the religious spirit of “Hindoos” and “Muhammadans.” 44 In popular
recountings of the Great Rebellion, religion sparked the events of
1857 – 8 and demonstrated the dangerous power religious belief and
affiliation presented to the Raj. Britons imagined religion to bear
dangerous weight: to offend religious sensibility or to impede upon
religion at all would enrage even the “dullest and most phlegmatic”
Indians, 45 and for many Britons, avoiding enraging the integrally
wrathful Muslims was an ongoing and pressing concern. 46
As scholar John L. Esposito has incisively observed, Muslims
represent a threat, both political and theological, to Christian empire
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
23
and in Christendom’s imagination from the medieval period onward. 47
Further, because the British had wrested power from the Mughal
Empire, a dyad of political and theological threats seemed very real.
Britons may not have feared the decrepit remnants of the Mughal
regime, but they recognized the powerful significance of displaced
Mughal elites, their potential to incite revolutionary zeal, and the
theological precepts that rebellion might intone.
British imperialists saw Muslims both as former rulers of India and as
politically and theologically dispossessed. Britons also considered
Muslims uniquely violent and intolerant to non-Muslims – both able to
incite rebellion and religiously required to do so. They were a double
threat before and after the Great Rebellion. While attitudes toward
religion and Islam changed over the course of British interventions in
South Asia, these broad strokes painted Muslims rather consistently
across fluctuations in rule and region. The specific concern about and
fixation on Muslim rebelliousness increased dramatically in the wake of
the Great Rebellion, but it is vital to explore precursor imaginations of
religion and Islam, formal and informal, so as to properly contextualize
later conflations of Islam and rebellion, Muslim and jihadi, and jihad and
rebellion.
The project of defining and delimiting religion as part of European
imperial expansion marks a complex matrix of political agendas,
relational inflections, and various expressions of domination (across race,
ethnicity, color, gender, mother tongue, and so forth). This process
attended to more than religion; 48 however, the relationship between
the British company-state and indigenous people in India, elite and
subaltern alike, in many ways rested on religion or an understanding of
local practice as a function of religion. Britons were concerned with
religion as it related to their rule, as it affected their profits, and as it
demanded correction – all issues in the multifaceted historical moments
leading up to (and shaping memories of) the Great Rebellion.
Categories constructed and observed in India were also commu-
nicated back from the colony to the metropole, with lasting effects.
Historian of religion Peter Gottschalk observes:
Since the fifteenth century, a system of knowledge has been in
development in Europe that would form a matrix of interrelated
disciplines used not only by Europeans to understand, exploit, and
24
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
control non-Europeans, but also by non-Europeans to understand
and control their own societies, and by others while resisting
European power. This matrix formed, and continues to represent, a
keystone in the Western hegemony that exists today, albeit in an
altered form. Not only was this matrix instrumental in establishing
Western-originated disciplines in non-Western societies, but it also
served to globally communicate information about those societies
and their cultures generated by imperial and colonial practitioners
of those disciplines. 49
What British observers reported about India and Indians served to
communicate truths received as objective about both India and Indians,
and, as Gottschalk explains, that are maintained in both Western and
non-Western disciplines.
The categorization of Muslim and Hindu traditions has influenced far
more than colonial practices during imperial control; these definitions
have lasting legal, political, and societal consequences.50 Religious
categorization has undoubtedly shaped the ways in which observers came
to write about the Great Rebellion; portrayals of Muslim rebels as jihadis
(as will take priority in the fourth chapter) have as much to do with a
scientific classification of Islam, its component parts, and its systematic
structures as with witnesses’ reports, attitudes, and biases. Put
differently, the Great Rebellion – like other historical events – came
to be read through the categories and lexicons available. Those categories
and lexicons, both distinctly imperial and distinctly religious, in turn
came to be read back onto the Great Rebellion, making definitions of
Islam and Muslim both theoretical interesting and historically vital.
While Britons may not have singled out Islam or Muslims to define,
exploit, or control them, the Empire held Muslims in different esteem
than other religious groups, notably in terms of threat. It was widely
thought that Hindus would not rebel, for a variety of reasons, unless
Muslims agitated them to do so. Before 1857, Muslims occupied a
position of suspicion different from that of their Hindu counterparts,
and were seen in terms of a unified whole, capable of whipping other
religious groups into a revolutionary frenzy – even when these groups
(namely, Hindus of varying castes) normally would be seen as incapable
of revolution when left to their own devices. The concern about Muslims
and Islam is fear of an inherent and rebellious contagion – Muslims in
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
25
this definitional landscape are a threat because of their capacity not
merely to rebel but to incite rebellion.
