Rajbir Singh Judge
Biographic Data
| ID | 225159 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rajbir Singh Judge |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rajbir Singh |
| FAMILY NAME | Judge |
| SIGNATURE | JUDGE R S |
| AFFILIATIONS | California State University, Long Beach |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1641-9987 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
A Critique of Contextual Reason
Though scholars are critical of unilinear and teleological notions of time, the form of reasoning that accompanies this time, contextual reasoning, remains dominant. This article grapples with the problem of contextual reasoning by examining a central Sikh institution, Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, in the late nineteenth century and its relation to colonial law. This article explores the colonial state’s violent attempt to produce a proper context fo…
Phase two: A review essay on Nicole Ranganath's women and the Sikh diaspora in California: Singing the seven seas
A Perilous Desire: A Review Essay of SherAli Tareen's Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire
Extremely Stupid Guidelines: On The Development of Historical Questions Around Guru Tegh Bahadur’s Martyrdom
In 1675, Mughal authorities beheaded Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru and, today, the martyrdom has become a highly contested historical question within scholarly circles. This article investigates the emergence of the event as a historical question and how the emphasis of historical fact-finding refashioned scholarly approaches to the Sikh tradition in the colonial and postcolonial periods. I end by exploring how the famous Sikh intellectu…
Works from the Dead Inside Series
The Destruction of Loss
To Escape and Yet Remain: Refashioning Tradition
Later on, again, Marriott underscores how one common misreading of Fanon is to read his theory of violence as a Hegelian struggle in which colonizer/colonized are a version of master/slave. Marriott writes “I am not saying that this reading is wrong, and certain aspects of it could be read into Black Skin, White Masks; but in The Wretched of the Earth decolonial violence is far from its Hegelian origin and refers to a struggle that that is not to…
Formations of the Corridor: A Border Christology
On November 9, 2019, celebrating the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, Pakistan and India inaugurated the opening of a border corridor—the Kartarpur Corridor. This article traces the political rationality that undergirds the corridor by questioning state intervention and the exception—all of which rely upon the corporate institution that is Christianity. I then examine how the corridor is said to correspond with alternative cartographies the…
Led Around by the Nose
The two books reviewed in this Kitabkhana, Omnia El Shakry's The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and Sarah Pinto's The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis, provide an opportunity to think about the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and colonialism—a relationship our reviewers explore admirably. In this introduction, I want to grapple within this troubled problem-space and the st…
Birha
Focusing on early twentieth-century Punjab, this article considers how situating the region into historical context circumscribes the literary by tying it to place, thereby creating a seamless economy of exchange. In contrast, noting the refusal of literary and artistic output to be adjudicated into context, this article asks, Is it possible to consider the encounters within the Punjabi literary and artistic scene through a dislocation rather tha…
Other than Human
This special section, “Other Than Human: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia,” speaks to the ways in which the other than human puts pressure on our sense of the secular contours of imperial rule and the postcolonial condition. Shifting from simply undoing the distinction between human and the other than human, each contributor grapples with how the other than human refuses to provide any easy to grasp object or politics, especially o…
Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity. By Junaid QuadriDefending Muhammad in Modernity. By SherAli Tareen
Talal Asad’s “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” is one of the more influential articles in the study of Islam, generating vociferous critique as well as favorable elaborations. Asad argues that to write an anthropology of Islam requires that we formulate the right concepts and, he continues, “discursive tradition” is such a concept. An Islamic discursive tradition is, Asad writes, “simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself …
Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition
This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state s…
Book forum on Charles Hirschkind, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2021)
Basit Kareem Iqbal and Candace B. LukasikCharles Hirschkind begins his new book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, by stating his argument simply: ‘medieval Muslim Iberia d
Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation
In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hes…
Mind the Gap
“Everyone appeals to past authorities all the time,” Hussein Ali Agrama writes in his introduction to Questioning Secularism, “but it does not follow that all such appeals are therefore traditional.”1 This appeal to past authority is quite noticeable, Agrama tells us, in modern law, with its references to earlier precedents or previously enacted codes. Modern law, however, is hardly considered traditional, since its orientation appears to fragmen…
The Invisible Hand of the Indic
The Invisible Hand of the Indic Rajbir Singh Judge (bio) Scholars have thoroughly reexamined the nature of the secular, noting that the secular is, as Talal Asad writes, "neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred)" (2003, 25).1 Instead, Asad has asked us to consider how t…
Dusky Countenances: Ambivalent Bodies and Desires in the Theosophical Society
There Is No Colonial Relationship: Antagonism, Sikhism, and South Asian Studies
This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article foregrounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reali…
Guru Nanak is not at the White House: An essay on the idea of Sikh-American redemption
This article examines the rights-based discourse deployed by Sikh advocacy organizations, the Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defense & Education Fund, in order to carve an inclusive space within the United States. We interrogate the deep violence of forgetting embedded within this politics that not only sanctions American values and their regulatory might globally, but also integrates the foundational anti-blackness of Western subjectivit…
The Invisible Hand of the Indic
The Invisible Hand of the Indic Rajbir Singh Judge (bio) Scholars have thoroughly reexamined the nature of the secular, noting that the secular is, as Talal Asad writes, "neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred)" (2003, 25).1 Instead, Asad has asked us to consider how t…
Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition
This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state s…
Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation
In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hes…
