colonies in India. He argues that Jewishness was terrifying to – and that
Jews became terrorized by – protestant Europeans,27 and this formulation
of Jewish identity provided a framework upon which “the very question
of minority existence” was based, then “disseminated globally in the
emergence, under colonial and semicolonial conditions, of the forms of
modern social, political, and cultural life.” 28 Mufti connects British
imagination of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism to the later imagination of
Muslims, Muslimness, and Islam; his careful book charts “how a concern
with the particularity of the Jews in a Europe of nations was transformed
into a consideration of what the forms of particularity of the Muslims
meant for the question of whether India was a nation.” 29 He examines the
process of minoritization and makes broader connections between a
prominent, religio-ethnic European minority (the Jews) and a prominent,
religio-ethnic Indian minority (the Muslims).
Mufti observes that the Great Rebellion was a primary catalyst in
making Muslims a political minority. He argues, at the very start of
Enlightenment in the Colony, that the crisis of Muslim identity first became
recognized as such in the decades following the events of 1857 – 8. 30
Later, he elaborates:
In the decades following the 1857 Rebellion, “the Muslims” come
to appear as a group with a paradoxical social existence – on the
one hand, as local and particularistic, caught in a time warp
outside the temporalities of the modern world, and, on the other,
as formed by loyalties and affiliations that violate and exceed the
territorial structure of the (colonial) state.31
56
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
Although documentation demonstrates that Britons, including Hunter,
knew that the rebels hailed from myriad caste, religious, and ethnic
backgrounds, they defined “rebel” specifically as “Muslim.” After the
Rebellion, Britons produced robust sets of writing about “the Muslims,”
as part of their project of systematic comprehension of their (perceived)
troublesome minority. 32 The events of 1857 –8 – the Rebellion,
massacres, and responses – served to mark Muslims as a unique collective,
and this marking not only minoritized Muslims, but also obscured the
complex, composite cultures of north India. These upheavals changed
what it meant to be Muslim in north India, calling into question literary,
social, and religious cultures, and often rendering their maintenance
impossible. The Rebellion established “The Muslims” as problematic,
and responding to that problem engaged not only Britons but also
Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and others still.
Restrictions upon Muslims after the Great Rebellion varied from
region to region. In some cases, they prevented Muslims from joining
the subordinate services of the Empire, like collectorships; in other cases,
they denied Muslims access to more important arms of the state, like
judiciary positions. In his seminal work on the Rebellion, Thomas
Metcalf estimates that between 1850 and 1885 – 7, the number of
Muslim judicial posts in the North-West Provinces had declined from a
height of approximately 72 per cent to just under 46 per cent. 33 This
indicates the effect of official imperial changes in light of the Rebellion,
and the specific loss of advantages and privilege(s) enjoyed by Muslims
in the North-West Provinces before 1857. Educated, aristocratic
Muslim elites were considered suspect by Britons, and consequently they
had decreased access to official positions, resulting in a reaction that
appeared to be an official inclination toward Anglicization.
Enforced change need not be conceived only in terms of law. Aamir
Mufti traces shifts in Urdu literature and culture in the wake of the
Great Rebellion, highlighting at some length debates around Urdu as it
related to a unified national culture of India. 34 These debates and shifts,
present in Muslim Urdu literature – as well as literature about Muslims
and Urdu – represent conversations about disciplining Muslims and
Urdu, and about the delimitation of Indian identity. Other spaces for the
de facto policing of Muslim identity and the minoritization of Muslims
included educational systems, especially those overseen by Britons and
purposefully (or titularly) secular.
SUSPECT SUBJECTS
57
In short, the Rebellion marked Muslims as a problem, and problems
entreat solutions.35 The overwhelming characterization of Muslims as
distinctively violent, religiously bound toward rebellion, or ethno-
racially predisposed toward both violence and rebellion led to their
suppression in the years after the mutiny.36 In the wake of the 1857
Rebellion Muslims found themselves more regulated and restricted
because of concerns about Muslims and their unique threat to the
Empire. The Rebellion catalyzed the minoritization of Muslims –
even if the ideas and ideologies well predated the uprising. Further,
and as we will see below, this process included the recasting of
Muslims as jihadis, an idea that crystallized in 1857 and that had
real repercussions as Britain claimed full constitutional dominion over
the Subcontinent.