The agents of the British Empire, both before and after the Rebellion,
had a keen interest in their Indian subjects across religious affiliation,
and one could certainly argue that British agents paid greater attention
to the demographic majority (Hindus) than to the largest minority
(Muslims). Britons also worried about Hindus and their loyalty in the
wake of the Great Rebellion. I submit, however, that their concern
about Hindus was subsidiary to their capacious preoccupation with
Muslims; many Britons in official capacities, ranging from governor-
generals to members of the East India Company army, saw the threat of
Hindu rebellion as definitionally tied to Muslim actions. Hindus
obviously comprised a major part of the 1857 Rebellion, India’s
demographic majority, and a governmental concern. However, because
of the imperialist focus on Muslims as instigators of rebellion, I have
largely omitted portrayals of Hindus before, during, and after the
Rebellion; I focus specifically on the imperial processes of racialization
and minoritization as they relate to Muslims and
the Rebellion, its
aftermath, and its historiography.
“Watershed Moment”: the Great Rebellion
However often its import is repeated a year cannot exist on its own. 1857
was, of course, preceded by 1856, and historical imaginations that take
seriously the apparitional nature of the Rebellion fail to properly
contextualize those events or to interpret the historiographical contexts
in which 1857 was written as a watershed. It was not the first time
Indians had rebelled, fought, or dissented against colonial regimes.
“Watershed” is a favorite term of a number of scholars for describing
the chaotic events of 1857 – 8 in South Asia. 51 Watershed, here, refers to
the perceived radical change to the flow of history in India. Prior to
1857, a decrepit and depleted Mughal Empire still existed, albeit in
titular capacities that barely echoed the imperial might of prior eras;
Britons colonized India largely through the sanctioned actions of the
East India Trading Company, but the relationship between Empire and
Company was complicated, and imperial power functioned and flowed
differently across the various regions of South Asia. After the Great
Rebellion, however, the flow of power changed – many mark this
26
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
moment as the difference between the colonial and imperial experiences
in India, though I would argue this terminological difference, while
historically accurate, does not fully encapsulate lived realities in South
Asia or the complex transitions from Company to Empire both before
and after 1857.
Yet 1857 remains a watershed for scholars in the twenty-first century
as it was for elites in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It is the oft-repeated, oft-blamed, and oft-cited source of changes that
ranged from the final demise of the Mughal Empire to the solidification
of linguistic identities to sweeping legalisms and legal reforms. For our
purposes, the interpretation and emphases placed on the Great Rebellion
in terms of religion and, critically, Islam, will be the primary concern.
Before delving into these imaginations of 1857, and their effects upon
definitions of religions and religious people, we must examine the
Rebellion itself, and the concomitant depictions of religion in this
historical moment.
While the Company had official recognition and permission – as far
as Britain was concerned – to operate in India as early as 1600, most
historians regard the Battle of Plassey in 1757 as a decisive blow to
indigenous rule in the colonies. Plassey is an Anglicized rendering of
Palashi, a city approximately 150 kilometers north of Kolkata in the
Indian state of West Bengal. In 1757, the region was under the
dominion of the Nawab of Bengal and Murshidabad, which was
subordinate to the Mughal Empire. Mirza Muha Siraj ud-Daulah
(d. 1757) was the Nawab at the time, and he attempted to stop British
expansion in Bengal, partly through an alliance with the French East
India Company (La Compagnie des Indes Orientales). However, the leader of
Siraj ud-Daulah’s armies, Mir Jafar (d. 1765), betrayed him and
collaborated with the British invaders in return for promises by the
British East India Company of financial and political favors. 52 Despite
the treason of their commander, the armies of Siraj ud-Daulah, in
collaboration with the French, were still a force to be reckoned with, and
Robert Clive (d. 1774), the British commander, resorted to extreme
violence (which came to light only well after 1757) to quell them. This
was not, as was sometimes romantically relayed, a kingdom without
leadership, nor a fantasy of savage natives without any governance. 53
While the Battle of Plassey stands as the temporal demarcation of
British dominion in India, it did not inaugurate a time of peaceable
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
27
control over what would become British India. As historian and
theorist Ranajit Guha notes, “India was not conquered in a nine-hour
battle on a single day.”54 Indeed, it took EIC troops years to secure
Bengal, even after the Britons had declared Plassey a decisive victory. 55
Expansion happened gradually and was accompanied by battles,
skirmishes, and their related resistances. Britons sometimes classified
these as battles, sometimes as protests, only rarely as rebellions. 56
Regardless of classification, the resistance to expansion demonstrates –
perhaps commonsensically – a resistance to British dominion writ
large. As South Asian historian Kamaluddin Ahmed demonstrates,
resistance to British rule was active after 1757; he specifically traces
Muslim and Muslim-affiliated movements, actions, and outward
revolts that indicate a pattern of active anti-British campaigning in the
years between the Battle of Plassey and the Queen’s proclamation of
sovereignty over India in 1858.57
The century between the Battle of Plassey and the Great Rebellion
was marked by a number of protests against, skirmishes with, and
complicated victories for the British East India Company. That the Great
Rebellion took Britons by surprise indicates not – as our sources
attempt to claim – a vast conspiracy that opportunistically reared its
head, but rather a system of privileging certain voices and information.
