strongholds in Oude, the advancement of columns of troops into the
most disaffected parts of the country – the rebellion may be said to have
ended.” 114 Malleson buried the capture of the mosque as one item in a
long list of advances made in Delhi on the way to total British victory,
and noted the ease with which it was captured. He wrote: “After that
success [at the Lahore gate], driving his [Brigadier William Jones] force,
42
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
he detached one portion up the Chandni Chauk to capture the Jamı´
Masjı´d, the other to gain the Ajmıŕ Gate.” Malleson added: “He [Jones]
entered the mosque without difficulty.”115
For Indian Muslim observers, however, neither the siege of Delhi nor
the capture of its largest mosque – an anchor of the city’s traditional
Muslim-majority enclave – was to be mentioned in passing. Nor were
these remembered as a simple events. After compiling a number of
Muslim-authored sources into one cogent narrative, Arshan Islam
recounts the fall of the Jama Masjid as violent, purposefully denigratory,
and seared into a collective memory:
On the evening of 20 September 1857 British and Sikh soldiers
danced around a victory fire inside the Jama Masjid. The Sikh
soldiers cooked halva next to the minaret and the British cooked
pork inside the mosque. The whole mosque was turned into a
military barracks. Sikh soldiers urinated inside the mosque, and
Englishmen’s dogs were even allowed to roam in the Masjid. 116
Two preliminary details merit attention: British soldiers are coded not
by their religious affiliation, but by “national” identity, while Sikh
soldiers are delineated both religiously and as a unique subfaction of the
British regiments in which they served. While this designation of
difference replicates official British segregation within the army, it also
upholds the axiom that conquering European colonists were considered a
neutral, normative body while conquered colonized peoples represented
religious bodies.117 Yet, the thrust of this selection of the narrative is
the defilement of the mosque as part of the recapture of Delhi. The
commentary, while mentioning Sikh and British offenses equally,
includes only one mention of those soldiers acting jointly – together,
they danced around a victory fire. Otherwise, they act separately, each
participating in a series of sullying activities that included urinating
and allowing dogs (a filthy, even haram animal for many Muslims118), as
well as cooking both halwa (a sweet with a variety of renditions) and
pork – the supposed offending element that ignited the Rebellion in the
first place.
The defilement of the Jama Masjid – which was later “returned” to
Muslims – highlights a Muslim point of memory ignored by the major
and authoritative British histories of 1857. It also supports celebrated
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
43
anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s characterization of the capture of Delhi as
purposeful “desacralization” of the stronghold of the (Muslim) Mughal
Empire.119 Undoubtedly, when the British regained control of Delhi, it
was a decisive blow to the Great Rebellion and a turning point in the
conflict. Its gruesomeness and selective violence affected Muslim authors
and observers deeply – whether because the fall of Delhi marked the
final blow to the Mughal Empire or simply because of the vastness of the
devastation. Many prominent Muslims described the events in Delhi
with heartbreak and fear, whether they sided with the rebels or the
British.
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (d. 1869), an eminent Persian- and
Urdu-language poet, sometimes harshly denounced the Rebellion and
its supporters, calling them “filthy vagabonds” among other unsavory
epithets. 120 Ghalib wrote in a number of collected letters, essays, and
diaries about the horrific violence he witnessed, listing names of
friends, relatives, and neighbors he knew to have been killed during
the Rebellion and sieges of Delhi. 121 He expressed a real fear of
censorship, exclaiming in a December 1857 letter to Hakim Gulam
Najaf Khan:
I am writing, but what can I write? Can I really write anything,
and is it proper to write? This much is true: you and I are still
alive. Neither of us should say anything more than that. 122
Ghalib’s personal sense of fear was characteristic of an elite who had
previously straddled the space between the East India Company and the
declining Mughal court; after the Rebellion, he, like others in his
societal strata, attempted to rehabilitate his position by declaring loyalty
to the British. 123
However, this did not bar Ghalib from commenting on uneven and
unequal British responses to Muslims in the wake of the Great
Rebellion. In a letter to Nawab Ala ud-Din Ahmad Khan Alai, he wrote:
Surely today every English tommy is Almight [sic ] God.
Now every man going to the bazar is panic-stricken;
The marketplace is become a slaughterhouse, and the house looks
like a prison.
The very particles of dust thirst for the blood of Muslims. 124
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INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
As an intellectual elite and witness to the violence that plagued Delhi
during and after the Rebellion, Ghalib’s recollections and interpretations
speak to issues of Muslim treatment and Muslim perceptions in the wake
of 1857 – 8.