Indian Musalmans and Hunter: Author of Empire
Sir William Wilson Hunter was an author of empire who produced
knowledge about South Asia’s history, inhabitants, literatures, and
demography. He was an important contributor not only to what the
British knew about India but how they came to know it. Hunter’s prolific
publications – single-authored monographs, co-authored histories,
introductions to other works, numerous bibliographies, volumes of
the Imperial Gazetteer, a serial, and one comparative dictionary – are
distinctive in both their breadth and prolificacy. His work is vital to the
history of South Asia, especially as it spans the pivotal transition of
Hindustan from a colonized locale to a part of the British Empire. This
movement was heralded by the Great Rebellion and followed by British
physical and legal force toward India and Indians.
Hunter wrote The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to
Rebel against the Queen? in 1871, some 15 years after the Rebellion and
in the wake of the still-unfolding transition of power. 37 This seminal
book traced the role of Muslims (whom he calls Musaĺmans and
Muhammadans interchangeably) within India, and, as his title suggests,
takes loyalty – or assumed proclivities toward rebellion – as a primary
concern and point of inquiry. It contains four chapters and a short
appendix, which provides English renditions of the primary fatwas he
cites as evidence in the main text. The first three chapters address
the threat Muslims in India posed to the Crown. The chapters are
58
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
provocatively titled: “The Standing Rebel Camp on Our Frontier,”
“The Chronic Conspiracy Within Our Territory,” and “The Decisions of
&
nbsp; the Muhammadan Law Doctors.” The final chapter analyses Muslims’
grievances toward Britons and British imperial rule, and suggests using
education as a means to ameliorate Muslim fanaticism. While this
chapter differs from the previous three, it does not suggest that Britons
ought to change their behaviors or ruling style, but rather offers
suggestions on how to discipline Islam to be amenable to and compatible
with British rule.
In 1857, the Rebellion highlighted Britons’ greatest fear: in the
midst of expansion and solidification of imperial rule on a number of
continents, the possibility of revolution was a stark reality. The
potential disloyalty of Muslims spoke to a unique concern, however.
Because Britain controlled swaths of Africa, the Middle East, and
South Asia, its leaders were necessarily concerned with Islam, as
many of these areas were, and continue to be, either majority or
significantly Muslim. In fact, by the 1920s, British rule directly
encompassed substantially more than half the Muslim peoples of the
world.38 We might expect that India’s Muslims, as former rulers and
with vestiges of power still intact, would hold the imagination of
Britons, especially as India occupied a special place within the British
imagination of power and control in Asia and more broadly.
If Muslims in India could be united under the premise of Islam, or if
Islam definitionally called for Muslims to hold loyalty to each other or
to laws beyond those of the Crown, then Muslims across the still-
expanding Empire could be called to do the same. Muslims in India
reflected not just a threat to British rule in India, but to the British
Empire in its entirety. Hunter’s assessment of Muslim attitudes and
loyalties was therefore not a limited study and indeed had far-reaching
implications.
However, it is worth noting that Hunter’s work was neither a polemic
against Muslims nor a dismissal of Muslim humanity, decency, or
intelligence. His final chapter of Indian Musalmans, in fact, is an attempt
to systemically address grievances of Muslims, either stated (published
or well-known) or inferred (per Hunter’s perspective). W. W. Hunter’s
insistence on including a full (and rather lengthy) chapter delineating
Muslim grievances is neither to be applauded nor dismissed out of hand.
Hunter was not, that is to say, a post-colonial theorist trapped in the
SUSPECT SUBJECTS
59
wrong century! In much of this chapter of Indian Musalmans, he phrased
criticisms, upset, or frustration in terms of the British having moved too
quickly or perturbing an irrational populace. He was not critiquing
imperialism or colonialism, but rather specific circumstances in which
Britons could have carried out imperial practices better, thereby
ensuring smoother reign. The places where he sounded sympathetic to
Muslim objections, and where he called for British self-reflection, are
frankly more analogous to what we might today call a “non-apology” –
that is, an acknowledgment that another party was injured, but without
any contrition or responsibility admitted.39
Hunter openly announced his aim: “The object of this little book is
not merely to explain the duties of our Muhammadan subjects to their
rulers, but to impress upon their rulers their duty to the world.” 40 He
added:
it is hopeless to look for anything like enthusiastic loyalty from
our Muhammadan subjects. But we can reasonably expect that, so
long as we scrupulously discharge our obligations to them, they
will honestly fulfil [sic ] their duties in the position in which God
has placed them to us. 41
Hunter was willing to engage the idea that British rule had caused harm
to Muslims, but he did not advocate for anything beyond smarter rule.
His goal for his “little book” (all 229 pages of it) was to outline the
problems of rule in India – and of ruling Muslims specifically – to help
British rulers either navigate or remedy those problems. Like Warren
Hastings, Hunter did not advocate quitting India, but he wanted to help
make British rule more efficient and expedient, especially in light of its
problem populace. Hunter’s remedy for jihad was to outsmart Muslims
within the correct bounds of British rule.
