7 - Faqirs and Fanatics, or, Reconfiguring Pilgrimage and Political Culture

Summary

The concluding chapter argues that the consolidation of the Company state in India led to a radical reconfiguration of the politics of Muslim pilgrimage. From 1818, a “paramount” Company Raj sought to secure its newly acquired sovereign supremacy by designating as legally deviant or permissible a host of circulating figures in and around India, including hajj pilgrims. Yet, against this backdrop, the British also became increasingly anxious of the supposedly subversive forces that were being smuggled into the Indian Subcontinent from Arabia by so-called Wahhabis, a colonial byword for militant jihadis. But then, in its efforts to tackle the violent insurgencies of “Muhammadan fanatics” as a specifically political problem, and so distinct from the putatively “religious” practices of pilgrim “faqirs,” the Company state and its secular legal regimes also became entangled in administrative quandaries of their own making. The result was not only pervasive forms of colonial “Mussulmanophobia” and repeated recourses to state violence against suspected Wahhabis under the cover of states of emergency. With the bigger and bloodier crisis of 1857, it was also a set of official gestures that radically recast and reified “religion” as the natural wellspring of modern Muslim politics in South Asia.