Abstract
In May 1888, travelling through the princely states of Rajputana as a reporter for the Allahabad Pioneer, Rudyard Kipling found himself unexpectedly bivouacked one night with three sepoys.1 As they settled down together around the campfire, the young Anglo-Indian journalist, anxiously knowledgeable, hastily established his credentials for his readers by fixing in place the ethnographic framework of the scene.2 It is a brief, lightly sketched reference, but it determines the very possibility of the guarded conviviality that follows. ‘They were all Mahomedans’, he wrote simply and without fear of controversy:
and consequently all were easy to deal with. A Hindu is an excellent person, but … but … there is no knowing what is in his heart, and he is hedged about with so many strange observances. […] But a man who will eat with you and take your tobacco, sinking the fiction that it has been doctored with shrab [liquor], cannot be very bad after all.3
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Notes
Some of the details of this tour can be found in Harry Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (London: Pimlico, repr. 2000; 1999), chapter 7.
Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque (Allahabad: Wheeler, 1891), p. 143.
Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel Volume II (London: Macmillan & Co, 1900), pp. 384–5.
Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 86.
Thomas R Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 89. The term ‘discourse’ is used throughout the study in Foucault’s sense not simply of ‘language’, but of the spectrum of ‘practices’ which determines the conditions of ‘emergence’ for ‘the objects of which they speak’.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A M Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, repr. 1995; 1972), pp. 40–9.
Alan Greenberger, The British Image of India: a Study in the Literature of Imperialism 1880–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 47–8.
T Metcalf, Ideologies, pp. 138–40; Greenberger, British Image, pp. 45–51; and Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930 (London: Allen Lane, 1972), pp. 49–50.
Susan Bayly, Caste Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, repr. 2001; 1991), pp. 18, 99.
Richard M Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, repr. 1994; 1993), p. 101.
On the evolution and effects of colonialist descriptions of Sikh identity, see Richard G Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 10.
Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr. 1994; 1990), p. 16.
D A Washbrook, ‘Ethnicity and Racialism in Colonial Indian Society’ in Robert Ross (ed.) Racism and Colonialism: Essays on Ideology and Social Structure (The Hague: Nijhoff for Leiden University Press, 1982), p. 157.
In this respect, see for instance: Lewis D Wurgraft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middletown, NJ: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: the Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics 1925 to the 1990s (London: C Hurst & Co, 1996), pp. 20–1; John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2; and Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr. 2000; 1999), pp. 60, 71.
John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2;
Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr. 2000; 1999), pp. 60, 71.
Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860–1923 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr. 1994; 1974), pp. 1–174.
Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, repr. 1998; 1972), pp. 61–70.
Farzana Shaikh has approached this discourse from the vantage point of Islamic norms of expectation in Community and Consensus: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–1947 (Bombay: Orient Longman, repr. 1991; 1989).
C A Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. ix.
J Malcolm, ‘Report of the General Committee for Public Instruction’, in Friend of India, 27 October 1836, quoted in C A Bayly, Empire, p. 2.
On Indo-Muslim interpretations and reformulations of this level of public debate, see in particular Javed Majeed, ‘Narratives of Progress and Idioms of Community: Two Urdu Periodicals of the 1870s’, in David Finkelstein and Douglas M Peers (eds) Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 135–63
Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). Syed Ahmad Khan’s role in the British ‘Wahabi’ debate in the post-‘Mutiny’ period is discussed in detail in Chapter 11.
Sander L Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 26. The role of stereotypes in colonialist discourse is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.
Clive Dewey, The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, repr. 2000; 1993), p. 9.
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© 2005 Alex Padamsee
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Padamsee, A. (2005). Introduction. In: Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512474_1
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