South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

Free-Standing Articles | 2012

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4987 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.4987 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Shah Shuja’s ‘Hidden History’ and its Implications for the Historiography of Shah Mahmoud Hanif

Thinking beyond Secularism: The Catholic Church and Political Practice in Rural South India Aparna Sundar

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Shah Shuja’s ‘Hidden History’ and its Implications for the Historiography of Afghanistan

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

Introduction: Locating Shuja in the first Anglo- war and in the context of the Pashtun domination hypothesis

1 The first Anglo-Afghan war of 1839-1842 sets the stage for this examination of Shah Shuja, and the large volume of literature on the war itself requires attention before we can turn to the Afghan monarch who is most intimately associated with the catastrophic colonial failure in Pashtun dominated Afghanistan. The first Anglo-Afghan war is well documented yet poorly understood. It is well documented from the diplomatic and military perspectives, but questions still remain about what is generally viewed as the most consequential defeat suffered by colonial forces in the history of the British Empire.

2 Sir John William Kaye (1854) produced the first substantive treatment of the Afghan disaster and he located blame with the Governor General Lord Auckland and his circle of advisors. Subsequent authorities on the subject have in various ways exonerated Auckland (Norris 1967) and focused more attention on and the Political Agency System he represents (Yapp 1962, 1963, 1964, 1980: 307-460). Some writers have drawn attention to the failure of the colonial communication networks in their own right and in relation to indigenous forms of information circulation (Bayly 1996: 128-140, Iqbal 1975), others point to Anglo-Sikh relations (Hasrat 1959, 1968), while still others have drawn attention to the failure of supply lines (McMunn 1977: 125). There are multiple first-hand accounts by British Indian soldiers and administrators that provide extensive information about the constitution of military units, routing and transportation issues, and the multiple battles that occurred at

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various stages of the war (Gould & Chadwick 1880, Greenwood 1844, Gupta 1987, Haughton 1879, Stocqueler 1983). Students also benefit from considerable literature on the fateful final march of Army of the Indus from the cantonments through its destruction at Jagdalak and final demise at Gandamak (de Wend 1915, L. Dupree 1976, Macrory 1966). One also finds a good deal of attention to the Company Surgeon Dr. William Brydon who was the sole survivor of that fateful march (Trousdale 1983), and the plight of British captives including Lady Sale in Bamiyan (Sale 2002), as well as the siege of and its defense by General (N. Dupree 1975a, 1975b, Trousdale 1983). We have a large volume of writings about the British Army of Retribution led by Sir George Pollock wherein the contributions of Robert Sale and Sir (Kekewich 2011, Nott & Stocqueler 1854) are prominent. There is a postal history of the war (Martin 1964) and biographies from a number of participants, including the American Quaker Josiah Harlan (Macintyre 2005). 3 In addition to the multiple general historical analyses (Durand 2000, Forbes 1892: 1-157, Hay 1911, Morris 1878), the war was reintroduced in the United Kingdom in 1969 through the historical fiction genre with George Macdonald Fraser’s novel that became the first in a popular twelve-volume series (Fraser 2005). Roughly thirty years later in the United States John Waller’s (1990) Beyond the Khyber also garnered a good deal of notoriety. The first Anglo-Afghan war received heightened attention after 11 September 2011 with a large number of American and British academics, policy makers, journalists, amateur historians, and web-based writers and cartographers generating another rich layer of information about this important conflict (Andovski 2010, Fremont-Barnes 2009, Johnson 2011, Loyn 2009, O’Ballance 2002: 1-28, Tanner 2002: 136-201, Fibis Wiki website). 4 Looking at these rich and diverse fields of literature on the first Anglo-Afghan war it is clear the conflict has been revisited by a large number of writers in each country involved in subsequent conflicts. Each cycle of writings appears to largely reproduce and repackage without substantial alteration a master historical narrative superimposed over the abysmal loss of the Army of the Indus that jeopardized the fiscal buoyancy of British East India Company rule in India and triggered events leading to the Great Indian Mutiny in 1857.2 The master narrative can be outlined as follows. British geo-political concerns with Russian imperial ambitions led to an ill-advised and poorly executed extension of British military power in the Hindu Kush in the summer of 1839.

Figure 1: Shah Shuja’s Qandahar Coronation, 18393

British Library Online Collection

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5 The poorly conceived occupation met its almost predictable end due to the treachery of the erstwhile Afghan ally, Akbar Khan, and the unexpected assassinations of its key leaders, William Macnaghten and Alexander Burnes, in November of 1841. In January of 1842 the occupation army, deprived of regular supplies and under the incompetent leadership of William Elphinstone, took the disastrous decision to escape Kabul and was massacred en route to Jalalabad.

Figure 2: General William Elphinstone’s final resting place, Jalalabad, 18784

British Library Online Collection

6 An Army of Retribution was organized later that year. Beyond its own ample resources the Army of Retribution coordinated the remaining forces under siege in Jalalabad and Qandahar in order to rescue the British captives in Bamiyan and destroy the spectacular Mughal covered bazaar in Kabul as a demonstration of reconstituted colonial authority.

Figure 3: Jagdalak, 18425, British Library Online Collection

British Library Online Collection

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Figure 4: Jagdalak, 18796

British Library Online Collection

7 A version of that narrative appears in all English language writings, and among the most prominent common denominators within the first Anglo-Afghan war literature is the attention given to the circulating monarchs Shah Shuja (r. 1803-1809 and 1839-1842) and Dost Muhammad (r. 1826-1839 and 1842-1863).

Figure 5: Shah Shuja Durbar, Diwan-e Am, Bala Hissar, Kabul, 18397

British Library Online Collection

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Figure 6: Shah Shuja Durbar, Diwan-e Am, Bala Hissar, Kabul, 18398

British Library Online Collection

Figure 7: Diwan-e Am, Bala Hissar, Kabul, 18399

British Library Online Collection

8 Shuja is the Afghan ruler who in 1809 received the first British emissary to the Kabul Kingdom, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and who thirty years later in 1839 was repatriated by the Army of the Indus and then met his fate with it. Dost Muhammad is the Afghan ruler who surrendered to the British at the beginning of the war and returned to power after it was over.10

Figure 8: Dost Mohammad Surrenduring to Macnaghten, 184011

British Library Online Collection

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Figure 9: Dost Mohammed in in British Custody, 184112

British Library Online Collection

9 Just as the master narrative of the first Anglo-Afghan war tends to elide its significant long-term economic impact on the Afghan economy, the master narrative of modern Afghanistan as a whole is woven around the theme of Pashtun domination.13 Without the space here to survey all of the literature on modern Afghanistan, it would be very difficult to argue the prominent theme of Pashtun domination of Afghanistan does not unify large, diverse, and growing sets of writings on the country. The most fundamental problem with the predicate of Pashtun domination of Afghanistan is that it is not explained beyond reference to tribal genealogies that, in keeping with short order thinking about the country and its people, are not interrogated as either historical texts or frameworks for political action. In this hasty reasoning manner Shah Shuja is accepted as a Pashtun because he is the grandson of the founder of the Afghan state Ahmad Shah who is portrayed as a Pashtun, but again conspicuously not demonstrated to be one.14 Mutatis mutandis Dost Mohammad becomes merely a ‘rival cousin’ who steps back into a stable framework of Pashtun domination of the Afghan state after the Shuja’s demise. So the master narrative of Pashtun domination imposes a view of the multiple reigns of Shah Shuja and Dost Mohammad and of the first Anglo- Afghan war more generally as simply a slight shift between from the Saddozay tribal lineage to the genealogical branch of who continued to dominate the Afghan state structure until the Revolution of 1978. Even through the transformative convulsions of invasions and war characterizing the last thirty plus years, the master narrative still dictates that Afghanistan be seen as a problem resulting from violent conflict inherent among Pashtun communities who are by nature hostile to other local tribal and ethnic groups congenitally predisposed to reject democracy, development and modernity.

10 It is very hard to follow the logic of how Pashtuns, who are allegedly unable to organize themselves at the state level, can use that very ‘failed state’ in Afghanistan to dominate anything, let alone other Pashtuns who are said, often in the same breath, to be indomitable. For present purposes, without detailing all of the problematic aspects and unsustainable tenets of the Pashtun domination thesis, it must be emphasized that it requires its consumers to fundamentally suspend their consideration of the realities of internal diversity among Pashtun, the many kinds and degrees of exposures Pashtuns have to non-Pashtuns and the outer non-Pashtun world, as well as the powerful influence of the Persian language on Pashtuns and in the Afghan state structure.15 The

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purpose of this article is to explore Shah Shuja’s biography with questions about Pashtun domination and the constitutive and sustained colonial impact on Afghanistan in mind.

Elphinstone’s mission and Shuja’s flight from Peshawar, 1809

11 Mountstuart Elphinstone is perhaps best known for his administrative service to the British East India Company (hereafter BEIC) as Governor of the Bombay Presidency (1819-1827) and Resident at Poona (1811-1817). Elphinstone is also very well known for his ‘Minute on Education’ (1824) and arguably famous for his History of India: The Hindu and Mohametan Periods (1841) that became a staple of Victorian Age reading. Less widely known aspects of Elphinstone’s life assume the highest significance as foundational elements of Afghanistan Studies and indeed Afghanistan itself. The referent here is Elphinstone’s inaugural British diplomatic mission (1808-1810) to the reigning King of Kabul who was then Shah Shuja, and the publication resulting from that delegation titled An Account of The Kingdom of Caubul (1992).

12 Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt triggered Lord Minto, the Governor General of the BEIC, to dispatch diplomatic envoys to the rulers of Persia, Kabul, and the Punjab that were intended to secure mutual defense treaties in the event of an overland French invasion of India. These were all very extensive and impressive mobile embassies and scientific laboratories. John Malcolm led the mission to Persia, Charles Metcalfe was in charge of the delegation to Maharaja Ranjit Singh in , and Elphinstone led the mission to the Kingdom of Kabul.16 Elphinstone’s mission was composed of at least 13 additional British officers, 4000 (combined) infantry and cavalry troops, 600 camels, 13 elephants and in total as a single column stretched nearly two miles.17 Elphinstone and his large retinue left Delhi in October or November of 1808 and in February 1809 arrived in Peshawar, a city Shuja considered the winter capital of his Kabul Kingdom. The most harrowing episode on the nearly four-month and 500-mile long journey was the near demise of the mission due to lack of water in the Rajasthan desert. Elphinstone achieved the goal of a BEIC treaty with the ruler of Kabul. He and Shuja signed a treaty the very day the mission departed from Peshawar, 14 April 1809. The treaty was ratified by Lord Minto on 14 June.18 13 Elphinstone’s diplomatic and scientific caravan returned to Delhi in September 1809 and was disbanded in June 1810, the interim period being dedicated to preparation of the mission’s final report.19 Portions of the report were published in 1815 in a book form as An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul that was twice reprinted in 1839 and 1842 for military and public reference in the context of the first Anglo-Afghan war. Elphinstone and his delegation were charged with producing an original and encyclopaedic reference work about the Kingdom of Kabul and its dependencies through their own scientific research. In large measure the scientific investigations performed by the British officers including Elphinstone were predicated on harvesting information from local informants, some of whom such as a nephew of Sayyid Muhin Shah were paid a ‘handful of money for answering a few questions’ while others were commissioned to undertake more elaborate ethnographic inquiries, for example Rs. 50 per month to one Mulla Najib contracted to gather linguistic and other data about the Siah Posh communities in Kafiristan.20 Although it is unclear precisely who and to what extent

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others beyond Elphinstone contributed to An Account that bears his name, the book is the first substantive British Indian publication dedicated to Afghanistan and it remains arguably the most important English language text about the country.21 14 Archival records reveal that while in Peshawar meeting with the Kabul King and gathering materials for his report, Elphinstone and other members of his delegation were receiving both local first-hand information about the rapid demise of his host’s position as Shah and communications from Shuja’s usurper and half-brother Mahmoud.22 While in Peshawar Elphinstone singularly received multiple letters from his superiors conveying intelligence about Shuja’s precarious position proffered by advocates of Mahmoud (a half-brother of Shuja who like Shuja and Dost Muhammad had to reign) now lobbying the British in Delhi. These mailings concerned protocol details about how various levels of the BEIC hierarchy and their clients/dependents in the Mughal court planned to formally receive and treat these Afghans who were opposed to Shuja, and what actually occurred during those communications and interactions. The decision whether or not to inform Shuja about the activities of opposition parties to his rule in Delhi with British officials and Mughal intercessors was left to Elphinstone. 15 Shuja was in fact displaced as the ruler of Kabul by Mahmoud while Elphinstone was still in Peshawar. Elphinstone and his superiors were fully aware of Shuja’s rapid loss of political buoyancy and knew they were signing a treaty with a defunct regime. As noted above, immediately after securing Shuja’s signature on the treaty Elphinstone and his delegation began their return to Delhi. Roughly 80 miles from Peshawar at Hassan Abdal, shortly after crossing the Indus, Elphinstone was overtaken by Shuja’s zenana or harem of at least seven known wives and an unknown number of concubines and dependents who were desperately fleeing Peshawar for Delhi while Shuja himself tried to elude his usurpers and escape Peshawar.23 16 As a known fugitive or refugee with British contacts Shuja still represented an important variable in local and regional political dynamics and as such he became a useful pawn after his displacement from Peshawar and the Kabul throne. For approximately five years after he and Elphinstone signed the treaty and parted company Shuja was on the run. During this time he appears to have been trying to make his way to British India to join his wives but such a reunion would not be immediate. Instead Shuja was symbolically hosted but practically imprisoned by rivals who might later become allies, and visa versa, at least three times including confinements in Attock (c. 1811-1812), Kashmir (c. 1812-1813) and most significantly for us in Lahore by Maharaja Ranjit Singh between roughly 1813 and 1815.24

Activities of Shuja’s wife Wafa Begum culminating in the permanent pension for Shuja and his household, 1809-1816

17 It is unclear precisely what happened to Shuja’s zenana after passing Elphinstone on the road from Peshawar in the spring of 1809, but the harem caravan was destined for British India. By late summer or early fall British officials were discussing which account to charge when presenting Wafa Begum with a gift of Rs. 1,000 and how much it would cost for Shuja’s favored wife and her followers to live ‘comfortably and

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decently.’25 Wafa Begum did not immediately settle in any single location in British India, instead she appears to be trying to reconnect with Shuja who as indicated was detained in various locations between his former dominions and British India after exiting Peshawar.

