Foreword: Mothers and Sikh Studies: An Introduction to Forum on Gil Anidjar’s On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal

Abstract

“Mothers—where else would one begin?” asks Gil Anidjar in his On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal (Anidjar, 2024, p. 22).^[1] Anidjar's inquiry into mothers and the political does not locate an origin of sovereigns, the one who gives birth to kings, but raises the question of maternal writing, a field of “transmission and translation,” of preservation, but also of devastation (6). There is a maternal contract, the mothering of mothers, which sustains and enables reproduction, Anidjar teaches us. It is a contract we must read (and reread) to learn of the plurality of maternal functions, of being mothered and unmothered (18).

If the project of a journal is always already a collective one (itself a field of transmission and translation), we can say this new editorial venture for the Sikh Research Journal begins with mothers because, as Anidjar insists, we have all been mothered. It is unquestionably a verb that is central to Sikh Studies, especially since scholars have often invoked mothering to prove the Sikh tradition’s feminist credentials.^[2] We have recognized, albeit in limited form, that the collective is maternal: "From her, we have been born." Yet it might be time for all of us to reread, with Anidjar and his interlocutors, the maternal contract that we may have taken for granted, to ask of the significance of the claim that sovereignty is birthed by mothers who have themselves been mothered, a sovereignty of mothers. What collective has been made and preserved by mothering? Is the 'her' reducible to the feminine? Is it singular or plural?  Should we have been saying, "from them, we have been born"? Has our monomaternalism allowed us to forget mothers, the chain of mothers, the mother and the slave? Yet the proliferation of other mothers invites a reading of the maternal function that,  as Elissa Marder demonstrates, is “an uncanny, ambiguous vessel that contains uncontainable events, ideas, temporalities, and that paradoxically creates a space for the birth of futures that may have otherwise remained unimaginable” (Marder, 2012, p. 8).^[3] What collectives are possible when we read the maternal contract? What, then, of the political and, yes, of the secular?

^[1] Gil Anidjar, On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 22. Hereafter cited in text.

^[2] For a caution regarding the analytic moves that lead to such an easy conclusion, see manmit singh, "Gender Abolition, Limits of Sikh Feminism, and Critique," Sikh Research Journal 10, no. 1 (2025): 43-58.

^[3] For one reading of other mothers in the Sikh tradition, see Satbir Singh, "Dandy (de)livery," An und für sich, May 20, 2025, itself.blog/2025/05/20/dandy-delivery-prophetic-maharaja-book-event/