Kiran Sunar gives a working paper on 'Religious Individualization Through Religious Transformation: Rethinking Conversion and Disguise in Bhai Vīr Singh’s Sundarī'

This paper navigates questions of religious transformation in Sikh Punjabi writer Bhai Vīr Singh’s 1898 novel Sundarī. The text offers insight into the necessity for continued reengagement of the  conceptual ideas of religious purity and fluidity in South Asian religious traditions in the colonial period. I sketch the complexity of religious transformations in Sundarī, arguing that religious transformation, defined as conversion and as disguise, offer not only sites of religious conversation, but also spaces for questions of political and situational allegiance to emerge in a landscape that was undergoing immense flux. My questions are: how does religious transformation operate at the level of conversion and disguise in the text? How are these various transformations depicted and what can they tell us about colonial Punjab’s engagement with the making of religion? I argue that in Bhai Vīr Singh’s Sundarī, we see a marked capacity for Sikh bodies to transform at the same time that we see a strongly developed sense of Sikh identity.