempt by sex to create their own autonomous state in Punjab, which was violently and brutally sort of snuffed out by the Indian state.
This figure of the calestani, I would say, is always present in historical analysis because the calestani becomes a representative of an orthodox violent form that then has to be sort of removed by discovering other plural forms. And this is, you know, it's kind of pointless too because of course human society is heterogeneous. There's plurality.
There's multiple different ways in which people define sec. Like it's a truism, think. It's like axiomatic. Like, if we all know this, like it's kind of an uninteresting historical argument that there's contingencies and there's, you know, all these different things happening. I think to own desire would be to like, in contrast, think about how one is embedded within those struggles.
about what constitutes an orthodoxy. So one thing my book is trying to do is say these things are always struggles between people, sometimes not friendly, oftentimes not friendly, but those struggles themselves are indicative, right, of a tradition that cannot be placed historically and pressed down. How do we inhabit those struggles?
Rajbir Judge (12:50.102)
In academia, think you're able to remove yourself from those, right? You're able to say, well, no, I'm just giving an analysis. But those analyses are too embedded within your tradition. So that's kind of what I was trying to get at. It's kind of hard because I was occupying both spaces. I think when you read the book, it's very difficult because there's always this sort of working through of...
what's going on both for historical actors but how we're trying to think about it. How are we thinking about something like reform? How does that understanding of reform itself create certain kinds of desires?
PJ (13:35.114)
And forgive me if I talk for a little bit here I'm just making sure that I'm clarifying what you have to say and also trying not to get you in trouble, but if If I understand correctly it's this idea of When you talk about going back to it like a previous form of sick that Is more fluid it allows us to kind of recover that but it's this this this history of
Rajbir Judge (13:42.486)
Yes. No, it's okay.
Rajbir Judge (13:59.466)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (14:03.596)
tolerance of all.
PJ (14:03.692)
the history of of Cal, it's Calistan. Am I saying that correctly?
Rajbir Judge (14:06.636)
Palestine is, yes, was an attempt to a nation state, an autonomous nation state.
PJ (14:13.154)
Yes, I'll just make sure I saying it correctly. So yeah, so you have Kalistan and then this idea that, well, we can recover it by being more pluralistic. We can recover it by being more fluid. And so that's, is that one way?
Rajbir Judge (14:26.656)
No, can challenge. think people are worried. I think it's like we don't want Kalistan. The Kalistan movement led to extreme violence in Punjab. Yeah. And then what we need to do is recover prior forms. Partition is also critical here. Partition divided Punjab. How do we recover a prior fluid form? Yeah. So that allows us to overcome the... And I think both sides do it. I think...
PJ (14:35.133)
okay.
PJ (14:46.958)
okay. I totally misread that. Okay.
Rajbir Judge (14:56.928)
What you'll have is also others, let's say, not interested in fluidity, also turn to the past and say, look, we just find orthodox. But my question is, why is truth tied, questions of truth and justice, bound to questions of historical sources? We all know truth and justice do not lie in history.
The historical sources aren't what give you, aren't justice. And yet, for the historians, it oftentimes is the recovery of a past context, a past time, right? Again, a question of periodization that leads to redemption. That's what this book challenges and says, no, it's always a struggle. And these struggles are always ongoing. And these struggles are ongoing, not just by.
the transcendent academic who is able to see beyond, right? It's not about historicizing sec understandings of history. That's another way you could do this, be like, well, yeah, sex have their own history, understanding of history. Let me historicize that. That's not what I'm trying to do because that too then continues the very project, right? The very operations of history without rethinking them. So my thing was
What if we look at this narrative not to sort of recover the leapsing, but to fragment him, to continuously fragment him? And in that fragmentation, we can think about questions of justice.
PJ (16:36.334)
And we talked about religious reform and I'm not sure if this is a good or or I Think that this is part of the conversation we're having so I just read a book on Called mere Christian hermeneutic and it's this kind of trying to recover Some kind of Christian religious reform Yeah Yeah, there you go no
Rajbir Judge (16:39.618)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (16:53.378)
Yeah. No, it's can always it's a of money to be made PJ. Just recovering prior forms.
