Born in rural Punjab, Guriqbal Singh Sahota grew up in the Bay Area of northern California and graduated with highest honors in History from UCSC (with a minor in Literature) and received the Chancellors Award for his thesis on early Indian nationalism. Sahota continued his studies at UC Berkeley where he undertook Sanskrit and Punjabi and later entered the doctoral program in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Before returning to UCSC where he is now associate professor in Literature, he taught at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), and a Fulbright Fellow in Delhi and London. His first book Late Colonial Sublime received the Mellon Foundation’s Modern Language Initiative First Book Award. He is currently working on a second book project titled Transposed Minds: Indo-German Cultural Exchange and a Critique of Identity, as well as a variety of writing and photography projects that intersect with the Sikh tradition and the literary languages of Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora in a number of ways. His longterm research will focus on an intellectual history of early Sikhism tentatively titled The Name of Reason.
The following is an interview from September 2024 with Sikh Formations regarding his article “Minor Philology: Aphorisms.”
Introduction
For over a decade now, G.S. Sahota has published a variety of work in different forms in Sikh Formations. The author of Late Colonial Sublime: Neo-Epics and the End of Romanticism (Northwestern, 2018), Sahota is associate professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, where he holds the Sarbjit S. Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies. With his background in history, literary studies, and critical theory, he brings to his diverse efforts within the fields of South Asian and Sikh studies philological rigor, historical grounding, philosophical acuity, and formal inventiveness. The multifaceted nature of his writing encompasses cultural history, experimental essay, fragmentary media analyses, and theoretical engagements. This work is generally characterized by a commitment to understanding and redefining the politics of minorities, especially Sikhs in various contexts, but with frames of reference that inform other social situations and political actors. His interventions aim to challenge, if not undo, the identitarian reifications of late capitalist society.
His most recent publication in Sikh Formations (vol. 20, no. 1-2) is a small set of aphorisms titled “Minor Philology.” By bringing back into play the minor medium of the aphorism for intervention into contemporary social, political, and intellectual concerns, the piece highlights the critical role of the foreigner, the stranger, and the minority figure in the articulation of certain crucial truths left unrecognized within the cultural armature of the majority. Working through the critical insights regarding this problem in the work of the Alexis de Tocqueville, the essay is linguistically layered, multivalent, and tinged with a sense of urgency stemming from current political crises. Though small, these aphorisms are intended to speak volumes and alert the wide readership of the journal to all that is at stake, not only with respect to contemporary political impasses, but also to the scholarly forms, methods, and paradigms brought to bear upon them.
Sahota was posed four questions about “Minor Philology: Aphorisms” by Sikh Formations. These questions and his answers follow below.
Questions and Answers
- What inspired you to write this article?
I am not sure if anything as mystical as “inspiration,” with its origins in Christian theology, had much to do with the writing of this piece. How much easier that would have been – just to let your pen be guided by some inscrutable force breathing through you as “the Lord God . . . breathed into [Adam’s] nostrils the breath of life . . .”! (Genesis, ii.7) In our current state one must be wary of ordinary language and its religious etymologies reflecting the dominance of the major. As I will point out in response to your other questions, several vectors – historical, political, ethical, aesthetical, and personal – convened upon the topos of the minor and the discipline of philology (“love of language/reason”) in the form, fittingly, of aphorisms. Thus, it may make sense to begin with this form of writing, one that is certainly minor, if not fully marginalized by academic normalization. Embedded in the very morphology of “aphorism” is the ancient Greek word “ὅρος” for “border,” “limit”, or “boundary.” (Incidentally, in Aeschylus, this word becomes a metaphor for a woman’s mind.) For me, the form is a metaphor for a liminal space that can serve as a catalyst for intervening in unusual ways on a number of intellectual and affective fronts simultaneously. Aphorism’s propensity for provocative formulations in dense, multilayered language is apt for recognizing the complexity, nuance, depth, and even relative opacity of minority cultures. In its condensed quasi-dreamwork, combining layers of language and multivalent allusions, the aphorism reflects the compressed richness of minoritized textual traditions such as that of Sikhism. The occasion for this experiment was the task of summarizing the proceedings of a conference roundtable that took place years ago under the auspices of the Saini Endowment at UC Riverside. The task of summarizing felt like an arduous climb to distant summits. I was reminded of Nietzsche’s line in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.” But my own limited capacities and normal stature reminded me of Pessoa, for whom the aphorism had become the medium of disquiet, as in his stunning Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet).
