Religion, Civil Society and the State: A Study of Sikhism.

• Author: FENECH, LOUIS E.
• Position: Review

Religion, Civil Society and the State: A Study of Sikhism. By J. P. S. UBEROI. New Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 166, 4 plates. $18.95.

To demonstrate that Sikhism is the herald of Indian modernity is the ambitious project that J. P. S. Uberoi's latest book undertakes. To this end there is scattered throughout the book an implicit critique of "modernity" and the positings of a modernism which resulted from India's, rather than Europe's, specific historical trajectory. What this modernism displaces is what Uberoi terms Indian "medievalism," a discourse which his third chapter attempts to reconstruct structurally by employing a synchronic analysis of religion, society, and state, respectively, in both the Hindu and Islamic cultures of the subcontinent.

Such critiques of modernity are, of course, not new. Members of the Subaltern Studies group, for example, have been deploying them since the early 1980s. What is novel in Uberoi's book is his attempt to demonstrate that Sikhism in and of itself (like "Gandhism" in the early twentieth century--which for Uberoi bears a strong structural resemblance to Sikhism) presents a radical rupture, a fundamental discontinuity in this medievalist course and is thus part and parcel of the Indian modernist project which attempts to bring together, face to face, "the three spheres of religion, state and society," spheres which were "walled off from each other" in medieval India (p. 84). The key to this rupture and the harbinger of Indian modernity, he proclaims, is in the figure of the martyr in Sikhism, specifically its first traditional martyr, the fifth Sikh Master, Guru Arjan (d. 1606). According to Uberoi,

[b]y the example of his life, work and non-violent self-sacrifice or martyrdom, the fifth guru folded up the...structure of the medieval regime and its intersecting dualisms of status and power...and found for good and all the true centre of freedom, self-rule and self reform. (p. 89)

The problems with this book are many, not the least of which is its convoluted and unconvincing argument. It is particularly unimpressive because the historical supports on which the argument rests are seriously fractured. As Uberoi is powerfully caught up in the Sikh tradition he readily affirms many claims on which critical scholars must suspend their judgment. What I, as a historian of Sikhism who also have focused upon martyrdom in the tradition, find the most troubling is Uberoi's selective use of textual...