Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

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by Ilyse R Morgenstein Fuerst


  number of reasons. The first is that for many years historians were quick

  to dismiss the Great Rebellion as a chaotic, haphazard war, and while the

  events of 1857 – 8 were not masterminded by a military strategist or

  one centralized commander, it is important to see them in terms not of

  military history, but of purposeful resistance to imperial might.

  “Mutiny” smacks of a particular insubordination that communicates a

  lack of development, a hasty attempt. When “mutiny” is paired with

  “sepoy” (i.e., soldier) – as in the popularly used Sepoy Mutiny – it

  communicates a definitional militaristic defiance (soldiers taking up

  arms against commanders) and belies the participation of civilians and

  other non-sepoy actors (a central fear and fixation of policies after the

  Rebellion and later British writings about 1857). Confusing how events

  unfolded with what they came to signify is problematic, and “mutiny”

  renders Indic actors as immature or impulsive. The bloody events of

  1857 – 8 were not, ultimately, a result of sepoys’ fears of guns smeared

  with cow and pig fats; they were anti-imperial revolts that did not

  merely scare Britons on the ground in that moment, but rather shook

  the imperial machine to its core, spurring cataclysmic global change

  that had lasting effects especially for Indians, as we will see below. I want

  to express the gravity that is better communicated in “rebellion,” so as

  to do better justice to Indic actors, but also to better represent Britons’

  fears of those actors. The fear of Muslims as provocateurs of such

  a serious, terrible set of events was a real outcome in the aftermath

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  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  of the Great Rebellion – so if a mutiny is localized and a rebellion

  widespread, the latter term better captures the historical imagination

  that is investigated here.

  A further introductory note on language and vocabulary: alongside

  the political terming of “rebellion” are the fluid terminologies – and

  spellings – for what we render today as “Muslim.” I follow the lead of

  my sources, and thus “Muslim” is sometimes rendered as “Musaĺman,”

  “Muhammadan,” “Mohametan,” or “Moslem.” I have retained their uses

  not only to maintain the integrity of the original works, but also to

  highlight the mercurial natures of terminologies, definitions, and

  meanings; I am concerned, in other words, with how seemingly static

  terms have radically shifted, especially with reference to particular

  historical events in South Asia. In order to visually underscore those

  shifts, I maintain curious spellings where appropriate. It is no doubt of

  interest and import that multiple terminologies are used to refer to what

  nearly all the primary sources claim to be one cogent whole. Multiplicity

  despite presumed unity underscores the limitations of categories, but

  more relevantly here, the lexical and symbolic diversity in terminologies

  for and about Islam and Muslims is directly located alongside an

  ideological and stated homogeneity of Islam and Muslims.

  Chapter Outline

  In order to sketch how Muslims came to be branded as uniquely and

  challengingly disloyal after the Rebellion, it is imperative first to approach

  how various facets of religion and Islam were seen in the period leading up

  to it, as well as how the events of the Rebellion themselves were seen as

  having religious underpinnings. While religion had been a preoccupation

  for Britons at home and abroad, the Great Rebellion solidified threats to

  Empire imagined to be the singular purview of religious actors, and

  especially Muslims in British India. The first chapter, “The Company,

  Religion, and Islam,” outlines the historical context of the nineteenth

  century, and addresses how “religion” as a category was regarded and

  policed in India. It also attends to issues of how the Rebellion was

  remembered by both Britons and Indian Muslims.

  Chapter 2, “Suspect Subjects: Hunter and the Making of a Muslim

  Minority,” addresses how the Rebellion produced a Muslim minority. Its

  central text is Sir William Wilson Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans: Are

  INTRODUCTION

  11

  They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871; reprints 1872,

  1876). Hunter’s answer to the titular question was a resounding yes –

  for him, Muslims were religiously obligated to rebel, and therefore

  constituted an inherent threat to the Empire. This chapter elucidates the

  relationship between scholarly analysis of the Great Rebellion and the

  production of a Muslim, minoritized subject.

  “‘God save me from my friends!’: Syed Ahmad Khan’s Review on

  Dr Hunter” is the third chapter. It primarily attends to Sir Syed Ahmad

  Khan’s written responses to the Great Rebellion and argues that Khan’s

  defensive writing about the Rebellion demonstrates a minoritized Muslim

  community that was distinctively and uniquely held accountable for the

  violence of 1857 –8. The chapter begins by analyzing Khan’s Causes of the

  Indian Revolt (Asba¯b-i bag̲h̲a¯vat-i Hind, 1858), and continues by focusing

  on Review on Dr Hunter’s Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to

  Rebel Against the Queen? (1872). The latter is an academic reply to Hunter

  that represents both an elite Muslim perspective on the climate of India

  post-1857 as well as the opinion of a loyalist – in other words, Khan

  represents a loyal Muslim attempting to defend and define Islam against

  British depictions. This chapter, like Chapter 2, attends to the process of

  minoritization, but takes as a central theme the ways in which Indian

  Muslims, exemplified by Khan, worked with and against this hegemonic

  process.

