Maulana Jafer Thanesri As a Mutiny Convict Seema Alavi Profess

Preliminary draft paper not to be cited Travel & the Nation: Maulana Jafer Thanesri as a mutiny convict Seema Alavi Professor, Dept. of History & Culture Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi Introduction This paper argues that the history of the mutiny has been largely written within the contours of the anti-colonial, secular-nation state. This has resulted in the marginalization of the histories of people who culled their sense of proto-nationalism from both a colonial as well as an Islamic discursive frame. Such omissions in the historiography of the mutiny and the struggle for freedom from British rule that followed have created the binaries of revivalist and reformist, cosmopolitan and religious, progressive and jihadi, communal and nationalist in the historical studies of the later period that was marked by high nationalism. This paper focuses on a mujahid- Maulana Jafer Thanesri (1838-1905) - who spent 18 years at the penal colony in the Andaman Island for his activities during 1857 1. It discusses two texts that he wrote after his release from the Andamans- the Tawarikh-i- Ajaib ( The Histories of the Wondrous) and the Sawaneh Ahmadi (Biography of Syed Ahmed Shahid of Rae Bareily) to understand how his sense of belonging changed as a consequence of his movement across the country as a mutiny convict. Thanesri’s sense of Self was transformed as a consequence of his experience of repression in the post mutiny decade. His writings reveal that 1857 precipitated for him a specific conjuncture that located him at the cusp of two global Empires: the Islamic imaginary and the Western ‘colonial’. The paper shows how the two apparently distinct worlds combined to 1 See the essay of Satadru Sen, ‘No Place like home:Maulana Thanesari in the Andaman Islands’ . Sen looks at the experience of Thanesri more from the sociological point of view: The impact of labour in the penal colony on his professional career and social standing and the re-configurations of family and domesticity. constitute Thanesri’s sense of Self. This made him straddle both the markers of a proto- nation and Islamic particularism with remarkable ease. Careers of mujahid convicts like Thanesri thus offer some rethink on the binaries of ‘nationalist’, ‘communalist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ that color our understanding of nation and nationalism. The Argument This paper concentrates first on the idea of travel and the nation: Travel of men of religion-defined erroneously as Wahabis by the British in the early 19 th century-across Hindustan and to and fro from Yemen and South East Asia pre-dates colonialism 2. The British crack down on such men in the 1820s only intensified their movement across India –especially from Bengal to the new resistance areas in the North-West regions and Afghanistan. But the mutiny-rebellion of 1857 introduced a new element in this movement. It created a category of a ‘mujahid wahabi convict’-a marked colonial subject who now moved under the aegis of an administratively defined colonial ambit. The mutiny-rebellion of 1857 is a very significant episode because it entails unprecedented movement of people across the length and breadth of India, and also abroad: marching brigades of Sepoys and rebel leaders that leave their parent villages and cantonments, deportations of convicts to the penal colony of Andaman, and the flight to Arabia and other parts of the Muslim world of those trying to escape the arm of law in the years that followed the mutiny. I explain how this extraordinary scale of travel via the networks laid out by the colonial state affected the sense of belonging experienced by men like Thanesri as the mutiny years brought them at the cross-roads of two world class Empires: the Islamic and the British. I argue that this critical juncture precipitated by the mutiny shaped the idea of a proto nation. This articulation of nation had a hitherto undefined wider geographical and cultural ambit, it was tied inextricably to Islamic beliefs and practices, and it was politically drawn and racially envisaged much before the launching of the politics of the Indian National Congress that is said to have crystallized such contours. The mass scale movement of people precipitated by the mutiny had been made possible by the expanded networks of communication that colonial rule had made possible particularly in the years immediately following the mutiny: the railways, roads, 2 Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim river and sea travel, telegraph, dak system, printing press, hierarchy of legal courts to which people leaned for help, police and military commissariat, jails, colonial daftars between which local scribes-munshis- moved, and of course the transportation of convicts to penal colonies in far away islands like the Andamans. The colonial administrative infra-structure that sustained the rhetoric of ‘rule of law’ and ‘public order’ facilitated long distance travel. This concretized and made real for many ideas