Day 84 : Book Excerpt : Islam and the Army in Colonial India

A visitor to the British cantonment of Aurangabad in the early years of the twentieth century may have been surprised at the sight of the naked Indian seen roaming most days round the orderly streets of the compound, occasionally calling out to passing soldiers or pausing to reload his pipe with cannabis. Had our visitor stopped to ask who this audacious fellow was, he may have received any one of a number of answers. Some person may have replied that he was a former soldier, invalided from the Army on account of insanity but whose presence in the cantonment was tolerated on account of his years of service. Another may have replied that the naked man was a holy fool, a gymnosophist celebrated across the land for his miracles; his errant behaviour was proof in itself of his communion with God. Some further respondent may have told our visitor that the dirty fellow was a mere beggar, an idle native who preferred the pleasures of the pipe to a proper day’s work. Others still may have given the reflex response to visitors’ curiosity about the many such figures seen in the streets of colonial India: he was a ‘fakir’.

With his links to a customary Islam of miracle-working holy men and to the patronal networks of Sufi affiliation which surrounded them, it is this figure of the faqīr who stands at the centre stage of our investigation into the religious world of the Indian Muslim soldier or ‘sepoy’ of the high colonial era. For during this period, the meaning of the label ‘fakir’ was caught between British conceptions of a traditional, passive and superstitious East and pre-colonial Indian notions of the strange powers of poverty and madness. With its literal meaning of ‘poor man’ derived from the Arabic faqīr, the different valence that the term faqīr acquired in its transition to English from its older usage in Arabic, Persian and the regional languages of India was symptomatic of wider transformations in the meaning of madness and poverty, of ‘true religion’ and rationality, that characterised many an encounter between Indians and Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The description of the ‘fakirs’ penned by the Methodist missionary Revd William Butler (1818–99) is a good example of both the denigration of this old-style religion and of its links to the Indian soldier:

These horrible looking men, with their dishevelled hair, naked bodies, and painted breasts and foreheads, are constantly roving over the country, visiting shrines, making pilgrimages, and performing religious services to their disciples. The Sepoys greatly honoured and liberally patronized these spiritual guides [...] But no one who has seen and known them can doubt that the great majority of the Fakirs are imposters and hypocrites.

Summed up in Butler’s disdainful prose are three of the key themes of this book: the nature of the ‘service industry’ that the faqīrs controlled; the character of their relationship with the Indian soldier; and the results of colonial Christian denigration of their form of Islam. Rather than focus on the abstract notion of ‘Sufism’ that European scholars developed to describe an Islamic counterpart to ‘true religion’ comprising high moral teachings, exquisite poetry, refined metaphysics and, in a word, ‘mysticism’, this book instead focuses on the neglected physicality that, in the vile bodies of the faqīrs, was obscured by this refined and intellectualising agenda. The faqīr was Islam in the flesh, with all of the problems and prospects which that implied.

As historians of colonial India have widely recognised, the Army was one of the most influential institutions to broker exchange between Indians and Britons. While merchants, bureaucrats and Orientalists make up a familiar side of the story of the colonial encounter, a strong case has been made for the centrality of the Army in negotiating the formative relationship between Indians and Britons. After the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, the Indian Army played an increasingly prominent role in the practical no less than imaginary lives of the British in India, from its role as the provider of employment and housing for thousands of British soldiers and their families to its provision of a culture of martial storytelling that lent a narrative template for encounters with living Indians. As Douglas Peers has noted, as the largest single employer in India, the Army ‘stands out as the institution in which the closest and most sustained contacts were made between the colonial state and its subject peoples’. But to render the Army as a simple tool of empire is to miss the complexity of the colonial encounter: the Indian Army was no less a source of employment, pride and identity for the millions of Indians and their dependents whose lives were shaped by its offer of prestige and a regular salary. The effects of the colonial military on Indian society were at once minute and vast in their reach. Over the past two decades, the emergence of a ‘new’ military history of India has sought to examine the different armies of India’s past against a range of culturalist concerns, from the transformation of the Indian peasantry to the reading habits of the Victorian schoolboy. This book seeks to understand the interface between the Army and religion as it found expression among the Indian soldiers of the Hyderabad Contingent between around 1850 and 1930. As such, the book provides a particular case study of the wider cultural negotiations demanded by the presence of vast numbers of Muslim soldiers in the multifarious regiments of the subcontinent.

~~Islam and the Army in Colonial India -by- Nile Green