The resurgence of Bhindranwale's image in contemporary Punjab

Singh, Pritam; Purewal, Navtej K.

doi:10.1080/09584935.2013.773291

Cited by 27 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The Indian state has yet to admit the true extent of its systematic terror nor its cover‐up thereof (Kaur 2019). Langar halls in the diaspora instantiate one crucial site wherein state violence has been memorialized for more than three decades, contrary to indifference from academics, media, and international actors (see Mahmood 1996, 244), and whereas the public installation of recent martyrological iconography had until recently been prohibited in India (Singh and Purewal 2013, 144).…”

Section: Diasporic Imaginaries: the Scaling Of Struggle In Memorial C...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

Hothi

2024

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article concerns how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement. The ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against Sikhs in the United States. Young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. However, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety. This article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global “economy of agonism,” which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. The article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the “problem of diaspora,” the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. An ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the “extimacy” of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, “collective relation-making,” i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others.

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Section: Diasporic Imaginaries: the Scaling Of Struggle In Memorial C...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

Hothi

2024

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…The focus on kinetic approaches has had long-term consequences in Punjab, however, since it has created resentment not only among the local population but also among the Sikh diaspora worldwide (CHOPRA, 2010;PUREWAL, 2013;FAIR, 2020). So, aiming attention solely at the supply side may work when dealing with terrorist groups, but can be catastrophic to counter insurgent groups, mainly those with vigorous help from local populations.…”

Section: Systemic and Direct Violence: The All-in Operation Green Huntmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mirroring its British masters

Lima

2022

Conjuntura Austral

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The Indian state has been adopting controversial policies for countering the Maoist insurgency. Even worse, this behaviour seems to mirror Britishcolonial attitudes against India’s population at some level. Consequently, this article attempts to understand this probable ‘paradoxical’ conduct. Withthe support of the post-structuralist theory, I discuss state and outsourced terrorist practices of the Indian state apparatus against this insurgency. Toreach this goal, first, I try to explicate the concept of state terrorism and its application in India. Then, I analyse the historical development of theMaoist movement and India’s concrete policies of state and outsourced terrorism against this counter-hegemonic movement. I believe the British Raj’scolonial practices have had a deep dialectical influence on India’s state apparatus and major political parties to date. So, this inquiry may clarify thepersistence of colonial practices within India.

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“…85 Jazzy B's unapologetic invocation of Bhindranwale-not to mention Rajoana and Hawara, both of whom remain in prison in connection with the 1995 assassination of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh-is not remarkable in itself: Bhindranwale's revenant presence in twenty-first-century Punjab is readily apparent, and the song echoes the ubiquity of his image on bumper stickers and T-shirts. 86 It was not simply invocation, then, but the gesture of incorporation that prompted criticism: the song's suggestion that hallowed "freedom fighters" like Bhagat Singh could be spoken of as "in the same vein" as Sikh militants, an alignment Congress MP Ravneet Singh Bittu suggested "tries to glorify terrorism." 87 It is perhaps significant that the Punjab-born Jazzy B has spent most of his life in Vancouver;…”

Section: "Our Heroes … Are Shadowing Your Tyrants"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics and the Work of the Dead in Modern India

Moffat

2018

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This article provides a framework for understanding the continuing political potential of the anticolonial dead in twenty-first-century India. It demonstrates how scholars might move beyond histories of reception to interrogate the force of inheritance in contemporary political life. Rather than the willful conjuring of the dead by the living, for a politics in the present, it considers the more provocative possibility that the dead might themselves conjure politics—calling the living to account, inciting them to action. To explicate the prospects for such an approach, the article traces the contested afterlives of martyred Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), comparing three divergent political projects in which this iconic anticolonial hero is greeted as interlocutor in a struggle caught “halfway.” It is this temporal experience of “unfinished business”—of a revolution left incomplete, a freedom not yet perfected—that conditions Bhagat Singh's appearance as a contemporary in the political disputes of the present, whether they are on the Hindu nationalist right, the Maoist student left, or amidst the smoldering remains of Khalistani separatism in twenty-first-century Punjab. Exploring these three variant instances in which living communities affirm Bhagat Singh's stake in the struggles of the present, the article provides insight into the long-term legacies of revolutionary violence in India and the relationship between politics and the public life of history in the postcolonial world more generally.

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The resurgence of Bhindranwale's image in contemporary Punjab

Cited by 27 publications

References 10 publications

The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek

Mirroring its British masters

Politics and the Work of the Dead in Modern India

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