There Is No Colonial Relationship: Antagonism, Sikhism, and South Asian Studies
This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article foregrounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reali…
Guru Nanak is not at the White House: An essay on the idea of Sikh-American redemption
This article examines the rights-based discourse deployed by Sikh advocacy organizations, the Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defense & Education Fund, in order to carve an inclusive space within the United States. We interrogate the deep violence of forgetting embedded within this politics that not only sanctions American values and their regulatory might globally, but also integrates the foundational anti-blackness of Western subjectivit…
Guru Nanak is not at the White House: An essay on the idea of Sikh-American redemption
This article examines the rights-based discourse deployed by Sikh advocacy organizations, the Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defense & Education Fund, in order to carve an inclusive space within the United States. We interrogate the deep violence of forgetting embedded within this politics that not only sanctions American values and their regulatory might globally, but also integrates the foundational anti-blackness of Western subjectivit…
Dusky Countenances: Ambivalent Bodies and Desires in the Theosophical Society
There Is No Colonial Relationship: Antagonism, Sikhism, and South Asian Studies
This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article foregrounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reali…
Mind the Gap
“Everyone appeals to past authorities all the time,” Hussein Ali Agrama writes in his introduction to Questioning Secularism, “but it does not follow that all such appeals are therefore traditional.”1 This appeal to past authority is quite noticeable, Agrama tells us, in modern law, with its references to earlier precedents or previously enacted codes. Modern law, however, is hardly considered traditional, since its orientation appears to fragmen…
The Invisible Hand of the Indic
The Invisible Hand of the Indic Rajbir Singh Judge (bio) Scholars have thoroughly reexamined the nature of the secular, noting that the secular is, as Talal Asad writes, "neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred)" (2003, 25).1 Instead, Asad has asked us to consider how t…
Book forum on Charles Hirschkind, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2021)
Basit Kareem Iqbal and Candace B. LukasikCharles Hirschkind begins his new book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, by stating his argument simply: ‘medieval Muslim Iberia d
Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation
In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hes…
Formations of the Corridor: A Border Christology
On November 9, 2019, celebrating the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, Pakistan and India inaugurated the opening of a border corridor—the Kartarpur Corridor. This article traces the political rationality that undergirds the corridor by questioning state intervention and the exception—all of which rely upon the corporate institution that is Christianity. I then examine how the corridor is said to correspond with alternative cartographies the…
Led Around by the Nose
The two books reviewed in this Kitabkhana, Omnia El Shakry's The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and Sarah Pinto's The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis, provide an opportunity to think about the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and colonialism—a relationship our reviewers explore admirably. In this introduction, I want to grapple within this troubled problem-space and the st…
Birha
Focusing on early twentieth-century Punjab, this article considers how situating the region into historical context circumscribes the literary by tying it to place, thereby creating a seamless economy of exchange. In contrast, noting the refusal of literary and artistic output to be adjudicated into context, this article asks, Is it possible to consider the encounters within the Punjabi literary and artistic scene through a dislocation rather tha…
Other than Human
This special section, “Other Than Human: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia,” speaks to the ways in which the other than human puts pressure on our sense of the secular contours of imperial rule and the postcolonial condition. Shifting from simply undoing the distinction between human and the other than human, each contributor grapples with how the other than human refuses to provide any easy to grasp object or politics, especially o…
Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity. By Junaid QuadriDefending Muhammad in Modernity. By SherAli Tareen
Talal Asad’s “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” is one of the more influential articles in the study of Islam, generating vociferous critique as well as favorable elaborations. Asad argues that to write an anthropology of Islam requires that we formulate the right concepts and, he continues, “discursive tradition” is such a concept. An Islamic discursive tradition is, Asad writes, “simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself …
Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition
This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state s…
Works from the Dead Inside Series
The Destruction of Loss
To Escape and Yet Remain: Refashioning Tradition
Later on, again, Marriott underscores how one common misreading of Fanon is to read his theory of violence as a Hegelian struggle in which colonizer/colonized are a version of master/slave. Marriott writes “I am not saying that this reading is wrong, and certain aspects of it could be read into Black Skin, White Masks; but in The Wretched of the Earth decolonial violence is far from its Hegelian origin and refers to a struggle that that is not to…
Phase two: A review essay on Nicole Ranganath's women and the Sikh diaspora in California: Singing the seven seas
A Perilous Desire: A Review Essay of SherAli Tareen's Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire
Extremely Stupid Guidelines: On The Development of Historical Questions Around Guru Tegh Bahadur’s Martyrdom
In 1675, Mughal authorities beheaded Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru and, today, the martyrdom has become a highly contested historical question within scholarly circles. This article investigates the emergence of the event as a historical question and how the emphasis of historical fact-finding refashioned scholarly approaches to the Sikh tradition in the colonial and postcolonial periods. I end by exploring how the famous Sikh intellectu…
A Critique of Contextual Reason
Though scholars are critical of unilinear and teleological notions of time, the form of reasoning that accompanies this time, contextual reasoning, remains dominant. This article grapples with the problem of contextual reasoning by examining a central Sikh institution, Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, in the late nineteenth century and its relation to colonial law. This article explores the colonial state’s violent attempt to produce a proper context fo…
Sociology (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · History (8 works) · South Asian Studies and Diaspora (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)