18 By late 1812 Wafa Begum was in touch with British officials to solicit their assistance in securing the release of some of her relatives, but apparently not Shuja, from the custody of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.26 This prompted a flurry of colonial communications in anticipation of her arrival in British India. The BEIC concluded that despite the ‘inconvenience, embarrassment, distaste, disutility, expense and regret’ of an ‘unavoidable scenario’ her ‘rank and calamities’ would ultimately dictate ‘granting her asylum, dignity and respect.’27 At this time the British were not considering a permanent pension or provisions for Wafa Begum and wanted it made crystal clear to ‘her and any other females’ that while in British India they can give absolutely no ‘aid or protection to any male branches of the family or any of the numerous dependents and followers.’28 It is noteworthy that to convey their intended messages the British used direct written and oral communications with Wafa Begum as well as local newspapers in Lahore (at least) to publicly broadcast their position regarding displaced Kabul royalty.29 19 By the summer of 1813 Ranjit Singh had taken possession of Shuja the person and, apparently of more importance to the Maharaja, the famous Koh-i Nur diamond Elpinstone saw adorning the former Kabul ruler’s elbow bracelet.30 The BEIC believed Shuja would soon be released and that both he and ‘his queen’ would make their way to British India. The British had been expecting to receive Wafa Begum for years and colonial authorities were prepared to tolerate her presence in their territory, but they were increasingly adamant that all possible steps be taken directly and through intermediaries to ‘dissuade, discourage and resist’ Shuja’s presence that would be ‘infinitely more troubling’ than his wife’s.31 The inevitable negotiations with both Shuja and Wafa Begum required ‘all the talents and reserves’ of the BEIC Resident in Delhi, who was then the aforementioned Charles Metcalfe, with David Ochterlony assuming the post subsequently. 20 Ochterlony was positioned in and around Ludhiana and Karnaul that were two likely destinations of asylum-seeking Afghan elites given the precedents of the Afghan monarch Shah Zaman (1770-1844). Zaman reigned in Kabul between 1793 and 1800 when he was deposed and blinded by Mahmoud. Zaman appears to be the first Afghan elite to be granted a British pension in Ludhiana in 1801.32 Elphinstone met him when returning from Peshawar and encountering Shuja’s speeding harem at Hassan Abdal in 1809 (see above). Zaman, Mahmoud and Shuja were all half-brothers sharing as their father Timur Shah (r. 1773-1793) who was the son and successor of the Afghan empire’s founder, namely, Ahmad Shah (r. 1747-1773). 21 Ahmad Shah was born in Multan in 1722 and in the spring of 1815 Wafa Begum was petitioning the British to leverage Ranjit for the release of Shuja so that they two could be reunited there in what might have been viewed as an ancestral homeland among many homelands.33 Records indicate the primary British concern was how various potentialities of receiving Shuja and his household at any location or communicating with him in any formal capacity would impact the BEIC relationship with the emerging Sikh empire of Ranjit Singh. The mutual defense treaty Charles Metcalfe failed to secure was likely a primary source of this institutional preoccupation. That conjecture

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notwithstanding, in August 1815 the BEIC rendered it prudent to grant Wafa Begum a pension of Rs. 1,500 per month.34 22 What exactly transpired over the next year is unclear, but in September 1816 the British decided to grant Shuja an annual pension of Rs. 50,000.35 This figure was inclusive of all previous arrangements with his dependents including Wafa Begum and remained valid while he and his household remained under British jurisdiction. When Lieutenant Murray was sent to convey the terms of this pension to Shuja in October he reported that the ex-King of Kabul ‘who spoke good but soft and low Persian… considered himself at home’ with those arrangements.36 Murray provided details about the precise statements, spatial movements, physical gestures, and material exchanges comprising this encounter. In Murray’s descriptions the heavily influential role of Shuja’s Persian-speaking ‘confidante and preceptor’ Mullah Shakur Ishakzai is most noticeable. As the -e azam or chief minister and the usual go-between for Shuja in written and oral communications with his British patrons, his wife Wafa Begum, his onetime captor and would-be ally Ranjit Singh, Hindu bankers from Shikarpur, and the Sind Amirs, Mullah Shakur was clearly the most influential member of Shuja’s small inner circle of confidantes. 23 Between November 1816 and July 1817 Murray and Mullah Shakur communicated and interacted extensively.37 Murray was stationed in Ludhiana and his duties appear to revolve exclusively around the pensioned ex-king. The day after his first introduction Murray received written requests from Mullah Shakur regarding Shuja’s desired appropriation of one of three residences already occupied by British officers in the vicinity of Wafa Begum’s recently acquired domicile. Communication ensued about those three and additional possible residences for Shuja alone, alternative homes for both Shuja and Wafa Begum, and about the technical prospects and estimated costs of potentially closing public roads to make private passages between separate residences. From records examined in Lahore it is unclear precisely where Shuja and Wafa were finally situated, or if one or both of them ever changed or shared residences while in Ludhiana. What is clear is that privacy was a primary concern of Shuja’s, and Mullah Shakur repeatedly complained to Murray about that value being compromised by passersby mounted on elephants.38 24 The concentration of records for the approximate eight-month period after Shuja was granted his pension reveal features of communicative practice on each side of this asymmetrical relationship. From the British Indian vantage point it was essential to disassociate themselves from their client’s expressed aspirations to recover the Kabul throne.39 But of course this particular position with reference to Shuja was destabilized by the British pension that entailed a number of widely publicly known components of their material support beyond the mere physical location of complimentary and complementary residences. To help sooth the tension between the theory and practice of their policy toward Shuja, Murray was instructed to disseminate official positions and refutations of ‘bazaar rumor’ via local news writers, their publications and the conversations those texts produced. 25 Some of the challenges the British had with reference to Shuja came from the ousted dynast’s own camp which tried to generate a robust public rendition of colonial patronage via its own networks of local communication that were never fully captured by British. In this information battle Mullah Shakur was repeatedly chastised by Murray for a number of communicative missteps and oversteps. One of the issues of

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contention was the circulation of alleged forgeries of correspondence between Shuja’s zenana and the British that jeopardized the pension itself. 40 This episode reveals targeted messaging and disinformation campaigns waged between Shuja and the British were triangulated through the relatively independent agencies of Wafa Begum personally and the zenana generally. 26 Armed horsemen comprise the final principal subject area addressed in the cache of archival documents generated in the months following the implementation of Shuja’s pension. The British characterized the approximate 4,000 horsemen in Shuja’s entourage as ‘unfortunate, presumptuous, and rapacious’ and note it was legal for them to be carrying away Shuja’s property in lieu of pay while migrating to an alternative center of Afghan political gravity in Karnaul.41 To replace this growing deficit among his retainer corps Shuja tried with little success to hire the ‘Hindustani’ horsemen he was fond of hunting with in daylight hours for night-time watch duty.42 The hiring of non-Afghan Hindustani military labor was contentious because of Shuja’s declared intention to recapture what he termed wilayat with the support of the wilayatis who still remained loyal to him.43 The point of friction was that Shuja had only the pension as income and the pension itself could not be used for purposes at odds with official British policy that in this case was not to support his desire to recapture Kabul. The issues relating to Shuja’s armed retainers were amplified by discrepancies in the amounts and modes of payment of the pension. These quandaries were particularly acute during the early transition months after Shuja was deemed to receive Rs. 50,000 annually which as noted subsumed Wafa Begum’s previously granted Rs. 1,500 monthly pension.44 27 The cumulative impact these issues entailed for his emerging relationship with the British apparently depressed Shuja to the extent that he expressed a desire to visit the ziarat or shrine of his spiritual ancestor, the Naqshbandi Sufi Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (c. 1564-1624), known as the mujaddid-i alf-i thani or the Renewer of the Second Millennium.45 Murray discouraged this request for spiritual relief that in symbolic terms at least would have made the pension appear more like a prison to Shuja.

Shuja’s failed attempt to recapture Kabul, household defections and education, 1832-1836

28 The second bundle of archival material for Shuja is from the 1830s and contextualized by the BEIC desire to ‘open up the Indus River for commercial navigation […] just as Alexander had planned two millennia ago.’46 The colonial plan for the Indus culminated in the Army of the Indus that ultimately evaporated on retreat from Kabul in January 1842. The Indus Navigation Project represented and underwrote the Army of the Indus. 47 The Indus Navigation Project was informed by a scientific understanding of dyadic fiscal, physical and temporal relations between the markets of Kabul in the Hindu Kush and the hypothesized but never realized port market of Mithenkote that was to be situated near the conflux of the five rivers of the Punjab. The Indus Navigation Project was predicated on an over-confidence in the prospects of modern technology to surmount nature by dredging the Indus and eliminating its floods, thus allowing for the construction of an inland port at Mithenkote that could be serviced by specially configured flat-bottomed steamships from Europe on the one hand and Afghan nomadic traders and their camels routed from Kabul on the other.48 To be realized the

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Indus Navigation Project required the cooperation of Ranjit Singh and a compliant ruler in Kabul, thus the collusion between Ranjit, Shuja and the British in the Tripartite Treaty of 1839 sanctioning the formation and actions of the ill-fated Indus Army that is the normative historiographic focus of the first Anglo-Afghan war.49 What is of interest here is Shuja’s earlier similarly unsuccessful attempt to re-capture Kabul made between 1832-34 without overt public political endorsement or military support from the BEIC.50

29 Even before his British pension began in 1816 Shuja wrote multiple letters to Elphinstone to seek assistance in reclaiming Kabul.51 Toward that end during the 1820s Shuja continued writing to lobby his cause with Elphinstone and increasingly influential colonial officials, ever more residual Mughal elites, and his former captor Ranjit Singh. By the early 1830s the BEIC had begun to survey the Indus and to calibrate the colonial commercial and political agenda around Kabul in opposition to Russian imperial expansion in Central Asia. It is important to note the chronological overlap between the Indus Navigation Project and colonial fantasizing about Mithkenkote on the one hand and Shuja’s first failed attempt to re-conquer Kabul on the other. After considerable effort Shuja was able to gain a four-month advance on his monthly pension from the BEIC and in early 1832 he set out from Ludhiana for Kabul via the southern Shikarpur-Qandahar route.52 Most of the northerly trajectory from Ludhiana to Kabul via the Punjab and Peshawar was under the control of Ranjit Singh. Shuja and Ranjit had reached a ‘pincer movement’ agreement against the reigning Amir of Kabul, Dost Mohammad, with Shuja to reclaim his old throne in Kabul and Ranjit to take Peshawar. The BEIC sanctioned this plan, however informally or surreptitiously, through at least the lack of opposition to it.53 30 Shuja’s expedition expected but ultimately failed to generate momentum in fiscal and physical terms as it moved from Ludhiana toward Kabul.54 The keys to being able to pay for the mobile and growing army necessary to capture Kabul were to secure the financial hub of Shikarpur and the support of Shikarpuri financiers, in either chronological order. Shuja encountered financial difficulties soon after leaving Ludhiana. To pay for his troops and their various support personnel including craftsmen and merchants before reaching Shikarpur Shuja had to mortgage some of his property and borrow against his British pension from Indian bankers that accompanied his army.55 Despite these financial challenges Shuja managed to retain his European advisors and at this still formative stage in early 1833 his army and intentions were consequential enough to generate correspondence with Dost Mohammad and his brothers who served as vice regents in Peshawar and Qandahar.56 Shikarpur had been vacated and his troops occupied a financial center emptied of treasure, but by seizing the city Shuja appears to have increased his threat level in the eyes of Dost Mohammad who wrote to him in May in somewhat conciliatory terms offering a son as a hostage and a reinstatement of some of Shuja’s former titles and privileges if the expedition were terminated.57 31 This letter had no effect on his plans and Shuja’s army left Shikarpur for Qandahar via Sind in early 1834. During this movement Shuja resolved tension with the Sind Amirs resulting from his extortion of an untold amount of rupees from the financiers of Shikarpur who eventually repopulated the city. Shuja captured Qandahar in March 1834.58 The occupation of Qandahar was quite brief, despite a large body of Dost Mohammad’s forces dispatched to relieve Shuja’s siege of the Qandahar citadel having been redirected toward Peshawar after that city was taken by the forces of Ranjit Singh.

