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During the period of 1708–1748, Khalsa Sikhs participated in a series of rebellions against the Mughal state, the first of which was led by Banda Bahadur. Jat peasants, who joined the Khalsa in large numbers began to see their struggle as a dharamyudh, or religious war, while their regional rivals described their own efforts as a jihad. The Khalsa Sikhs were able to create a greater cohesion across their networks. By the mid-eighteenth century the rapid influx of Jat peasants led to a growing accommodation of local cultural traditions, creating a hybridized ritual practices and texts for Sikhs. Thus, even as the martial orientation of the Khalsa peasant soldiers sharpened in these tumultuous times and the size of the Khalsa bands (misals) grew, the distinctive worldview and practices of the Khalsa as described by Sainapati began to soften, incorporating elements borrowed from peasant cultures.

According to Rattan Singh Jaggi, there are two opposing evaluations of Bansāvalīnāma Dasān Pātshāhīan Kā written by Kesar Singh Chhibber: one based on extreme scepticism and the other which borders on credulity. Dealing primarily with genealogies, the Bansāvalīnāma discusses the state of the Sikhs in the author’s own time, the Sikh faith and the Khalsa Panth, Banda Bahadur, Jit Singh, Mata Sahib Devi, the ten Gurus including Guru Gobind Singh, Guru Hargobind, and Guru Nanak. Chhibber’s detailed account of Guru Gobind Singh dwells on kinship. He views the Khalsa Panth as distinct from both Muslims and Hindus as the Third Panth. Chhibber has a positive view only for Brahman Sikhs and not for all Brahmans, one of the many contradictions in the Bansāvalīnāma.

Gurū Panth Prakāsh, finalized by Ratan Singh Bhangu in 1841, deals with the true source of Sikh sovereignty. Bhangu links the issue of sovereignty with the creation of the Khalsa, indicating that the Khalsa never submitted to the Mughals. Bhangu talks about how the Sikhs became Singhs, who then began to plunder the villages around Anandpur and joined forces with Guru Gobind Singh before the battle of Muktsar. Bhangu also gives much importance to the time of Banda Bahadur, whose followers were bound to go down before the Tat Khalsa. For Bhangu, the most important aspect of the Sikh tradition was, in a sense, martyrdom. Bhagu explicitly refers to the Khalsa as the third panth, with a distinct identity of their own in relation to Hindus.

The late eighteenth century brought a series of important changes to the Rio de la Plata region. The expulsion of the Portuguese from Colonia, the creation of the vice-royalty of Rio de la Plata, and free trade changed the balance of power in the region. During this process, Montevideo became the mandatory port of call for ships leaving and entering the estuary, the only port authorized for disembarking slaves and the main port for Atlantic trade. Montevideo also became the seat for authorities in charge of repressing contraband. The elites of Montevideo used their control over trans-imperial interactions to expand their influence over the border areas with Luso-America and over territories that was previously under the administration of Buenos Aires.

Trans-imperial networks of trade, religion, and information in Rio de la Plata provoked changes in the imagined geography of the area, and written representations of the region reflect this spatial transformation. Because the Banda Oriental was a contested ground, agents of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires produced a plethora of information on the region. Between 1750 and 1813, the toponymy used to describe the region in written and cartographic material changed from Banda Norte to Montevideo’s Province to Banda Oriental. This process of information production shows spatial changes reflecting the emergence of Montevideo elites as imperial actors within the Rio de la Plata estuary.

This chapter aims to identify the aesthetic criteria behind Nor-tec's appropriation of nortena, banda, and grupera traditions. It aims to discover which issue of class, race, ethnicity, and nationality are at stake in such an appropriation. It further seeks to determine the particular artistic and musical styles that tell about the glocal desires that have informed the development of the Nor-tec scene. It shows how the hybrid music style of Nor-tec actually allows the transformation of key dichotomies privileged in the colonial imagination. It explores the histories of nortena, banda, and grupero musics and their identification as markers of specific social, cultural, and generational groups and traces the use of samples from these traditions to understand the development of individual musical styles by different Nor-tec artists. It further explores the contradictory relation between Nor-tec fans and musicians and the nortena traditions as a type of articulation that resignifies “unsophisticated” manifestations of kitsch artifacts.