of the ‘nation’ and the ‘global’ which had so far remained narrowly defined or confined to an imaginary. The former was concretized in the emergence, perhaps for the first time, of the idea of a proto ‘nation’ which meant something more than immediate locality and the patrimonial agrarian patriotism of the early 19 th century. This idea of a sense of belonging that spilt put of the immediate confine of locality was culled out of the British administrative and legal framework –sarkari amaldari - and its claims to uphold a just society where the rule of law prevailed. This pan India discursive frame and its rhetoric of the ‘rule of law’ rubbed on the everyday lives of people even if it did not always improve their lives. It colored transactions that ranged from employment opportunities in the army, lower level clerical jobs in colonial offices, courts of law, payment of taxes, to travel, law and order problems, redress of social and inheritance grievances etc. Even if people were not transferred across the country, such jobs created an awareness that similar offices and opportunities existed for people across the length and breadth of the sarkari amaldari . Both the praise for the functioning of this colonial marked edifice as well as the critique of its non- functioning served to reinforce the idea of the individual being part of a proto-nation as carved out by the administrative frame of the colonial state. However, this proto-nation had an Islamic moral and spiritual framing. For that was the only way in which the atrocities that were committed under its aegis and the hollowness of some of its claims were made comprehensible to Muslim men of religion. Thus the idea of nation was from its very nascent stage tied inextricably to that of an Islamic system of beliefs and practices. It was a particularistic proto-nation that blurred the boundaries of religion and territorial belonging until the politics of the Indian National Congress introduced the categories of the ‘nationalist’ and ‘communalist’ and injected it with fresh inducements. Second, travel and transportation across large areas ensured the experience of different geographical and linguistic regions, and introduced the idea of belonging to not just a wider territorial confine, but also to one that was culturally diverse. It burst the bubble of the supremacy of any one language or culture that the relatively sedentary life styles of the early colonial period had created. At the same time the anti-colonial fervor of the mutiny years that triggered most travel, gave this more embracive concept of belonging a distinct political hue. This political profile was defined ironically in opposition to the very colonial state that had made its realization possible in the first instance. Thirdly, a racial envisaging of this geographo-politico belonging began particularly after the mutiny when state policies discriminated against people of color. Indians were critical that discrimination along lines of class, with which they had little issue, was being substituted by new referents of race and color. They grudgingly, realized that their sense of geographical and political belonging also had racial underpinnings. They complained about discrimination on grounds of skin color that they felt represented their way of life. Thus they defined themselves against not just the pure Englishmen, but also vis-à-vis to those of mixed race-Eurasians -and the anglicized natives. The physicality which colonialism provided to the Islamic global imaginary was more complex. At one level colonialism with its print capitalism, and greater opportunities of travel across sea and land, wider networks of communication, facilitated travel and access to Muslim cultures and made the Islamic imaginary physically real at least for the privileged. But this physicality also brought home the reality that the global so far envisaged as the Empire of Islam had given way to the Western dominated global. This invoked envy as well as the urge to access this novo global Empire that corresponded in terms of its sheer scale and political influence to the Islamic imaginary. The fact that this Empire was ‘colonial’ of course created its own dynamics for the Muslims. But their take on it was derived also from the ambivalence in their minds between an Islamic global imaginary and the reality of life within its successor –the mid 19 th century western Empire with its control on capital and culture. Interestingly, the colonial infra-structural and intellectual grid, along with its legal vocabulary, English language and political rhetoric was used both to access this new Empire as well as to contest it. Out of this ambivalence what emerged as the clear winner was an Islamic identity that was culled from within the networks of colonial rule, rooted in the spiritual and moral frame of Islam, and politically stoked by the rehabilitation through the print media of early mujahids like Syed Ahmed Shahid and their tarika Muhamadiya (Muhamedan path) that was a global phenomenon.

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