In his introduction to this book event, SherAli makes reference to a formulation of Talal Asad that I have found to be haunting as a regulative ideal: “Life is essentially itself.” The truth of this is what makes friendship appear across the symbolic register, but also requires attention to the ways that each term—life, being, essence, itself—may be captured within the colonial frame and betray friendship that remains impossible. For me, this brings to mind a guilty pleasure of mine, romantic comedies. Specifically, romantic comedies that take interracial relationships as their focus. In those films there is often a scene where the two protagonists come face to face with the reality of trying to love each other in a world where their racial identity matters and structures how they might live. For example, in the (admittedly middling) 2023 film You People, Ezra (Jonah Hill) and Amira (Lauren London) fall in love and are able to inhabit that space together joyfully and erotically. That is until they make their relationship known to their respective Jewish and Black communities. Once they make their love visible within the community—casting their love as subject to what the community is able see—they confront the reality that who they “really” are is not unmoored from how they inhabit the world within the symbolic register. That they love each other in a way immanent only to themselves is no less true than the reality that they must face being racialized within the world that imposes distance and transcendence to their experience. 

Reference to such a middle-brow film might seem strange in the context of engagement with such a rich text as Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja, but what is common despite the low and high-quality of the two is a kind of yearning for the impossible while having to contend with the reality of loss, and rumors of even greater losses. The abyss between a shared life that is only immanent to itself and life that can only be communicated through the symbolic might be another way to describe loss. Attention to this gap might be another name for mourning and melancholia. Rajbir’s book—which flows between the historical and deeply theoretical, all while deftly dealing with the imposing demands of a historico-disciplinary institutional machine—offers no simple nostalgia for a lost sovereignty, nor a kind of defense of a future sovereignty to-come. In a line that is undeniable in its understated desire, and draws me in for that reason, Rajbir writes, “I am ambivalent about loss, 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. […] the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss (13, emphasis mine).” 

Part of what has been lost, I take Rajbir to be teaching us, is even the ability to see what has been lost clearly. What is the rhythm that emerges when the Sikh community is drawn toward the possibility of a lost sovereignty when the language of that loss is irreparably changed by the presupposition of “a Christian paradigm (8)”? Might we even say the language is “infected” or is this too much? Does that notion of infection not itself presuppose a Christian paradigm of biopolitics? Instead, maybe we can say the rhythm is now inflected, but still the rhythms that were are now no longer. They are new, which is perhaps something to mourn, but can the loss even be related to when this new beat, this new notion, remains stuck in our head? Ambivalence becomes a powerful stance here.

This relation to loss is what I think allows Rajbir something unique and rare in academic work today, especially academic work in the so-called Western academy that often relegates work like this to “area studies” or even to the discipline of history itself, sold as it is amongst a million different cultures where stories can be heard and understood. The nefarious nature of Christian-secular hegemony also creates spaces within the Western academy where borders are policed in the name of fighting for some form of recovery, where seemingly “provincial” concepts get recast into and for Western academia. Rajbir’s book moves with a kind of beloved ambivalence between concepts of European origin and those of Sikh tradition. He passes across these borders seemingly without anxiety, precisely because this ambiguous relationship to loss undermines claims that some final or complete knowledge of Duleep Singh will be found anywhere. What the Punjab and Europe share in common is not an understanding of sovereignty, but that they “appear to have ‘failed’ (13)”. Failure is common across the divide, across the traditions, across lives lived essentially as themselves. 

I find that there’s something enjoyable, even if is not reparative, in knowing that even if the colonists think they’ve won, my god, how they have failed! How much they have lost! I realize that Rajbir’s book is not about the colonizers, but given my own relationship to colonialism, I did find myself thinking of them. I don’t know if this is failure and I can accept it if it is. But I was drawn in particular to the concept of “rumor” in the book, a form of knowledge that is totally lost on the colonizers. I think rumor identifies another resource that works on loss (like mourning and melancholia) and is truly a philosophical concept. I was drawn at first to the way that rumor is described by Rajbir as exceeding what the colonizers’ can understand, what they can know. For example, in the chapter following “Rumor,” we find the British consular agent in Pondicherry reporting on the rumored increase in supporters of Sindhanwalia (who was working to restore the Maharajah to the throne) with the admission, “what this means I do not know (156).”  

Rumor is a kind of knowledge, but without clear or secure meaning. Rajbir connects such an understanding of rumor to gossip, “Rumor and gossip contest the tightknit relationships between public and private, outer and inner, world and home, central to both colonial rule and nationalist thought (117).” Agamben turns to gossip as a philosophical idea in his book on St. Paul, The Time That Remains. He doesn’t fully flesh out the idea, but I find his description as fascinating as it is dense: 

This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement] (Agamben, p. 8).