One of the most significant developments in terms of communication since the 1990s involves the Internet's dissemination and diversification. The spread and exchange of information over the World Wide Web has moved towards global digital networks' macro level, local online communities' micro level, and virtual connection's intermediate level within geographical areas. Transamerican arts' relations may adopt a multidirectional spread as it may encompass all of the Western Hemisphere's countries. This chapter introduces Banda Hispânica—an Internet location that utilizes technological means to represent cultural inclusions— and how Brazil occupies a substantial area in cyberspace because of its international and national poetry postings. The most wide-ranging Brazilian lyric Website sponsors a “Hispanic band” which is further divided in sections that are always found to be in progress.

This chapter focuses on the regional administration problems encountered by the Mughals in Punjab during 1707-15. A major failure of the Mughals in the region was their inability to deal with the Sikh problem. The period saw the resurgence of the Sikh uprisings directed against the Mughal state. The Sikhs viewed the Mughal state as the source of all tyranny, since it not only had the largest share in the social surplus but also legitimized and sustained the existing power-structure in the locality. The Sikh movement challenged the Mughal authority and significantly eroded it during the four phases of struggle under the leadership of Banda Bahadur. The Sikhs posed challenges by posing alternative concepts of rule and rulers, by integrating several Jat and Jat Sikh zamindars and gaining strength from the overt and covert resistance of hill chiefs against Mughal power. However, the support base of the Sikhs withered away over a period of time. The khatris and the non-Jat zamindars aligned with the Mughals due to their political and economic interests. The local magnates too gravitated towards the more distant power of the Mughals. Some of the hill chiefs too sided with the Mughals. While the Mughal power had regained some ground and although Banda Bahadur, the formidable Sikh leader of the early-eighteenth century was captured and slain in 1715 along with 700 other Sikhs, Sikh hostility continued to erode the foundations of Mughal power until the province was in total disarray in the middle of the eighteenth century.

This chapter provides a detailed account of the rise and fall of Banda Bahadur, who was tasked by Gobind Singh to punish those who had persecuted the Sikhs and killed his sons. It first looks at the peasant upsurge that occurred in eastern Punjab. This revolt soon spread, covering Sutlej and the whole of Majha. The armies formed by the peasants travelled from the plains to the hills, and the Mughal officials did everything they could to stop this surge. It was only when the Emperor ordered a massive army to march against the peasants were they defeated them at Amingarh. The third section in this chapter focuses on Banda Bahadur's final stand at Gurdaspur Nangal, which led to his defeat and eventual capture. He was executed near the tomb of Bahadur Shah, along with his son, five commanders, and a group of Sikh prisoners.

This chapter talks about the persecution of the Sikhs shortly after Banda Bahadur's execution, emergence of Sarbat Khalsa, and the reorganization of the Khalsa army. Sikh persecution intensified, since they were viewed as responsible for the agrarian revolt. Little was then heard of the Sikhs half a decade after Banda was executed, and the discussion turns to the Persian invasion. It also examines the period between the Persian invasion and the Afghan invasion where Zakarya Khan persecuted the Sikhs and the Khalsa. After Khan's death, his sons became busy fighting the Khalsa used the opportunity to strengthen and reorganize their forces.

This chapter considers the question of “cultural proximity”, i.e. the proposition that a Faith Based Organization can have a privileged access to beneficiaries who share the same religious culture. It was based on a visit in 2007 to Aceh province in Indonesia, to observe the contribution of Islamic charities to reconstruction after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. Special attention was given to the rebuilding of houses and schools, in which several other international NGOs experienced serious local difficulties. The conclusion was that a common religion can be an advantage, but not so much as to outweigh the importance of technical proficiency, especially in the heated political climate that prevailed during this period. As well as describing the mainly successful work of Islamic Relief Worldwide, Muslim Aid, and the Turkish Red Crescent, the chapter also notes that official international evaluations of the huge aid flows after the tsunami gave little credit to local organizations, notably the Muhammadiyah.

Chapter 8 looks at how the expanding regional economy offered a unique financial opportunity for Yapeyú and San Miguel and why these two missions and their inhabitants failed to prosper. Between 1776 and 1786, these missions used their rights over innumerable cattle to take advantage of the rapidly expanding regional economy by becoming major producers of the Río de la Plata region's primary transatlantic export item—cattle hides (cuero). The high levels of revenue from such sales errantly imply that these missions could avoid the decline described in earlier chapters. Instead, expenses consumed much of the revenues in the short term and the inability to protect property rights in the face of intense competition and the lack of rule of law made large-scale hide operations unsustainable in the long term.

