1. One of the things for which I have come to rely on Rajbir over the years is his unfailing attentiveness to the dynamics of loss: one that is unsentimental and non-indulgent. (Against the empire of trauma and the weaponization of victimhood, to say nothing of wounded attachments and left melancholia.) Of course, this is not to say that one can stand apart from loss, either; simply that the language of loss is ubiquitous: it does not make you special or confer some kind of election. And this despite the manifold claims of loss today, when the political and media classes run breathless about identity politics, however “for” or “against”. These claims are everywhere; they populate the discourse of the institutions that shape our lives, even into the methodologies that now promise epistemological emancipation (“autoethnography” and “lived experience,” ad nauseum).

Talal Asad had argued decades ago that “it is not the origin of given theories, methods, or explanations which will tell us whether they are more suitable” (an argument of his I now keep repeating, since it strikes a discordant tone against how he is widely read today). (Yet, as I hear from progressive and traditionist colleagues and graduate students alike, the origin of theory and method do indicate what is suitable. Postcolonial nativism as decolonial voice, back to the things themselves. Here we run into an impasse, for it turns out that, despite my self-styled pessimism, I do affirm the possibilities of translation — mono-lingualism of the other — precisely through the proliferating losses — including of translation. Hmm.) More recently, in some reflections after October 7, 2023, Asad comments that the “power of the victim is capable of accommodating a variety of motives and experiences in all of which the desire for self-affirmation is central.” Claims to loss directly become a means for self-affirmation, for justification, for immunization: for sovereignty. Is this claim successful or frustrated? How is it to be measured? Is there an outside to its ambition? Does its justification admit another? (Is that admittance a name for “ethics”? Or is that also a liberal ruse?) In another register, how can one adjudicate between “competing narratives”? Holocaust and nakba, together (!)? (To be clear, that is another feint, a desperate pacification of the antagonism Rajbir has already alerted us to.) Is there no outside to which one can recourse, in order to sort out the history of loss, which is never one?

Instead of a history of Sikh loss, bounded and secured, Prophetic Maharaja opens onto the problematic of loss: where loss itself can be lost, along with the historical horizon. Or loss is destroyed, as in the big project Rajbir and I worked on during the pandemic years. But Rajbir’s attention to the prospect of losing loss does not veer into a kind of nihilism. (That would be too easy.) Instead he carefully shows how what is at stake in every gesture, expressed in the Sikh tradition, is the relationship between loss and sovereignty. Vah!

2. “Rather than centering the loss of a prior sovereignty,” Rajbir writes, “this book asks: what do we make of loss and sovereignty?” (11). The former construction is surely more familiar (not least in a work of history), however much I expected it to be complicated by an insistence on the double genitive (loss of sovereignty / sovereignty of loss), perhaps also with a comment on how each formulation implicates the other. But the shift from of to and does something else: it opens each of these terms to question. Rajbir cites the first page of “Force of Law” on this “and”, where Derrida comments that “the conjunction ‘and’ brings together words, concepts, perhaps things that do not belong to the same category. A conjunction such as and dares to defy order, taxonomy, and classificatory logic, no matter how it operates – by analogy, distinction, or opposition.” What even was sovereignty? And what loss? “And so loss and sovereignty become a problem for and of history” (11). The answer is not to ground loss in sovereignty or the other way around. Instead to embrace the ambivalence: “affirming and denying it, resisting it and acknowledging it, working through it and against it, and interrogating its nature, its ground or presuppositions, its form and its failures” (13). Not to “provide a theorization of loss” but to dwell “in the various rhythms of loss.” The shape of these rhythms, it seems, is key, but following them (elaborating their poetics) remains foreclosed when either sovereignty or loss is a stable object of history or narration. Rajbir’s insistence on the conjunction (loss and sovereignty) is what allows for this ambivalence through his reading; this ambivalence is what allows, as on the final page, for “a learning without closure” (185). What more can one ask? The book is so instructive, on so many fronts (its formidable readings of psychoanalysis, Subaltern Studies, historiography, deconstruction, and more); among others, this turn from the genitive to the conjunction is one of the methodological commitments I will take with me to other readings.

3. We are given on the very first page the leading question: “What happens when a tradition encounters the possibility of its loss, especially when that loss – not unlike the present-day losses that mount in the wake of environmental, political, and social disaster – exceeds the very possibility of narration, reflection, and redemption?” (1). Perhaps a tradition is then withdrawn, surpassed in the disaster (per Jalal Toufic); perhaps it is rendered counterfeit. Or perhaps, as Rajbir writes precisely, people may “respond to loss not solely by seeking to recover the past but also by seeking to remake the past and create change” (2). Not simply to recover the past given in knowledge, or to repair it, but to remake the past and create change; what loss asks is something other than reproduction of the same (and not only because it puts that knowledge in question).

A dozen years ago, encountering al-Juwayni’s Ghiyath al-umam in a reading seminar at the University of Toronto, I was stunned by his unsentimental propounding of the loss of the living sharia. What if the scholars all passed away and the historical age were emptied? If there were no mujtahid in the community who could discover god’s law? Other Islamic theological schools refused to countenance this prospect but he is forthright about its possibility. I tried to understand this as one of the questions by which Islamic juridical theology confronted its limit, but here I remember how Juwayni’s account of the fatigue of the sharia prefigures the Hasidic story Scholem relays at the end of his book on Jewish mysticism, the story which Agamben reads as “an allegory of literature,” where “what remains of mystery is literature” (2): across the generations, knowledge of a prayer was lost, then the fire which was lit with it, then the place in the forest where it was recited—but knowledge of these losses itself is sufficient, say the rabbis. If each tale is a “memory of the loss of the fire” (3), if Scholem cannot access “the mystical kernel of tradition” except through “the wall of history,” or if variously with Koselleck and Hayden White there is no history without narrative, then we can only follow Agamben when he underscores the enigma of the rabbis’ smile: knowledge of the loss or its tale is sufficient to what??

The question of sufficiency cannot be answered in advance, not even by the historian. Certainly not with his given repertoire. (This question spools outward, into other registers: for example, it resonates with what I’m translating now as the Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s inquiry into the “ruination of form” (takharrub al-shakl) in the destruction of Syria and what he calls the production of the atrocious, namely, how to engage violence when it scathes the frame of representation.) And yet, as Rajbir says directly, “one must narrate” (25). Here I remember a lengthy discussion with my late advisor Saba Mahmood on Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I had argued that if Lear read more deconstructively (let alone more politically), then he would understand that a tradition is always exposed to its outside and so it encounters the possibility of its loss. She had corrected my reading, noting that what is at stake is not only the possibility of its loss but how those inhabiting a form of life encounter its dissolution. What comes through Rajbir’s narration is thus not only the encounter with the possibility of loss but encounters with its shifting form (in and of community, in and of public, in and of conversion, in and of rumor, in and of reform). And a reminder that, given its shifting forms, sufficiency is only conjunctively related to redemption. The sufficiency of a narration for the rabbis, for Sikhs, and for me (each inhabiting our losses, which touch one another, not least in language) may not be redemptive for the professional historian.

I am grateful to have learned from Rajbir articulating a non-redemptive knowledge of the fire and the tale.