PJ (17:03.374)
This actually comes out of academic press. I don't know how much money the author made. Maybe the press made a lot of money, but that's a different discussion. So, quotes C.S. Lewis talking about, if you're in a tool shed and there's no light coming in except through a crack, and you can see the light.
Rajbir Judge (17:05.858)
Alright.
Rajbir Judge (17:11.734)
Yeah, we should support academic presses, they don't make much money.
PJ (17:30.606)
like a beam of light. You know how we often see a sunbeam and there's dust going through it? It's like you can look at the light, but if you look along the light, you can look outside and you can see grass, can see forest, and that sort of thing. And I think this is his way of, it's Van Hooser, this is his way of talking about what Gadamer will talk about with an alienated historical consciousness.
Rajbir Judge (17:32.972)
Yes. Yes.
Rajbir Judge (17:54.188)
this.
PJ (17:56.834)
What you're talking about with the historian who's like, I'm not a part of it. They're looking at the light rather than looking along the light and participating in the community. And there is value of looking at the light per se, but there's not as much value as like using the light to look at things. that, how does that fit? Do you understand what I'm trying to get at with that?
Rajbir Judge (18:18.966)
Yes, would say, I haven't read the book, shouldn't, I'm not commenting on the book, but I would say that maybe light and darkness sort of aren't opposed. we're not, know, light is the very condition of possibility for darkness. It's not that, you know, so how do, how then do we think when light isn't actually clarifying whether directly or alongside, but actually is what precisely creates darkness?
PJ (18:20.844)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rajbir Judge (18:48.77)
So that's kind of where I was, I'm in this sort of the twilight space where I'm not in either refusing both, let's say, the gesture of liking that would be my response.
PJ (19:01.946)
Would that, but would the, does that capture kind of what you're getting after with historians doing their own kind of myth making? Okay. Yeah, for sure.
Rajbir Judge (19:08.278)
Yes. Yes. So like, think what I argue, like, I can just go over the argument is, you know, there's, I say there's like two, there tends to be two kind of ways to think about the Leap Singh, as if we mourn the Leap Singh, we understand him, we can lay him to rest, and then attachments to him can become sort of pathological. Like, he was a part of an earlier time, we know what he did, it's over.
get over it kind of thing. We've gotten over it historically, know, the academics have gotten over it. We know, yet they still seem attached to what's wrong. And that becomes sort of, think, another strand of thinking about the lip-sync, which then looks at these sort of melancholic attachments, these sort of refusals to lay a sick sovereignty to rest, even though it was surrendered. So I think that's kind of like what I was thinking of. like this sort of...
But maybe perhaps we don't need to think with mourning and melancholia so closely, even though the theorizations of mourning and melancholia are so robust that I don't think I'm... I wouldn't necessarily pose myself in opposition to them. But would say those two would be two tendencies. What if we stay with the rhythms of loss, where loss is not something that just happens, but is something just ongoing, and in its ongoingness, it's actually creating?
So like, I think the one example I give is there's this portrait of Dalip Singh that Brian Keith Axel points to that he says sort of becomes the commodity form. It creates a fetish. So you have this portrait. Now that becomes sort of stuck. That's the, that's the melancholic fixations on a fetish. But fetishes aren't necessarily like fixation doesn't have to be necessarily opposed
creativity, right? We know that, right? If you've ever been in love, let's say this is a form of fixation that isn't, it can be dangerous, but it can also be quite beautiful because it can create all kinds of new forms. So what if we think about fixation and what is done with the fetish object rather than just taking the fetish object itself as given? So I say in the book, for example, that I'm just sitting there
Rajbir Judge (21:27.692)
picking at the paint, right? Peeling the paint of this portrait in an indifferent, perhaps, movement, right? That's creating. And I'm really drawing here on notions of the psychoanalytic notions of the drive, which are, I don't really get into in the book, but I would recommend Marika Rose's book on drive, because I was trying to think of going at
something without end, without closure, therefore open to new forms.