- What primary message did you want to convey to readers?
The aphoristic form does not admit to such a straightforward ordinal positioning of meanings and messages. Yet, it is worth noting that the article takes up the ghostly presence of philology in our midst, a field that is, by some accounts, as dead as the ancient languages on which it thrived in the past. In contemporary assessments of the literary field and its disciplinary norms, philology emerges simultaneously as a failed and now long-lost academic endeavor, on the one hand, and as a set of methods for authoritative reading clamoring for restoration to the highest echelons of scholarly prestige, on the other. The picture is thus complicated, even contradictory, and perhaps reflective of an uneven, fully stratified institutional order when it comes to humanistic education today. This is not the occasion to survey all its fissures and dissensions. But it is worth noting that in colonial contexts, such as those addressed in these aphorisms, philology operated as a highly successful technology for the transfer of textual and cultural authority from native to imperial actors, such as Ernst Trumpp, who worked directly under the employ of the British colonial state. Emerging in tandem with other sciences such as biology and economics in the 19th century, philology aimed to put the study of texts on solid footing. From fragmentary accounts and ill-assorted information regarding modern and ancient languages coming from disparate sources, philology set itself the task of making key distinctions (between, say, Urdu and Hindi), working out comprehensive grammars (such as Sir Charles Wilkins’s for Sanskrit), and venturing linguistic comparisons (such as those leading to the discovery of the Indo-European system). The tedious work of the first generations of Orientalists reflects a particular will to categorize and control the populations and objects under its domination. Foucault grasped what was at stake in his discussion of philology in Les mots et les choses (translated as The Order of Things):
Having become a dense and consistent historical reality, language forms the locus of tradition, of the unspoken habits of thought, of what lies hidden in a people’s mind; it accumulates an ineluctable memory which does not even know itself as memory . . . The truth of discourse is caught in the trap of philology.
Mastery of language was tantamount to mastery over texts, traditions, memory, law, and forms of future collectivity; thus, philology became the key means – or trap – by which authority could be transferred from native institutions to colonial masters. The minor philologist recognizes the impact once wielded by the power of philology – the historical patterns that gave rise to the majority, including contemporary nationalist hegemonies, as well as its demotion and debilitation of groupings of lesser numbers. The question for the minor philologist is how to reconfigure the field in the form of ongoing interdisciplinary critique. The seeds of new political possibilities are often found in the dust of failed projects and neglected zones of our collective existence. That is at least one potential of a renewed philology. There are others, but it depends on philology casting off its original rationale and adopting a more liberatory telos.
- How does your article address or relate to current pressing socio-political issues, and why do you believe this connection is important?
