Religion, Resistance, and Sovereignty in Early Modern North India: Re-reading Guru Tegh Bahadur as a Patriotic Figure

Abstract

This paper revises the political value of Guru Tegh Bahadur as an actor in early modern India and challenges the history of devotionalism and nationalism that have the tendency to simplify the historical nuances of his deeds. The issue that the research proposal will solve is the marginalisation of Guru Tegh Bahadur in historical accounts of political resistance where sovereignty is often evaluated in terms of dynastic or military power and not through moral religious dissent. The conceptual way the research is incorporated is the combination of religion, resistance and sovereignty in studying how the authority of the ethics played a counter-sovereign role in the Mughal imperial rule. The paper is methodologically based on textual-historical analysis of the Sikh primary sources such as the Guru Granth Sahib, Bachittar Natak, Bukamnamas, early rahit literature and Persian Mughal chronicles and the current historical literature as well. It features the main thesis as re-interpretation of Guru Tegh Bahadur as an expression of patriotism whose martyrdom was the expression of an idealistic defence of plural religious legitimacy and moral autonomy, and not sectarian motive. The article has its contribution to the discourse at the social-science level since it establishes a redefinition of early modern patriotism as something other than a territory-based nationalism, thus pointing out the element of ethical resistance as a progressive form of political sovereignty in the South Asian history.