PJ (22:02.051)
Mm-hmm.
Do you think there's a link between colonization and fetishization?
Rajbir Judge (22:11.68)
No it's not. Where are we going? We're not going anywhere.
Rajbir Judge (22:22.536)
That's a good question.
PJ (22:28.321)
Yeah, so we have Dalip Singh. But I mean, I think of I've seen Indian comedians or well, I saw an Indian comedian. Can't remember his name off the top of my head, but talking about how strange it is to see the Queen's portrait still in his mom's bedroom. And he's like, why? No, no, that was bad. Right. Like, why is you know? And so it seems that, you know, and I think this gets back to
Rajbir Judge (22:42.37)
Yeah.
PJ (22:55.195)
And I think we kind of talked around a little bit, and I'd love to dwell more on sovereignty and community. But that's definitely like, think there's a link there between colonization and fetishization. How does that work?
Rajbir Judge (22:59.477)
Yeah, let's
Rajbir Judge (23:03.468)
Yes. So, you know, the link between the fetish and colonialism is over 24-hour conversation. The fetish is sort of a critical concept, right, that comes to distinguish between colonizer and colonized, to give one example, where the fetish object is an inability
PJ (23:13.454)
If you could solve the next five minutes, that'd be great. Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (23:32.716)
to abstract thought, right? They don't have the capacity for abstraction. They are still stuck with objects. And this becomes critical to theorizations of community from Freud's Totem and Taboo is sort of the classic example there. But yeah, the fetish plays a central role in sort of Christianity against
it's others. And you could trace it. Yeah, there's a long history there of the role the fetish plays in defining the West. this, you know, we can talk all day because it's just how religion comes to be defined, what religion, how religions become, how embodied forms of practices.
PJ (24:22.488)
Yeah
Rajbir Judge (24:30.754)
can become sort of backwards in time on all these things. Yeah, and then, know, I don't want to go there. Christopher Bracken has a great book on this. But I'll go into community and sovereignty because I can tie them together, I think. One way then, but community itself.
PJ (24:54.35)
Yeah. Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (24:59.138)
How is the community defined? And Christianity plays a central role. First, we have to say, what a strange question to ask. This is Gil Nijar asks this. What a strange thing to say that we can find something that tells us what a community is. We're all in communities. If I was to try to say, let me find out what that essence of that community is, what substance
is that community made of very difficult. And yet, we say, blood. Oftentimes, kinship becomes defined by blood. And this is a Christian question. It has to do with Christ, the general kinship of blood tied to the Eucharist and all these things.
it's essential to understand how community becomes enclosed, a possession. Again, a lot of literature on this that I don't want to get into here, but I will just say that community comes to be immune, enclosed, a possession, something we own.
PJ (26:07.404)
No, no, it's-
Rajbir Judge (26:19.744)
And yet, we also know the community is open. It cannot be realized. You cannot enclose a community. It always remains open. Of course, COVID is the classic example of this. No matter how much we isolated, we put on masks, we remained open to contaminations. That's, you know, it is what it is.
So this openness to contamination remains a problem then in this immune community. And I wanted to dwell in this place. What does it mean to think about a community then without enclosing it? While trying to refuse the very question. This is a very common question in sex studies. It's who is a sec? It's literally a title of a book in sex studies.
you'll get this. It is a very difficult thing to define, as is everything. But I wanted to ask, how can we think with scholars in the Sikh tradition who have answered this question? And what I find is that they have thought about this in terms not just this binary between sort of fluidity and rigidity, but sort of the tension between the two, the tensions
between an open community and an enclosed community. So that's kind of what I was trying to do in that part. The question of sovereignty then is there is no sovereignty, right? We have never been sovereign. What does it mean to be sovereign, right? Instead what you have are attempts to struggle for sovereignty that are always reaching certain kinds of limits.