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The increasing number of defections among Shuja’s forces during the siege of the citadel led to the disbandment of his consistently fiscally tenuous expedition. With his plans rapidly unraveling Shuja feigned an escape to only to make a return to his safe haven in Ludhiana through the still relatively friendly terrain controlled by the Amirs of Sind. 32 During this return flight to British India Shuja communicated with the Sind Amirs about monetary losses he suffered from the approximately 500 Sindi horsemen who offered their services to him but were rejected and then absconded leaving a Rs. 500 debt to the bankers in his camp.59 The still ex-King of Kabul appears to have ended his reconquest expedition in the summer of 1834 with the mortgaging of personal property that mirrors how the unsuccessful foray began nearly two and a half years earlier. The mortgaging incident that occurred on return to Ludhiana involved the disappearance of the finance minister Shuja employed on this expedition, the Shikarpuri Hindu Lala Jeth Mal, who was said to be in unwarranted possession of property valued at Rs. 50,000 being held as loan collateral.60 Correspondence with the Sind Amirs and BEIC officials including Elphinstone directly, indirectly through Mulla Shakur, and via letters delivered by runners led to the return of the goods in question that included an illuminated Quran, a jeweled battle axe and a telescope. In these communications that lasted until at least the summer of 1835 Shuja and Mulla Shakur tried to emphasize the expedition was not defeated by its opposition, but rather failed merely for want of money.61 In terms of cost it was noted that sieges such as that in Qandahar are particularly expensive and that Shuja’s army required one lakh or Rs. 1,00,000 per month to be properly maintained. 33 Shuja’s defeat had a number of important and arguably predictable ramifications on his household affairs in Ludhiana. These include apparent defections of important members of his family, most notably his eldest son Timur on more than one occasion. In December 1835 Timur entered British records for being abandoned by his servants on one of his escapes, and then managing to borrow money that he could not repay against his father’s pension.62 34 Archival reference to schools and education during the 1830s are most consequential for us because they speak to planning for a prolonged stay of Afghan elite pensioners and their dependents in Ludhiana and elsewhere in British India. Both pensioned former Shah’s of Kabul, namely Zaman and Shuja, established schools for their dependents. Zaman established a school with a combined Arabic and Persian curriculum and Shuja a school that operated only on the Persian model. In approximately July 1836 the pensioners began to petition the British for more funds to purchase books or for gratis texts for these schools. It is unclear from the materials consulted precisely when schools sprung up within the Afghan community in Ludhiana, but by the summer of 1836 there were approximately 3000 school age males enrolled in Zaman’s and Shuja’s schools.63 35 Schools run by Afghans in Ludhiana must be seen in relation to the schools run by the British in that city and elsewhere. The school organized under the direction of the influential political agent in Ludhiana, Claude Wade, had in 1834 attracted the attention of a key local intelligence provider and logistical ally in Kabul for the British, Nawab Jabar Khan who was an elder half-brother of Dost Mohammad. Nawab Jabar Khan had to arrange for the secret escape of his son Abd al-Ghias Khan out of Kabul to attend Wade’s school in Ludhiana. Once there, Abd al-Ghias received a monthly British

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scholarship/pension of Rs. 100 per month. This was apparently insufficient and just like Shuja’s son Timur so too did Abd al-Ghias run away and accrue large debts on the open market.64 For colonial officials these actions only served to complicate the presence of their Afghan clients in British India. 36 Full attention to competing schools and the politics of education more broadly among Afghan refugees, exiles and pensioners in British India is beyond the scope this paper. The subject of education nevertheless is a reminder that we are discussing a community of Afghans composed primarily of exiled and pensioned former elites that numbered in the multiple thousands in Ludhiana in the 1830s. The historical trend for Afghans to seek education in India continued, and today Afghans are the largest population of foreign students in India, with ’s Master’s Degree from Simla University in 1983 being a notable example of that long-standing pattern of Afghan intellectual migration to the subcontinent. Beyond intellectual migration, Shah Shuja’s inter-regnal years as a pensioner in Ludhiana draw attention to other forms of movement and circulation between Afghanistan and India including military and commercial migrations, as well as spiritual pilgrimages.

Conclusion: unlearning and relearning Afghanistan through Shah Shuja

37 The variety and constancy of migrations between Afghanistan and India is an important historical theme evinced by Shah Shuja’s biography. The patterns of migration between Afghanistan and India vary by theme (e.g., secular or religious learning, commerce, politics), through multiple historical areas (e.g., pre-Islamic, early Islamic, Mughal, colonial) and across different cultural and spatial geographies and circuitries (e.g., Bamian-Gandhara, -Lahore, Kabul-Delhi, Qandahar-Karachi). During Shuja’s lifespan the lucrative provinces of Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir fell away from Kabul’s sway and rival centers of political gravity such as Herat, Peshawar and Qandahar exerted independence from the emerging tenuously singular state capital of Kabul. Shuja’s biography represents the last gasp of mobile kingship and thus the end of the Afghan empire and, simultaneously, the determining influence of colonialism on the historical profile of the increasingly Kabul-centered Afghan state. While Shuja therefore helps us see that colonialism transformed patterns of migration between Afghanistan and India in general terms, his case highlight a conspicuous larger pattern of circular migration among political elites that will be considered below. First, however, we need to consider how the master narratives of the first Anglo-Afghan war and Afghanistan more generally fail to help us understand Shah Shuja’s biography.

38 As indicated in the introduction to this essay, the master narrative of the first Anglo- Afghan war follows a military timeline that de-emphasizes the less dramatic economic, intellectual and cultural exchanges that occur beneath and around the chronologies of coercion that are supplied in overabundance to new generations of would-be- conquerors of Afghanistan and students of failed colonial conquests. The master historical narrative of Afghanistan that took shape during the colonial era has been transferred into Afghan nationalist historiography. From the perspective of stakeholders in that totalizing vision of Afghanistan, this distillation of archival records about Shuja’s pension in Ludhiana might be seen as ‘airing dirty laundry’ about the

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exceptional experiences of a unique ruler whose aberrant over-dependency on the British ultimately cost him his life. After all, those addicted and confined to the master narrative would say, the bloody end of Shuja’s second tenure represents the ‘real history’ of eternally xenophobic Pashtun tribal resistance to imperial aggression of one sort or another that has been occurring for millennia. 39 What is strikingly ironic about the rich colonial archival database on Shuja that one would expect to support the master narrative of Pashtun dominance of Afghanistan is that it does the opposite. There are a number of criteria available for evaluating Pashtun identity, speaking (Pashto wayal) and the behavioral exhibition of core values () in ‘doing Pashto’ (Pashto kawal) being at once ordinary and primary features of Pashtun identity. Nowhere in the hundreds of files on Shuja, scores of which are cited here, is there any reference to the peripatetic king speaking Pashto or practicing Pashtunwali. A researcher can look in vain for evidence of Pashtun identity or Pashtun tribal connections in the thousands of pages providing extremely minute detail on, for example, patterns of speech and domestic arrangements. In terms of verbal conduct, it is clear that Shuja was a monoglot Persian speaker and did not know Pashto or display any need or desire to engage the Pashto language, or any other language for that matter. In terms of the exhibition of the core values of Pashtunwali, far from practicing badal or anything resembling blood revenge, for example against his captor Ranjit Singh who carted him around in a cage and dispossessed him of the famous Koh-e Nur diamond, Shuja appears interested in forgetting the past, and making an alliance with Ranjit Singh to continue with that example of a lack of vengeance for being publicly dishonored. Instead of practicing purdah or female seclusion, Shuja put his wife Wafa Begum metaphorically and literally ahead of himself in relation to the wider public that was not limited to just British colonial officials. Another primary contradiction between the master narrative of Pashtun domination and Shuja’s lived experience was that he was unable to offer melmastia or hospitality of his own, and instead had to accept nanawati or asylum from the British! Perhaps the most basic problem is that Pashto and Pashtuns are grounded in rural zone, while Shuja’s predilection was for the urban life. 40 The imposition of what Edward Said (1994) helps us identify as a highly Orientalized pre-packaged master narrative about Pashtun identity and Pashtun domination do not help us understand Shah Shuja and his place in Afghan history, rather, those faulty templates distort the historical realities of his cultural profile and the cultural complexity of the country-at-large. Following Said’s general cultural critique while offering a specific conceptual remedy to the prevailing Orientalist mystification of Pashtuns and Afghanistan, I suggest an inversion of the ordinary analytics that impose a Pashtunization agenda on Shuja and the Afghan state elites he represents. As an alternative to existing models of tribalism, ethnicity and/or nationalism among Pashtuns, the concept of migration provides a much more appropriate mechanism for drawing larger meanings from the ample concrete data we have about Shuja’s biography. The argument for a revisionist approach to Shah Shuja specifically and Afghan historiography more generally is essentially advocating a data-first methodological approach to the subject matter. Once intellectually liberated from the politically addictive qualities of a hyper-ethnicized and militarized master narrative, Shuja does not appear as the exceptional dynast whose dependencies were clearly out of line with the normative but awkward understanding of perpetual Pashtun rule in Kabul. Instead, Shuja’s external dependency becomes the most characteristic feature of

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the Afghan political system. Shuja’s and other Afghan elites’ resource dependency sustained a pattern of circular migration that requires brief attention. 41 A cursory review of Afghanistan’s history beginning with its founder Ahmad Shah through to the present Hamid Karzai will indicate that a high level of dependency on external resources is a primary characteristic of Afghan political elites and the regimes they form. The basic pattern is as follows: rulers take local power in relation to external resources; this prompts the voluntary or forced migration of local political opponents; many of those opponents receive refuge and asylum from the (same) external powers that routinely provide resources to exiles and refugees; the collusion of interests between powerful ‘host’ external actors wanting to advance their peripheral interests and the deracinated dependent ex-elite ‘guests’ hopeful of regaining their former status in Kabul with external support is realized; the cyclical pattern is repeated. 42 This migration-based model of Afghan history is predicated on circulation and the continual relationship between internal and external processes that form the Afghan political system. The circular migration model does not fit every Afghan ruler and each historical era perfectly, but it carries the weight of much evidence. The model is particularly useful for helping to explain how Afghan elites such as Shuja and his household were exposed to colonial frameworks of understanding and acting on Afghanistan while in ‘diaspora,’ during which time they received education, training and incentives to transfer colonial practices and frames of reference ‘back’ to Afghanistan when ‘repatriated.’ The Afghan national reproduction of colonial ideologies through the conduit of circulating political elites requires separate treatment, here Shuja only illuminates the historical pattern to be explored elsewhere. 43 Far from understanding Afghanistan, particularly the origin and organization of the Afghan state, through atavistic Pashtunness that cannot be extinguished, the history of Shuja’s near quarter century in Ludhiana force us to reckon with the non-Pashtun, particularly the Persianate features of the Afghan polity, and the wide range of external influences including especially colonialism’s economic effect on Afghan society and its intellectual and ideological impact on Afghan elites. What I have called Shuja’s ‘hidden history’ highlights how much there is yet to learn, and what must be unlearned and relearned about Afghanistan. It is time to unlearn historically static Pashtun ethnic domination as the key to understanding Afghanistan. It is time to think much more seriously about a number of other issues, including the multiple historically conditioned migration patterns and the permeability of Afghan cultural identities generated by those movements and interactions. So, then, despite his lack of Pashtun credentials and his intimate colonial connections, Shah Shuja can be embraced for at least helping us toward new and improved ways of knowing Afghanistan based upon historical and cultural realities, no matter how uncomfortable these facts are to reckon with for those who remain invested in a crumbling master narrative.

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Waqiat-e Shah Shuja (1954) Herati, Muhammad Husain (ed. [parts I and II from Shuja, part III from Herati], Kabul: Afghan Historical Society.

Yapp, Malcolm E. (1980) Strategies of British India: Britain, , and Afghanistan, 1798-1850, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Yapp, Malcolm E. (1962) ‘Disturbances in Eastern Afghanistan, 1839–42’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 25(1/3), pp. 499-523.

Yapp, Malcolm E. (1963) ‘Disturbances in Western Afghanistan, 1839-41,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 26(2), pp. 288-313.

Yapp, Malcolm E. (1964) ‘The Revolutions 1841-2 in Afghanistan,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 27(2), pp. 333-81.

