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Making History: The State's Intervention in Urban Religious Disputes in the North- Western Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Katherine Prior
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Extract

In the nineteenth century the towns and cities of the North-Western Provinces witnessed a huge expansion in public expressions of Hindu identity: temples mushroomed, new processions graced the streets and the cow attained new prominence as a symbol of Hindu piety. Rarely, if ever, were such activities motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment, but they could provoke ill-will between Hindus and Muslims, especially in the towns where Islamic government, buildings and festivals had previously set the tone for the public life of their inhabitants. The colonial administration was a powerful but ill- informed force, able either to suppress or to protect the new display, and its responses were crucial in determining people's understanding of their rights to public religious expression.For the first half of the nineteenth century the British tried to preserve the balance of religious display in each town and city as they had found it, but this goal required that individual officers piece together a local history from imperfect sources and then invest it with the authority of the new state. It is easy enough to delineate the simplistic and sometimes crass categorizations that the agents of colonialism employed to explain Indians' religious sensibilities. What I want to do here, however, is show how their fundamentally novel reconstructions of a town's history of public religious display could feed back into Indians' own reading of their past and hence their future, even long after the British had abandoned their pursuit of a locality's ‘established usage’.

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Articles
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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , February 1993 , pp. 179 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Prior, K. H., ‘The British Administration of Hinduism in North India, 1780–1900’, Cambridge Ph.D. Dissertation, 1990, pp. 100–4.Google Scholar

2 The lunar year is about eleven days shorter than a solar year. Over 33 solar years the lunar calendar will ‘fall behind’ by approximately 363 days, hence the cycle of 33 solar years for the repetition of the overlap of particular lunar and solar dates.

3 In the 1800s Holi was an informal festival, with groups of Hindus enjoying their merrymaking on a family or neighbourhood basis. There was no grand exhibition which could claim to speak for the Hindu community as a whole, and so Holi did not engender the same sort of two-party competition for public space and administrative sympathy that an overlap of Ramnaumi or Dasehra with Muharram could.

4 Krishna's birthday, Janam Ashtmi, falls on the eighth day of the dark half of Bhadon (August–September). Krishna is the only avatar of Vishnu to be worshipped in the dark half of a lunar month. Shivratri falls on the fourteenth night of the dark half of Phalgun (Feburay–March).

5 It is easy to overlook the number and mobility of the Ramanandi ascetics in this part of India. A devotional order which had settled at Ayodhya in the sixteenth century, by the mid-nineteenth century they were the most numerous class of ascetics in Hindustan and were especially influential in the Doab. Wilson, H. H., Essays and Lectures chiefly on the Religion of the Hindus, ed. by Reinhold, Rost (2 vols, London, 1862), I, 67–8.Google Scholar

6 Even when the same family was responsible for both festivals the vicissitudes of nineteenth-century life took their toll. In Bareilly, Chaudhari Basant Ram, who started up Ramlila and Ramnaumi processions in the mid-1820s, lived to see the overlap of Muharram and Ramnaumi in 1837–39. But it was his son Naubat Ram who oversaw the Hindu festivity during the overlap of Muharram and Dasehra in 1852–54 and his son's widow, Rani Ganesh Koer, who was sponsoring the Ramnaumi procession at the time of the 1870–71 concurrence with Muharram. By the time of the 1885–87 overlap of Muharram and Dasehra the family's headship had changed again, passing on to Chaudhari Shif Lal. Prior, , ‘The British Administration of Hinduism’, pp. 106–40.Google Scholar

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10 Nita Kumar's work on Benares is surely one of the best studies on the interplay of different allegiances and loyalties—religious, residential, professional and recreational—in the composition of a group's identity, in this case that of Benares' Muslim weavers. The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986 (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar

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15 C. A. Bayly has discussed the phenomenon in relation to the rise of new Hindu and Sikh rulers in the Punjab in the eighteenth century. In trying to win control of pilgrimage sites or ban cow-slaughter they were not pursuing any general anti Muslim policy, but attempting to establish their sovereignty by association with those symbols most prominent in their own religion. Such aims did not prevent them from pursuing ‘eclectic religious practice in other spheres’. Bayly, C. A., ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”? Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860’, Modern Asian Studies 19 (1985), 186–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20 Freitag's study in Collective Action and Community of the Hindu—Muslim conflict in Agra in the 1880s is a good illustration of the extent to which intercommunal conflict could be initiated by ‘intracommunal’ competition, in this case between supporters of the Arya Samaj and the local Sanatan Dharma Sabha.

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29 This is not to suggest that Pandey underestimates the impact of the creation of lasting, accessible histories on religious disputation in the British period. See in particular The Construction of Communalism, pp. 151–7.Google Scholar

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34 I have considered Kasipur's history of religious tension in more detail in ‘The British Administration of Hinduism’, pp. 144–52.

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42 There was one form of religious display in which the British continued to pursue established usage, viz., the right to sacrifice cows at Bakr Id. With sometimes disastrous results, district officers attempted to produce lists of approved sacrificers so that Hindus would not be offended in the post-1857 era of equal rights of observance for all by a huge increase in the numbers of sacrifices performed. In Mau in 1893, as Pandey and other scholars have noted, inviting Muslims to record an intention to sacrifice seems to have had the effect of increasing the proposed number of sacrifices and it upset the local Hindus. The Construction of Communalism, pp. 151–5. In Bareilly in 1893 many old Muslim families were outraged when they had to prove to the Magistrates that they had a tradition of cow sacrifice. Moreover, because of the policy of investigating each claim's honesty, the Magistrate ended up authorizing more individual acts of cow killing than a British representative of the state had ever done before which did not endear him to Bareilly's Hindu population. See my ‘British Administration of Hinduism’, pp. 164–75.

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