Introduction
In July 1869 Amir and Hashmadad Khan, distinguished elderly members of Calcutta's business community, were arrested and transported to Bihar, where they were imprisoned without formal charges for nearly 14 months on suspicion of financing Wahhabi rebels fighting the British on the northwest frontier of India.Footnote 1 In India during the 1860s, the label ‘Wahhabi’, a term loosely used to describe various Islamic reform movements, was closely associated with political sedition. The ‘Great Wahhabi Case’, as the Khan brothers’ legal ordeal was popularly known, was the last, and the most controversial, of the large state trials of suspected Wahhabis in the 1860s and 1870s. The brothers’ legal ordeal stretched over eight years, involving court hearings in Calcutta, London, and Patna. In the summer of 1871 a lower court acquitted Hashmadad, but convicted Amir of waging war against the queen. Adding to the sensation surrounding the case, days before the scheduled final appeal in Amir's case, an assailant murdered the officiating judge on the steps of the Calcutta courthouse. In a final twist, after spending years securing his conviction, in 1877 on the eve of the coronation of Queen Victoria as empress of India, the government officially pardoned Amir.
The historical record of the case—including police investigations, trial proceedings, personal correspondence, and newspaper coverage—presents the raw material for an almost novelistic narrative, replete with eccentric characters and strange plot twists. Yet the evidence presented in court was, according to accounts published by convicted Wahhabis, the product of judicial torture and offers of pardon in exchange for evidence incriminating others. The government's case against the Khan brothers was so weak that subsequent histories of the movement have assigned them, at best, a very minor role.Footnote 2 In this paper, therefore, I pursue another character who emerges from the piles of bureaucratic correspondence, judicial proceedings, newspaper reports, pamphlets, and articles from the period—what I have termed here the ‘Phantom Wahhabi’. This figure was in part real. A few dozen men were put on trial; some of them had links to religious reform movements that other Indian Muslims, for decades before the trials, had derisively labelled ‘Wahhabi’. In the colonial imagination, however, these few figures were construed as indicative of a pervasive political threat, imagined as the vanguard of a much wider plot to bring down the empire. This Phantom Wahhabi, merging a kernel of reality with overblown paranoia, haunted the imperial imagination as the embodiment of the intertwined threats of religious fanaticism and anti-colonial resistance.
The Great Wahhabi Case provides crucial material for understanding the construction, and ultimately the deconstruction, of this Phantom Wahhabi. In the case-law, the trial established the government's power to suspend perpetually the right of habeas corpus in India.Footnote 3 Studied purely in terms of the recorded decisions, therefore, the case documents the conservative ideological shift that occurred in the wake of rebellion in India and colonial unrest in Jamaica and Ireland. Faced with the threat of what they increasingly viewed as irrational and violent colonial populations, colonial officials turned away from liberal reform and embraced autocratic strategies of governance rooted in ideas of colonial difference. Yet the public reaction to the trial suggests a more complex narrative of the post-Rebellion ideological climate. The spectacle of the brothers’ legal ordeal led a surprisingly broad range of people—cutting across religious and racial boundaries—to wonder whether arbitrary police powers posed a greater threat to their security than religious fanatics. In criticizing the actions of the government, many sections of the Indian public—including middle-class Indians and Europeans—deployed liberal discourses emphasizing the danger of unchecked executive power to criticize the government's disregard for the legal rights of its subjects.
The Great Wahhabi Case highlights the key role the phantom-figure of the Muslim fanatic played in contests between authoritarian and liberal strands of imperial ideology.Footnote 4 The decades following the Rebellion of 1857, more often associated with new strategies of authoritarian governance emphasizing racial and religious difference, also fostered reformulations of liberalism. Challenging the boundary between the courtroom and the court of opinion, Indian journalists and Anglo-Indian lawyers cultivated liberalism as a language for calling colonial authorities to account. The case, like debates over the Ilbert Bill in the mid-1880s, became a crucial site for debating the relationship between the rhetoric of legal rights and ideas of colonial difference, although in these contests Indians, Anglo-Indians, and colonial officials played shifting roles. Amir Khan's release, which colonial officials in private correspondence described as a concession to public opinion, seemingly represented a victory for a liberal critique of unchecked executive authority. Yet, the tangled narrative of the case, and the persistence of the Wahhabi as a recurring character in imperial thought, also resists a narrative of liberal triumphalism. If liberalism enjoyed a remarkably long life in colonial India, it did so—like the feared Wahhabi—by assuming new, and sometimes strange, forms.