NOTES

2. See Bilgrami 1972: 109-10 for the war resulting in Indian bankruptcy as well as fueling the Great Mutiny, and Engels for more on the war’s ruinous effect on British Indian finances. 3. Figure 1: The city of . This is plate 14 from ‘Sketches in Afghaunistan’ by James Atkinson. This view was taken from the camp of the Fourth Brigade, about a mile and a half south of Kandahar. Atkinson described the fortified city: ‘[It] is situated on the north side of an extensive plain, about two miles from the lofty mountain called Baba-Wulee, and is surrounded by a mud wall, about thirty feet high, with numerous bastions; the length of the city is about 5000 feet, and 4000 in breadth, with a small stream running across the interior from north to south.’ The second city of Afghanistan and its southern capital, Kandahar was ruled by a brother of the Emir Dost Mohammed. He fled north to Mohammed’s stronghold of Kabul when the Army of the Indus approached in 1839. The chieftains in the city were bribed with gold. The British then organised a triumphant entry into Kandahar for Shah Shuja, to whom they bestowed an ‘official coronation’ as Emir of Afghanistan, even though the crowd of Kandaharis was minuscule and unenthusiastic. 4. Figure 2: Jellalabad, the bastion where General Elphinstone and other were buried during the seige [sic] 1841-42. Photograph of the fort at Jalalabad, taken in Afghanistan by John Burke in 1878. Burke, an intrepid photographer widely travelled in the Indian sub-continent, is best known for his photography during the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80). He entered Afghanistan in 1878 with the Peshawar Valley Field Force and during the two-year campaign worked steadily in the hostile environment of Afghanistan and the North West Frontier Province (now Pakistan), the scene of the military operations. Burke’s photographs include many of the people of Afghanistan and his Afghan expedition produced an important visual document of the region where strategies of were played out. The Anglo-Russian rivalry (called the Great Game) precipitated the second Afghan War. Afghanistan was of strategic importance to the British in the defence of their Indian Empire, and the prevention of the spreading influence of Russia. They favoured a forward policy of extending India’s frontiers to the Hindu Kush and gaining control over Afghanistan. An opportunity presented itself when the Amir Sher Ali turned away a British mission while a Russian mission was visiting his court at Kabul. The British had demanded a permanent mission at Kabul which Sher Ali, trying to keep a balance between the Russians and British, would not permit. British suspicions of the Amir’s perceived susceptibility to the Russians led them to invade Afghanistan. Jalalabad, the traditional winter capital of Afghan rulers, was the first major city of Afghanistan encountered after traversing the Khyber Pass. Situated in a fertile valley watered by the Kabul and Kunar rivers 90 miles east of Kabul, it had once been an important town of the Gandhara period (1st to 5 th centuries AD), but the

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modern city was built by the Mughals. Babar, the founder of the Mughal Empire, first planted gardens here, and his grandson Jalaluddin Akbar built the city named after him in the 1560s. It stands in a strategic position on the trade route to the Indian sub-continent. After taking the Khyber Pass, the British troops’ occupation of Jalalabad was largely uneventful, and although minor skirmishes with local chiefs took place around it they moved about the city freely. Burke took a number of photographs of the city and its surroundings which are believed to be among the first taken of it; there are no other surviving images from this period. The British spent a considerable amount of time here waiting for the Amir Yakub Khan in Kabul to accept their terms and conditions. The title of this photograph refers to the last resting place of General William Elphinstone, a commander in the first Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42). Old and ill, he had led the terrible retreat towards Jalalabad when many soldiers and civilians had been killed by Afghan fighters hiding in the hills. He finally surrendered as a hostage in exchange for safe passage for civilians and died of dysentery in captivity. 5. Figure 3: Jugdelluk, the last stand made by General Elphinstone’s army in the calamitous retreat. This lithograph was taken from plate 21 of ‘Afghaunistan’ by Lieutenant James Rattray. The British army suffered its worst disaster while retreating from Kabul in January 1842. On 6 January, the British force of 4,500 soldiers and about 12,000 followers under Major-General Elphinstone pulled out of Kabul and left for Jallalabad. They had been guaranteed safe passage by 18 tribal leaders, but fell prey to the extreme cold, lack of food and supplies and attacks from higher ground by local tribesmen. The column suffered terrible losses and upon reaching Gandamak near the Jagdalak Pass the survivors made a last stand, only to be massacred in a final ambush on 12 January. A single European survivor, Dr William Brydon, managed to reach Jalalabad the following day. Rattray himself rode through the pass in October 1842, as part of Nott’s rear-guard. The pass rises in steep ascent; between its walls of blackened granite remnants of barricades still stood, interlaced with bones. Piles of mummified bodies and whitening bones were everywhere. Rattray, depressed that none had the time to perform a decent burial, wrote: ‘we were led on by our skeleton guides from mountain to deep ravine, over valley and rugged cliff, skeletons for landmarks, for direction posts, skeletons.’ 6. Figure 4: Jugdulluck Camp. Photograph with a distant view of a British army camp at Jagdalak taken from the neighbouring hills by John Burke, 1879-80. The narrow Jagdalak Pass, situated between Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, cuts through the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range and was the scene of bitter conflict during the first (1839-42) and second (1878-80) Afghan Wars. It resonates in British military history particularly because many British soldiers were killed here during the First Afghan War. The photograph is part of a series of images forming the Afghan War albums which provided a visual document of the country and resulted in Burke achieving renown as the first significant photographer of Afghanistan and its people. The British became involved in Afghanistan, trying to create a buffer state and protect their Indian empire in the face of Russian expansion in Central Asia. The Anglo-Russian territorial rivalry created what came to be known as the Great Game between the powers. In 1878 Burke accompanied British forces into Afghanistan, despite being rejected for the role of official photographer. He financed his trip by advance sales of his photographs ‘illustrating the advance from Attock to Jellalabad’. In his two-year expedition in Afghanistan during the Second Afghan War, Burke became the photographer of the region where the strategies of the Great Game were played out. In a latter phase of the war, from October 1879 to the summer of 1880, British troops (the Kabul Field Force) under General Roberts occupied Kabul. Burke stayed here for many months, photographing the city and its inhabitants and the surrounding territory. It is obvious from his varied images that he had a close relationship with the British troops and did not hesitate to be part of the frontline of action. 7. Figure 5: Interior of the palace of Shauh Shujah Ool Moolk, Late King of Cabul. This lithograph is taken from plate 3 of ‘Afghaunistan’ by Lieutenant James Rattray. This scene shows Shah Shuja

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in 1839 after his enthronement as Emir of Afghanistan in the Bala Hissar (fort) of Kabul. Rattray wrote: ‘The Shah was a man of great personal beauty, and so well got up, that none could have guessed his age.’ He continued: ‘the wild grandeur of the whole pageantry baffles description.’ The population watched Shuja’s grand entry in absolute silence. He was then seated on a white and reputedly ancient marble throne. From here he could be seen by the court in the quadrangle below. The wooden arches and pillars surrounding him were carved and painted and the ceiling richly decorated. A year later the sanctity of the scene was bloodily violated: Shah Shuja was murdered and ‘the sacred throne, [became] a lounge, a pitch-and-toss table.’ 8. Figure 6: Shah Shuja holding a durbar at Kabul (Afghanistan). Water-colour sketch of Shah Shuja holding a durbar at Kabul, Afghanistan by Jams Atkinson (1780–1852) between 1839 and 1840. This is plate 22 from the album ‘Sketches in Afghaunistan’. Inscribed on the mount is: ‘A Durbar held by Shah Shooja at Caubul.’ During the 19th century the British were sporadically engaged in conflicts with Afghan leaders due to British fear of Russian encroachment on their Indian colony and internal divisions within Afghanistan. Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk was the Amir of Afghanistan from 1802 until 1809 when he was driven out by Mahmud Shah. The Governor- General of India Lord Auckland attempted to restore Shah Shuja in 1839 against the wishes of the Afghan people. This policy led to the disastrous first Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42). After the retreat of British troops from Kabul Shah Shuja shut himself up in his fortress, the Bala Hissar. He left this refuge and was killed by adherents of Dost Muhammad and his son Akbar Khan on 5th April 1842. 9. Figure 7: The Dewan-e Am looking towards Upper Bala Hissar [Kabul]. Photograph showing the Diwan-i-Am or audience hall of the Amir at Kabul, Afghanistan, with the fortress of Bala Hissar in the background, taken in 1879 by John Burke. It is part of a series of pictures of Afghanistan taken by Burke during the Second Afghan War (1878-80), which form an important visual document of the country as it was during the time of the Great Game or Anglo-Russian rivalry in the region. In 1878 Burke accompanied the British forces into Afghanistan, despite being rejected for the role of official photographer. He financed his trip by advance sales of his photographs ‘illustrating the advance from Attock to Jellalabad’. British forces re-occupied Kabul in October 1879 in a fresh phase of the war, as a consequence of the killing of the British Resident Sir Louis Cavagnari and his mission in September 1879. General Roberts who led them aimed to secure his force at Kabul and establish a line of communication with the rest of the British forces via the Khyber Pass. The cantonment here offered a secure and easily defendable position close to the city; it was large enough to accommodate the troops and provided easy access eastwards through the Khyber Pass towards Peshawar, northwards towards Kohistan and westwards into the Chardeh plain. The ancient citadel of Bala Hissar or High Fortress dated from the 5th century AD and encapsulated Afghan history, with successive invasions and rulers adding to and rebuilding different parts of it. It was the seat of power and much of Kabul city lay within it and its rulers sheltered within its thick walls. When the British under General Roberts occupied Kabul in 1879 they stayed here too. When leaving, they partially destroyed it as a lesson to the Afghans. 10. See Noelle 1997 and Lal 1978 for Dost Mohammad and his two reigns. 11. Figure 8: Surrender of Dost Mohommed Khan, to Sir William Hay Macnaghten Bart, at the Entrance into Caubul from Killa-Kazee. This is plate 18 from ‘Sketches in Afghaunistan’ by James Atkinson. The fear of growing Russian influence around India brought the British to the buffer state of Afghanistan. In 1840 they ousted the Emir, Dost Mohammed, from Kabul and replaced him with the pro-British Shah Shuja. This view shows the road leading from the camp to Kabul in the valley of Qila-Qazi. It was here that Dost Mohammed suddenly gave himself up in November 1840. Atkinson wrote: ‘The road from Killa-Kazee is very confined, hemmed in by huge masses of rock on the left hand and dense groves of mulberry trees on the right.’ On Mohammed’s surrender: ‘This event occurred while the British Envoy was taking his accustomed ride, attended by his staff, and totally unconscious of any intention on the part of the Dost, to surrender

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himself’. McNaghten was political secretary to George Eden, Lord Auckland, Governor General of British India. He was convinced of the correctness of British fears over Russian intentions, and the necessity of placing Afghanistan under British tutelage. 12. Figure 9: Dost Mahommed, King of Caubul, and his youngest son. This lithograph is taken from plate 2 of ‘Afghaunistan’ by Lieutenant James Rattray. Rattray was in the Bengal Army and took part in the first Afghan War, from 1839 to 1842. This conflict saw Dost Mohammed deposed as Emir of Afghanistan. Rattray was granted an audience with the Emir in Peshawar in January 1841. At this time, Dost Mohammed was a prisoner of state and on his way to exile in Calcutta. Rattray was struck by the Emir’s deep voice, open manner and intelligent countenance, and by his followers with their finely chiselled features and tall, handsome figures. The young boy with his head shaven in the manner ‘peculiar to the rosy-cheeked children of Caubul’ was the Emir’s son from his youngest wife. Rattray wrote that since Dost Mohammed had been ‘a ruler just and merciful and attentive to affairs of state [...] the population of Peshawur considered him to be most unjustly treated by us.’ The decorations of this apartment were a facsimile of the Emir’s former audience hall in the citadel of Ghazni. 13. See Hanifi 2011: 77-94 for attention to the economic impact of the first colonial occupation on the economy of Afghanistan, Hopkins 2008: 25-30 for situating Pashtun tribal identity at the core of colonial frameworks for understanding Afghanistan, and Barfield 2010 for one of the latest installments in a long line of writers who perpetuate the Pashtun domination thesis. 14. See Singh 1981 for a biography of Ahmad Shah Durrani. 15. See Hanifi 2012a, 2012b, and 2012c (forthcoming). 16. See Malcolm 1827 for Persia, Ahulwalia 1982 and Kaye 1854, chapter 8 for Metcalfe’s mission to Lahore and Elphinstone 1992 for the British Mission to Kabul. 17. Cotton 1892: 53-54. 18. Faiz Muhammad, 1913, vol. 1: 77-8. 19. The cost at supplying the mission was Rs. 5,244.7 but Elphinstone went into roughly Rs. 25,424.12 in personal debt due to the actions of a corrupt Afghan banker employed by the mission that was not recovered until at least 1821. See British Library, Oriental and African Studies Reading Room, Mountstuart Elphinstone Papers Mss Eur F88/474 ‘Bills and Accounts 1808-1820’ and Mss Eur F88/107 ‘Caubul Expense Report.’ 20. See Connolly 1838, vol. 2: 58 for payment information, Masson, vol. 1: 191-193 for more on Mullah Najib’s account of the Siaposh Kafirs. 21. Hopkins 2008: Introduction, and Hanifi 2012b. 22. Delhi Resident Informs Elphinstone of Reception of Cabul Refugees, Press List II, Book 4, Serial n° 101, 12 April 1809, Elphinstone dispatch about Kabul Intelligence, Press List II, Serial 204, 22 May 1809, Seton to Edmonstone, Press List II, Book 3, Serial n° 42, 17 April 1809, (Archibald) Seton to (Neil Benjamin) Edmonstone, Press List II, Book 3, Serial n° 44, 18 May 1809, Seton to Edmonstone, Press List II, Book 3, Serial No. 43, 28 April 1809, Seton to Edmonstone, Press List II, Book 3, Serial n° 53, 3 August 1809 23. Cotton 1892: 73. 24. See Faiz Muhammad, 1913, vol. 1: 94 for Ranjit Singh’s practice of carrying Shuja around in a cage. For Shuja’s narration of his time in Lahore in Ranjit Singh’s custody see Waqiat-e Shah Shuja, The Twenty Sixth Event: 40-51. 25. Seton to Edmonstone, Press List II, Book 3, Serial n° 42, 17 April 1809. 26. Seton to Edmonstone, Press List II, Book 3, Serial n° 53, 3 August 1809. 27. Shuja’s Wife’s Desire to Enter British Territory, Press List II, Book 9, Serial n° 2, 19 December 1812. 28. ibid. 29. Use of Native Newspapers to Contradict Rumours that the British Espouse Shuja’s Cause, Press List II, Book 9, Serial n° 106 and Ochterlony to Metcalfe, Press List IV, Book 61, Serial n° 87,

