Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion
Page 9
rule over South Asia. Similarly, hindsight for some Indian and Indian
Muslim observers offered enough distance from which to criticize both
the rebels and Britons with a degree of security; much later, however,
the Great Rebellion began to be portrayed by Hindus and some
Muslims as the “First War of Indian Independence,” highlighting a
different teleological interpretation that signposted budding Indian
nationalisms. 141 In both cases, however, looking back and reconstruct-
ing the history of the 1857 Rebellion – the meaning-making – reified
extant notions that religion bolstered, prompted, and promoted revolt.
Sir William Wilson Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in
Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? is one such example of meaning-
making in light of the Rebellion that fixates on religion, Islam, and
innate characteristics of Muslims – and the focus of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 2
SUSPECT SUBJECTS:HUNTER
AND THE MAKING OF A
MUSLIM MINORITY
For most British observers in 1857 a Muslim meant a rebel.
– Peter Hardy1
The Great Rebellion produced “the Muslims” in India – one unified,
cogent group. In its wake, Muslims became a singular category in both
practice and imagination for Britons. As imperial agents attempted to
figure out the causes of the Rebellion in its immediate aftermath and
in the decades following, religion maintained a central fascination for
Britons. Indians were distinctively religious: religion organized their
society, religion ought not be trespassed upon, and, as the East India
Company’s policies demonstrated, Britons were wary to insult the
religious affairs of the locals precisely because they thought this to be a
truly unforgiveable foreign intrusion. If Indians broadly were distinctively
religious, Muslims particularly were understood to be religiously
legalistic, bound unwaveringly and without exception by religious laws.
After the Rebellion, Muslims were seen as uniquely culpable for those
events and as posing a threat of repeated revolts; observers collapsed
differences among the milieu of north Indian Muslim communities on the
basis of law binding all Muslims to fight for Muslim rule.
The simplification of vastly diverse Muslim communities into a
singular entity is the process of minoritization, the process by which the
ruling elite came to perceive Muslims of various and differing religious
50
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
practices, classes, and castes2 as a unified collective and as a distinctive
problem. Demographic majority has little to do with minoritization:
Britons did not turn a Muslim majority into a minority, as Indian
Muslims before British control could not be called a demographic
majority, although elite culture was undoubtedly Islamicate and, in
many places, under the rule of Muslims.3 Minoritization refers not to
demographic reality, but rather to the systematic process by which a
ruling elite denies one group access to power through local, national, or,
as in this case, imperial politics. 4 Minoritization often refers to the
unfolding ways in which a normative majority comes to be recognized –
often against a prominent minority. Some have argued that the
mobilization and creation of national identities requires minoritization. 5
Empires craft subjecthood and establish cogency through this process,
either to ensure loyalty or to “divide and conquer” recognizable groups
with definitive characteristics. 6 As we will explore in this chapter,
Sir William Wilson Hunter (d. 1900), a crucial example, both fostered
and invested in the minoritization of Muslims. Making Muslims a
minority – outsiders, disempowered, and both unique and uniquely
problematic – is a key outcome, if not a stated goal, of The Indian
Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871;
2nd ed. 1872, reprinted 1876).
Indian Musalmans is a fairly lengthy answer to its titular question:
would Muslims be required by their religious “conscience” to rebel
against the British throne? Yes, Hunter contended, because Muslims are
bound by their exclusive and exclusionary religious laws to rebel against
any non-Muslim authority. Hunter typifies an agent of colonial
apparatus: he served as a member of the Indian Civil Service, working
variously as a statistician, compiler of data (firsthand narratives,
demography, and histories), and author. He was an influential, respected,
and knighted scholar of the Indian Civil Service. Later in life, he became
the vice president of the esteemed Royal Asiatic Society. In his official
capacity for the British Empire, he wrote many pieces, some in books
and others in serials; his work was widely distributed in its day and
beyond, and he founded and was a prominent organizer of one of the
most important tools for imperial knowledge production, the Imperial
Gazetteer of India. His most famous and widely distributed work in the
Gazetteer was Indian Musalmans, which went through numerous reprints
as both a serial and a bound volume; the second edition, published in
SUSPECT SUBJECTS
51
1872 and with a new preface, was the version which was reprinted or
reissued frequently, both in part and in full.
