Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion
Page 26
in contemporary politics, I cannot help but evoke William Faulkner’s
over-cited line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 22
NOTES
Introduction
1. Malcolm Lewin, Esq., ed., Causes of the Indian Revolt, by a Hindu Bengali
(London: Edward Stanford, 6, Charing Cross, [October] 1857), 12.
2. E.g., Partha Chatterjee, “For an Indian History of Peasant Struggle,” Social
Scientist Vol. 16, no. 11 (November, 1988), 3 – 17.
3. E.g., Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and
‘The Mystic East’ (London: Routledge, 1999).
4. Many have discussed, defined, and redefined “minoritization.” A particularly
concise and productive definition appears in Wisdom Tettey, and Korbla
P. Puplampu, The African Diaspora in Canada: Negotiating Identity & Belonging
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 94.
5. E.g., The Law Relating to India, and the East-India Company; with Notes and an
Appendix. 2nd ed. (London: W. H. Allen, 1841); Ebrahim Moosa, “Colonialism
and Islamic Law.” Islam and Modernity Key issues and debates, ed. Muhammad
Khalid Masud, Armando Salvatore and Martin van Bruinessen (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 158 – 81; Alan Guenther, “A Colonial
Court Defines a Muslim,” in Islam in South Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara
D. Metcalf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 293 – 304.
6. E.g., Sanjay Sharma, “The 1837 – 38 Famine in U.P.: Some Dimensions of
Popular Action,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 30, no. 3 (1993),
337 – 72; Rachel Lara Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial
India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012); David Lelyveld, “Colonial Knowledge and the
Fate of Hindustani,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.4 (1993),
665 – 82.
7. E.g., Peter Robb, “South Asia and the Concept of Race,” in The Concept of Race
in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb, SOAS Studies on South Asia: Understandings
and Perspectives series (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1.
164
NOTES TO PAGES 7–14
8. Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500 – 2000: Colonialism,
Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 383,
398 – 400.
9. E.g., Pierre Bourdieu and John B. Thompson, Language and Symbolic Power
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Ranajit Guha, “The Prose
of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, eds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45 – 86;
Laurent Dubreuil and David Fieni, Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of
(Post)colonial Expression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Chapter 1
The Company, Religion, and Islam
1. W. W. Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer: Vol. 2. Bengal to Cutwa (London: Trubner and
Co., 1881), 18.
2. Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, An Account of the Loyal Mahomedans of India (Meerut:
J. A. Gibbons, at Motussilite Press, 1860), Part I: 4.
3. E.g., Humphrey Prideaux, The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the
Life of Mahomet, 1697.
4. E.g., Vicente Cantarino, “Dante and Islam: History and Analysis of a
Controversy (1965),” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society,
no. 125, Dante and Islam (2007), 37 – 55.
5. E.g., Frederick Quinn, The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western
Thought (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Sophia Rose
Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
6. Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, “Common Heritage, Uncommon
Fear: Islamophobia in the United States and British India, 1687 – 1947,” in ed.
Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America: Anatomy of Intolerance (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 30.
7. Ibid.
8. Chartered by Elizabeth I (d. 1603) in 1600, the East India Company
increasingly sent Britons to India, for purposes of colonizing, civilizing, and,
especially early on in its history, trading in South Asia. In the late eighteenth
century, the Company expanded influence and power alongside the declination
of centralized Mughal control; by the nineteenth century, the impact and role
of the Company became the subject of scrutiny, as the possibility for wealth
and a more explicit expansion of the British Empire increased. All along,
however, agents of the East India Company produced various forms of
writing about all manner of issues, including religion and religious subgroups.
East India Company officers participated in legitimately sponsored and
privately supported data collection and production; these often influential
works came to inform scholastic endeavors, Parliamentary acts, and official
writs. As an example, see: Penelope Carson, The East India Company and
NOTES TO PAGES 14–17
165
Religion, 1698 – 1858 (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press,
2012).
9. No author, “Preface,” in George Chapman, LLD, Tracts of East India Affairs
viz., Collegium Bengalense, a Latin Poem with an English trans., and a dissertation
on the best means of Civilizing the Subjects of the British Empire in India, and of
Diffusing the Light of Christian Religion throughout the Eastern World, 2nd ed.
(Edinburgh: John Moir, Royal Bank Close, 1805), n.p., dated October 1804.