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10 June 1813. See also Wade to Macnaghten about the concentration of Lohani commerce, Press List V, Book 101. Serial n° 17, 21 May 1834. 30. Elphinstone 1992, vol. 1: 68. 31. Shuja’s Intention to Seek Asylum in British Territory, Press List II, Book 8, Serial n° 51, 9 July 1813. 32. Chabra 2005: 92. 33. (unknown first name) Adam to (unknown first name) Birch, Press List II, Book 9 Part One, Serial n° 15, 15 march 1815. 34. (unknown first name) Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 157, 7 December 1816. 35. Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 142, 10 November 1816. 36. Metcalfe to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 136, 3 November 1816. 37. Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 142, 10 November 1816, Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 157, 7 December 1816, Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial No. 158, 10 December 1816, unkown to Birch, Press List III, Book 19, Serial n° 35, 2 March 1817, Adam to Metcalfe, Press List III, Book 19, Serial n° 59, 10 May 1817, Adam to Metcalfe, Press List III, Book 19, Serial n° 65, 17 June 1817, and Murray to Ochterloney, Press List III, Book 19, Serial n° 70, 5 July 1817. 38. Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18 Serial n° 136, 4 November 1816. 39. Adams to Ochterlony, Press List II, Book 9, Serial n° 35, no date. 40. Ochterlony to Murray, Press List IV, Book 61, Serial n° 197, 11 November 1816. See Bayly 1996 for more on the information landscape of colonial India. 41. Ochterlony to Murray, Press List IV, Book 61, Serial n° 207, 26 December 1816. 42. Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 158, 10 December 1816, and Murray to Ochterloney, Press List III, Book 19, Serial n° 70, 5 July 1817. 43. Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 142, 10 November 1816, and unknown to Birch, Press List III, Book 19, Serial n° 35, 2 March 1817 44. Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 157, 7 December 1816. 45. Murray to Ochterlony, Press List III, Book 18, Serial n° 158, 10 December 1816. See Freidmann 1971 for more on Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi. 46. ‘Trevelyan’s Note on Commerce of Afghanistan,’ and ‘Trevelyan’s Note on Trade of Cabul,’ National Archives of India, Foreign P.C., September 5, 1836, Proceeding n° 9-19. For published examples of colonial officials viewing themselves as literally following in Alexander’s footsteps, see Burnes 1992, vol. 1: 6-7, 46-8 and Moorcroft 1979 vol. 1: 61-2. 47. To identify the British plan for the Indus river the ‘Mithenkote Market Scheme’ phrase is used in Hanifi 2011, while the ‘Indus Navigation Scheme’ is used in Hasrat 1959: 119-132. 48. Hanifi 2011: 51-76. 49. For the text of the Tripartite Treaty that was signed on 26 June 1838 (23rd rabi’ al-sani 1254) and the subsequent correspondence about amendments culminating in its ratification by the British on 6 August 1838 (15th jumad al-awwal 1254) see Faiz Muhammad, 1913, vol. 1: 134-141. 50. Faiz Muhammad, 1913, vol. I: 114-115 and 118-125. 51. Adam to Metcalfe, Press List III, Book 19, Serial n° 65, 17 June 1817. 52. (Frederick) Mackeson to (Sir Claude Martin) Wade, Press V, Book 105, Serial n° 27, 4 October 1932. 53. (Sir William Hay) Macnaghten to Wade, Press List V, Book 105, Serial n° 105, 25 September 1833. 54. Shuja to Wade, Press List VI, Book 139, c. early (late winter/early spring) 1833. 55. Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 141, Serial n° 68, 31 July 1835. 56. Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 139, 9 April 1833, and Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 139, Serial n° 45, 15 July 1833.

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57. Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 139, Serial n° 50, 31 July 1833, and citation #30A 6 June Merchants Abandon Shikarpur as Shuja approaches. 58. Faiz Muhammad, 1913, vol. 1: 230-123. For another rendition of Shuja’s failed attempt to recapture his throne see Waqiat-e Shah Shuja, Thirty-Second Event: 69-75. 59. Letter from Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 140, Serial n° 47, 17 June 1834. 60. Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 141, Serial n° 68, 31 July 1835. 61. Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 141, Serial n° 54, 5 June 1835. 62. Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 141, Serial n° 99, 15 December 1835. 63. Wade to Macnaghten, Press List VI, Book 142 Part I, Serial n° 44, 9 July 1836. 64. Untitled, Press List VI, Book 140, undated (between 1 and 17 November 1834). 1. The archival research in India and Pakistan forming the database of this essay was made possible through grants from the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Near and Middle East Research and Training Act, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers in conjunction with the American Institute of Indian Studies and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. A Faculty Development Grant from the Department of History at James Madison University allowed for research at the British Library in London that is also incorporated here.

ABSTRACTS

The essay uses colonial archival materials from the Archives of the Punjab Province in Lahore to address the thirty-year period between the two reigns of the Durrani Afghan Monarch Shah Shuja (r. 1803-1809 and 1839-1842). Focusing on the 1809-1839 period, the first part of the essay deals with Mountstuart Elphinstone’s 1809 diplomatic mission and Shuja’s flight from Peshawar. The second part of the article considers the communication between Shah Shuja’s primary wife and colonial officials that culminated in Shuja’s receipt of housing and a monthly British pension in Ludhiana in 1816. The third part of the essay treats Shuja’s aborted attempt to recapture Kabul without British support in 1832-1833 and its consequences for him in Ludhiana. Shuja’s lack of Pashto credentials, his dependency on British capital, and his circular migration pattern are viewed as normative rather than exceptional for Afghan rulers, and as such this essay contributes to a revision of the traditional historiography of Afghanistan that views the country through the incompatible lenses of Pashtun ethnic domination of the Afghan state structure and Pashtun tribal resistance to Afghan state formation.1

INDEX

Keywords: Afghanistan, British Colonialism, First Anglo-Afghan War, historiography, Shah Shuja, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Ludiana

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AUTHOR

SHAH MAHMOUD HANIFI

Assistant Professor in the History Department, James Madison University

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Thinking beyond Secularism: The Catholic Church and Political Practice in Rural South India

Aparna Sundar

1 In recent years, the notion that the world is inexorably moving towards secularisation has been effectively laid to rest, with the rise of a religious right in the United States, the growing reach of Pentecostalism across the world, the spread of political Islamic movements across Asia and Africa (Casanova 1996, Gorski & Altinordu 2008, Freedman 2009, Mahmood 2004). Within India, the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its claim to represent the Hindu majority, as well as the issues it has raised vis-à-vis other religions, such as Christian conversion and Muslim adherence to personal law instead of a common civil code (Jaffrelot 1996, Bhatt 2001) have sparked a series of analytical and normative debates about the nature of Indian secularism (Bhargava 1998, Tejani 2008, Srinivasan 2007, Needham & Sunder Rajan 2007). On political platforms the debate has been waged between those who advocate a strict separation of religion and state (the left-liberal position), to those who argue that Indian secularism has meant a tolerance of all religions and equal respect and patronage for them by the state, to those who argue for a form of Hindu theocracy (Tejani 2008: 7-11).

2 In academic terms, the lines have been drawn most sharply between T.N. Madan and Ashish Nandy, on the one hand, who argue that secularism is alien to India, where all the major religions have prioritised religion over politics, and comes from Protestantism and its particular relationship to science and state (Madan 1998, Nandy 1998), and Rajeev Bhargava who argues for a distinctive form of Indian secularism, based not on rigid separation, but a ‘principled distance’ between religion and state, based on contextual moral reasoning about what each religion required and how this fitted in with the lines that the state had demarcated for itself (Bhargava 2007). Thus if Christians feel the need for conversion, while no other religion does, or Muslims feel the need for their own personal law in some spheres, a secular state would recognise these imperatives and balance them with the interests of others. While the Madan/ Nandy argument has been criticised, not least because it does not reflect the trajectory

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of European or American secularism (Archer 2001), Bhargava’s approach runs the risk of focusing too much on the state, and not adequately looking at forces within religion itself which may be driving certain kinds of secularism and democratisation (Nigam 2006, Tejani 2008). 3 Sociological attention to the forces driving secularism and democratisation within religions, and more broadly to the ways in which religion interacts with politics, has been limited, in what has often been a theoretical debate around secularism. This neglect is especially striking with regard to the ʻminorityʼ communities outside the main-frame of Hindu nationalism, with some honourable exceptions (essays in Saberwal & Hasan 2006). We still know little about new forms of religious subjectivity, about struggles around representation, and about larger national and transnational influences on religious practice, identity and political assertion within such communities. 4 This article breaks new ground by looking at politicised Christianity and its role in creating certain kinds of citizens.1 I argue that debates over secularism need to look at the ways in which particular religions construct the good life, and if, or the extent to which, this comes into conflict with secular ideals. I look at the way in which the Catholic Church in Kanyakumari mediates the relationship of villagers with the state and civil society through structures and ideologies of authority and participation, faith, and identity. Rather than taking away from some abstract universal identity, I show how it is the local Church that makes it possible for individuals to participate as citizens. Contrary to the sense that religious politics occupies a separate sphere from that of the secular, there is in fact an articulation of the politics of the Church to the secular politics of the state, and vice versa. The Catholic Church often draws on the same tropes of development, nationalism and uplift as the state, and the shifts in ideological orientation (right to left to right) within it mirror those in other contexts both international, and national. 5 The empirical core of this paper draws on field work conducted in seven fishing villages in Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu in South India over two periods in 1994-1995 and 2004, and on continuing conversations with diocesan priests and lay people in the years since then. Kanyakumari district borders Kerala and has a sizable Christian minority, though not all of it is Catholic. According to the 1991 census, 42.35% of the district’s population identified as Christian, compared to 19.32% in Kerala, 5.69% in Tamil Nadu, and 2.32% (only 1.7% of whom are Catholics) in India as a whole. Located at the southernmost edge of the district, are the forty two coastal fishing villages which are the focus of this article. Kurien (2000) has noted that the fishing villages in Kerala prove an aberration to the ʻKerala modelʼ of high literacy and social development; this is equally the case in Kanyakumari, as it is globally (Bene 2003). The fishing castes – Mukkuvar and Paravar – that make up these villages are both categorised as ʻOther Backward Classesʼ in the Indian Constitution, for purposes of affirmative action. Despite their traditional economic and social marginality, these fishing communities have a strong sense of their own identity, stemming from an awareness of their long lineage in the region, pride in their difficult profession, their independence from everyday ritual submission to higher castes, and their conversion to Catholicism in the sixteenth century. Notwithstanding their relative poverty, and the strong identification with place, they are not isolated. They are shaped by a variety of intellectual, social and political influences made possible by their closeness to the district headquarters of

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Nagercoil, a busy town of some two hundred thousand in 2001, as well as to Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala; the constant flow of tourists to Kanyakumari; the presence of an international institution – the Catholic Church; the fishermen’s own mobility, both across the country and to the countries of the Persian Gulf; and the villagers’ steady consumption of films, television, and now, the Internet. 6 Although the Catholic Church is an institution of singular importance in the coastal villages of Kanyakumari, there is no single way of understanding its role. It is a key element of the identity of the villagers, the basis of their faith, and an intimate part of their everyday lives and struggles. As Kalpana Ram (1992) has argued, it also functions as a ʻquasi-stateʼ in the villages. From the time of the Church’s entry here five centuries ago, every state of the day, including that of postcolonial India, has accommodated it, allowed it to take on administrative and judicial functions, and to represent the villagers. The size and prominence of the church in every village, especially when contrasted to the cramped housing of the villagers, illustrates its centrality as a structure of authority. The Church also operates at multiple scales beyond the local: not only as part of a powerful international institution, but at the national scale, as representing a small minority. Catholic faith and identity are deeply rooted and thoroughly indigenised; nevertheless, as an international institution, the Church must constantly struggle between introducing new ideas and directives from the World Church (for instance, around theological purity and liturgical practice), and the need to ʻinculturateʼ 2 and remain indigenous, especially in the context of Hindu nationalism. Nor is the relationship between the local Church and its community entirely harmonious, with its authority being constantly called into question, and many of its own activities being about restoring or trying to maintain legitimacy. Charting the course this struggle has taken over the centuries – between the secular and the spiritual, the international and the national, the institutional and the popular – is necessary to a complex understanding of the Church’s present role. 7 Much of the task of mediation between the different levels outlined above is carried out by individual clergymen, many of whom come from the fishing villages. Drawing on Gramsci’s schema (1971: 5-14), this article examines their role as agents of transformation, both as organic intellectuals representing their class, and as traditional intellectuals who articulate the ideology of the Church and state. Attending closely to the background and role of the clergy helps us to compare and counterpose their involvement in politics with similarly placed individuals in Hindu right organisations, most of whom are drawn from the upper castes (Jaffrelot 1996, Saberwal & Hasan 2006), and for whom the intertwining of religion and politics is a way of keeping other castes and religions down. 8 Church-related associations play another key linking role between the Church and state. Over the years, for reasons having to do locally with needing to maintain legitimacy with its followers, nationally with matching secular movements aimed at social reform, and internationally with movements of contestation and reform, the Catholic Church has introduced a variety of associational forms in the villages. These range from pious associations and youth groups, to the Basic Christian Communities (BCCs) and Parish Councils. They have become spaces from within which the Church struggles to maintain its relevance, and from which parishioners seek to make claims upon the Church and state, while simultaneously asserting their autonomy from them. But they are also spaces within which villagers seek to reform the hierarchies of village

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life itself, such as the exclusion of women from political authority. Religiosity here is mediated by an awareness of wider Indian tropes of democracy and development, and villagers’ ability to negotiate between the Church and other patrons such as political parties in order to further their secular interests. Fishers rarely act only as Catholics, but also as members of backward castes, regional and linguistic identities, fisher people, and women. Equally importantly, the associations are spaces where members learn the routines and technologies of modern governance, such as rules of order for the conduct of meetings, minutes and accounts, village censuses, and membership cards. 9 In the first part of this article, I provide a brief history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region, its key structures, influences and turning points. From the beginning, it was embedded in local politics, establishing parallel structures of justice and revenue collection, while also moulding itself to local caste hierarchies and aiding rulers in their conflict with other powers. In the second section, I look at contemporary efforts by individual clergymen to articulate ideas of reform and development, mediating between their own class, the wider Church hierarchy and the state. The third section looks at villagers’ participation in Church-generated civil society associations as spaces where they negotiate between spiritual and secular imperatives, and the shifting alliances this leads to. The article ends with a discussion of the Catholic Church's place in the political community, particularly in relation to democratisation, development and communalism, concluding that we need to think of practices of religiosity and citizenship as not mutually exclusive.

