Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion
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religion, as well.
A key component of this book is the argument that an oft-repeated
(and deeply problematic) formulation that Islam and Muslims are
inherently tied to ideas of violence, specifically understood and named
jihad, is not a new, contemporary categorization. Rather, I contend that
the 1857 Rebellion marks a dramatic and palpable moment in which
jihad comes to signify Muslims broadly and definitionally as religious
actors and as (potential) subjects of empire. These are new contributions
to the study of religion, empires, and Islam, and I believe them to be
vital contributions: as we come to grasp the role and racialization of
Muslims in contemporary settings, it is of the utmost utility to trace
how that racialization began. This book aims to take the long view and
locate these processes not in contemporary memory, but rather as part of
imperial formation and global acceptance of the narrative of Rebellion.
Just as one cannot understand the history of the study of religion
without navigating how India has been portrayed, neither can one
comprehend a contemporary relationship between Muslims and jihad
without first locating its historical correlation to the Rebellion.
On May 9, 1857, disillusioned and disgruntled sepoys protesting the
use of (supposedly) greased cartridges awaited sentencing. Many must
have anticipated long jail terms, hardships both financial and physical,
and humiliation. They perhaps could not have anticipated the violent
bloodletting that would follow in subsequent weeks, months, and years.
They likely would not have predicted the retaliation of the British that
was not merely physical, but imperial: the changes to myriad laws,
increased military presence, policies that forced widespread
famine, interruptions in daily lives, impositions of definitions of “real”
caste, “real” religion, “real” civility. The mutinous sepoys, afraid to lose
caste or religion for biting tallow or lard, could not possibly have
imagined how definitions of religion would still carry the marks of their
actions, many years later, which were essentialized in the wake of 1857.
And yet, how definitions of religion formed in the aftermath of 1857
are major components of the claims in this book. The unimaginable
consequences of the mutinous sepoys, acting out of frustration,
bewilderment, and anger – acting based upon rumors of betrayals of
their religions – included widespread violence and massacres, and also
4
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
epistemological and ontological (re)categorization of those religious
actors themselves. All this – the violence, the bloodshed, the imperial
interventions that followed, the reformulation of Indic identities – all
this because religion had been trifled with.
Religion, Rebels, and Jihad
This book tells a story of stories: how the memory, history, and
historiography of the 1857 Rebellion shape the stories about religion
in India, especially the religion of Indian Muslims. It interrogates the
1857 Rebellion in terms of religion asking how religion, as a category,
shaped interpretations of the Rebellion and how the Rebellion came to
contour conceptualizations of religions and religiously identified
people, especially Islam and Muslims. Religion was at the forefront of
British imperial thinking in India, which was dominated by fears of
rousing the religious sensibilities of the “natives,” attempts to
recognize, define, and ultimately control religion, and identification of
characteristics of religious subgroups. Definitions of religion cannot
ignore India or the religions of India; what would become the
discipline religious studies begins in India, and it was forged on the
British imperial imperative to know its conquered population, as well
as, more specifically, on notions that Hindus were not Muslims.3 The
defining of religion – especially Hinduism and Islam – cannot itself
be understood without understanding the Great Rebellion.
That the Rebellion came to be portrayed as a religious insurrection –
and specifically a marker of religious obligation for Indian Muslims – is
the central topic of this book. The Rebellion is not important to the
narrative of religion in India merely because it is a cataclysmic series of
events that reshaped the subcontinent; it is important because the very
memory – including history, historiography, and memorialization – of
the Great Rebellion writes religion in India. It is only after the Rebellion
that some of the nascent ideas about Hindus and Muslims, in particular,
came to be full-fledged categorical truths, and the Rebellion itself serves
as the evidence of those truths.
The 1857 Rebellion had lasting effects for India and Indians of
varying religious stripes, but for India’s Muslims the interpretation of
the Rebellion as jihad shaped subsequent discourses, definitions, and
codifications of Islam. Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion:
INTRODUCTION
5
Religion, Rebels, and Jihad is therefore an examination of the production of
religion, rebels, and jihad in nineteenth-century India. More specifically,
it is an examination of how the Great Rebellion came to serve as the means
through which to understand the rebels, primarily in essentialized
terms of religion. An exchange between two leading intellectuals, both
servants of the imperial regime, serves as a lens through which to read
the 1857 Rebellion’s construction and reconstruction of Muslim
identity in the British Empire. One half of the conversation is W. W.
Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel
Against the Queen? (1871 (2nd edn 1872)), which was widely published
and circulated. Hunter’s treatise spurred a lengthy reply from Sir Syed
Ahmad Khan, noted and knighted Muslim modernist, Indian Civil
Service member, and prominent scholar.
The post-1857 political climate, expressed through Khan and
Hunter’s interchange, scripted religion, rebellion, and jihad in imperial
India. I argue that this confluence produced “Muslims” as a discrete
and static category, indelibly marked as rebellious and jihadi. The
intertwined processes of minoritization and racialization – theoretical
concepts that frame my analysis – played a central role in this cultural
and imperial production of Muslims as jihadis.
This book traces the construction of Indian “Muslims.” I first
discuss religion in India before the Rebellion. I then highlight the
theoretically operative conceptualizations of minoritization and
racialization in post-1857 India. I argue throughout this book that
the minoritization and racialization of Muslims is a direct consequence
of the Rebellion. The stories told about the Great Rebellion –
histories, memories, poetry, political texts, and more – constitute
stories told about religion, rebels, and jihad.
Theoretical Framing
In tracing the ways in which Muslims came to be seen primarily in terms
of threat,
and how jihad – as we will see, conceived as religious war
waged against non-Muslims – came to define authentic Islam. More
directly, we will see how the minoritization and racialization of Muslims
after the 1857 Rebellion created a grammar in which to be Muslim
meant one was a threat to the empire, and threats to the empire were
connected to Muslims. The stories told about the Great Rebellion serve
6
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
to tell readers and listeners key information about the lead characters;
this project is concerned with how these stories tell readers and listeners
information thought to be essential (but is deeply essentialized
information) about Muslims. Part of the undergirding approach,
therefore, is to think through the ways in which Muslims come to be
defined in light of essential portrayals of the Rebellion, especially since
these portrayals shifted radically after 1857.
Despite the lengthy political rule and expansion of Muslim empires in
India, Muslims never occupied a demographic majority – but inhabiting
a minoritized position is not the same as inhabiting a demographic
minority. Minoritization does not refer solely to the demographic realities
of a particular location, but instead to the systematic process by which
elites deny power or access to a group through the implementation of
power, be that local, linguistic, economic, or political.4 Minoritization is a
process, in this instance, of the solidification of British power over former
Muslim ruling elites and the demographic, religious constituency they
were thought to represent. This was achieved by both de jure (legal,
economic, and political policies5) and de facto cultural shifts that included,
as examples, the discontinuation of Islamicate and Indic languages and
(real or perceived) mistreatment of Muslims. 6
Despite locating the Rebellion as a crucial rupture in the depiction
and conceptualization of Muslims in India, rendering Muslims a
political minority did not occur overnight. Rather, as we will see, the
act of remembering and retelling the events of 1857 – 8 created the
narrative in which Muslims became both minoritized and racialized.
In other words, making Muslims a racialized minority is related to the
processes of memory and memorialization, the solidification of a popular
and academic narrative of the Rebellion that came to have specific and
essentialized characterizations of the lead actors (Muslims, Hindus,
and Britons alike). We can pinpoint the Rebellion as the cataclysmic
moment in which the shift occurs, but the writing that comes from the
decades following 1857 makes this moment palpable. Defining Muslims
as a minority – and a dangerous, racialized one at that – was a key goal
of a number of the sources we will explore below, including the primary
textual focus of Chapter 2, W. W. Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans: Are
They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen?
Where minoritization collapses a group into a singularity with both
identifiable and marginal traits, racialization marks individuals as
INTRODUCTION
7
having immutable traits because of their membership in a minority
group. The concept and construct of race includes essentialization of
groups based upon traits imagined to be inherent, hereditary, and
prognostic – that is to say, rooted in biology (or pseudo-biology) and
therefore scientifically “real.”7 Racialization is the process through
which a group is made or marked as a race; it is the process through
which individuals are made manifest as both belonging to one cogent
group as well as possessing those inherent, hereditary, and prognostic
characteristics.