So how do we inhabit those limits? How do we inhabit limits of sovereignty? It's difficult, but that's precisely what ethical practice is. What does it mean to practice? What does it mean to sort of, meriadda, right? What does it mean to inhabit meriadda, ethical embodiment of conduct, ethical conduct, to cultivate ethical conduct continuously without closure, without knowing.
Rajbir Judge (28:47.126)
this, I've reached it, I have become sovereign.
PJ (28:51.822)
Forgive me for you know, I'm gonna relate it. I'm a developed Christian myself So one when you talk about the blood like man, I grew up singing those songs, right? You know, like the power of the blood right like of course, it's gonna be Yes, yeah So are we talking in some ways you talk about being closed and open at same time Are we would porous be another way of talking about this? Like if you're if your community is gonna live you have to let people come in and out
Rajbir Judge (28:56.372)
Okay, yes.
Rajbir Judge (29:03.146)
It is. It circulates.
Vigorously.
Rajbir Judge (29:19.394)
So I didn't want to use porous because I want to think about tensions. So I think one example I'll give is like the relationship between meady and pity in the Sikh tradition. It loosely translates as like sovereignty and like pity would be like more saintly sort of this relationship between the meady and pity. And they're always in like
PJ (29:22.24)
Okay. Okay.
Rajbir Judge (29:47.98)
For the philosopher Siddhartha Kapoor Singh, they can never be a harmonious whole. So when I'm talking about the relationship between fluidity and rigidity, I'm really thinking about how these become harmonious forms where they're known. So with fluidity, it is, right? It's circulation. It's set. We know it. It's...
Does that make sense? It's like a circulation, it's a flow, but there's no tensions in there. With sort of orthodoxy, let's say, or rigidity, it also too is set, it's a form. But I want to look at sort of the tensions between the two that can't be sort of enclosed. I can't just say it's porous because it depends on at that moment how it's porous. It depends on how sort of these sort of arguments are taking place.
That's kind of it.
PJ (30:46.508)
Yes, so if, coming at it from the Christian point of view, and I'm just trying to match this in my head. Yeah. But as you're talking about the ethical form never being closed, it's something that I'm continually called to repentance. And what I have learned through that is,
Rajbir Judge (30:55.058)
all have a Christian point of view. That's kind of one of the arguments of the book.
PJ (31:15.448)
You're like, if I could just learn how to do this better, right? I know that I have grown as a human being, at least I hope I have. Maybe I'm just fooled entirely, but I've grown as a human being and I have become a very different person than I thought I was going to become, right? Because as you grow in your ethics, you're going to grow in your knowledge and you're going to go to different places than you expect. And so that's why it can never be closed off if you close yourself off from
And I'm using the word repentance here, but I think there's a, I won't say a sick equivalent, but there's this idea of if you are going to change and become a better person, then you always have to be open because you always have to be open to change. Is that, am I understanding you correctly as far as the openness of ethical or go ahead? Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (31:48.353)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (32:06.572)
So I can expand on this, I just want to say, you know, I'm speaking of Christianity, not in individual practice, but as an institution, an institution that has created our world. That's what I mean by Christianity. And then I would say that when I'm thinking about ethical conduct, I'm not necessarily thinking about the individual, the individual becoming sort of
PJ (32:13.782)
Right.
Yes. Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (32:33.012)
a better person, but I'm thinking about a relationship between conduct and numb, let's say. So
If namras is a sort of sense, it means like sort of being enveloped within the divine, let's say like ras is sort of the elixir of what it means to be in nam. This could be one way to think about how I should inhabit my relation to the divine, right? Just immersed, immersion. And you see this in certain kinds of aesthetic practices, I would say. But Sikhi also says,
This tradition, and I get this from Professor Jagdish Singh, is it also teaches us to have Mariyadah, which means limits. It's actually like the shore of a bank. So like limits to oneself. So how do we think about immersion and limits together? One cannot just be in the divine, which might, you know, with the Eucharist.
