Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion
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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
10
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.
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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
14
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