| Book Review | Journal of World History, 18.4

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| Book Review | Journal of World History, 18.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World. By TONY BALLANTYNE. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. 230 pp. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

This rich, diverse, and always compelling volume gives us a view into the changing nature of Sikh culture and the Sikh engagement with modernity, from the early colonial era up to the present. It is not a comprehensive account of Sikh history, even in the postcolonial period—there is, for instance, no discussion of the 1980s Khalistan movement—but Ballantyne provides a stimulating set of essays that illuminate the ways Sikhism came to terms with, and took advantage of, the challenges posed jointly by empire and migration. In its wide-ranging analysis, the book adopts, as Ballantyne writes, "an explicitly global approach to Sikh history" (p. 168). Against much conventional historiography, especially that written by scholars of Sikhism, Ballantyne insists that Sikh history does not take place in the Punjab alone, even in the nineteenth century, and is not found only in texts. At the same time he argues, in opposition to postcolonial theorists who describe Sikhism as an invention of the British military, that Sikhism possessed enduring traditions of its own, what he calls a "precolonial knowledge," and yet one that over time took the shape of "innovative cultural formations" (pp. 36, 70).

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