  Chapter 4, “Rebellion as Jihad, Jihad as Religion” specifically

  addresses the use of jihad in the nineteenth century and focuses on how

  jihad came to inform definitions of Islam and Muslims. It examines

  Muslims’ calls for jihad before and during the Great Rebellion as well as

  Britons’ labeling the Rebellion jihad after the fact; in other words, I take

  seriously the deployment of jihad as a theological, political, and anti-

  imperial tactic of Indian Muslims as well as the ways in which Britons

  come to deploy jihad against them. Chapter 4 addresses the relationship

  between minoritization and racialization, where jihad came to serve as

  shorthand for inherent, transmitted, violent, and distinctive disloyalty

  of Muslims. Further, it traces the role of the 1857 Rebellion in both

  solidifying and manufacturing a particular distrust of Muslim subjects

  amongst British agents and scholars. I contend that after 1857, rebellion

  became tied especially to Muslim actors and organizations and to jihad,

  and, as part of the process of racializing Muslims, that jihad came to

  serve as a primary identifier of Muslims in British India.

  12

  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  In the conclusion, “Religion, Rebels, and Jihad: Legacies and

  Ongoing Impact,” I briefly revisit some of the major them
es of the book,

  pertinent primary source quotes, and theoretical themes discussed in the

  preceding chapters. I consider the ways in which these categories –

  religion, rebels, and jihad – function together after the Great Rebellion

  of 1857, and I ultimately contend that these categories are indelibly

  imbricated in the historiographies and memories of the Rebellion.

  Religion (especially Islam), rebels (distinctively Muslims), and jihad

  (the unique threat) color not only how the Rebellion was – and is –

  read, but also how Muslims came to be understood after the tumult

  of 1857 – 8, and as the British Empire reframed its rule in the

  subcontinent. I suggest that understanding the discursive shifts caused

  by the Great Rebellion is vital to understanding the minoritization and

  racialization of Muslims in South Asia – an issue that still lingers in

  South Asia and in South Asian diasporas.

  The dialogue between Hunter and Khan exemplifies how Britons and

  Indian Muslims constructed a memory of the Rebellion that was

  unmistakably tied to religion, religious groups, and religious actors.

  Hunter and Khan each weave a narrative that ultimately places jihad as a

  fulcrum around which Muslim loyalty is addressed; they articulate

  rather different opinions, to say nothing of their diametrically opposed

  conclusions, but they each take the theological, textual, and legal

  category of jihad as a central and real way to think about Muslims as

  subjects of the Crown. Further, they do this as they think about the

  primary evidence of seditious behavior – the Great Rebellion. The

  stories they tell prioritize one trait, imagined to be inherent and shared

  by one group, revealing a larger, underlying narrative about the category

  of religion and its role in the minoritization and racialization of Islam

  and Muslims. After 1857, Muslims come to be portrayed by Britons as

  always already potential jihadis, as if jihad were an inborn characteristic;

  even as Muslims argued against this narrative, the story itself became the

  hegemon, with impacts that continue to echo today.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE COMPANY, RELIGION,

  AND ISLAM

  The very essence of Muhammadan Puritanism is abhorrence of the

  Infidel. The whole conception of Islam is that of a Church either

  actively militant or conclusively triumphant – forcibly converting

  the world, or ruling the stiff-necked unbeliever with a rod of iron.

  – W. W. Hunter1

  In newspapers, I find the most bitter denunciations against the

  Mahomedans, who are being freely represented as everything that

  is vile, treacherous, and contemptible.

  – Syed Ahmad Khan2

  While Hunter and Khan epitomize a particular depiction of Muslims

  after the Great Rebellion, negative conceptualizations of Muslims and

  Islam had existed in Europe well before the East India Company came

  into existence, Britain colonized South Asia – or Hunter wrote a treatise

  expounding upon the ways in which Muslims fundamentally could not

  be loyal subjects of the Crown. These preexisting depictions range from

  portrayals of Muhammad as a fiendish, self-serving, maniacal fraud3 bent

  on personal glory, to dismissal of his visions as delusionary, epileptic

  seizures, 4 to Muslims as lustful, violent fanatics. 5 For Britons in South Asia, the decline of the Mughal Empire meant that no obvious, unified

  Muslim challenge to their imperial expansions existed; so, before 1857,

  we do not see a widespread fixation on an immediate Muslim threat, nor

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  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  do we see condemnations of Islam, broadly, to the same degree as we do

  after the Rebellion.