W. W. Hunter was a prolific, widely read, and highly esteemed author.
Historian S. C. Mittal describes him, alongside other eminent British
historians like James Talboys Wheeler (d. 1897) and Alfred Comyn Lyall
(d. 1911), as “the official mind of the bureaucratic Victorian historians in
India. ”7 His work carried gravitas, which led the Viceroy Lord Mayo to ask
Hunter to write “his account of the so-called ‘Wahabi’ conspiracy.” 8
Hunter obliged, drawing upon official documents provided for his use
by the Home, Foreign, and Military Departments, as well as his own
research and experience. Indian Musalmans, published in the same year
as it was commissioned, was the result of this request. In its conception
and execution, Indian Musalmans was a project that assumed connections
among Indian Muslims, Wahhabism, “conspiracy,” and the Great
Rebellion. From the outset, it collapsed Indian Muslims into one
distinctive category – a group characterized as legalistic, violent, and
bent toward seditions against the British.
Hunter’s carefully researched book drew upon a broad scope of
evidentiary support, including the works of other European scholars and
observers, legal statutes and juridical commentaries, East India Company
demographies and documents, and Muslim and Islamicate juridical
rulings, histories, and commentaries. He tried to offer a comprehensive,
objective view of the matter at hand, and while readers today may readily
point to his failures, Hunter’s contemporaries and some in the subsequent
generation lauded his influential work. 9 A number of later authors drew
upon Hunter, often reiterating or expounding upon his central claim.10
At times, his work offered a sympathetic gloss of Muslims’ status an
d
position in British India and expressed criticism of both British policies
toward and general ignorance about Muslims. However, these criticisms
and sympathies were fleeting, and even when Hunter expressed such
sentiments or analysis, he typically concluded that Muslims ought to
respond better to the pressures of British dominion, rather than that
Britons should change their official policies or personal behavior. Hunter
unmistakably championed British civilizational models over and above
those of the population they ruled.
Hunter contended that Muslims could not ever truly become proper
citizens of a modern, secular (monarchial) democracy. Because they
possessed their own legal system, he argued, they necessarily stood apart
52
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
from the British state. In Indian Musalmans, Hunter frequently termed
Muslims “agitators,” “rebels,” and “traitors.” The Viceroy Lord Mayo
was preoccupied with a perception that Wahhabism was spreading
rampantly through northern India, and Hunter’s expertise was meant to
weigh in on this particular threat. Hunter’s work often collapsed
“Wahabi” 11 and Muslim. It is not entirely clear why he did so, especially
since he occasionally warned against such elision; nevertheless, these
elided categories dominate his analysis.
Hunter was preoccupied, as were other British observers, with Islamic
law, and especially with its relationship to Wahhabism. He contended
that Wahhabism was primarily interested in jihad, and he connected
Wahhabism to normative Muslim beliefs, laws, and practices.
By conflating Wahhabi literalism with normative north Indian Muslim
praxis, Hunter depicted Muslims as thoughtful, careful juridical
thinkers, but who as such were distinctively bound by laws – laws that,
to his eyes, necessarily pitted Muslim subjects against British rulers.
Therefore, Hunter advocated for Britons to act carefully and with regard
for Muslim law, precisely because Muslims within the British Empire
would be bound to rebel. His claims relied on the minoritization of
Muslims, on a rigid interpretation of Islamic law and a related conflation
between Muslim and Wahhabi, and finally on a belief that Islamic law
definitively instructed Muslims to rebel against non-Muslim rulers.
In what follows, I will demonstrate how the Great Rebellion of 1857
served to make Muslims a minority and how Hunter’s later treatise both
reshaped and reproduced conceptualizations of the Rebellion and
Muslims’ subjecthood in light of it.
Bound to Rebel: Making Muslims a Minority
Eminent historian Peter Hardy notes that for “most British observers in
1857 a Muslim meant a rebel.” 12 Similarly, Thomas Metcalf argues that
“[i]n the British view it was Muslim intrigue and Muslim leadership
that converted a sepoy mutiny into a political conspiracy, aimed at the
extinction of the British Raj.”13 The characterization of Muslims as
distinctively responsible for the Rebellion developed alongside the
events themselves, partially due to preexisting conceptualizations of
Muslims as violent, legalistic, and unwilling to be governed by non-
Muslims, and partially in light of Britons’ characterization of Muslims as
SUSPECT SUBJECTS
53
one unique and monolithic entity. I focus on Sir William Wilson
Hunter’s work below in part because his attitudes and conclusions were
not aberrations. The ways in which he characterized Muslims as
inherently disloyal echo similar concerns held by others and demonstrate
a measured approach to the question of Muslims under the rule of Britons,
especially after the Great Rebellion.