As this article is not an exercise in journalism or political commentary, whatever relationship it might have to current socio-political issues is likely to be indirect, but hopefully no less impactful. In departing from the immediacy of contemporary conflicts and calamities, one attains a view of what is significant for the longer durée, for different scales of social reality, for a diverse array of political actors who might on the surface be facing separate challenges, but who from afar can be seen to be caught in overlapping historical (il-)logics. One might see glimmers – or merely maddening mirages – of hope for the future when the day only brings the bleakest of news, as the return of polio in the already desperate situation of Gaza (just when the world was on the cusp of eliminating this easily preventable illness). The mind reels from the daily onslaught of unimaginable tragedies. The sunny California days I experience seem to blot out a darkness that returns in the form of an unrelenting knocking from an unending night that shrouds the less fortunate elsewhere. Their reality must be acknowledged, and the questions it raises for all of us must be faced directly. In this connection and in response to the second part of your question, I can say that the article urges a widening of academic freedom, a commitment to parrhesia, an experimentation with new languages and forms of discourse for grappling with our crises, and a refusal to sweep difficult issues out of the political picture. The legacy of Edward Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual who is cited in one of my aphorisms and whose image is included to metaphorize the task of the minor philologist, has long provided a model for a form of scholarship as political engagement. The current holder of the Edward Said chair at Columbia University, Professor Rashid Khalidi, was asked recently whether the powers that be “might do away with the ‘terrorist’ name altogether, the Edward Said professorship?” His response draws attention to the “campaign in the United States against Middle East Studies in general, and studies on Palestine in particular,” which “is virulent and spans the political spectrum.” The refortification of principles of academic freedom is of paramount importance. Only with the guarantee of such freedom can the most difficult questions be faced, such as how current atrocities in Gaza connect back to the Nakba, how victims of genocide may become its perpetrators, or who pays the price of past injustices in the present? Khalidi notes the changes that are already underway; these depend on academic and other freedoms:
I grew up in a world where there was no Palestinian voice—in the Arab world, in the public sphere in the West; none at all, it didn’t exist. Palestinians didn’t exist. My four grandchildren are growing up in a time when there are quite vigorous voices for Palestine, all over the world. So that’s an element of change for the better. I grew up in a world in which the Zionist narrative was completely hegemonic and Israel was fulsomely described as ‘a light unto the nations’. That is no longer the case. Today it is widely, and rightly, seen as a pariah state because of its own genocidal actions. These are among the few good things that have happened in these very bad times.
- How do you think your article contributes to or fits into the broader field of Sikh/South Asian studies?
This in many ways is the easiest of your questions to answer, though it too brings up difficult issues in our midst. What is the connection between Sikh studies and South Asian studies? Does one fit neatly within the other? Are they equals who meet on an even plane, or is one subordinated to the other, and if so, on what grounds, and does it have to be? Despite overlapping geneses in Orientalism, do the two fields diverge so much as to part ways? These are all very genuine questions which can only be broached here (and perhaps taken up again elsewhere). These aphorisms assert the distinct role minority fields must perform nolens volens to attain their own centers of gravity. In doing so, such fields draw attention to the forms of power that were the sine qua non for knowledge formation, however much later repressed, of larger disciplinary structures. What is submerged truth in the larger field, say South Asian studies, is experienced as an onerous burden on the minority one, for instance, Sikh studies. Given this parallax between majority and minority, what is taken to be axiomatic in the majority field (for instance, that India is a “Hindu” civilization) may be received as a grave error in the minor discipline. This problematic ordering of things reveals the manner in which the majority formation is often beholden to, if not created by, colonial forms of knowledge and their unwieldy absorption into the norms of the nation-state. Such errors need to be taken seriously and in becoming reframed under the auspices of a different epistemic paradigm, these misprisions become the grounds for a deeper and more historically accurate truth, just as the Copernican notion that the Earth moves around the Sun was thought preposterous from the perspective of Ptolemaic astronomy, but later became the basis for a sounder understanding of the universe (as well as the commonplace errors to which its workings give rise). In its current dispensation, and under the leadership of theorists such as Arvind-pal Mandair, the editor of Sikh Formations, Sikh studies has shed its Orientalist positivism and become the basis for wide-ranging reflections. This field has moved beyond the enclosures of area studies to encompass diasporic critique, traversed transnational frameworks that leave behind civilizational fabrications, and animated modes of philological study that establish solidarities with other minority field formations. In doing so, it has disposed of the impoverished paradigms of the past. These aphorisms convey through their figurative force such paradigmatic turns in response to the panoply of the current crisis. Briefly put, the contemporary current in Sikh studies may serve as a corrective to South Asian and other conventional area studies programs. That is, Sikh studies may very well become a richer, more critical, counterpoint to traditional area studies’ problematic disciplinary underpinnings. Dehli hanuz dur ast – we still have a long way to go.