The Catholic Church in Kanyakumari - a brief history

Origins and early history

10 A relationship of accommodation and collaboration for mutual benefit was established between Church personnel and the state from the Catholic Church’s very beginnings in the region. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a period of enormous political flux, with contending rulers like the Kingdoms of Venad (later Travancore), Cochin, the Pandyas, the Nayak of Madurai, and the Zamorin of Calicut seeking to control both the pearl trade and populations associated with it, and enlisting Portuguese support in this. The Paravars converted in 1536 in exchange for Portuguese protection of their independence in the pearl trade (Bayly 1989: 323-5, Schurhammer 1973-1982: 259, Fernando 1984), while access to the Mukkuvars was enabled by Portuguese support for the Venad king against the Pandyas in 1544 (Narchison et al 1983: 12).

11 Given the tactical nature of the conversions (Bayly 1989: 328), a new religious identity was slow to emerge. The syncretic nature of the emerging religious tradition was exemplified by the growing cult of St Francis Xavier, whom the Jesuits encouraged the Paravars to revere as a supernaturally endowed tutelary figure, exorcist, and healer (Bayly 1989: 330), with features of the Sufi tazkiras (saints' biographies), and of the region’s warrior cults. Other pre-Christian traditions endured such as the pulling of a decorated chariot for the feast days of the church, as in a temple festival; and caste histories and oral traditions which relate the Paravars and their rituals to the great Hindu temples of southern Tamil Nadu (Bayly 1989: 330-58). The question of caste hierarchies was contentious from the very beginning. Influential priests such as Robert

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de Nobili took the position that the maintenance of caste separation (having different churches for different castes, or serving them mass at different times) was necessary for the survival and spread of the Church in the region and had no religious implications. This received papal assent in the early 1600s, while later Popes overturned it as a religious sacrilege. In practice, separate churches were constructed for the inland Nadars and the coastal Mukkuvars and Paravars; in some churches a wall was erected to separate seating areas for the higher and lower castes (Roche 1984, Subramanian 2009: 49-50). 12 Parochial governance increasingly relied on the fusion between the group's caste institutions and their identity as Roman Catholics. The Roman Church had been allowed by the Raja of Venad to arbitrate in civil and criminal matters for its members. Xavier and subsequent missionaries used the village leaders as a kind of moral police against drunkenness, adultery, idolatry, and other transgressions. Portuguese colonial authorities confirmed these powers, using the local leaders’ authority to recruit and discipline Paravar divers and others necessary to a productive fishery (Bayly 1989). The missionaries also introduced new structures of administration, appointing a judge and a policeman in every village, and themselves adjudicating more serious cases (Thekkedath 1982: 189). Lay involvement in running the parish and in ministry was solicited from the outset to make up for the shortage of priests; the first pious association, the Confraternity of Charity, was set up some twenty years after the Paravar conversions (Thekkedath 1982: 167-73). Although the kings of Venad, Quilon and Cochin contributed to the erection of churches in their territory, and for a while to their maintenance, and the Portuguese Governor during Xavier's time paid an annual sum to support the missionaries (Schurhammer 1973-1982: 462-3, Xavier 1992: 124 n. 11), the lay officers were maintained, the bulk of the churches constructed, and, in later years, the priests supported, through taxes on the fishery in each village. A variety of levies were imposed, to the extent that the Portuguese priests were commonly referred to as kuthagaikkara samigal [levy-priests] (Sivasubramanian 1996). 13 The new religious identity worked not only to create cohesion in the caste and enable it to manoeuvre more efficiently for status vis-à-vis other castes and the rulers, but also to bargain with the Church hierarchy itself. By the 1830s the Jesuits found that caste notables could decide what sacraments each family was permitted (Bayly 1989: 360-1). In the Jesuits' campaign to regain control over these decisions, they drew on the support of disaffected mejaikarar [white-collar] families, and even kamarakarrar [fishing] families who had grown rich on trade but did not have ceremonial status in the village. But the leading families were likewise able to retaliate by exploiting the schisms within the Church, threatening to shift to new affiliations like the Protestant London Missionary Society,3 or even threatening to leave the fold (Bayly 1989: 316-8). In other cases, the less powerful villagers also organised against the hierarchy, including the parish priest, using allegations of financial or moral corruption to call on the Bishop to replace their priest, threatening conversion if he failed to do so. 14 In 1930, the new diocese of Kottar was erected by papal decree from the southern and Tamil-speaking part of the diocese, and entrusted to the indigenous diocesan clergy (Villavarayan 1956: 34). The Church was one of the few avenues for social mobility in the villages and many Mukkuvars became clergy. The new diocese moved rapidly to reform some of the most hated elements of Church governance in the villages, and with more limited success, to strengthen a more doctrinal Catholicism against the forms of

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popular devotion that were central to religious practice in the region, such as shrines to St. Antony and other saints to cure possession and other ailments. One of the earliest reforms was to the kuthagai system of revenue generation for the coastal parishes, based entirely on levies on the fishery. Following sustained campaigns by fishing families, intra-village divisions between pro- and anti-levy factions, and the conversion by a group of anti-levy Paravar to Hinduism (Sivasubramanian 1996), the diocese eventually took steps to curb expenditure and redistribute levies to all village residents (Villavarayan 1956: 52). 15 India’s independence led to new developments in the national Church. The understanding of secularism implicit in the constitution of the new Republic of India (and made explicit in a 1976 constitutional amendment describing India as a ʻsecularʼ republic), was one of ʻequal respect for all religionsʼ, rather than a distancing from religion altogether. However, secularism as the increasing desacralisation of life remained a powerful aspiration for modernising leaders like Nehru. This posed new challenges for the Indian Church, given that opposition to secularisation was a key principle of the Church's involvement in politics across the world, along with opposition to communism (Houtart 1984). In the second general elections in 1957, for example, the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) issued a statement which was read in all churches, asking Catholic electors not to support candidates who were against religion, morality, and the sanctity of family life. In the following elections too, Catholics were asked by the Tamil Bishops not to vote for the communists or the social reformist Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), as both were opposed to religion. In general, the Catholic Church in Tamil Nadu was, for the first decades after independence, explicitly in favour of the (Indian National) Congress (Narchison et al 1983: 94-5, 115-6). It also expanded its long-standing work in education and health in this period, cooperating with the government in these areas (Wilfred 1981: 829).

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)

16 The election of Pope John XXIII in 1958, and the holding of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in 1962, marked a major change in the Catholic Church’s understanding of its role in the polity. Historically, society, Church, and state were considered organically interlinked, with political authority seen as ultimately derived from God. The Vatican II documents express an acceptance of religious, social, and political pluralism, a constitutional state, and the principle of freedom of the Church in society (Hehir 1993: 22). The result of Vatican II at the national and local level was greater lay participation, both in parochial administration and in the liturgy. This was to be facilitated by new structures of administration, such as the Parish Councils, and new pastoral strategies, such as the Basic Ecclesiastical Communities. In addition, there was new theological reflection, best known in the Liberation Theology of Latin America, but also elsewhere, as in the Contextual Theology of South Africa (Lehmann 1996: 49, Littwin 1989). The idea of social ministry – the understanding that the work of the Church is the defence of the person – became central. This was to be performed, not through direct political involvement, as in the standing of clergy or religious for office, but through social activism.

17 The ideas of Vatican II interacted with indigenous movements and currents of social reform emerging across Latin America and the decolonising nations of Asia and Africa

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(Lehman 1996: 13-4). An Indian theology of liberation emerged from theologians such as George Soares-Prabhu (1929-1995), M.M. Thomas4 (1916-1996), and Sebastian Kappen (1925-1993) (Kappen 1986: 305). It was cross-pollinated by Gandhian tropes of indigenous development; in the early 1970s by the ideas of Naxalbari and the Jayaprakash Nararyan movement, both of which challenged, albeit in different ways, the class bias of the Indian development model; and by the emergence of a voluntary sector (Shah 1988). But Indian liberation theology was unique in being forced to grapple from the outset with India’s multi-religious society. Here, the true community of Christ, if it was to offer the promise of transforming social structures, must necessarily be larger than the Christian community. As Kappen (1986: 310-31) wrote: ‘[T]he stirrings of a new theology can be found only among theologians and such Christian groups who have broken loose, at least mentally if not also physically, from the ghettos of church institutions and have cast anchor in the secular world.’ 18 In Kottar, some of these shifts had already begun with the arrival in 1950 of the Belgian priest, Fr James Tombeur (1924-2002), of the Society of the Auxiliaries of the Missions (SAM), who lived and worked in Kottar until his death. His efforts led to the formation of the Kottar Social Service Society (KSSS) in 1963, which over the decades took up numerous activities, such as a community health development project, cottage industries, and cooperatives for fishermen and farmers. Of the KSSS, he wrote: ‘from the start [it] was people-oriented and low priority was given to relief and to institutions like schools, convents and so on. The inspiration was taken from the Gandhian type of development: village-centred, cottage and village industries, providing employment to all and trying to be self-supporting’ (Tombeur 1990: 41). Tombeur’s work also prefigured many of the themes of inculturation5 and lay participation emphasised by Vatican II. The churches he helped build in the small, remote inland communities in which he served as parish priest in the 1950s were the first (and still the only) local churches in the Dravidian style, rather than the standard pseudo-Gothic (Collins 2007: 128-9). 19 Following Vatican II, these innovations began to be taken up across the diocese in the form of: liturgical renewal; emphasis on the Bible and on catechism; inculturation, through the mass now being said in Tamil, and other local elements of worship added to the liturgy; lay participation – in the mass, as in the celebrant facing the congregation – and in ministry, such as through pious associations; new structures for pastoral administration, as well as for social awakening and involvement; and the taking of more critical positions on social justice. Leading diocesan priests expressed a growing sense that even developmental works might not be radical enough: The developmental works of KSSS, commendable though in themselves, are they not still becoming unwittingly agents of alienation? Do they not deflect the Church from raising fundamental questions about the condition of the society and the structures of injustice at work? The strength of the developmental work can well become the weakness of the Church in Kottar, in the sense that they can make the Church insensitive to the real causes of poverty and underdevelopment and blunt the Christian conscience of its social responsibility. They can make us forget that as Church we are called upon to be catalysts and agents of change in society. This responsibility of every Christian cannot be simply delegated to a developmental organization. (Narchison et al 1983: 229-30) 20 The spirit of Vatican II remained strong in Kottar even after it waned elsewhere by the early 1980s. A pastoral letter issued by Bishop M. Arokiaswamy in April 1986 traces the problems of the people to the unjust socio-economic structures of feudalism and

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capitalism and speaks of the danger that religion might legitimise them. Describing various flawed Church models and pastoral approaches adopted in the past, such as the ‘traditional’ approach, the ‘charismatic-prayer’ approach, the ‘dependence’ approach, the ‘social service’ approach, and the ‘extremist’ approach (Jeremias 1989: 203), the Bishop recommended a new approach, the ‘Radical Church’ model, which was guided by the gospel vision and aimed to bring about radical change in all spheres.

21 The action plan for Kottar diocese laid out on the basis of this radical Church approach is truly remarkable (Jeremias 1989: 204-5, and all citations below). It calls upon the Kottar Church to take a stand in support of the various people's movements of workers and the marginalised active in the district, arguing that ‘[w]e too, if we transcend the limits of our parish, diocese and religion and collaborate with these movements, may accelerate the spread and realization of the values of God's kingdom.’ The Church must rally round the progressive parties and trade unions, and engage with Marxist ideology and movements as sharing a common concern with human liberation. Strategies that involve violence are not condemned out of hand; rather, structures that oppress people are seen as violent in themselves. The action plan calls for priests and lay people to work together as equals, and for youth and women to be involved. Political awareness and involvement is seen as a Christian duty, the priests being responsible for fostering it among the laity.

The hardening of identities

22 The election of John Paul II as Pope in 1978 saw a retreat from the principles of Vatican II, concurrent with a strengthening of the papacy, and the encouragement of more conservative groups like the Opus Dei (Della Cava 1992, Houtart 1984). This was reflected in the Indian Church, which also exercised greater caution about questions of social justice, a greater emphasis on spirituality, and a re-separation of the notions of development and evangelisation. Even prior to this retreat, the CBCI had maintained silence, and even tacit support for the Emergency (1975-77), perhaps necessary and inevitable for a minority institution; it spoke out only against the compulsory sterilisations carried out by state agencies in this period. Despite the overall retreat from more radical positions, the commissions (departments) established in this period, such as the Labour Commission, and the Committee for Social Welfare, continued to take strong stands on social justice.

