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Meta-Narratives, Public Intellectuals, and Us
Jaspreet Kaur
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The World Sikh News had triggered a debate
with Jaspreet Kaur’s article “(Re)Defining
Sikh Activism: Sikh Scholars, Ivory Towers, and the Sikh
Community,” (World Sikh News;
October 14-20, 2009 edition) in which the
author had
engaged with suggestions made by Prof IJ Singh and characterized
these as efforts "to plug holes that don't actually exist." The
article had argued against the tendency to manufacture a
discourse that paints Sikh scholars as haplessly esoteric and
unable to visualize the 'bigger picture' and underlined that the
entire argument supporting this claim was feeble. In response,
Prof IJ Singh had mounted a defence for the idea of ‘public
intellectuals’, a response that we published in our October
21-27, 2009
edition. Now, we take pleasure in publishing Jaspreet Kaur’s
rejoinder to Prof Singh’s response in which he had signed off by
saying, “By all means, let the discussion go on.” By all means,
we are happy to see it does. – Ed. |
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In his response to
“(Re)Defining Sikh Activism,” one of
Professor IJ Singh’s major objections is that because he did
not explicitly state that the work of theoretically engaged Sikh
scholars is irrelevant to the community’s general welfare, his
original article should not be held to account for producing this
discourse. Of course, a “reasonable reading” of my previous
response should convey that it does not matter whether Professor
Singh states this explicitly, nor does it matter what his intentions
are. The arguments, assumptions, inflections, and larger context
of his original article generate this very rhetoric. Knowingly or
not, Professor Singh’s article is being informed by an entire
cultural disposition that has found itself an exuberant champion in
him, and my critique is not only of Professor IJ Singh's article
but also of the larger discourse that informs it. Professor Singh
asks we take his text at its literal word, insisting that he is “baffle[d]”
when I write that “he subtly suggests that only social and political
activism can be of real value to the Sikh community.” I myself am
baffled that he is baffled. Interpretation implies looking at what
the text does rather than focusing solely on what it says,
and in the course of my lengthy original article, I laid out, in
detail, exactly how Professor Singh’s article does what it does.
Professor Singh
also contends that his original article was not “glossing over the
divide that often seems to exist between the scholars and the
community.” However, I never suggested he was “glossing” over this
divide; I suggested (quite explicitly) that his article was actually
producing it. The title of the very first subsection of his
article, “Scholars - Community Gap,” should indicate as much. This
section is dedicated to creating a schema in which Sikh scholars are
represented as isolated theorists weary from dealing with the
community, and the Sikh community is shown as being angry and hurt
for being neglected by Sikh scholars. I am not suggesting that
there is no discord between Sikh scholars and the community, and
that all of this is purely a figment of Professor Singh’s
imagination. I am suggesting that Professor Singh’s article
characterizes this dis-harmony in a particular way that makes Sikh
scholars’ work seem off the point and out of touch. His
representation is producing this gap despite its claims to pure
objectivity. Again, my original article illustrates in greater
detail how Professor Singh’s article accomplishes this.
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Professor IJ Singh’s deceptively simple question can not account
for the fact that developing more clarity about theoretical
frameworks and doing more rigorous academic work will expand the
possibilities of engagement between the intellectual and the
community. The work of Sikh scholars, which now may appear to be
overly esoteric, is actually laying the foundation for engaging
with the very issues that the larger community is concerned
with, such as culture, history, translation, language, politics,
media, gender, and marriage. |
Further, Professor
IJ Singh asks, “What is wrong in hoping that in time some public
intellectuals would emerge out of our academics?” What is wrong
with this hope is that, aside from the fact that his formulation of
“public intellectual” is vague and his examples of successful public
intellectuals have little application in the case of the Sikhs, it
ignores the complexities and contingencies that Sikhs and Sikh
scholars face. The very notion of the public intellectual
necessarily implies that the intellectual in question already
possesses a relatively clear, well-defined message that he feels
confident taking to the public. However, in the case of Sikhs, we
do not yet have even the minimum of theoretical certainty about our
“message” and even the very notion of “Sikh Studies” that usually
predicates the birth of a public intellectual.
For decades, Sikh
Studies in Punjab largely appropriated the modernist framework
without attacking its colonialist foundations (with a few notable
exceptions), and Western Sikh Studies was confined to McLeod’s
historicism, a decidedly imperialist and racist methodology.
Incidentally, Dr. IJ Singh himself is not only modernist in his own
approach, but at times is also supportive of Hew McLeod. This
should indicate to us the extent to which we are facing a crisis of
interpretation. Only in the last decade or so have Sikhs began a
serious engagement with the objectionable sources of these previous
attempts at Sikh Studies. This effort, of which the conferences
held at UC-Berkeley are an integral part, is trying to create a more
authentic cultural and theoretical space for Sikhs. Sikh scholars
in Punjab and in the West have only just begun to establish a Sikh
discourse and a Sikh school of interpretation.
How can Sikh
scholars begin to publicly preach a message when simple questions
like “What is a Sikh?” are still being extracted from their colonial
contexts? (Even despite these obvious difficulties, several Sikh
scholars have initiated serious efforts to begin engaging with the
larger community, as detailed in my previous article.) Professor IJ
Singh’s deceptively simple question can not account for the fact
that developing more clarity about theoretical frameworks and doing
more rigorous academic work will expand the possibilities of
engagement between the intellectual and the community. The work of
Sikh scholars, which now may appear to be overly esoteric, is
actually laying the foundation for engaging with the very issues
that the larger community is concerned with, such as culture,
history, translation, language, politics, media, gender, and
marriage. The implications of asking Sikh scholars to adopt the
persona of a “public intellectual” will indeed “deprive the Sikh
community of much needed rigorous intellectual engagement,” by
obscuring what their challenge is and over-simplifying it to the
point of distortion, whether intentionally or not.
4
November 2009
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