THE HAJJ FROM INDIA IN AN AGE OF IMPERIAL TRANSITIONS, 1707-1820 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Rishad Islam Choudhury August 2015 © 2015 Rishad Islam Choudhury THE HAJJ FROM INDIA IN AN AGE OF IMPERIAL TRANSITIONS, 1707-1820 Rishad Islam Choudhury, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 This dissertation examines the political and religious worlds that emerged from traffic between the late Mughal and Ottoman empires. Focusing on the Hajj pilgrimage, it illustrates how Indian devotional circulations threaded unprecedented webs of state, commercial and cultural exchanges across South Asia and the Middle East. I argue that the Hajj from India produced new visions for state regimes, and forged new pious practices among Indian Muslims. Reflecting on an age defined by the decentralization of the two great Muslim empires and the rise of colonialism, this study observes that Indian Hajjis drew states into polemical and legal conversations even as they established horizontal links between them. Pilgrims breathed life into novel personal and banded forms of religiosity. And, finally, state management of the Hajj quickened expectations that old and new regimes, both Islamic and European, needed to secure durable legacies of religious legitimacy to thrive. So what appears, at first, as a long eighteenth century (1707-1820) caught between the “crisis” of Islamic states and the coming of colonialism, led in fact to lasting changes in religion and rule, in India and beyond. I advance my arguments and analyses through four chronologically organized, thematically distinct chapters. Chapter 1 dwells on the economic horizons of the Hajj. By surveying the expansion of Indian acquisitive and altruistic exchanges in Arabia, I reconsider a straight transition from status to contract in Indian Ocean “bazaar” economies. Chapter 2 reduces the scale of inquiry, treating, in turn, the experiences of the Indian ‘ulama in the Hijaz, and their ramifications on local webs of knowledge. Tracking the career of a newly connected “all-India” ‘ulama, I reveal how intellectual interactions on the Hajj transformed political morality and provincial judiciaries. Chapter 3 highlights the making of a little-known but sprawling network of corporate Indian pilgrims beyond South Asia. It thus assesses the institutional, diplomatic, and legal entanglements of the “Indian” or Hindi Sufi lodges of the Ottoman Empire. My last chapter demonstrates the contradictory character of pilgrimage under early colonialism. Although the British Company-state offered patronage to pilgrims for the sake of state legitimacy, I assert that it did so under the mounting burdens of war and conflict caused by its own military-fiscal expansion. Ultimately, the dissertation adds to histories of eighteenth-century South Asia that have suspended investigations beyond analyzing political transformations within indigenous regimes. At the same time, it questions if colonialism was the exclusive engine of change in early modern India. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Rishad Choudhury completed his BA in History at Oberlin College in 2007, and his PhD in History at Cornell University in 2015. Between 2015 and 2017, he is Academy Scholar at the Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University. v To RIC and MAC (née K) In memory āshini ēkākī āmi ēi tīrtha-pathē Kazi Nazrul Islam Najrul Rachana-Sambhār, vol.1 (Calcutta, 1965). vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like Nazrul, I did not venture out on the pilgrim’s path alone. Along the way, I have accrued innumerable debts. It is therefore with pleasure that I dispense them here, with the unnerving awareness that some of them will never really be repayable. This dissertation was written under the supervision of Durba Ghosh, whose personal and intellectual generosity never failed to exceed expectations. She read, reread, critiqued, cajoled, and was generally the most significant person behind every line of this work besides its author. Robert Travers taught me, in a word, what it means to pursue the historian’s craft. I cannot think of a higher expression of tribute to his mentorship. Cornell’s own Hajji, Eric Tagliacozzo, led by the example of his scholarship, his characteristic geniality, and his skilled soundings into the pasts of the Indian Ocean world. Numerous other teachers, friends, and colleagues enriched the long experience by offering advice, comments, a sympathetic ear, and on occasion much more. Together with those who made my travels and research in India, Turkey, the United Kingdom possible, I am particularly grateful to Nicholas Abbott, Ismail Alatas, Andrew Amstutz, Ernesto Bassi, Anne Blackburn, Bronwen Bledsoe, Bernardo Brown, Vincent Burgess, Holly Case, Indrani Chatterjee, Vivian