  Before the Great Rebellion, Mughals by and large stood in for

  Muslims, especially with respect to official or semi-official policies,

  procedures, tracts, and laws. Britons certainly saw Mughals either as

  excessive – in their palaces, architecture, and courtly lives – or as

  despotic, having enacted laws like the jizya (poll tax on non-Muslims);

  more often, they set a self-aggrandizing understanding of British

  rule in shining contrast to the previous, declining Mughal rule. 6 British

  commentators often posited Muslims and Hindus as unique and

  oppositional; in the British imagination Muslims were violent, manly,

  and fanatic while Hindus were passive, effeminate, and flexible. 7

  The East India Company (the Company or EIC) looms large in any

  historical account of nineteenth-century India, and especially in those

  that think through official and unofficial stances, policies, and

  ideologies. The tracts, treatises, and demographic and cartographic

  data produced by various levels of administrators – from humble

  collectors to governor-generals – cannot be overstated in their heft or

  underestimated in their lasting import. The EIC was famously allergic

  to religion, deeming interference in religious matters as bad business.

  Yet, it was also famously attuned to matters of religion, regarding it as

  central to both sensible business and governance practice. As a result, the

  EIC commissioned both Indians and agents of the British Empire to

  research and write numerous tracts about India and its religions. Those

  varied documents tell us that religion mattered to the Company, and

  they characterize Muslims in very particular ways. 8

  Before the 1857 Rebellion, many imperial writings about Islam

  exhibited a missionizing or civilizing tone and seemed rather concerned

  with what religious deficiencies were left in the wake of the failing

  Mughal Empire. George Chapman, a Company employee, for example,

  in a text called Tracts of East India Affairs added a poem (in Latin) in

  which he retells a story about one of the Biblical Magi who is,

  parabolically represented as standing on the bank of the river

  Ganges, near the city of Calcutta, and bewailing the calamites

  brought upon his country by the tyranny of its Mahometan

  conquerors, and their successive and desolating wars: and the angel

  Gabriel, the benevolent and ancient Announcer of the Messiah, is

  THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM

  15

  introduced as comforting him with the view of general Peace in

  that extensive country, and with a prospect of the introduction of

  the Christian Religion, in its primitive Purity, under circumstances

  highly favourable to so desirable an object. 9

  Chapman represents a particular Christian imagination of Muslims,

  and specifically of Mughals: they were despots who conquered India,

  tyrannically dealt with its original inhabitants, and then left it in a state

  of calamity, which could and ought to have been remedied by the new,

  British rulers, who helpfully and happily also brought Christianity with

  them. Chapman also presents a fairly typical early nineteenth-century

  tract, in which the affairs of the British in India are conflated with either

  (though in this case both) the spread of Christianity or of civilization.

  Chapman writes that it was by the “will of GOD” that India came to

  “obey the KING of GREAT BRITAIN,” 10 later conclu
ding that it was

  “by the appointment of Providence, for the purpose of enlightening and

  civilizing the blinded and infatuated Indians, and bestowing upon them

  the blessings of peace and of the Christian Religion.” 11

  However, unlike Chapman, who called for conversion and religiously

  sanctioned rule in India, many imperialist agents explicitly criticized

  religious connections between Britain and the Indian subcontinent.

  Many East India Company officials vehemently opposed conflating

  Christianity – by way of missionaries – and their own presence in India.

  In fact, until 1813, missionaries were not granted permission to work or

  travel in India. A number of East India Company officials thought

  missionaries, in their roles as promulgators of Christianity, would

  damage the relationship between Britain and India. Sir Henry

  Montgomery (d. 1830) warned that widespread, unrestricted activity

  of missionaries in India would encourage feelings of suspicion and

  rebellion in India.12 The Honorable Frederick Douglas (d. 1819) added

  that the EIC ought to tolerate but not encourage missionaries.13 While

  these men, among others, wanted to support Christianity and religious

  and civilizational change in India, they saw the work of missions as

  counter to the financial and administrative work of the Company – and

  to the tenuous peace it held over zealous natives. 14

  The East India Company was originally a joint-stock trading

  company, meant to solidify Britain’s financial and political holdings in

  Asia. It was not necessarily conceived of as a religious force for native

  16

  INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION

  peoples; almost immediately upon its founding, the EIC functioned as a

  company-state, establishing not only trade routes, partners, and products,

  but also functional and self-sufficient governmental apparatuses, like tax

  collection, armies, and other civic institutions. 15 In 1813, Parliament

  passed the Charter Act, which formally and fundamentally altered the

  Company’s and the Crown’s relationship to South Asia. The Charter Act

  expressly established the Crown’s sovereignty over India and, significantly,

  ended the East India Company’s monopoly on trade. 16

  During the official hearings for and about the Charter Act,

  religion – especially Hinduism and Islam – was fiercely discussed and

 

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