The following is an excerpt from a July 14, 2020 interview between Scott Rappaport of UC Santa Cruz and G.S. Sahota, upon his appointment to the UCSC Aurora Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies.
SR: Why did you take on this appointment as chair?
GSS: In this moment of racial and ethnic self-reckoning in American society, I wanted to make sure UCSC can help open a new chapter in higher education that would forge a curriculum more in keeping with our times, more reflective of the needs of a multicultural California, and more deeply involved in questions of social justice such that new approaches, paradigms, critiques, histories, languages, and ways of seeing the world can be included in our institutions. We inherited a curriculum that was predominantly Eurocentric, maintained by an intellectual class that was disciplined to be dismissive of non-Western traditions of art, literature, philosophy, religion, and cultural norms. The critique of Orientalism in the ’70s helped bring scrutiny to the ordering of culture according to an imperial will to power. This critique pointed out that it will take structural reinvention to adequately rectify the wrongs inflicted by the long history of Western racism. The pervasive Orientalist stereotyping and xenophobia in our midst today is a reminder of how urgent this task remains and how crucial it is that we educate new generations of students who are more critically informed and less handicapped by the racist paradigms of the past.
SR: Describe the significance of having Sikh and Punjabi Studies at UCSC.
GSS: The Aurora chair provides a platform for advocating for a stronger Asian humanities infrastructure at UCSC while prefiguring what is possible through various curricula and scholarly activities at UCSC. The position allows for a bridging of traditional South Asian studies (with its focus on classical Indian languages, literatures, religions, and arts), on the one hand, with critical race and ethnic studies (with its focus on social justice, diaspora, cultural difference, exile, and the politics of marginality) on the other. It means that students will have the opportunity to receive excellent instruction in the Punjabi language, take courses that expose them to the centuries old history of the Sikh community, and widen the horizons of Californians by introducing them to facets of their surroundings that in turn open up new understandings of our intricately interwoven worlds. I would like the chair to open new and lasting educational paradigms for a better future.
The ultra-right majoritarian nationalism that characterizes contemporary India has a tendency to confabulate much that is erroneous regarding the subcontinent’s past and present. In this context, it is all the more imperative that we assure some true appreciation for the real, the local, the regional, the particular, as well as the minority viewpoints and subaltern voices that they all bear in common. My hope is that the Aurora chair, with its focus on a less commonly studied region and a minority religious community, will help foster new paradigms for meeting these needs and thereby break free of any narrow framework itself. That is what I believe the current moment calls for.
SR: What plans do you have for your term as chair?
GSS: My plans include all of the above. With respect to event planning and programming, my aim is at times to foreground what is often submerged as well as to re-situate what we believe we already know into new contexts so new understandings may emerge. For instance, it would be interesting to have workshops that look at key texts in the Sikh canon as well as, say, a conference on the languages and styles of devotion in early modern India in order to provide comparative context and deeper analyses. I’ve been impressed by some of the new films coming out of Punjab in the tradition of the Indian New Wave of the ’70s such as those of Gurvinder Singh, so some screenings are also in order. I plan on carrying out some photography projects meant to document the longstanding Sikh/Punjabi presence in California, and am currently focussing on the gurdwaras (Sikh temples) around the state. I plan on teaching at least one course per year on relevant topics and continue to make possible for undergraduates and graduate students alike advanced research in the few Indian languages and literary traditions with which I am familiar, diasporic cultural studies, and critical theory. I hope the chair will afford me the opportunity to return to Punjab on occasion, to wander off the beaten track, make some forays into different archives, and maybe discover something captivating in the process. Something of the sort seems to happen every time I am there!