language. Shah Abdul Aziz, Syed Ahmed Barelvi, and Shah Ismail
represent the best-known Indian Muslims who shaped how jihad was
interpreted, deployed, and navigated in the nineteenth century. Abul
Aziz’s fatwa declared India dar-ul-harb, but he never went as far as to
declare jihad. Barelvi and Shah Ismail died in battle against the Sikhs in
what some – including Sir Syed – have called the only legitimate
jihad.107 However, modernists like Khan disputed whether Barelvi and
Shah Ismail were using religious law legitimately; Khan sardonically
remarked that Barelvi may have been a leader of jihadis, but he was not a
preacher.108 During and after the Rebellion, Muslim sepoys were
148 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
marked as jihadis, but many often fled their regiments once they had
amassed enough loot to help their families. Muslims living in the
North-West Frontier Province were assumed to be warlike and anti-
British, and Sir Syed attempted to explain this as part of their (racialized)
natures as opposed to Hunter’s sense that Islam’s notion of jihad made
these “tribes” more warlike.109 Hunter, among others, prioritized various
historical events, legal interpretations, and an assumed pan-Islamic appeal
of the textualist minority movement. This reduced the multiplicity and
nuance in Muslims’ varying interpretive frameworks, especially the
movements labeled “Wahhabi,” to the singular and simplified “Muslim.”
“Muslim” in turn came to signify “jihadi.”
Elites, ulama, modernists, Wahhabis, sepoys, and North-West Frontier
Province “tribals” are wildly different; these groups did not equally or
evenly participate in the Rebellion, nor did they agree – between or
among them – that the Rebellion was jihad. Yet interpretations of the
Great Rebellion produced and produce them as “the Muslims,” and
“the Muslims” were uniquely bent toward war (jihad) on the basis of
literalism and legalism. Muslims emerged from the Great Rebellion
minoritized and racialized, a group with immutable traits, stripped of
power and access. Muslims after the Great Rebellion were – and
perhaps remain – always already a distinctive threat.
CONCLUSION
RELIGION, REBELS, AND JIHAD:
LEGACIES AND ONGOING
IMPACT
The Great Rebellion holds a place in Indian historiography and popular
imagination that has far outlasted the battles and massacres of 1857– 8.
Its immediate effects were myriad, in legal, political, militaristic,
and social domain. It was invoked as the independence movement gathered
momentum, and it continues to be remembered on its major anniversaries
as part of a teleology in which India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh) began
their independence from Britain in May 1857, some 90 years before
achieving it. 1 Even more broadly, the Great Rebellion is undoubtedly
woven into the fabric of the popular conceptualization of South Asia. Its
events, themes, and persona have been portrayed in countless Indian books,
film, television, and other popular media,2 and it has a foothold in English-
language popular culture as well.3 The Rebellion’s effects – and the
often brutally enforced imperialism that followed – reverberate on the
contemporary nation states of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, as they
continue to struggle with colonial and imperial legacies. These include, of
course, issues of language, education, infrastructure, and imperial laws
still on the books.4 The Rebellion is often described as the “watershed
moment” in British rule of India, and as clicheás this phrase has become, it
nevertheless accurately communicates a complex history: it altered the flow
of power in the Subcontinent, and it heralded an era of imperialism that
saw major social, economic, and political upheaval – in addition to well-
documented imperial violence committed against Indians. 5
150 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
The Great Rebellion actively looms in Indian conceptualizations of
history and national identity. In May 2007, India celebrated the 150th
anniversary of the Great Rebellion – or, rather, as it was memorialized
at the time, the India’s First War of Independence. In his reflection on
the 150th commemoration of the Great Rebellion, renowned historian
and theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty explored the politics of remembering
acts of revolt. He suggested that commemorations display a tension
between celebrating a date in the life of the nation and that date’s
representation of a “perpetual incitement to future rebellion.” 6 He
argues that the process of simultaneously remembering and forgetting –
a dearth of sources explicating affective responses of average folks makes
remembering impossible – renders 1857 as only a memorialized and
memorized signifier. 7 In other words, its impact lies in the acts of
celebration and eulogization; it is important because of the ways it is
imagined and reinscribed.