This chapter examines the Mexicanization of Southern California and its impact on the demographics of the region's radio markets by focusing on one song by the L.A. Mexican hip-hop duo Akwid: “No hay manera,” rapped in Spanish over samples of Mexican banda music. It considers three issues related to “No hay manera”: the ongoing Mexicanization of South Los Angeles in the context of economic globalization and deindustrialization, along with the significance of Mexican immigrants' identity to the social structures and economic circuits of contemporary Los Angeles; the ongoing transformation of Mexican migrant cultural expressions from banda and norteño forms to new urban hybrids based in genre mixing, bilingualism, and generational reinvention; and the extent to which the creation of local musical forms in Los Angeles is both the product of the global flows of commercial popular culture and the producer of them.

Chapter 4 discusses the Slovak folk revival of the 1990s–2000s with a case study of the musical group Banda. In Slovakia, audiences continued to enjoy styles of staged folklore from the communist era, but revivalists opposed these older styles and were outspoken in rejecting them. The chapter describes how revival folklorism is part of a movement to rediscover and reimagine Slovakia that sprang up in the 1990s; revivalists wanted to expand styles of rural music-making that existed outside communist-era folklore performance. The chapter discusses the mediation of neighboring Hungary’s dance house movement in Slovakia, and outlines the historical conditions that made it challenging to sustain dance house activity. The chapter argues that at the turn of the twenty-first century, revivalists managed artistic tensions and strengthened their reform efforts by becoming skilled neoliberal actors; making the transition from revivalism to a world-music fusion style allowed the musicians of Banda to be independent creatively and economically.

Chapter four, Hip(g)nosis as Brand, examines the state’s re-appropriation of the mulata as a sex symbol. Of particular interest will be an analysis of the contemporary social dance form known as despelote (loosely translated as an unravelling) as a way to complicate the mulata as commodity once again. I argue that its frenetic hip movements corporeally represent the current socio-economic climate in Cuba as it struggles to define itself in the current global marketplace.

Using Electric Counterpoint as a central reference, this chapter outlines the constitutive role played by audible cultures of the non-West in shaping the distinctive sound of Steve Reich’s music. Reich’s involvement with African music, in particular, extends beyond the common historical narrative of “influence” (construed as mostly confirmation and encouragement for an already formed style). Electric Counterpoint draws on a host of African musical strata—ranging from literal quotations and paraphrases to the application of techniques and principles—derived from local expressive cultures, ritual traditions, biospiritual practices, and musical cosmologies from Ghana, Nigeria, Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, and Mozambique. The project tracks the way music and sound circulates within different regimes of meaning, mediation, and value, with a particular interest in retrieving the often tributary and ephemeral phenomena found in geographically remote cultures that, for complex reasons, are systematically written out of world history.

Guru Gobind Singh had an important meeting with Bahadur Shah at Agra in July 1707. It was recorded in the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu‘alla that Guru Gobind Singh went fully armed into the presence of Bahadur Shah and received a medallion set with precious stones. On 2 October 1707 Guru Gobind Singh wrote to the Sikh sangat of Khara that his meeting with the emperor had settled matters and he would return to Kahlur (Anandpur) in a short time. However, Bahadur Shah had to go to Rajasthan first and then to Haidarabad, and he persuaded Guru Gobind Singh to accompany him. At Burhanpur in the summer of 1708 the Guru decided to go to Nanded. He appears to have been disillusioned with Bahadur Shah due to his evasive attitude. The first thing he did in Nanded was to commission Banda to go to the Punjab and lead the Khalsa in revolt in a bid for Khalsa Raj.

A long struggle for political power that culminated in the establishment of Khalsa Raj in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was the most striking legacy of Guru Gobind Singh. Significantly, a wide range of literature was produced during this period by Sikh writers in new as well as old literary forms. The Dasam Granth emerged as a text of considerable importance. The doctrines of Guru Granth and Guru Panth crystallized, and influenced the religious, social and political life of the Khalsa. The Singhs formed the main stream of the Sikh Panth at the end of the century. Singh identity was sharpened to make the Khalsa visibly the ‘third community’ (tisar panth).