23 Within Kottar diocese, notwithstanding the startling radicalism of the approach outlined in the Bishop’s pastoral letter, ‘liberationists’ had at no point been the majority of the clergy. Rather, their influence appears to have been due to the leadership of key Bishops and other clergy. However, insofar as there was a clear shift away from liberationist positions by the end of the nineties, the impetus for this was not the outcome of internal contestation, but of shifts in the global Church, and, importantly, of the need to respond to external threats: the rise of Hindu nationalism as a significant political force, and the growing popularity of Protestant Evangelical Churches, even among the Catholic masses. 24 Although their influence in Kanyakumari never reached the proportions that it did in Latin America (Lehmann 1996), many Catholic villagers were attracted in the nineties to the new Pentecostal Churches (Mosse, 1994a). Their practices of ‘sharing’ life histories and ‘bearing witness’ to the moment of revelation were recognised even by

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radical clergy as providing the individual catharsis and psychological healing that post- conciliar Catholicism, with its emphasis on social change, had turned away from. One response, which may have succeeded in arresting the spread of these churches, was the charismatic movement within the Catholic Church encouraged under Pope John Paul II; its prayer meetings resemble those of the Evangelical movement, with elements such as catchy music, prophetic preaching, and collective cathartic participation. 25 The growing political strength of Hindu nationalism posed a problem of another kind, in this case for the Catholic community as much as for the Church as an institution. Relations between the Catholic fishing communities and their Hindu and Muslim neighbours had not been markedly conflicting. Of the 66 incidents of conflict recorded since 1956 in the police stations covering half the fishing villages, only 21 were between the Christian fishing communities and Hindu or Muslim communities. Of these, only three may be called ‘communal’, in the sense that by their very nature they invoked religious identity: two were over religious symbols such as the desire of one community to carry out a temple procession through the living quarters of the other; the third was over competition in Panchayat elections. All the others arose from the same ‘secular’ causes – drunken disorderliness, harassment of women, minor thefts, etc. – as in other inter- or intra-village fights. 26 While a few conflicts escalated due to political parties inflaming local quarrels in order to secure electoral majorities (Chiriyankandath 1993), the institutional threat came primarily from the rise of Hindu nationalism in the early 1980s, reflected in two watershed events in the district: the government-supported construction of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial on a site claimed also by Catholics as a spot where Xavier had meditated, and an incident at Mondaikadu village in 1982, in which rumours set off a spiral of retaliatory violence between Hindus and Catholics, leading to massive injury, loss and destruction in the coastal villages (Mathew 1983: 417). While there were no subsequent incidents of similar scale in the district, smaller incidents continued to occur, such as the destruction of a church in 1995 (Indian Express 1995, Kottar Newsletter 1995). The BJP’s rise to power nationally in the 1990s, and the rising tide of attacks against minority communities across the country in the decade following, contributed to a growing sense of besiegement. This hardened identities to a great extent, but did not do away entirely with syncretic practices, or with villagers’ bargaining with the Church hierarchy for secular ends. For instance, in the mid-1990s, when expressing frustration with the local priest, or the diocese more generally, more than one fisherman voiced to me in private a threat (usually rhetorical) to convert; such a conversion of a few families did take place in the neighbouring diocese (Fishing Chimes, 1987). More significantly, in 1995, Catholic trawler owners voted as a group for the BJP, upset that the radical politics of the diocesan Church had led it to favour the small-scale artisanal fishermen over them in their conflicts over space and catch (Subramanian 2009: 228-34). 27 By the turn of the century, as a result of the conjuncture between a number of imperatives – the need to demonstrate patriotism in the face of Hindu nationalism; gradual conformity with the international Church in its retreat from Vatican II; and the changed understanding of ʻdevelopmentʼ as market-led growth after India’s economic reforms of the early 1990s – the Diocese had reverted to older priorities. These included establishing elite educational and medical institutions, and development work, which now consisted increasingly of microcredit groups for women and various kinds of

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training programs around health, hygiene, or computer literacy. Nevertheless, ‘power from below’ and ‘breaking the yokes of injustice’ remain two of the four basic pillars of the Diocese’s stated vision (Diocese of Kottar website), suggesting that liberationist values were not just strategic but, rather, deeply held by a significant number of diocesan clergy.

The Clergy

28 The Church governs over the fishing villages, but it is also intimately of the villages. The parish priests embody this dual relationship, for they are functionaries of the Church, and also frequently themselves come from the coastal villages. The 275 or so diocesan clergy are drawn from the district's Catholic castes: Nadar, Paravar, and Mukkuvar. Although the inland Nadar priests appointed to coastal parishes are commonly said to have a harder time than Mukkuvar or Paravar priests, virtually every priest regardless of caste had his critics in the village. Rude jokes about their soft hands and clean- shaven faces (in a region where manliness presumes a moustache), and rumours (rarely substantiated) of financial corruption, or intimacy with women, were in constant circulation. The youth wanted dynamic priests with new ideas. Old-timers spoke disdainfully about the younger priests with their casual manners, quick to shed their cassocks, frequently off on their motorcycles to commissions and activities outside. They recalled with nostalgia the ideal priest of an earlier time, distinguished by his pious demeanour and perennial brown cassock, who read the Bible or prayed with the people in his spare time, and rarely left the village. Yet, as seen in the previous section, factions involving the priest, and accusations against him, were as common earlier, especially in the days when the priest also managed the parish funds.

29 The priest in the coastal parish is called upon to fulfil a variety of functions, unlike in an inland one, where parishioners are more comfortable dealing directly with the civic administration (Narchison et al 1983: 138). In the fishing village, the priest is leader, judge, problem solver, liaison with government, sole representative of the village, preacher, counsellor, and guide (Ram 1992: 40). The work of the priest is not only concrete and practical, but also, as famously observed by Gramsci (1971: 5-16), ‘intellectual’, that of generating social and political hegemony. There are, increasingly, other intellectuals in the villages, such as social workers, political activists, and NGO staff, but the priests are still the best educated as a group, and, by virtue of their historic pre-eminence and institutional base, the most authoritative. 30 Gramsci (1971: 5-16) distinguishes between two types of intellectuals, organic intellectuals and traditional intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are those who arise as a part of every social group or class to give it ‘homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields’. Traditional intellectuals are those who have always performed the role of intellectuals in society, such as administrators and other state functionaries, scholars, scientists and philosophers; by virtue of their uninterrupted historical continuity as a group and their special qualifications, they consider themselves autonomous of every social class. The Gramscian schema, while productive for this case, cannot be transposed directly across time and space (Arnold 1984, Davidson 1984). Gramsci writes that ‘(t)he category of ecclesiastics can be considered the category of intellectuals organically bound to the landed aristocracy’, and further that, unlike other social groups, a person of peasant

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origin who becomes an ‘intellectual’ (priest, lawyer, etc.) generally ceases thereby to be organically linked to his class of origin, and functions as a traditional intellectual. In India, the Church is both a minority institution and not organically linked to the state, either constitutionally or through its affiliation with the dominant classes, such as the landed aristocracy, and to a large extent represents instead the lower castes.6 Despite these differences, Ram holds that the clergy of Kottar diocese function as traditional intellectuals, sharing with state intellectuals ‘a commonly understood vocabulary of reform, rationalism, development and cultural nationalism’ (Ram 1995: 293). 31 There is much to Ram’s argument, for as seen in the previous section, the social projects of the Kottar Church have frequently paralleled those of the state. As in Lehmann’s discussion of basismo7 in Brazil, it is possible to see certain common ideological tropes that underlie both religious and secular attempts at social transformation. However, just as basismo represented a new respect for the subaltern, and thus a challenge to the more authoritarian and elitist traditions of Church and state in Latin America, so different currents within the Kottar Church must be seen as existing in some tension and contradiction with each other, and with the state. For instance, although the idea of modernisation informed both state fisheries policy and the interventions of the KSSS, the former resulted in large-scale mechanisation initially accessible only to a handful of villagers, while KSSS interventions through appropriate technology and cooperativisation reached more widely into the villages. 32 I argue, therefore, that the reformist clergy are in fact drawn to act both as intellectuals of their class, articulating the consciousness of that class, and of the Church and state. Their identification as organic intellectuals is illustrated by the opening words to Fr Jeromias's thesis in pastoral theology: ‘The eagerness to search for ways and means to better the conditions of the fisherfolk gushes out of me as I am one who had experienced the stings of poverty from my birth.’ In the ideas and aspirations the clergy hold and transmit, and in the variety of pastoral approaches they favour, they mirror the different stages of, and influences in, the universal Church's recent development, its location within the Indian political community, and its local social and cultural embeddedness. This can be seen in the wide range of ideological positions held by the clergy of Kottar diocese, particularly among those working in the fishing communities. These include: i) an exclusive focus on the spiritual aspects of the religion, usually accompanied by the encouragement of works of charity and non- political activities such as youth groups and prayer meetings, family development, and personal ‘improvement’; ii) an emphasis on development understood as schools, better housing, cooperatives, and community health programs; iii) an emphasis on political and cultural activism (‘social analysis’ and political critique) informed by a liberationist theology. 33 These strands are not always mutually exclusive, and all the priests involve themselves in development works within the village, and other traditional parochial responsibilities. There is nonetheless a tension between the first category of priests, concerned to separate religion from politics, and the other two. What distinguished the priests who took one of the latter two positions, but chiefly the third, broadly influenced by Vatican II and liberation theology, was that they were intellectuals in the commonplace (non-Gramscian) sense of the term, being highly educated and frequently engaged in research and writing. Several of them had post-graduate degrees, and most had held important appointments in the Diocese or elsewhere. The diocesan clergy all

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begin their education in a local minor seminary where they are formed in matters intellectual and spiritual, and also in skills like music, public speaking and acting, before being sent elsewhere to a major seminary for theological studies. There is also a growing tendency for them to be sent to college between minor and major seminary, or to pursue higher studies, often in secular subjects (Narchison et al 1983: 211). Of the group I interviewed, almost all had further studied subjects they believed would assist them in their role as (organic) intellectuals and leaders, such as group dynamics and management, public administration, law, media and communication, computers, and counselling. 34 Working in the coastal parishes, these priests had introduced reforms to break existing power structures, encourage lay leadership, reduce violent conflict, and systematise parochial administration. For instance, Fr Dionysius interacted intensively with individual fishermen to initiate fishermen’s cooperatives that would end the power of the merchants; Fr Edwin refused to act as mediator with the administration over complaints, but began, again through painstaking house-to-house visits, to set up participatory administrative structures in his parish that eventually turned into the diocesan Basic Christian Communities program; Fr Servatius sat on a three day fast in the church as a way of ending the factional fighting in his parish. Fr Justus personally surveyed each of the seven hundred houses in his parish in order to issue family cards containing basic household information. He had computerised all parish records of birth and baptism so that they were accessible alphabetically and was working to get individual land titles issued to each family. 35 In the mid 1990s, some twenty of these priests had formed a group called the ‘Coastal Analysis Programme’ aimed at studying and strategising around the social problems in the villages. As the group grew, they decided to think of themselves as an enabling group within the Diocese, providing direction and analysis to other organisations, building up a library and documentation centre on coastal issues such as sea erosion, and carrying out reflection on coastal ministry. They began to hold study meetings around issues such as the Indian Government's deep sea fishing (DSF) policy which led to support for strikes against this policy, educational backwardness and violence in the villages, and the design of participatory governance structures. At one of the group’s meetings, I observed an extensive discussion on how to work out a program of for the villages, the understanding being that certain of the villagers’ cultural habits prevented their liberation. Many of those present spoke as ‘insiders’ to this culture, talking nostalgically of old games and songs that had been lost with the coming of television. Although the group disbanded after a few years, its members’ interests became institutionalised in diocesan agencies concerned with new media and the revival of traditional cultural forms.

Lay associations

36 In the seventies, the diocesan Church began attempting to reform structures of village governance, prompted partly by the directives of Vatican II, and partly by growing popular resentment against the traditional headmen it had backed. The two main types of organisations introduced in this period were the Parish Councils, and the Basic Christian Communities (BCCs). Villagers’ participation in these organisations provides a

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third layer within which to examine the intersection of religious authority, identity and faith with the secular politics of the village.