10. Chapman, Tracts of East India Affairs, 11.
11. Ibid., 16 – 17. Emphasis in original.
12. The Parliamentary Register: Or, an impartial report on the debates that have occurred
in the two Houses of Parliament, in the course of the first session of the Fifth Parliament
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. III (London: Printed for
John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1813), 246.
13. Ibid., 247.
14. Ibid., 104 – 5, 245.
15. Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern
Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 19 – 20.
16. The practical effects of the Charter Act were manifold, and included the
increased presence of Britons in South Asia; an increased imperial presence,
especially with regard to judiciary concerns; formal permission for British,
Christian missionaries to work in South Asia; and funds reserved for the
education of Indians. See, as examples: The Law Relating to India, and the East-
India Company; with Notes and an Appendix, 2nd ed. (London: W. H. Allen,
1841); Anthony Webster, “The Strategies and Limits of Gentlemanly
Capitalism: The London East India Agency Houses, Provincial Commercial
Interests, and the Evolution of British Economic Policy in South and South
East Asia 1800 – 50,” Economic History Review 59, no. 4 (2006), 743 – 64; and
Nancy Gardner Cassels, Social Legislation of the East India Company: Public
Justice versus Public Instruction (New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 2010).
17. Abstract of the Minutes of Evidence Taken in the Honourable Ho
use of Commons before
a Committee of the Whole House to Consider the Affairs of the East India Company, by
the editor of the East India Debates (London: Black, Perry, and Co., 1813), 54.
18. Ibid., 58.
19. Ibid., 59.
20. E.g., Ibid., 80, 83, 125, 127.
21. Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the Honourable House of
Commons, appointed for the purpose of taking the examination of such Witnesses as
shall be ordered by the House to attend the Committee of the Whole House, on the
Affairs of the East-India Company, and to report the MINUTES of such Evidence
from time to time (London: by order of the Court of Directors for the information
of the Proprietors, Cox and Son, 1813), 430.
22. Ibid.
166
NOTES TO PAGES 17–21
23. Salahuddin Malik, 1857 War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations?: British
Public Reactions (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 13.
24. Ibid., 34.
25. E.g., Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-mutiny India, London
Studies on South Asia, no. 7 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993); Dana
Lee, Robert, ed. Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History,
1706 – 1914, Studies in the History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans, 2008).
26. E.g., Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and
Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15 – 29.
27. Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee of the Honourable House of
Commons, 522, 539.
28. The Parliamentary Register: Or, an impartial report on the debates that have occurred
in the two Houses of Parliament, in the course of the first session of the Fifth Parliament
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. II (London: Printed for
John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1813), 177.
29. Ibid., 183.
30. Ian Copland, “Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of
India under the Company, C. 1813 – 1858,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 4
(December 2006), 1030.
31. Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698 – 1858, 153 – 4.
32. Ibid., 155.
33. Ibid., 158 – 162.
34. E.g., Syed Ahmed Khan, The Causes of the Indian Revolt, in Urdoo, in 1858, and
translated into English by his two European friends (Benares: Benares Medical Hall
Press, 1873), 17 – 25.
35. While shari’a has made it into contemporary parlance as “Islamic law,” it does
not neatly line up with state-based conceptions of law, an immobile cannon,
nor one unique thing. Scholar Marion Katz writes that shari’a is law “in the
sense that it encompasses the realm of judicially enforceable rules and the
conduct of the state, even while extending to realms of ritual practice and
private ethics exceeding the purview of modern Western ‘law,’” in “Pragmatic
Rule and Personal Sanctification in Islamic Legal Theory,” in Austin Sarat,
Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merrill Umphrey, Law and the Sacred (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2007), 91. Late historian of Islam Shahab Ahmed
problematized the reduction of Islam to law, offering both a gloss on Euro-
American attempts to parse “religion” from “culture,” as well as the variety of
Islamic terms involved in Islamic law beyond shari’a, including fiqh
(jurisprudence), adab (etiquette), and kalam (theology) in What is Islam? The
Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015),
167 – 77. Other scholars of Islam and Islamic jurisprudence have further
stressed the idealized nature of shari’a: it is a goal of an Islamic community, in
addition (sometimes) to an active state- or religious set of laws. Carl W. Ernst
specifically terms “the complex of Islamic law as an ideal, usually known as
NOTES TO PAGES 21–22
167
shari’a,” in Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 104.
36. Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee of The House of Lords, appointed
to enquire into the Present State of the Affairs of The East-India Company, and into
the Trade between Great Britain, the East-Indies, and China, and to Report to the
House (London: Parbury, Allen, and Co., 1830), 93.
37. Ibid.
38. Appendix to Report from the Select Committee XII: Crimes & Misdemeanors
in Affairs of the East India Company, 16 August 1832 (London: printed by the
Honourable Court of Directors, J L Cox and Son, 1833), 564.
39. Most relevant is famed philologist F. Max Mu¨ller. See especially: Introduction to
the Science of Religion (London, 1873), “India – What Can It Teach Us? (1883),”
in Historical Thinking in South Asia: A Handbook of Sources from Colonial Times to
the Present, edited by Michael Gottlob (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2003), 104 – 7; Lectures on the science of language, delivered at the Royal Institution
of Great Britain in April, May & June 1861 (Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lal,
1965). See also: Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How
European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005); Tomoko Masuzawa, “Our Master’s Voice:
F. Max Mu¨ller after A Hundred Years of Solitude,” Method & Theory in the Study
of Religion 15, no. 4 (2003) 305 – 28.
40. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Mark C. Taylor, ed.,
Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
269 – 84.
41. E.g., David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 17, 31.
42. While some of these sources maintain that “religion” and “politics” are separate
realms, many scholars of religion trouble this dichotomy. As examples: Jason
Bivins, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Peter van der Veer, Religious
Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1994); Richard M. Eaton, “The Political and Religious Authority of the
Shrine of Baba Farid,” in Richard M. Eaton, ed., India’s Islamic Traditions, 711 –
1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 263 – 84.
43. E.g., Chidester, Empire of Religion, 308 – 9.
44. E.g., Abstract of the Minutes of Evidence Taken in the Honourable House of Commons
before a Committee of the Whole House to Consider the Affairs of the East India
Company, by the editor of the East India Debates (London: Black, Perry, and
Co., 1813), 9 – 10, 22, 34.
45. Lewin, ed., Causes of the Indian Revolt, 12.
46. E.g., Sir Alfred Lyall, Race and Religion: An Address, May 5, 1902, Reprinted
from The Fortnightly Review, December 1902 (London: Social and Political
Education League, ND), 11 – 12.
168
NOTES TO PAGES 23–28
47. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 45.
48. If we can in
deed define what “religion” is, was, or might still be. E.g., Russell
T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and
the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
49. Peter Gottschalk, Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in
British India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5.
50. I am indebted to Kathleen Foody and Megan Goodwin, who in conversations
about classification and categorization made an excellent and illustrative
point: turkeys are not mammals, for example, unless power structures redefine
them as such. The seemingly obvious miscategorization of a turkey as a
mammal relies on having accepted the very premise of taxonomy itself: after
centuries of debate and discussion, birds have come to dominate and
distinguish the category that boasts “feathers.” All classifications are rooted in
power and are socially constructed, even for the turkey. Cf. Gottschalk’s
“platypus syndrome” analogy, Religion, Science, and Empire, 198.
51. As examples: Sitakant Mahapatra, “The Mutiny and the Sociology of
Literary Imagination,” Indian Literature 53, no. 1 (249) (January/February
2009), 172; Tapti Roy, “Visions of the Rebels: A Study of 1857 in
Bundelkhand,” Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 1, Special Issue: How Social,
Political and Cultural Information Is Collected, Defined, Used and Analyzed
(February, 1993), 205; James W. Hoover, “Indian Mutiny,” in International
Encyclopedia of Military History, ed. James C. Bradford (New York: Routledge,
2006), 643.
52. Peter Harrington, Plassey, 1757: Clive of India’s Finest Hour (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2005).
53. E.g., John Campbell, Memoirs of the Revolution in Bengal, Anno. Dom. 1757.
By Which Meer Jaffeir Was Raised to the Government of That Province, Together with
Those of Bahar and Orixa (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1760).
54. Ranajit Guha, “A Conquest Foretold,” Social Text 54 (Spring 1998), 85.
55. Ibid., 86.
56. E.g., David Baker, “Colonial Beginnings and the Indian Response: The Revolt
of 1857 – 58 in Madhya Pradesh,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (July 1991),
511 – 12.
57. Kamaluddin Ahmed, Plassey to Proclamation: A Study of Indian Muslim
Resistance to British Colonial Expansion in India (Kolkata: Mudrakar, 2010).