The historical novels of Bhai Vir Singh: Narratives of Sikh nationhood

I analyze the trilogy of Bhai Vir Singh's historical novels within the contexts of what I have termed the two lives of these texts. In their first lives, they were instruments employed by Sikh reformists to establish and enforce religious boundaries between Sikhs and other religious communities and to circumscribe this nascent Sikh religious identity within the then-prevalent Victorian gender ideals. In their second lives, they are translated into English and disseminated throughout the globalized Sikh community. The movement of these texts through this trans-national Sikh world is facilitated by numerous Sikh social, cultural, religious, commercial and political enterprises. The second lives of these texts echo the multifarious challenges that confront Sikhs of the late twentieth century, many of which intimately relate to the Sikh separatist movement that spanned the 1970s through the 1990s.; I argue that within their second lives, the circulation of these novels within the context of the Sikh insurgency, advanced the territorialization of the corporate Sikh imagination. I further contend that these novels contribute to a sequence of steps that enable a number of outcomes, one of which is political violence.; While this work addresses the notions of Sikh political identity and mobilization, my intent is that this methodology can more widely applied to the study of political violence within political science and related fields by demonstrating the importance of understanding cultural products (novels, films, music, etc) and their impacts. Expositing the ways in which communities produce and consume culture contribute to the ways in which notions of collectivity and political identity are forged. I also contend that cultural productions are critical in constituting cultures of violence and in establishing a worldview that justifies particular courses of action through the tandem processes of cultural creation and consumption. This implies that politicized groups (some of which may eventually pursue political violence) do not simply exist, but rather are created and continually reconstituted. This is a principal reason for understanding the means through which these groups re-create themselves as subjects, how they police this formation, how they remember and how they forget.