Religions are not races – Islam is not a race – but Islam and its
practitioners are racialized. As Sylvester Johnson has recently and
masterfully demonstrated, assumptions of race as tied to phenotype or
biology fail to capture the ways in which power – especially colonial
power – invented, assigned, and defined race based upon exclusionary
definitions that were not tied to specific bodies. 8 In other words, while
Islam is not a race, Muslims are racialized and defined racially in large
part based upon their relationship to imperial power. After the
Rebellion, Muslims in India come to be depicted as possessing inherent,
unchanging, and transmittable characteristics. They are portrayed as
inherently seditious, bound by both law and intrinsic disposition to
violence, and necessarily ill-tempered, incorrigible, and unable to be
ruled by non-Muslims. These are decidedly racialized classifications:
Muslims cannot escape these traits – they are imagined to be part of the
fundamental composition of what and who is Muslim. To be otherwise, in
effect, would indicate that one is not Muslim. We will see Britons make
claims to the inherent and transmittable characteristics of Muslims in
bald-faced statements below; we will also see more obtuse references to
supposedly inalienable traits of Muslims in works by both Muslims and
Britons.
Racialization and minoritization do not function solely as external
labels thrust upon Europe’s Others. Instead, they often demand and require
the participation of those who have been racialized and minoritized.
These are pernicious systems of power, definition, and classification,
and with respect to Indian Muslims, they relied on stories told about
the Great Rebellion. As we will see below, Britons and Indian Muslims
alike told these stories.
Minoritization and racialization are at the heart of the question of
Muslim belonging – a question posed by Sir William Wilson Hunter
8
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
and answered by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in an intertextual dialogue at the
center of this book. Works like Hunter’s Indian Musalmans contributed
to the process that rendered Muslims a distinct minority; Indian
Musalmans, among other texts described below, posited Muslims as a
distinct problem to be solved by the ruling elite. They come to be
portrayed as an inherent threat on the basis of racialized characteristics
that stem from interpretations of Islam. Further, as we will also see, even
Muslims arguing against these characteristics perpetuate the idea that
Muslims stand as a unique, cogent group, and thus participate – albeit
asymmetrically – in the processes of definition, racialization, and
minoritization. Ultimately, I argue that the Great Rebellion is a catalyst
for the minoritization and racialization of Muslims, and that in its wake
Muslims in India emerge permanently differentiated along these lines as
a result of the epistemological and physical violence of imperialism.
A Note on Language
Accounts of 1857 – 8 India have an almost bewildering set of titles: the
Great Rebellion, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Uprising of 1857, the Sepoy
Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, India’s First War of Independence, the
Indian Rebellion, the Indian Revolt, the Sepoy Revolt, and, tellingly,
&nb
sp; the Mahomedan Rebellion. Each moniker represents a vantage point and
interpretation of the tumult – each tells a story about how the stories
of 1857 were told. These titles indicate the operations of power and
control not only during the events, but also and more importantly,
in historical narrative itself. In the years immediately following the
conflict, British authors preferred the term “mutiny.” A mutiny
indicates insubordination, which assumes instantiated leadership; this
word choice reflects an understanding of official and properly established
power against which a group of soldiers acted. Most Indic authors, on the
other hand, preferred “rebellion” or “revolt” in their discussions about
1857 – 8. These, too, indicate a rejection of an established authority but
more readily communicate resistance, a term itself laden with symbolic
and semiotic meaning an imperial context. Further, where “mutiny”
necessarily communicates disobedience against an authority, usually
within an army, “rebellion” suggests noncompliance vis-à-vis the entire
ruling elite. “Revolt” similarly suggests an impetus to fully upend the
status quo and end the current authority’s reign.
INTRODUCTION
9
Language expresses power, and many scholars have suggested that all
communication is merely the exchange, establishment, and negotiation
of power. 9 I do not aim to rewrite – or unnecessarily rethink – how
terminologies and categorizations of these events support, negate, or
obscure historical and relational power dynamics. I aim instead to justify
my near-exclusive use of “rebellion,” and occasional use of “mutiny” and
“revolt,” to refer to the events of 1857 – 8. In all cases, I maintain the
language used by the primary source in question. One expects to find
“mutiny” in the official records of the East India Company and writings
of British imperial agents; similarly, “mutiny” appears often when
I highlight authors of popularly available articles as well as various
tracts and treatises printed in South Asia and the United Kingdom.
“Rebellion” and “revolt” most often correspond to sources written by
Indic authors, though occasionally to works by critical Britons as well.
I almost exclusively use “Great Rebellion” and “the Rebellion” for a