37 The BCCs were brought to Kottar Diocese by Fr Edwin, a Mukkuvar diocesan priest who had grown up in a fishing village. He had been involved with youth movements like the Young Christian Students (YCS) and Young Christian Workers (YCW) at the beginning of his active life, keenly read Marx, and also literature about the base communities (Communidades Eclesiales de Base, or CEBs) which had emerged in Brazil and other parts of Latin America, post Vatican II (Lehman 1990: 128-9, Levine & Mainwaring 1989). His first parish was notorious for its violent factionalism, making the idea of cross-cutting, neighbourhood based units of participation especially appealing as an alternative. Fr Edwin began with house visits and sustained interaction with his parishioners between 1977-79, running formation programs on spiritual and socio-economic themes, as well as on topics such as leadership, group dynamics, and the problems of fishermen, carrying out some two hundred days of formation programs for various groups. 38 The BCCs emerged out of this process. The basic units set up by Fr. Edwin consisted of thirty neighbouring households each, called the anbiam, which in turn sent five people to the general body of the village, one of whom was elected to the executive committee. This was then registered as a society – the Muḻu Vaḷarcci Sangam (Total/Integral Development Society) or MVS. The MVS set up various committees such as an education committee, and gave out short term loans. For the first time, the village leadership, including the President’s post, was in the hands of the laity rather than the parish priest. A whole new generation of active youth emerged from this process, but it was also met with a great deal of opposition, with many of the past leaders and strongmen resenting their loss of power, and using the increased visibility of women in public life to denounce the new structures as ‘alien to the local culture’. 39 The BCCs were eventually officially adopted by the Diocese in 1984 as the basic units from which representatives were to be elected to the Parish Council. However, their most radical element – institutional autonomy from the Church – was tempered by making the parish priest rather than a lay person, the President of the Parish Council. In practice, the scope of the BCCs varies from village to village, depending in part on the interest of the parish priest and the powers he is willing to cede to them: in some villages they discuss village finances, which give them a great deal of power, in others where this financial control is lacking because of opposition from the better-off fishermen, they function almost solely as prayer groups, and are composed mainly of women and children. 40 Since the mid-eighties, Parish Councils have been made mandatory in each parish. Parishes which do not have them are not entitled to any diocesan money. Of course, the bulk of village monies continue to be raised from within the village itself, and the Diocese has no means to insist that these flow only through a Parish Council. The Parish Councils act like a village governing body, with rules for membership and elections, the conduct of meetings, constitutional amendments, and representation for different categories of village residents, including women and youth movements, and for key village associations, such as the fishermen’s cooperative groups. 41 Of the seven villages I studied, Parish Councils had been successfully established in three; in the remaining four they had been prevented from being set up, or opposition to the BCCs meant that they could not be set up as required through representation from the basic communities; or the Councils were set up, but struggled against

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opposition and then collapsed. In Kanyakumari village, for instance, the establishment of a Parish Council was resisted, not because of factional differences, or the belligerence of previously dominant families, but because they did not want women leaders. It was argued that women could not take the lead on highly contentious issues in the fishery; there was a sense that physical prowess and backing continued to be important in settling these. It was also feared that a Parish Council would mean that every decision would be subject to review by the Church. Nevertheless, the village committee that governed instead was also elected, and consisted entirely of active fishermen, rather than being formed by nomination from the leading non-fishing families of the village, as in the past. The three functioning Parish Councils I observed did indeed follow rules of order. Their meetings were held in the Parish Priest's office, the church, village meeting hall, or school. Matters dealt with by the Council arose from a variety of sources: precedence, ongoing projects, and petitions by villagers. A sample list of such matters, drawn from the three councils, includes expenditure and revenues; development and welfare projects; fishing conflicts; intra-village conflicts, usually factional; relations with other organisations, in the village and outside, such as the fishermen’s cooperatives; village services; the school; stopping alcohol sales; and collective support in the lean fishing season for the families belonging to the various service castes (mainly barbers). 42 The organisations described here – the BCCs and Parish Councils – emerged, not out of internal contestation and change within the villages themselves, but out of broader debates and changes at other levels, such as the Universal Church and the Indian state. While the structures may have been externally conceived, however, it is conditions at the village level that determined their reception, functioning, and survival. The historical compact between Church and state which gives the former relative autonomy to oversee law and order, development, and finance in the villages has some merit, for the state lacks the ability to work through overlapping and networked structures based close to the lifeworld, such as the Basic Communities, pious associations, and youth groups. Nor is it willing to invest resources and personnel in the kind of close and sustained attention to formation seen here, in the efforts of parish priests such as Fr Edwin, for instance. Political parties have managed to make some inroads, linking up to factions, or creating their own youth and women’s wings, but they too lack the Church’s access to the lifeworld of the villages, and nor do they represent the villages in their entirety as the Church does. 43 It has been argued that, as bodies aimed at democratising the Church, the power and the promise of the CEBs in Brazil was greatest when they had no legal or religious status and remained informal bodies, that is, when they represented a real alternative to the Church hierarchy (Lehmann 1990: 131). This was not the case for long in Kottar, because the BCCs early on became an official Commission of the Diocese, with central rules and templates; they were further integrated into diocesan administration when they were made the basis of the Parish Council. On the other hand, there seems to be consensus among observers of the Latin American CEBs (Lehmann 1996, 1990, Adriance 1995, Levine & Mainwaring 1989), that their success depended very much on the presence of supportive priests or nuns, and on support from the local hierarchy, so that they were never completely autonomously generated and sustained spaces for lay participation. In this sense, the Kottar BCCs are no different. Given this, we may question the extent to which the BCCs had a radical impact on the nature of Church authority in the villages. Lehmann’s (1996: 76) argument might certainly apply here:

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‘This paradox of an anti-hierarchical movement depending for its survival on the hierarchy itself,’ had the effect of blunting the possibility of genuine transformation of the Church. 44 However, one must look beyond the democratisation of the Church to judge the true significance of these organisations. In her ethnography of these villages, Subramanian (2009: 250-2) argues that villagers’ negotiations with the Church, other powers, and the modern state, reveal a long history of claims-making with its own vernacular forms, one of which is the seeking of alternative patrons. She resists the idea that rights and democracy might have a European or specifically modern provenance, and seeks instead to ‘provincialise’ them. While I am sympathetic to this aim, I see the establishment of liberal democratic institutions and processes under the postcolonial state as having enormous consequence for a new vocabulary of claims-making, as well as for new technologies of governance. The associations described here reflect the politics of the reformist Church, but also the deep influence of the ideas of social equality, and democracy as participation in governance, contained in India’s liberal- democratic constitution (Mosse 1994b). 45 While the associations described here were initiated by the Church, participants do not simply accept its authority. What we see instead is a struggle between the Church, the village community, traditional village leaders, and hitherto marginalised groups such as youth and women. What becomes clear is that individual, gender, and class interests are emerging to challenge the traditional identities of village and Church community. Participation is directed at transforming society itself. We also see a widening of the will to self-governance, and the routinisation of the procedures and technologies of modern governance. This can be seen in the insistence that all members of the community have equal claims to participate, and that leaders, even at the village level, should be elected. A self-conscious modernity may also be seen in the manner in which meetings are conducted, with rules of order, minutes, and formal agendas. Various technologies of (self-) governance are beginning to be adopted, such as village censuses and the computerization of village records; family cards indicating membership in the village; and the assignment of individual land titles to land previously held in common in order to allow villagers to apply for bank loans. It may be that, as Lehmann (1996) has argued regarding the Brazilian CEBs, the deeper impact of these associations has been to serve as mediums of modernity.

Conclusion

46 Religion acts variously: as an essential element of identity; as a matter of private faith; and as the basis for social critique and reform. Examination of this phenomenon at three levels - the national Church and Diocese, the clergy, and the laity – provides both an institutional and a political economy perspective on the role of religion in politics, undermining assumptions that it acts in any essential way.

47 The evolution of the Catholic Church has mirrored developments at the various scales into which it enters: the universal Church, the Indian political community, and the local social and cultural community within which it is embedded. Even at each of these scales, there is considerable heterogeneity, as the reversals following Vatican II, or the always contested status of Liberation Theology, suggest at the scale of the global institution. At the national and local scales, both for its faithful, and for others, it

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embodies a variety of meanings including faith, identity, and governance. It has had to steer a careful course between these multiple scales and diverse meanings. It has had to accommodate to the state and carry out governance functions in order to strengthen itself as an institution, while seeking to retain an always restive congregation. It has had to cultivate and maintain a distinct identity, characterised by a unique tradition of worship, while resisting attempts to cast it as alien and non-indigenous. It has had to fulfil both the spiritual and the secular needs of its followers. And it has had to resist the secularisation of society, in the sense of a withdrawal of religion from the public sphere, while welcoming state secularism in the sense of constitutional protections for all religions. 48 Like every state, the local Church has had to contend with challenges to its legitimacy, such as those contained in accusations of corruption, or priests’ relationships with women. The difficulties of maintaining legitimacy are linked in part to the nature of the religious identity of the coastal Catholics. This was always a somewhat fluid construct, incorporating tropes and symbols from existing religious traditions, and retaining social features such as caste. Conversion, real or threatened, has over the centuries been used as a bargaining tool with the institution. Dissatisfaction with the social reading of religion introduced by Vatican II led some parishioners to transfer to Pentecostal churches. Despite the threat of Hindu nationalism Catholic trawler owners voted for the Hindu nationalist BJP to indicate displeasure with diocesan policies favouring the small-scale fishers. Each of these moments of dissent sparked a revision of course by the hierarchy. The hierarchy’s own values and practices are fluid and open to multiple influences. Following Vatican II, there was increased interest by progressive theologians and clergy in using ‘Indian concepts and traditions of worship’. The rise of Hindu nationalism in the last two decades has had the effect of hardening religious identities, yet Church and secular intellectuals have continued to share values of development, reform, and uplift. Thus the alliances between the state, the institutional Church and its members, and the wider community, continue to be tactical and frequently shifting. 49 As part of its faith, and as part of its effort to retain control over its members, the Church has resisted secularisation in the sense of the withdrawal of religion from the public sphere and the reduction of religion to a private matter. However, secularism as constitutional protection for all religions, has been interpreted by state officials to mean a representative role for the institutional Church in all matters representing Indian Catholics (or, in Kanyakumari, all matters referring to the fishing villages), and in this sense, it has been welcomed by the Catholic Church,8 for it has served to reinforce the sense of a natural and uncontested unity between the institution and its members. A stronger challenge to this understanding of secularism as mutual accommodation was posed by Vatican II. On the one hand, the move to decentralise Church decision-making to the national and regional levels, the emphasis on pluralism between Church and state, and inculturation and diversity of practices of worship, allowed the Catholic Church to ʻintegrateʼ more explicitly within Indian society. On the other, priests inspired by Vatican II’s emphasis on social justice, and the theological turn to liberation, sought to interpret their religion politically. In doing so they confronted more explicitly the hierarchies of the state and the arrangements of mutual accommodation that underlay its ʻsubcontractingʼ of authority to the Church. But by

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reinterpreting the faith to make it speak to urgent social realities, they sought simultaneously to reaffirm its value and relevance for the vast numbers of the faithful. 50 As an institution of civil society, the Church represents the polyvalence of the sphere (Casanova 1996). On one side, it carries out several of the functions of the state, both those that are directly administrative and those that have the function of generating hegemony for its values of development, democracy as institutionalised participation, and secularism as equal treatment. At the same time, struggles within the Church challenge these hegemonic understandings. Against development as modernisation, they pose development as social justice; against democracy as institutionalised participation, they encourage more radical and open-ended conceptions of democracy; and against secularism as equal respect for all religious institutions and practices, they seek to infuse and transform the public sphere through a critical and political reading of Christ’s message. It may be possible to conclude then that certain forms of public religious practice are not incompatible with what Needham and Sunder Rajan (2007: 33) describe as ‘the analogues and constituents of secularism: reason, ʻmere reasonablenessʼ, rationalism, pluralism, tolerance, law, multiculturalism, minority rights, democracy, liberalism.’

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NOTES

1. Mosse’s (1994a) work on Ramnad district in Tamil Nadu makes some of the same arguments, with a greater focus on the ritual sphere, and less attention to the role of the clergy and popular associations. 2. ʻInculturationʼ, defined as ‘the on-going dialogue between faith and culture or ’ (Shorter 1988: 11), is a term and concept that gained currency in the 1960s following Vatican II. But ‘accommodation’ to local cultures, or in the Indian case, ʻIndianisationʼ, has a long history within missiology. See also Collins 2007. 3. If the LMS had limited reach, it was not only because of the defence put up by the Catholic Church, but also because the LMS themselves were more interested in the inland low castes (Subramanian 2009: 53, Agur 1903: 70). 4. That M.M. Thomas was a member of the Mar Thoma Church, rather than the Catholic, reflects the ecumenism of Indian liberation theology. For the origins of the Mar Thoma Church, see Bayly 1989: 312-20. 5. Fr James was deeply influenced by Fr Vincent Lebbe (1877-1940), a Belgian missionary in China in the early twentieth century, for whom inculturation (then referred to as ‘accomodation’) was about adopting the culture not of the elites but of the popular classes, and about aligning with them against colonial power and racism. 6. This is not uniformly true across the country – the earliest Christians, of the Syrian and Malankara churches in Kerala, are large landowners and historically close to the Travancore and Quilon rulers; Portuguese missionising in Goa also yielded a more Brahmin and upper-caste catch than in southern India. 7. Influential social current of belief that the people, the ‘grassroots’, have a distinctive culture and outlook on life and society and that political and religious salvation necessarily involves listening to them and gaining empathy with their culture (Lehman 1996: 13-4). 8. Not all attempts at equal treatment have been welcomed. In 1994, Jayalalitha, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, issued a series of pictures of herself depicting various Hindu goddesses.

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Her attempt at ‘equal treatment’, involving her portrayal as the Virgin Mary, only served to provoke state-wide demonstrations by enraged Catholics.

ABSTRACTS

This article re-opens the debate on secularism in India by looking at a religion and a region that has historically been marginal to this discourse, focusing on the way in which the Catholic Church has historically mediated the relationship between individuals and the state, among the fishing communities of South India. The Catholic Church’s dominant position among the fishing communities, its minority status within India, as well as theological and other shifts that have taken place within the global Church, lead it to articulate a secular, even radical politics as its primary mode of religious engagement. Radical clergy, many from fishing backgrounds, act as both organic and traditional intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, linking the traditional religious concerns of the Church to the secular interests of their parishioners. Likewise, villagers participate in Church-generated associations spaces to secure wider political goals. The paper concludes that certain forms of religious organisation in the public sphere might indeed be compatible with democracy, citizenship, and even secularism.

INDEX

Keywords: caste, Catholic Church, Christianity, citizenship, clergy, democracy, Gramsci, minorities, secularism

AUTHOR

APARNA SUNDAR

Assistant Professor, Ryerson University, Toronto

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , Free-Standing Articles