Choi, Sherman Cochran, Jared Conrad-Bradshaw, Duane Corpis, Natalia di Pietrantonio, Barbara Donnell, Naimur Rahman Farooqi, Suraiya Faroqhi, Munis Faruqui, Roy Fischel, Michael Fisher, Daniel Gold, Molly Green, Iago Gocheileishvilli, Ramachandra Guha, Gökçe Günel, Usman Hamid, Alexandra Lane, Elizabeth Lhost, Andrew Liu, Nidhi Mahajan, Peter Marshall, Owen Miller, Mostafa Minawi, Yagna Nag Chaudhuri, Nida Nalçacı, Quentin Pearson, Gyan Prakash, Paula Richman, Dwaipayan Sen, Asheesh Siddique, Ashfaque Siddiqui, Hasan Siddiqui, Osama Siddiqui, Yasmine Singh, Phillip Stern, Ananda Suarez, Drew vii Thomases, Shawkat Toorawa, Benjamin Weber, and Rachel Weil. A special thanks to a fellow tīrtha-yātrī and coconspirator, Carter Higgins. And to Pigeon, a cat. Segments from the dissertation research were presented at Bilgi, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Princeton universities, and at conferences organized by the Social Science Research Council and the American Historical Association. I am indebted to audiences and participants at each venue for engaging inchoate ideas. Staff at the following libraries and research institutions heaved and hauled too many volumes, and for that I am extremely thankful: the National Archives of India and the Iran Culture House, New Delhi; the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections research room at the British Library, London; the Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive and the Topkapı Palace Archive, Istanbul; and the libraries of Columbia University, New York University, the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), and the Centre for Islamic Studies (Turkish Religious Foundation). Among them I must single out the fantastic librarians of Cornell University for their vital and cheerful assistance, day in and out. The research and writing were supported by two Sage Fellowships from the Cornell University Graduate School; by the Society for the Humanities, the Einaudi Center, and the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University; by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association; and by the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with additional funds from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. From home, my family gave through their own strange pilgrimages. All of them made this journey possible: so again, my warm thanks to them all. Needless to add, all errors, exaggerations and oversights remain mine alone. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..……………………………………………………………………………..vii List of Tables and Figures…………………………………………………………………….….xi List of Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………….....xii A Note on Transliterations and Translations….………………………………………………...xiii Introduction A Hajj and a Crisis of Empire, 1744……………………………………...…………………...1 Old and New Empires of the Hajj: India, 1707-1820…………………………………………3 Mecca and Motion...…….…………………………………………………….........................7 Political Transitions, Pious Transits: The Argument………………………………………...12 Chapter 1. The Hajj Bazaar Economy of the West Indian Ocean Introduction: After Pilgrimage……………………………………………………………….22 Traditional Terrains in the Bazaar Economy………………………………………………...25 Meanings of the Market: Indian Merchants and the Hajj……………………………………31 Between Mercantilism and Altruism: Indian States and the Hajj…………………………....40 The Gift in the Bazaar………………………………………………………………………..51 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...63 Chapter 2. The ‘Ulama on Hajj Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..68 The “Inner Lives” of Scholar-Pilgrims………………………………………………………70 Movements of the New ‘Ulama……………………………………………………………...72 An All-India ‘Ulama…………………………………………………………………………82 Scholar, Qāzī, Revivalist: A Career in Thatta, Sind…………………………………………86 The Intellectual as Pilgrim……………………………………………………………….......96 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….108 Chapter 3. The Hajj and the Hindi Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………111 The View from Istanbul…………………………………………………………………….115 Locations of “Hindi”...……………………………………………………………………...119 Death and Diplomacy at the Horhor Hindi Lodge………………………………………….129 Indian Sufis as Ottoman Subjects…………………………………………………………..135 The Sublime Porte, the Provinces, and the Politics of Itinerant Piety……………………...137 Networks of the Sultan’s Supplicants, or the Writ Regimes of Corporate Sufism…………143 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….151 Chapter 4: John Company and the Hajjis Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………158 Two Routes to the Early Colonial Hajj……………………………………………………..158 Colonial Crossings: From the Bazaar Economy to a Begum’s Letter……………………...162 Patronage by other Means: The Hajj as Political Maneuver………………………………..171 ix