Abstract
In this chapter I want to examine two major related strands to what we might call the pre-‘Mutiny’ Anglo-Indian discourse of Muslim ‘conspiracy’. They can be glossed here (and will be dealt with in turn) as the discourse of Muslim ‘fanaticism’; and the discourse of Mughal ‘dispossession’.
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Notes
Radhika Singha, ‘“Providential” Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation’ in Modern Asian Studies, 27 (1) (1993), pp. 83–146.
On the fascination that this dual location exerted on the colonial mind see Javed Majeed’s excellent discussion of Meadows Taylor’s novel Confessions of a Thug (1839).
Javed Majeed, ‘Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug: the Anglo-Indian Novel as a Genre in the Making’, in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.) Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 86–110.
Ahmed, Bengal, pp. 46–7; Kenneth W Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (New Delhi: Foundation Books, repr. 1994; 1992), pp. 20–1.
Robinson, Islam, pp. 145–6; Michael H Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British and the Mughals (New Delhi: Manohar, 1987), pp. 228–34. This passive British encouragement took place, moreover, in the knowledge of open and pan-regional support for the ‘jehadis’ by important Muslim leaders in North India (including the Begum of Bhopal).
Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700–1900 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, repr. 1992; 1989), pp. 226–8.
P Chinnian, The Vellore Mutiny, 1806 (Madras: Capricorn Printing House, 1982), pp. 90–104.
Roger Beaumont, Sword of the Raj: the British Army in India 1747–1947 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), p. 104; Chinnian, Vellore, pp. 97–99. While Bayly notes some ‘interesting parallels’ between the Vellore and 1857 army revolts, he does not follow this through with speculations as to their differences in terms of British responses to Muslim involvement with insurrectionary movements. See C A Bayly, Indian, p. 179.
Seema Alavi, The Sepoy and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr. 1998; 1995), pp. 90–4, 282.
Michael H Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System 1764–1858 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr. 1998; 1991), pp. 318, 364.
Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 128.
M A Laird (ed.) Bishop Heber in Northern India: Selections From Heber’s Journal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 144–5.
For a fascinating account of the early, often competitive interaction of Mughal and Company administrative and informational institutions, see Michael H Fisher, ‘The Office of Akhbar Nawis: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms’, in Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993), pp. 45–82.
See in particular, William Knighton, Nawab Nasir-ud-Din Haider of Oudh: His Life and Pastimes (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, repr. n.d.; 1855).
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
For the bewildered reactions of the Mughal service gentry during this period, see Frances W Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 3–30. On the destruction of the ‘old city’ of Lucknow, see Oldenburg, Lucknow, pp. 21–61.
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© 2005 Alex Padamsee
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Padamsee, A. (2005). The Pre-‘Mutiny’ Discourse on Indian Muslims. In: Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512474_6
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