Statecraft and Borderwork: Emerging Frontiers of Political and Social Representation in Colonial Punjab

Harleen Kaur, Arizona State University

To reckon with tensions in postcolonial political projects, we must first contend with how contemporary state-civilian relations emerged from what colonialism left behind (Maan 2005). In the case of Sikh Punjabis under British colonial rule in the late 1800s to mid-1900s, traditions of weapon-bearing and physical readiness led the British to construct Sikhs as a ‘martial race’ – a colonial logic which claimed certain communities, particularly those living in constructed border territories, were biologically and culturally predisposed for military service (Rand 2006). Following Mahmood Mamdani’s (2020) argument that the nation-state was born out of colonialism, I draw on over 500 colonial administrative documents from the Punjab State Archives to demonstrate the central role Sikh weapon-bearing practices played in the British Raj’s need to construct a monopoly on the legal use of physical force (Weber 1919). Second, I study the lasting effects of the Sikh elite’s rejection of these practices as sovereign for the sake of their own “security and economic benefits”. I posit that British colonial statecraft was as much a project of political border creation and maintenance – through the production of a clear, bounded, and ever-expanding British empire – as it was social border creation and maintenance – through regulation and policing of social hierarchy based on constructed identity categories. Analyzing the case of the Sikh Punjabi ‘martial race’ and other conceptualizations of Sikh Punjabi subjectivity during British colonial rule, I demonstrate the work done in constructed border zones to develop and legitimize the state through the establishment of social borders, such as race, religion, gender, and caste. This historical, relational analysis further elucidates how colonized peoples’ relation to the state as a project around accurate recognition and representation results in adaptations of state productions of social control as mechanisms for self-advocacy and inclusion (Coulthard 2007; Spade 2015).

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 167. Protests, Movements, Rebellions