God does become in the world, you know, and there is a harmony in the Trinity, which does lead to conceptions of supersessionism, right, which is another word for periodization, which I began the critique with earlier. Yeah, but so I was trying to sort of think about what does it mean to inhabit these tensions rather than foreclose them, let's say, with...
PJ (33:56.716)
Yeah, that's all right. Yeah, you can keep going. I'm good. I'm good.
Rajbir Judge (34:11.362)
a tradition that often advocates for a certain kind of harmony.
PJ (34:18.094)
And so I think this is part of reason you focus a good amount on conversion as well And as we talk about this, so how does how does conversion I think I understand? I'm not sure I'm entirely tracking with you So but I feel like your discussion of conversion fits here somehow
Rajbir Judge (34:23.862)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (34:34.006)
Yeah, well, didn't, you know, I think this, I think all the chapters are questions I wanted to refuse to answer, but I cannot refuse, right? The historiography as such is that one must respond and my response is inadequate. So as it must be. So in the conversion chapter, I'm trying to think about like the difficulties of demarcating conversion when we focus strictly on the individual. So when it becomes like,
an announcement, right, a profession of one's faith, then I think it doesn't make much sense, right, in the Sikh tradition. What I wanted to say is it's actually embodied practices that created legitimacy for the possibility of something, let's say, of a return, but was never quite a return at all.
Right. So that was kind of what that chapter was doing. So most people, when they focus on this, would say like, the leap sink chose to become a sec again. He discarded his prior past and he's now it's a form of periodization actually in right. He's superseding this sort of previous. Yes, now redemption. And that's where like Judaism plays such a central role for Christianity and like superseding it. So.
PJ (35:43.042)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Demarcated, closed off. Yes, yeah, yeah.
Rajbir Judge (35:57.132)
But what I wanted to say is that kind of periodization, this focus on authenticity within the interior, takes us away actually from how it worked in the Sikh tradition, where it was actually what the Leep Singh wanted to do was very unimportant. Instead, you had to create certain kinds of conditions that allowed the possibility for the Leep Singh to
return. you know, I work with Taussig, the anthropologist McTaussig there, to say it's an epistemic Merck, that these very murky conditions can create the possibility for like something different. Yeah.
PJ (36:43.502)
Can you give us an example of some of those conditions? Are you talking about the British holding him and their education? Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (36:48.122)
yeah. that's, yeah, the book does have kind of a fun narrative. that's, I think I've been very theoretical here. But yeah, so they've been, yeah, so it's very interesting because for his, for him to take Amrit, right, he's arrested. So all the ceremonial sort of, sort of these embodied practices that I'm talking about have to work through the British. So the British have
PJ (36:56.492)
No, no worries, yeah.
Rajbir Judge (37:15.67)
are the ones that are like, okay, we need to collect five sects to allow for the ceremony. And they're deeply worried about the ceremony. A classic sort of argument in South Asian historiography and the colonial state is this question of what constitutes intervention into religion. So once you say you're not interfering in religion, you've already demarcated what religion is. You've already kind of set off.
the parameters of what constitutes religion. So is religion just strictly like individual belief? The state doesn't. So if conversion is individual belief, then they cannot intervene into it because that's the Leipzig interior decision, private decision. So yeah.
PJ (38:03.938)
Well, forgive me, but I mean, you say that, like as a child, he's being indoctrinated and becoming like, right? So in some ways, like you can, there's this idea of that, that idea of it's your internal, I'm not saying you're even advocating for that, but that narrative breaks down when you talk about like, well, we have a choice. And you're like, when a child, when you take a 12 year old and all their best friends and their mentors are all Christian,
Rajbir Judge (38:11.519)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (38:24.511)
Yeah!
PJ (38:31.756)
and then they convert and they're like, well, it was his choice. I'm like, that's really sketchy.
