The Queen's Urdu: Translating Colonial Secularity in Victoria's 1858 Proclamation

Abstract

This article argues that Queen Victoria's Proclamation of 1858, marking the transfer of power from the East India Company to the crown, ushered in a new era of colonial secularity. “Colonial secularity” refers to the myriad ways that normative distinctions between religion and not-religion emerged and proliferated in colonial contexts. The proclamation committed not to interfere in religion, but “religion” is circumscribed, reconceptualized largely as a matter of private conscience set against the purview of the state. As this article explores, it is according to this logic that the abolition of Islamic criminal law after the proclamation could register as noninterference in native religion. At the same time, Christian missionaries contested the proclamation's notions of neutrality to carve out a space in which they might operate.