Whether Muslims were loyal to the British during the Rebellion or
not, as historian Mushirul Hasan notes, for many and especially for the
intelligentsia, “the post-1857 decades were haunted by long memories,
some angry, most sickening.” 125 And loyalty did not ultimately protect
many Muslims from British suspicion or retaliation. Historian Avril
A. Powell observes that some Britons – even the famed historian
William Muir (d. 1905) – offered evidence that Muslims were not
opposed to British rule and, in particular examples, were advantageous
allies to Britons.126 However, she also suggests that elite Muslims, like
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, attempted to demonstrate “overwhelming proof
of unquestioning loyalty” with some regularity. 127 This indicates an
atmosphere of suspicion in and of itself: a community would not need to
regularly assert its allegiance if such a quality were a given.
Much of the British rhetoric around Muslims revolved around issues
of Islamic law. Britons assumed Muslims to be indisputably tied to
laws – problematically, laws that were not those of Britain.
An emphasis (or overemphasis) on shari’a led to British reliance on it
in many conversations and disputes about Muslims, as well as to
various real legal challenges for Muslims in British South Asia, over
issues like personal laws, implementation of long-standing community
practices, and definitions of what counts as proper Islamic practice
itself. 128 Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the Great Rebellion, and as
commentators attempted to get the
ir bearings on the origins of the
mutinies and the best strategies to avoid such uprisings again, the place of
religion and law took the fore. S. M. Azizuddin Husain’s work offers a
number of important translations and analyses of 1857 historiography in
Islamicate languages, namely Persian and Urdu. His contribution helps
make clear that not only is the historiography of the Great Rebellion
heavily weighted toward British sources, but it also establishes complex
interactions between and among Muslims over time and with respect to
political and religious orientations. Of particular note is his observation
that primary sources – and especially a letter by Nabi Bakhsk Khan, a
clerk of the Mughal emperor – highlight that “both types of people were
present in the [Mughal] administration: those who were acting against the
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
45
law of Islam, and others who were protesting against the violation of
Islamic law. ”129
Muslim narratives about 1857 and its aftermath shed important light
on the Rebellion. More relevantly, these narratives also give a sense of
evolving attitudes toward the British, formalized British rule, and the
Great Rebellion, as well as perceptions of British attitudes toward
Muslims themselves. The Great Rebellion offered Muslims – especially
those of the elite class – an abrupt and pressing reason to define and
redefine their relationship to authority in India. Many found themselves
unemployed (and even impugned) with the final collapse of the Mughal
Empire, and they aimed to reestablish themselves within the British
government. This was possible because British agents had long hired
local elites to serve in various positions, and in many ways, they merely
continued these practices after brutally taking official command in
India. Other Muslim elites found themselves in precarious positions
after the Rebellion, and scholars have noted the ways in which political,
economic, and even physical self-preservation caused some Muslims to
shower high praise on British rule where, before, they had been quiet
or even critical. 130 Moreover, Muslims were not unified in experience
or opinion. As Husain demonstrates, Muslim elites were reviled as
members of the fallen Mughals and susceptible to the rebels’ violence;
but as Muslims and affiliates of the Mughals, they were similarly
susceptible to British prosecution after 1858. 131 We will delve deeper
into Muslim recollections and interpretations of the Great Rebellion in
chapter 3.
Conclusions
After nearly 200 years of operation in South Asia, in 1813 the East India
Company saw major revisions to its Charter and thus its writ of
operation in South Asia and beyond. The parliamentary hearings for the
Charter Act in 1813 not only ushered in a new era of colonial and
imperial rule, but also display British assumptions about India’s
populace – namely that religion dictated nearly all local action and
thought, mundane or paramount. Some parliamentarians suggested, for
example, that Indians might want, based upon religious mores, Scottish
woolen goods, available to them via the trade arrangements proffered in
the Charter Act. 132 The Charter Act debate (which centered on the
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INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
admission of missionaries to India) found members of both Houses of
Parliament reproducing conceptualizations of Indic religious actors.