Rajbir Judge (38:36.374)
Yes. Yes, and then the child plays such a signal. That's a question of immaturity and maturity. So when does a subject have the capacity to make such a decision? And then it has to do with suspicion too. How does the suspicion enter into the realm of the religious? How do we know what he's doing is really religious or is it for just for certain kinds of political stakes?
I don't get into... So for sex, yeah, he was indoctrinated as a child. I don't want to get into that. I think the child overdetermines a lot of how colonialism functions, especially in this question of reproductivity. I'm interested in Leap Singh precisely because he doesn't reproduce. He fails. He's not generative in that sense.
PJ (39:17.23)
Okay.
Rajbir Judge (39:36.226)
He actually he doesn't have he has children, but they don't have any children. His lineage dies out, right? In that sense, and yet he survives, which is right, a non kin community right there. So yeah, the child I do go into like, how those arguments are made, how they're struggled over, right? Because it is fascinating how what constitutes
the mature subject who has the capacity to convert. But I don't want to define the parameters of what constitutes a real conversion. One of the reasons I wouldn't want to do this is because it's also really politically charged in India at the moment where you can never convert out of Hinduism. Right. So there's this whole movement of called like Garbhapsi is like the return home is like
PJ (40:16.801)
Right, right, right, right.
PJ (40:23.426)
Yes, yeah.
Rajbir Judge (40:35.082)
All these people who have converted to Christianity, let's say, they just don't know what they're doing. They were misled by missionaries. Now we need to return them home to sort of an authentic Hindu place. So that's why I'm very hesitant to try to locate authenticity in a conversion.
PJ (40:48.76)
Yes.
PJ (40:53.208)
So my goal there, and maybe I did it poorly, but was to more problematize it, if that makes sense. Right. And so it's not to answer whether his conversion was real or not. It's to say, even his Christian conversion was deeply problematic. then you have this, you the same thing on the other side where it's like, okay, what counts as conversion when you have, it's through this filter of British sovereignty. Is that kind of the way that we should, is that one way to think about it?
Rajbir Judge (40:56.832)
No. Yes, yes exactly. Exactly.
Rajbir Judge (41:08.758)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (41:19.628)
Yes.
Yes, it's one argument. We can see how the arguments themselves develop from certain... Yeah.
PJ (41:28.31)
Okay. I think I'm getting a handle on this. Thank you for your patience.
Rajbir Judge (41:31.424)
Good. No, feel... Yeah, you know, the problem is also like it's very odd to read one's book. Like, so I'm not really, I'm just kind of like going off the fly trying to remember. Because you hate it, right? When you read it, one hates it. It's horrifying. Even watching this, I'm never going to watch this podcast.
PJ (41:47.026)
yeah, it's it's horrific. Yeah reading my own writing is yeah. Anyways, that's that's a whole other thing I've had so many guests tell me like I started listening and it was great while you were talking and I started talking I turned it off. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's So, okay, we have the community and we have sovereignty how does this so take us to the place now where and I want to be respected your time here so I think this is a great way to kind of looking forward how do we deal with
Rajbir Judge (42:01.516)
Yeah
PJ (42:16.642)
what you call a fractured or un-uprooted inheritance.
Rajbir Judge (42:22.816)
Yes, you know, I'm, I struggle with this. There's this sort of deep desire for certain kinds of authenticity of recovering past forms that will give us a politics. And I think this is, it's just a very dangerous form of politics that as we see in almost every nation in the present.
that is not going to help us. I do not want to dismiss claims of peoples like Indigenous sovereignty. That's why who are the best at theorizing questions of fractured inheritance. Because we all inhabit these sort of... Look, that's what I said earlier. We're all Christian. At the end of the day, at this point.
We all are struggling. What do you believe? Already a question that has so many Christian assumptions. We answer it. One must answer. One can refuse, but those refusals are, you know, then tied to questions of maturity and immaturity. So it's all this kind of difficulty.