Gossip does not have to be accurate in order for it to be closer to truth than fact is. Yet, the truth gossip is close to is still far from being information. When Agamben tells us that it is inelegant to treat gossip in this way, we can extend the argument logically to see that treating information as if it were truth is equally as ignoble. This confusion of truth and information, even a fear of gossip and rumor, is at play when the colonial occupiers work to categorize and track individuals as information amongst the Sikh community. 

Is rumor, as Rajbir describes and traces it, distinct from Agamben’s philosophical gossip? If gossip in Agamben’s text brings to mind catty scholars leaning in over drinks to share what they heard, rumor has a distinctly more insurgent character. Rajbir builds upon Ranajit Guha’s argument that, “As a spoken utterance, rumor, […] was central in creating rebellion in the colonial era, since rumor spread more urgently and dynamically than the written word (118).” Fanon, who appears elsewhere in this text, might also be instructive here, writing in the “On Violence” chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, 

Colonized peoples are not alone. Despite the efforts of colonialism, their frontiers remain permeable to news and rumors. They discover that violence is atmospheric, it breaks out sporadically, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime. The success of this violence plays not only an informative role but also an operative one (Fanon, p. 30).

Rumor is insurgent because its relation to law in the political realm shares something with gossip’s relation to truth in the metaphysical realm. Colonial violence is presented as law which hides its identity as violence through the myth of meaning. Colonialism’s conception of the law is mythic in structure because law presents itself as the meaning of violence. The way that rumors can spread, both anonymously and without the requirement that the speaker or the hearer believe in the rumor, reveals the underlying disjuncture of law and truth. The distinction that Walter Benjamin finds in his “Critique of Violence” is that between law, taken to be universal, and justice, which is always particular. 

Rajbir’s conception of rumor again returns us to the question of the community and tradition that runs throughout his book and is both a place of dwelling with loss and what is lost. In the discussion of rumor we see Rajbir repeating a structure that flows out of the his stated relationship to loss. On the one side, the community and tradition are real and operative, “Though open to improvisation, rumor remains grounded in local credibility, within the parameters of tradition” (119). Rumor is not universal, and when the British attempt to turn it into information, they will necessarily miss what it has said, may say, and is saying. The particularity of the community is what allows rumor to remain rumor, to let it speak truth without turning it into a dead letter of information or law.

On the other side, though, rumor “is not simply about local credibility or precoded political thinking, but about disjuncture and displacement, which both creates and restricts possibility for political struggle (ibid, emphasis mine).” Rumor, and the insurgent violence that may emerge from it, is not a simple matter of the community’s moral affirmation or condemnation. The truth that this tradition—any tradition—is itself not secure, complete, or finished, is understood in rumor. Rumors tell us that this tradition is no more sovereign than the colonizer is or the rule that was lost was. What is particular is also displaced, particularity requires displacement or else it is simply captured and circumscribed by law. 

I suspect some readers of Rajbir may find his ideas of loss too melancholy, even rumor lacks something of the healthy mind real strivers have. Too melancholy too those concepts that flow out of his dwelling in that loss, both within failed European traditions and in the failure of Duleep Singh. Of course, heart to heart, I do not find them too much. For those who listen and can move to it, there is something beautiful in the rhythms of loss that Rajbir plays out for us. A reminder that the colonial borders repeated in the university between academic disciplines are not real, even if they are deadly (sometimes for our bodies, sometimes for our spirits). Yet, the rhythms of loss allow for movement anyway. A little ambiguity about any of the claims that, once lost, we can be found, allows for a wild theoretical freedom still controlled like a dancer pushing the boundaries of the body while the rhythm keeps that body in time. 

When scholars and intellectuals refuse loss, what is it that they are so scared of? When reading Rajbir on rumor, I was surprised to find myself quoting Matthew 24:6, “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.” So much loss, and yet I still cannot fully get rid of this tradition, which I suppose I could claim, however tenuously, even if it does not claim me. What are they so scared to lose, when the reason the loss hurts so much is that it is never fully lost, there’s no certainty in the loss to remain lost? Are you scared that when you get what you want you’ll still be lost? Rajbir says of the colonizers, “They refused to consider the possibility of rumor outside of the certainty of their law (137).” I have heard a rumor that two people fell in love, that friendships were formed, despite the world they live in, and rumor says that they’re totally fucked, but they might just make it. Though, I do not know what this means.