To this end, Indian Musalmans presents a careful argument meant to
survey Muslims as the other (i.e., non-Hindu and non-Aryan42) religious
group, ethnic identity, and racialized minority in India, because they
innately posed a threat to the Empire. The interrogation of Muslim
sources was a key part of this survey. Hunter paid scrupulous attention to
Muslim sources: he cited, even overemphasized, “Muhammadan legal
doctors,” as an attempt to demonstrate what “authentic” Muslims said
about foreign rule.
60
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
Laws, Literalism, and All Muslims: Hunter’s Claims
The Great Rebellion demonstrated, to Hunter and others, that British
holdings in India were never terribly far from being challenged, if
not altogether lost. Elite Britons at home in the metropole worried,
seemingly at regular intervals, about their sovereignty in India. For
example, the periodic renewal of the East India Charter hearings in
Parliament demonstrate a general anxiety vis-à-vis British control over
religious actors, especially Muslims.43 Further, authors featured in
serials, gazetteers, and newspapers in the nineteenth century regularly
debated the state of dominion. 44 The Rebellion heralded a new era of
suspicion and angst, witnessed in all manner of official hearings and
tracts, but also in popular literature. Thomas Metcalf estimates that
before 1900, some 50 novels about the Rebellion were published, and an
additional 30 or so appeared before World War II. 45 The Rebellion
figured in institutional and popular imaginations, and many of these
depictions rested upon the anger and volatility of religious actors. As the
transition of power in India happened incrementally – city by city,
region by region, by force on the ground as well as by parliamentary acts
passed in London to be enforced on the other side of the globe –
Hunter’s fixation on threats to power and imperial sovereignty were not
abstract, even if they appear now to be rooted solely in overstatements of
Muslim identity and ideology.
In Indian Musalmans, Hunter located Muslims within a narrative of
rebellion based upon his interpretation of their religious obligations, and
against the tableau of definitions of and imaginations about Islam and
Muslims discussed in the previous chapter. His sustained use of Muslim
sources throughout the text is noteworthy. On the one hand, Hunter
offered a savvy, knowledgeable, and well-researched set of opinions.
In his introduction, he wrote that there was “not a shadow of a doubt”
that the Indian empire was endangered, citing papers “by Muhamma-
dans themselves.”46 He did more than merely reinterpret religious and
religiously inflected texts (i.e., the Qur
’an, hadith, fiqh, fatwas) and issue
broad pronouncements based on a limited interpretation of Islam.
On the other hand, however, Hunter foundationally rejected Muslims’
ability to apply their own legal histories when it suited his argument,
and rather overtly – sometimes bluntly articulating as much, as we will
see below – dismissed Muslim glosses in favor of his own, which he
SUSPECT SUBJECTS
61
presumed to be better researched and reasoned. In this way, while he
prodigiously cited Muslim authors, often in their original languages
(Persian, Arabic, and occasionally Urdu), he still managed to silence
Muslim voices. 47
Hunter relied heavily on legal rulings, or fatwas, and he
overrepresented this genre of text and interpretation because he
assumed that Muslims adhered to, held unique faith in, and were
unable to argue with (or against) such rulings. Limiting his evidence,
Hunter specifically focused on Sunnis, calling them the “Puritans” of
Islam, 48 and on Wahhabis, whom he called a fanatical sect but also
commented that he would “find it impossible to speak of them without
respect.” 49 Hunter’s reliance on Sunni sources and his emphasis on
Wahhabi sources and figures distorts the vast plurality of Islam in
India; the emphasis on Wahhabism is telling not necessarily of a reality
of Muslim praxis but of Britons’ heightened awareness and distrust of
this reform and revival movement. 50 On the whole, Muslims across
differing times, locations, religiosity, and sects are conflated and collapsed;
this is especially noticeable in Hunter’s discussions of Wahhabis and
Wahhabism.
Wahhabism is an ideological interpretation of its eponymous
inspiration, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahha¯b (d. 1792), and it is often
categorized as part of eighteenth-century reformist and modernist
movements geared toward streamlining Islam, returning to original
practices and interpretations of Islamic sources, and purging contempor-
ary Muslim practice of outside innovative additions. 51 Despite being
composed and promulgated originally in Najd – a remote, central region
of Saudi Arabia with many linguistic and cultural dissimilarities to
South Asia – the writing and teaching of ‘Abd al-Wahha¯b reached
India, though accounts differ on how and by whom. Like many of
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Page 10