I do not know what it would mean to write a history of the sect tradition.
To do that, I had to inhabit this fractured form that I am thinking with multiple traditions. I'm not psychoanalysis is one. I'm rereading a psychoanalytic literature, which is historically elite, right? A bourgeois form, some would argue. And I'm reading it alongside subaltern actors.
Rajbir Judge (44:25.984)
Some would say I fail, but that's precisely how we learn by failing. If we were going to learn what we already know, there's no reason to write this book. I already know it. There's no reason to read it because we already know. But what I was trying to do then in inhabiting this sort of fractured inheritance that I inhabit, which I think many do, is to learn. It was to learn, which is fundamentally...
what being in a tradition is, as you were saying earlier with the question of repentance as well. Yeah.
PJ (45:04.671)
Yeah, well, I mean, and that was me trying to, yeah, I understand that that's a Christian concept. was trying to, I come from a gutter.
Rajbir Judge (45:11.616)
No, it's not. No, no, no, it's the Christianity we thought of as an institution, a corporate institution, as Gil and H.R. would say, right? That isn't necessarily about what people or individual Christians are doing, but the power, right, Christianity holds and its own sort of ways in which it has always escaped its own sort of...
PJ (45:18.264)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rajbir Judge (45:39.234)
through the secular how it sort of right being placed into the confines of religion itself
PJ (45:48.335)
So you're talking about the fractured inheritance. Is it wrong to try for a synthesis? Is synthesis just impossible? How does the concept of synthesis fit into this idea of these disparate traditions? Like you're talking about being, you're talking about, you're Christian.
Rajbir Judge (45:54.122)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (46:09.194)
That's a question. Yes.
PJ (46:13.408)
In some senses, this secular, like you have these Christian underpinnings and you're sick at the same time. Is it okay to try and find a synthesis there, like an answer at the other end?
Rajbir Judge (46:16.439)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (46:24.15)
Already we're in trouble. Waters, aren't we? I am. I am sick. No, I want to inhabit the aporias, right? The whole book is a history that refuses to historicize. So that's one gesture of this fractured inheritance, right? So it's an, which then just draws out sort of aporias that exist in our attempts.
PJ (46:26.67)
Right, right, I know it could just be impossible.
Rajbir Judge (46:53.356)
Sort of these sort of tensions, right? The rhythms of loss. How are we going to synthesize if we're always already losing, right? We're already in these places of loss rather than of like...
Rajbir Judge (47:09.442)
So I'm not saying like, I guess also one thing I'm saying is, just to be clear, I'm not interested in then like the loss of sovereignty. It's also something I say in the book, which is really important because once we say we're interested in a loss of a sovereignty, I'm already trying to then recover it. I'm interested in like loss and sovereignty because I don't think we've ever been sovereign or never. So if it's...
How are you going to recover or synthesize something that's fundamentally not there?
That's always the code.
PJ (47:46.082)
When you're talking about sovereignty, are we talking in some ways about would another kind of adjacent concept be the autonomous individual, the autonomous community, the sovereign? Yes.
Rajbir Judge (47:56.736)
Yes, yes, the sovereign self. Yes. So that's why the conversion. Yes, exactly. So I thinking about this, right? So that's the whole question of like, what does the historian do? You have to sort of, there is attempts to sort of proclaim mastery of sources. Like what becomes a primary, all these sort of things, right, are strange to me. I mean, I just find it really strange, the whole like attempt.
And yet, people do it. So I'm trying to have a conversation with them to work through certain kinds of arguments. While refusing to say, look at them. They have this type of history. So that's another thing. It's sort of an accumulation aspect of it. Like, yeah, yeah, there's multiple different types of history. So let's just collect all these different versions. What I'm saying is, no, the very project itself is impossible.
PJ (48:30.569)
Hahaha
Rajbir Judge (48:56.386)
So how do we sit with that impossibility? And what kinds of conditions of possibility emerge from the very impossibility itself? Again, that goes into like how I was talking about the fetish object too. These things aren't necessarily like enclosures. Like they also then things emerge.
