This essay seeks to illuminate the 'biography' of an early modern frontier in Chittagong, Bengal. It unravels the political rise and cultural reification of the frontier by revisiting, through multiple perspectives and successive stages, the final years in the life of a Mughal prince, Muhammad Sultan Shah Shuja' (1616-60?). I suggest that the language of a state frontier emerged from an 'eventful' conjuncture: a war of succession that caused Prince Shuja' to take flight through Chittagong to the Mrauk-U Kingdom in Arakan, northern Burma. Born of these events, it is argued that the genealogy of the Chittagong frontier shored up a deep history of difference between Bengal and Arakan. Beginning with some reflections from the colonial epoch, the essay then moves back for a consideration of seventeenth-century Chittagong. From 1660, as the state discourse of the frontier first took form, I follow the category to 1666, when the Mughal military annexed the city. The next section moves forward again to illustrate how the twin memory of the prince and the frontier were recalled in later, chiefly eighteenth-century traditions in Bengal. Ultimately, the essay contributes to a growing discussion on the political ideology of frontiers in early modern India. Likewise, it reorients the question of the impact of Indo-Persian on vernacular traditions by observing that such entanglements inspired both 'cosmopolitanism' and 'othering' in South and Southeast Asia.
In 1786, several hundred subjects of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–99), ruler of the kingdom of Mysore in southern India, travelled to the Ottoman Empire on a diplomatic mission. This essay revisits the embassy's travels, and travails, across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean by drawing attention to a rich cache of administrative documents. I suggest that this collection, hitherto unexamined, can illuminate some significant aspects of diplomatic conduct and procedure in Islamicate Eurasia, yet underexplored. The essay accordingly highlights such overlooked themes as the bureaucratic complexities that were involved in long-distance ambassadorial tours, the role ceremonials played in elite intercourse, and the myriad ways in which material culture mediated interstate exchanges. While its significance lies also in how it decentres a dominant scholarly focus on encounters between Europe and its others, scrutiny of this collection, I additionally argue, can enhance historical understanding of how reciprocal relations between Islamicate polities transformed due to growing European influence. As contemporary configurations of imperial power changed in both South Asia and the Middle East, the Mysore-Ottoman embassy hence at once reflected and anticipated the advent of European—and more specifically, British—hegemony in non-European diplomatic contexts.
This book round table discusses two recent monographs on political violence and revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India, Kama Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919India, -1947India, (2017. Maclean's A Revolutionary History of Interwar India uncovers how revolutionaries in Punjab and northern India reshaped the goals and tactics of the Indian independence movement, especially the policy of nonviolence. Ghosh's Gentlemanly Terrorists explores the relationship of political violence in Bengal to the development of the modern nation-state in India. Both Ghosh and Maclean rethink the conventional narrative of the Indian freedom struggle and connect local developments in South Asia to global trends in anticolonial resistance and to larger conversations about the relationship between democracy and surveillance. In the five review essays, Daniel Elam, Rishad Choudhury, Mou Banerjee, Rohit De, and Michael Silvestri assess the impact of these two monographs on South Asian history, legal studies, histories of religion, studies of anticolonial movements, and British imperial historiography. In their responses, Maclean and Ghosh assess the challenges of writing histories of revolutionaries in the present in relation to the anticipated futures of the revolutionaries themselves.
This article charts several historical paths, hitherto underexplored, through the Hindi or ‘Indian’ Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire. Focusing on the ‘long eighteenth century (circa 1695–1808)’, it tracks their remarkable ascendance as an institutional network for mobile and migrant Indian Sufi pilgrims. From Istanbul to the provinces, the article demonstrates how Naqshbandis and Qadiris on the Hajj circuit drew on local channels of social communications, legal petitioning strategies, and state and inter-state linkages to forge unique identities as ‘trans-imperial subjects’ in an age of decentralization in the Ottoman world. I argue that central to their social success was the creation of new corporate regimes of itinerant piety. But first, I place the little-known lodges at the heart of a specific shift in early modern attitudes to identity, as the story behind ‘Hindi’ beckons wider inquiry into emergent differences among Sufi pilgrims in the Ottoman empire.
This article offers a new interpretation of the “Indian Wahhabi” beyond an ostensibly religious identity. Examining encounters between a centralizing state and decentralized circulatory regimes, the study thus illuminates an overlooked sociolegal genealogy of the jihadi militant in colonial India. From 1818, the East India Company secured its sovereignty by designating as deviant or permissible a host of itinerant figures in and around South Asia. In police records, court transcripts, and legislative archives, pilgrims with links to Arabia accordingly began appearing as suspected Wahhabis. Yet, in then seeking to distinguish “faqirs” from “fanatics,” colonial law used logics and exceptions with two important implications. First, as the “Wahhabi” came to imply a violent counterclaim to sovereignty, it also became a juridical formulation more political than religious. The faqir pilgrim here supplied the conceit of religion. Second, the complex question of jihad produced a deeper paradox, as grappling with a “religious” problem without “religion” stretched secular jurisprudence to breaking points. Until 1857, around South Asia, states of emergency hence dominated official responses to Wahhabis. Ultimately, colonial law's gestures not only rendered unexceptional its regimes of exception. Ironically, they also reified religion, such that Islam and violence became culturally consubstantial in colonial thought.
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