In May 2015, for example, the northern Indian state of Haryana’s
government announced that it would establish a memorial to the
“martyrs of 1857 mutiny at Ambala Cantonment.” A bhu¯mi pu¯ja¯, or
groundbreaking ceremony, was performed as government officials laid
the foundation stone on May 11, one of the mid-May dates remembered
as the start of the Rebellion. The Hindu reported that after the ceremony,
Haryana’s Health, Sports and Youth Affairs Minister Anil Vij said that
establishing this memorial to the martyrs was “historic,” and “future
generations would always remember the present government for this
important step.” 8 The government of Haryana built a memorial to the
martyrs of the Great Rebellion that died in its state, timed its
foundation to the calendric occurrence of the first revolts, and offered a
(largely Hindu) ceremonial groundbreaking. Moreover, as Minister Vij
suggested, the memorialization of the Great Rebellion aimed to serve a
dual purpose: it would commemorate those lost in the revolts, to be sure,
but it would additionally commit the contemporary government to the
popular memory, as well. This government would be remembered for
properly remembering – memorializing – the Great Rebellion.
Of note, as well, is the way in which the Haryana memorial
symbolically claimed its space in broadly Hindu symbolism and ritual.
A bhu¯mi pu¯ja¯ is a ceremony that ritually blesses the ground or earth
(bhu¯mi), and it has a classical Sanskritic source in the Va¯stu sá¯stra, a
Hindu system of architecture. It is important to note the ways in which
CONCLUSION
151
the government cast those who died in the earliest part of the revolt as
martyrs for India, and the ceremony to establish that memorial in
religious terminologies, marking the martyrs and those remembering
them as Hindu. Religion here is deployed in fascinating ways: it marks
the physical memorial; it marks those memorialized (the martyrs); it
marks the cause (the Rebellion); and it marks the current political states
(Haryana and India
). Religion – the religion of Hindus – is constructed
in this example as the religion of the rebels, of the Rebellion, and of
current and future Haryana citizenry. Muslims are notably absent.
One of the enduring products of the Great Rebellion is the
production of religions in South Asia. Eminent historian Nile Green
notes the “grand narrative of intrinsic Muslim fanaticism” that played
“such a prominent role in colonial politics from 1857 to the present
day. ”9 “The Muslims” were produced – minoritized, racialized – as a
direct consequence of the Rebellion. And it is this identification and
ability to identify “the Muslims” that simultaneously produces “the
Hindus,” their religious counterpart and opposite in this classificatory
system. Hindu nationalism, the articulation of India as necessarily
Hindu, has many discursive roots and routes of transmission, one of
which is the Great Rebellion.10 The Great Rebellion served to
homogenize and define the two primary and imperially controlled
religious groups of India. The Rebellion mobilized “the Muslims” as a
category, and in turn, “the Hindus” as well. In Haryana, the state
government recently memorialized the Great Rebellion in exclusively
Hindu vernaculars. This is possible precisely because “the Muslims,” a
British imperial category – as foreign, violent, incapable of being
subjects of non-Muslim rulers – lingers in this memorialization,
regardless of who deployed it.
The classification of religions – especially Islam and Hinduism –
came to be a hallmark of the British Empire. Despite statistical data and
often personal experience, on the whole, Britons were convinced of the
“essentially religious character of Indians and the mutual exclusivity
between Hindu and Muslim communities.”11 The imperial project in
India instantiated a classificatory system in which religion was the
operative category; the import of this category – the stress on the
differences between and among Indians on the basis of religion – is most
evident during and after the Great Rebellion. The definition and
classification of Indians on the basis of religion reflects British imperial
152
INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
tactics of control as well as the racialization of the population. Religion,
in this classificatory system, is not merely a set of beliefs, texts, practices,
or ideologies; instead, one’s religion is a transmittable, inheritable set of
characteristics. Defining religion in India was therefore about both the
definition of populations and the demarcation of racialized identifiers.
Muslims were not Hindus, in part on the basis of beliefs and practices, but
ultimately on the imperial delineation of inborn characteristics that
necessarily and intrinsically demarcated and separated these groups
intrinsically.
Sir William Wilson Hunter and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s
intertextual debate represents a window into the processes of
minoritization and racialization. On their own, their writings look
like relics of elite, literate nineteenth-century north India. But this
debate offers meaningful insight into the essentialization of Islam and
Muslims in India – a discursive process that involved literate elites,
agents of empire, lawmakers, and political actors. The effects of an
essentialized, racialized Muslim population cannot be overstated.
These are the discursive norms that prefigure and influence later
movements based upon these categories: Hindi – Urdu classification; 12
independence movements; 13 the Muslim League; 14 Partition and
Independence; 15 religious nationalism in India;16 and ongoing debates about Muslim citizenship in India. 17
These legacies also include the ongoing nexus of debates about what
it means to be an Indian in the post-colonial moment: issues of
religious categorization continue to influence politics, citizenship, and
identification. Religion in India remains a racialized identification, and
Muslims in India in particular (though not alone) find themselves
minoritized, racialized, and often still represented as a monolith.