Various parliamentarians and expert witnesses depicted Hindus as passive,
effeminate, and, though religiously problematic, “good” subjects to the
Crown, while they simultaneously cast Muslims as easily agitated,
aggressive, and inherently disloyal.133
When the Charter Act of 1813 passed, the East India Company lost
both its monopoly over trade in India and its right to control missionary
activity in the subcontinent. Despite an ongoing connection among
the EIC, missions, and the Crown – institutions where the expansion
of Christendom or related civilizational machinery were thought to
coexist neatly – the development of cordial relationships among these
institutions was not nearly so neat. Many Britons, especially those in the
EIC and “on the ground” in India, were wary of openly trifling with
matters of religion: Britons were concerned that it would take very little to
arouse the violent temperaments of Muslims who in turn could and likely
would ignite the passions of Hindus. In categorizing Indians as necessarily
and distinctively religious, first the Company and later the Empire found
themselves rather hamstrung between their warring directives, to carry
out civilizational (and Christian) mission and simultaneously to tread
lightly, all while enacting brutal imperial control.
As reproduced in the epigraph, Lewin, the editor of Causes of the
Indian Revolt, by a Hindu Bengali noted that: “Religion is not a thing to
be trifled with, and the dullest and most phlegmatic will be roused to
the boiling point of rage and enthusiasm when it once is affected.” 134
This slim treatise may be meant to represent the ideas of a “Hindu
Bengali,”135 but it implies – as we have seen elsewhere – that Indians
and especially Muslims were uniquely assumed to be rebellious, or at
least, easily swayed by offenses to religion. Indeed, contemporaneous
accounts and later recollections of the Great Rebellion alike repeated
narratives that assumed religion and especially Islam to be a key factor in
the events. Of course, these assumptions rest upon accepted narratives
about Muslims and Islam that predate the Rebellion and even the period
in which the EIC (whether begrudgingly or not) found itself closely tied
to missions. Nevertheless, the nexus of issues of religion, Islam, and
Muslims in India during the mid-nineteenth century produced a climate
in which a revolt of sepoys and later of civilians came to be understood as
decidedly religious, and especially Islamic.
THE COMPANY, RELIGION, AND ISLAM
47
The broader context of the development and study of religion in the
nineteenth century matters here, not only because India was a primary
site for such intellectual work,136 but also because the definitions
rendered stemmed from and, cyclically, were applied to its ever-
changing landscape. In 1813, as part of the Charter Act hearings,
members of Parliament explained that religion was of the utmost
importance to Indians, and some expressed concerns about meddling in
such personal matters. As few of these parliamentarians had themselves
travelled to India, we know that their estimations of Indic norms were
assumptions, and from their comments, we have also seen the ways in
which generalized conceptualizations – often unflattering at best and
racist at their core – dictated high-level governmental conversations and
policies.137 The minutes of the hearings and petitions to sway voting
parties do not showcase a uniform British conclusion about religion, but
they do establish a consensus that Hindus and Muslims were
distinctive,
definable groups, and had radically different relationships to their
religious texts as well as to Britons and British rule. Some suggested that
all Indians were “fanatical,” citing Brahmin food pollution mores
alongside those of Muslims. 138
More commonly, however, Britons characterized Indians as religious
on the whole, but with the caveat that only Muslims possess the inherent
potential for fanaticism that threatened British rule, Christianity,
even Britons individually. 139 In the wake of the Charter Act of 1813,
missionaries established institutions aimed at properly situating
Christianity within the subcontinent, which included rules governing
British or Europeans in the EIC and affiliated positions, the founding of
schools and orphanages, and the distribution of missionary literatures,
to name but a few. In addition to changing the official relationship
between the Company and missions, the Charter Act ushered in an era
of changing patterns of authority, and it poignantly formalized the
relationship of the Company to the Empire, specifically declaring the
Crown’s position vis-à-vis India.
British characterizations of Muslims as fanatics took the fore during
and after the Great Rebellion. We have seen how observers first delineated
Indians based upon religious identity, over and above caste, ethnic,
regional, or linguistic definition. Carey, Malleson, Kaye – authors of well-
documented and standard histories – assumed both unity and cohesion
when they used appellatives like “Hindu” and “Muslim.” Religion as a
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INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
driving force is a given in these accounts, even as authors like Malleson
offer honest misgivings as to whether individual issues, like the greased
cartridges, happened, happened in the way they were rumored to have
happened, or affected religious sensibilities evenly. 140 After the Rebellion
and its very immediate aftermath, observers increasingly labeled its
causes, events, and lingering effects as religious, and many tied these
uniquely to Islam.
Hindsight offered Britons a means through which to portray the
powerful Rebellion as a purposeful, planned series of attacks by violent
natives that was ultimately quashed; their histories were often
teleologies that demonstrate the inevitability and “rightness” of British
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