Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

by Ilyse R Morgenstein Fuerst

  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

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  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.

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  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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

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  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