Much as British media reported definitive victories in 1757 despite
the hard-won (and lost) realities of conquest in South Asia, smaller
movements of resistance went unmarked or were written off as
unorganized, dislocated protests. Some of these were coded as minority
expressions of discontent or peasant rebellions. This may have mirrored
class politics in Europe, and had the effect of annulling native sentiment;
further, Euro-American historiography and European eyewitness
accounts alike branded peasant rebellion as unimportant, local, and
limited. As Guha notably observes, this history failed to fully appreciate
either the scope or scale of peasant uprisings, of which there was no short
supply from the beginning of British control in South Asia. 58
The disregard for peasant uprising is evident even before the Great
Rebellion. Many contemporary observers were shocked by the violent
events of 1857, which demonstrates a failure to connect the Rebellion
to other movements in northern India at the time. The Rebellion
was contemporarily held over and above other, smaller examples of
resistance, and historians have replicated this lacuna by assuming
28
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
functionally narrow foci on 1857, the sepoy (soldier) involvement
therein, and the bloodshed that followed. The real context belies those
foci: in central India (Khandesh, Dhar, and Malwa), the Bhils, an Adivasi
people, rebelled in 1852; Santhals, another scheduled tribe typically
located in north-east India and Nepal, rebelled in 1855 – 6; and Savaras
of Parliakhemedi revolted in 1856 – 7. 59 Likewise, despite adamant
claims to the contrary, Bengal saw the Indigo Revolt
begin in 1859,
which complicates the neatness of the Great Rebellion’s impact,
duration, and finality, as well as the claims that Bengal was a “zone of
peace” at that moment. 60 Moreover, ongoing protests dotted India’s map
well after 1857, right up until Independence/Partition in 1947, though
none were characterized by the extreme violence or overtook popular
imagination as did the Great Rebellion.
In 1857, the British – via the East India Company – controlled
approximately two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent’s land, and about
four-fifths its population, maintaining influence over the remainder. 61 In
May 1857, sections of the East India Company’s sepoy (from the Persian
sepa¯hi, meaning “cavalryman”) army began to rebel, first at Meerut and
then across northern India. The revolts spread from sepoys in
cantonments to civilians, and some historians note this shift from
disquiet among soldiers to full-scale civilian uprising linguistically: the
distinction between Sepoy Mutiny and Indian Rebellion or Great
Rebellion becomes less of a marker, as we saw earlier, of power, and more
a historic demarcation aimed at clarity. 62
As revolts spread, many Britons, including men, women, and
children, found themselves quickly outnumbered and isolated in
unfriendly or hazardous environments. Infamously, some were killed in
massacres at Delhi and Cawnpore. Others fled private homes or family
compounds, some taking shelter in forts and mass residencies that were
also besieged (as in Agra and Lucknow, among other places). 63 Stories of
atrocities, especially those committed against women and children,
quickly and freely circulated in the British press in India and the United
Kingdom; the defilement and murder of women, and murder of children
spurred particularly ruthless calls for vengeance.64 While they pale in
comparison to today’s instant and immediate digital news cycle,
communication systems in the mid-nineteenth century had vastly new
technologies and improvements, making the British (and European)
public well aware of the Rebellion’s spread and viciousness.65 Scholars
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
29
Andrea Major and Crispin Bates note that the Rebellion marked the
“first experience of ‘total war’ for the British [. . .] in which British
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 5