Courtly ecologies of devotion in early Sikh devotional poetry and hagiography

Abstract

Metaphors of the court were frequently employed in the Sikh religious corpus, just as the formation of Sikh religious spaces and geographies relied on the courtly idiom. Following Nile Green’s prompt to read text and territory along a continuum in the context of Sufi devotion in early modern India, and comparatively applying it to the emerging Sikh community in the sixteenth century, this paper focuses on a key aspect of the court— the assembly— as a keystone idea in the discursive formation of the Sikh court. I analyse the assembly as 1) literary trope in the early Sikh religious corpus (poetry and hagiography) from the  sixteenth century, and as 2) social and historical precondition for the reception of that religious corpus. In doing so, I show that just as the courtly registers of comportment informed social spaces and thus influenced practices of community formation for early Sikhs, concurrent understandings of the assembly, broadly understood, transformed the understanding of court and courtly behavior. Such literary transformations, enacted upon social space allowed Sikhs to reimagine their subjecthood (in relation to figures of pedagogic and religious authority, i.e. their Guru) in the early modern period.