One such example comes from a noted contemporary of Hunter, Sir
William Muir (d. 1905), a Scottish Orientalist, scholar of Islam, and
British official. He held multiple positions, including, eventually,
lieutenant governor of the North-West Provinces. Like Hunter’s work,
Muir’s scholarship was widely cited in its day and beyond, and he held
the esteem of imperial agents, scholars around the world, and well-
educated elites. His best-known scholarship includes the critical Life of
Mohammad14 and The Caliphate, its Rise, Decline, and Fall. 15 Muir has been credited, if we may call it that, with contributing to the “myth of
the Muslim as always armed with the sword in one hand and the Qur’an
in the other.” 16 In October 1857, he wrote to his brother about the
rebellion and disloyal Muslims: “The Musulmans, while they thought
their cause had a fair chance of final success have frequently compromised
themselves by flagrantly traitorous acts.” 17 He subsequently noted that
this was to be expected, given the “singularly close combination of the
political and religious elements in the system of Islam.” 18 Though well
regarded by many Britons, Muir became notorious among Indian Muslim
elites as someone whose work specifically and especially misrepresented
Islam. Muir garnered the attention of Syed Ahmad Khan, who cited Life of
Mohammad as emblematic of why Muslim modernists ought to dismiss all
scholarship from Western or British intellectuals.19 Muir’s characteriz-
ation of Muslims as traitorous and violent, and of Islam as necessarily tied
into the political regime, reproduced Hunter’s ultimate conclusion that
Muslims were required to rebel.
Others still described Muslim rebels as overwhelmingly destructive,
violent, and prone to revolt, or described Muslims broadly as rebellious.
Charles Raikes (d. 1885) saw the 1857 events as a rebellion not of a ruled
population against its rulers, but rather of Muslims against Christians:
The green flag of Mahomed too had been unfurled, the mass of the
followers of the false prophet rejoicing to believe that under the
auspices of the Great Mogal of Delhi [Bahadur Shah II20] their lost
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INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
ascendancy was to be recovered, their deep hatred to the Christian
got vent, and they rushed forth to kill and destroy.21
In a June 1857 letter to Governor-General Lord Canning (d. 1862), John
Lawrence (d. 1879) comparably noted: “The Mahommedans of the Regular
Cavalry when they have broken out have displayed a more active, vindictive
and fanatic spirit than the Hindoos – but these traits are characteristic of
the race. ”22 Both of these commentators saw a characteristic violence in the
actions of Muslims during the Rebellion. Raikes unhesitatingly attributed
it to religion, especially within a framework of competitive religion –
Islam against Christianity, Muslims against Christians. Lawrence
conceived of the violence as a consequence of religious fanaticism an
inherent attribute of Muslims. In all these cases, despite the particularities
of the claims made by Muir, Raikes, and Lawrence, Muslims were
portrayed as intrinsically predisposed toward violence and rebellion.
Of course, not all Britons imagined Muslims as uniquely responsible
for the Rebellion or even as one homogenous group. Sir George Campbell
(d. 1892) nicely represents this counterpoint as he argued that the
rebellion was neither Hindu nor Muslim in character, but Hindustani –
that is, comprised of previously dominant classes and castes whose
fortunes, statuses, and livelihoods had changed for the worse under
British dominion. 23 Hardy summarized Campbell’s perception of the
rebellion as one that “cannot be improved upon,” and stated that
Campbell’s understanding of the rebellion in terms of religion,
religious identity, and Islam was simply that, “It [the Rebellion] was
not a general Muslim movement against the British.”24
However, despite meaningful counterpoints like Campbell, the
majority of Britons writing about the Rebellion imagined it in terms of
religion and described Muslims as a homogenous entity distinctively
culpable for the revolts. The Great Rebellion solidified British power,
which had previously been present but was ambiguous and amorphous
in the earlier half of the nineteenth century.25 These massive changes to
British rule in and Britons’ imagination of India demanded formal
revision and enforcement of extant policies that stemmed, in large part,
from Company procedures. It also meant that relationships among
groups would be reshaped and reformed, perhaps especially so between
the previous ruling class (elite Muslims and Mughal officials) and the
current ruling class (Britons and British imperial officers).26 In this
SUSPECT SUBJECTS
55
climate, Muslims found themselves not only a demographic minority,
but also an ethno-religious group that came with imported assumptions
and characterizations. Muslims became minoritized, in other words, as a
result of the Great Rebellion.
Fittingly, a number of scholars refer to minoritized groups in
language inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as
tracts and treatises on “the Jewish Question” were published widely
under developing, liberal governments and during periods of colonial
expansion. One significant example is Aamir Mufti, who addresses issues
of secular modernity, by linking the so-called question of Jewish identity
within post-Enlightenment secularist movements in Europe to the
minorities that formed in Europe’s colonies – specifically, the British