Observing that Indian Muslims are “doubly marginalized,” sociologist
Maidul Islam asks whether Muslims can be seen as both a religious
minority and an economic one. 18 Issues we saw in fatwas and
debates about whether British India was treating Muslims correctly –
like cow slaughter – still dominate Indian newspapers’ headlines
and op-eds. 19 As we think through the narrative Hunter and Khan
helped to co-constitutively shape, it is vital to imagine not just the
nineteenth-century realities these texts tried to honestly portray,
but how they continue to influence contemporary imaginations,
depictions, and estimations.
CONCLUSION
153
This is not to argue that Hunter, having written the answer to his
titular question – Are Muslims bound in conscience to rebel against the
Queen?
– wrote the next hundred years of Indian history as well.
He did not singlehandedly create an image of Muslims as a unitary
whole, neither did he invent the elision between jihad and Rebellion,
nor did he concoct Muslims as inherently rebellious. He drew upon
extant notions – some based upon long-standing European depictions
(and stereotypes) of Islam, and others based upon newer political
and theological movements’ tracts, like Wahhabism. However, his
interpretations of and elisions among categories of Islam, Wahhabism,
Indian Muslims, and jihad were widely circulated, cited, and reprinted.
His arguments can and ought to be seen as both demonstrating and
manufacturing the discourse that produced “the Muslims” as jihadis
and the Rebellion as jihad.
In Review on Dr Hunter’s Indian Musalmans, Khan took Hunter’s
premises as his starting point. He even wrote that Muslims, aware of
unjust characterizations about themselves, “deemed it necessary to
issue the futwas alluded to by Hunter” (i.e., the Calcutta decision). 20
Sir Syed, while clearly arguing a divergent perspective, can and
ought to be seen, along with Hunter, as both demonstrating and
creating the discourse that reified and replicated images of “the
Muslims” as a unified, particular, and racialized group. Although Khan
countered Hunter by presenting Muslims as religiously diverse, and
not by definition violent and rebellious, Khan nevertheless reinforced
and reproduced Hunter’s basic assumption, that Muslims were a
demographic and identifiably community:
Like begets likes; and if cold acquiescence is all that Mahomedans
receive at the hands of the ruling race, Dr Hunter must not be
surprised at the cold acquiescence of the Mahomedan community.21
Muslims here are posited against the ruling race, Britons, as a collective.
They are identified not by practice, but rather as a definable and
recognizable category.
The memory and memorialization of the Great Rebellion ties Islam
to revolt, paints Muslims as rebels, and marks Muslims as ji
hadis. It is a
rhetorical and discursive shift, and Muslims like Sir Syed demonstrate its
reach: a loyalist, a knighted Indian, and a well-known modernist still had
154 INDIAN MUSLIM MINORITIES AND THE 1857 REBELLION
to defend himself and his community against the dominant norm, by
repeatedly denouncing jihad, the Rebellion as a jihad, and those
Muslims who preached jihad. Causes of the Indian Revolt is an argument
against the static background noise as much as it is a refutation of the
direct statement of Hunter’s Indian Musalmans. Sir Syed is often
described as an apologist, and while I do not necessarily disagree with
this label, I do not find it a reason to dismiss him out of hand. That he is
an apologist illustrates, rather than negates, the prevailing character-
ization and categorization of Muslims as rebellious, seditious jihadis.
The defensive stance in his writings demonstrates his positionality
vis-à-vis imaginations of Muslims as necessarily not what he was – as
decidedly disloyal compared to his loyalty, extremist compared to his
moderateness, jihadi in light of his pacifism.
By insisting that Hunter’s and Khan’s writings and intertextual
exchange paradigmatically represent how Muslims came to be minoritized
and racialized, I have not proposed that they have singlehandedly invented
conceptualizations of Muslims as violent, seditious, or rebellious, nor have
I suggested that their texts have invented the very real legal concept of
jihad, or its related legal criteria (i.e., dar-ul-islam, dar-ul-harb). Rather,
I have demonstrated that these representations are exemplars – neat and
robust illustrations of how descriptions and concerns about Indian
Muslims shifted from the early nineteenth century to the period during
and after the 1857 Rebellion.
I also have not suggested that Islam is a race, but instead that Islam
was racialized in this historical moment. This is an important
difference for a variety of reasons, including primarily that Islam is a
set of beliefs, practices, and ideologies influenced by textual, ritual,
regional, and linguistic particularities that are, and have been, in flux;
Muslims represent the globe’s multiplicity, and it is counter to my
point to insist that various Muslim communities constitute a unitary
Islam. Instead, echoing other scholars, I have asserted that Islam and its
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