PJ (49:19.384)
So are we talking in some ways about, so that in particular, when we talk about enclosures in the fetish, it's about enclosing people a of times like, if you use this fetish, you have a very distinct enclosed identity, but what you're saying is you can have this fetish and you can have an open identity as well. Like a more fluid identity? Okay.
Rajbir Judge (49:32.46)
Yes.
Rajbir Judge (49:37.248)
don't think in terms of identity, I think when we think about the sovereignty, so let's just think about the portrait. If the argument is that the portrait of Gleip Singh is a fetish object that then encloses the community, they're too attached to this form of sovereignty that's been lost and they can't let it go. What I'm saying is it can be a fetish, but it doesn't have to be that they can't let it, it can just exist.
PJ (49:45.324)
Yeah, it's probably not the best. Yeah.
PJ (50:05.026)
Yeah. Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (50:06.498)
that people are playing with. There's like playfulness. There's all kinds of like ways in which people relate to objects that doesn't necessarily have to be about enclosure.
PJ (50:17.058)
Yeah, yeah. It can be, can it be transformed in a sense? Can it become like something for like hope? Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (50:23.21)
Yes, exactly. Yes. Yes. That's what I said. Like a form of fixation, fixation itself leads to sort of eruption. Right. Because if you're like fixated long enough, it's not that object. Like a worry stone, I guess, would be another example. You have anxiety, you know, it's a small repetitive movement, but the stone is going to eventually disappear, even though you have, right, repetitive movements.
PJ (50:40.29)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ (50:48.312)
You
Rajbir Judge (50:53.748)
Right? toward it.
PJ (50:56.75)
One, a doctor, judge, I just want to say thank you for coming on. before we kind of close off, what is one thing that you would ask our audience to do or to think about over the next week? Something like a major takeaway from today's interview that you're just like, this is what people should be thinking about. This is what someone should do kind of as a takeaway from today's interview.
Rajbir Judge (51:03.841)
Yeah.
Rajbir Judge (51:26.274)
I'm not sure I can give advice on what people should do, but I would ask them to think about how to inhabit tensions in their life without grabbing an easier answer, especially history. think the turn towards history is really more harmful than good.
PJ (51:29.314)
Yeah
What would you recommend?
PJ (51:52.142)
Hmm.
Rajbir Judge (51:55.97)
I would ask them to be more creative with the past in ways in which people will inevitably struggle against them. you can't have a basically like. So people say, I mean, the one response I get to something like a statement like that, I'll just make a counterpoint because I know where this is to go. Well, what about like alternative facts? We need to fight against alternative facts.
That's kind of the, well, we have to the real history because people are making shit up. I mean, but people still keep making shit up. People know. this idea, like, so like, basically, politics cannot be located as a politics of knowledge. That's not what politics fundamentally is. We want it to be that way. Academics, of course, of course I...
PJ (52:31.214)
They do yeah, it's a continual struggle
Rajbir Judge (52:50.496)
If I give the true history of the Leap Singh, sex are going to be different. No, it's not how I work. It's just not because their fantasies and attachments and desires cannot be reduced, like can't be dissipated by like authentic knowledge and like whatever that is, right? Because somebody else can write a different narrative of the Leap Singh, right? We all know this historical knowledge is constantly shifting and changing depending on the sources you use and the new sources that emerge.
PJ (52:54.744)
Yeah
Rajbir Judge (53:19.488)
That's what I would ask, I guess, your listeners to think about, is what does the call towards more knowledge actually do? What has it done? Especially as universities invest so much in violent technologies of war and destruction as our world burns around us.
PJ (53:43.822)
So learn to be comfortable with the tensions, learn to face them without fear. I appreciate it. Dr. Jod, it's been an absolute joy having you on today. Thank you.
Rajbir Judge (53:50.498)
Thank you so much. Take care.