The Indian Wahhabis
The so-called Indian Wahhabis have provoked great interest among colonial administrators and Indian historians alike. Histories of the Wahhabi movement in India generally start with the spiritual and political movement of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi, who died in 1831 while fighting a jihad against the Sikhs in the region around Peshawar. There were some general similarities between the beliefs of the Arabian followers of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab (1703–1792), including an emphasis on direct consultation of the Qu'ran and hadith, and religious reform movements in India dating to the late eighteenth century. Indian reformers, however, retained a strong connection to Sufi practices with deep roots in South Asian Islam.Footnote 5 Whether there was any direct connection between the Indian and Arabian reformers remains a matter of dispute.Footnote 6 The association with the Arabian Wahhabis was unlikely to elicit support among Indian Muslims. During the early nineteenth century, the Arabian Wahhabis conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, where they destroyed religious tombs and shrines, which they considered un-Islamic forms of idolatry, deeply offending the religious sensibilities of many Muslims in India.Footnote 7
Some sources suggest that Fazl-i-Rasul of Badayun (1798/99–1872) was the first person to use the term ‘Wahhabi’ to discredit Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi's political and religious movement.Footnote 8 Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the prominent nineteenth-century educationalist and reformer, claimed that the term Wahhabi was used regularly in India from the early period of British rule to discredit those who called for direct consultation of the Qu'ran and hadith and who questioned the binding authority of the judgements of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence.Footnote 9 Himself sympathetic with some of these reforms, in an essay written in 1850 Sayyid Ahmad Khan lamented: ‘he who follows the sunnat [the teachings and practices of Muhammad] is called a Wahhabi and he who practices bidat [heretical innovations] is called wali [holy man]’.Footnote 10
Although Indian Muslims used the term Wahhabi from an earlier date, the British did not regularly use the label to describe a distinct Indian sect posing a significant danger to their government until the 1860s.Footnote 11 The British had limited political contact with Arabian Wahhabis during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although they repeatedly accused them of supporting piracy in the Persian Gulf.Footnote 12 Initially, the British did not perceive Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi and his followers as a significant threat since their jihad was directed against the Sikh kingdom. In the late 1830s rumours circulated about an anti-British conspiracy organized by the brother of the nizam of Hyderabad, who allegedly associated with Wahhabi preachers. Events in Hyderabad, however, elicited minimal concern from the government of India, which considered them merely ‘some very wild & unsupported attempts on the part of the adherents of a peculiar sect to raise a spirit of disturbance’.Footnote 13 With the commencement of the Anglo-Sikh wars in the 1840s, the British inherited the frontier problems that had plagued the Sikhs. Between 1850 and 1863 the British sent 20 expeditions of troops into the frontier region. According to accounts written in the 1870s, colonial officials started to notice the presence of Bengali and Bihari men in the region from the late 1840s, purportedly the last remnants of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi's followers. Official concern remained limited, evidenced by the fact that men who were later tried and convicted in the 1860s were arrested and released on monetary bonds of security during the 1840s and 1850s.Footnote 14
The idea of an anti-government Wahhabi conspiracy stretching from eastern Bengal to the frontier regions of the Punjab emerged out of phobias peculiar to the post-1857 period. William Tayler, a panic-prone and quarrelsome colonial administrator in Patna, might be the best candidate for being the original conjurer of this Phantom Wahhabi. In 1855 Tayler assumed the commissionership of Patna. He considered the city a ‘seat of disloyalty and intrigue’, associated in particular with its ‘immense Mahomedan population—many of them of old and respectable families—many impoverished in consequence of the resumption of their lands’.Footnote 15 As news of revolt spread across the Indian countryside during the summer of 1857, Tayler attempted to quash any impending disturbances in Patna by arresting anyone he suspected of sedition. He called the city notables to his house, on the pretext of consulting them on the crisis, and at the end of the meeting, arrested three prominent Muslim leaders, supposedly due to letters and petitions he had received linking them to an anti-government conspiracy.Footnote 16 During June and July, he had over 20 men hanged, in many cases presiding over the trials himself.Footnote 17 Tayler insisted that disturbances in Patna and the surrounding areas were the result of the plotting of ‘an anti-christian crusade’ by a well-organized network of Indian followers of Abdul Wahab.Footnote 18
Convinced that Tayler was misdiagnosing events in Patna, Lieutenant Governor Frederick James Halliday sent increasingly panicked letters of reproach to Patna. As revolt spread across North India, Halliday lost his patience with Tayler's insubordination and suspended him in August of 1857.Footnote 19 Tayler spent the following 30 years waging a campaign protesting against his dismissal, publishing a stream of pamphlets defending his actions and lobbying Parliament for an official apology.Footnote 20 Tayler framed his personal grievances in terms of an ideological clash over the causes of the Rebellion of 1857. After his dismissal, he argued that, ‘the present outbreak is no Military revolt alone—no Soldier Mutiny—no mere rising of an Army. It is the issue of a long-meditated and deeply-laid scheme, the deliberate purpose of which was the extermination of the whole Christian race, the overthrow of the British Government, and the re-establishment of Moslem Rule.’Footnote 21
While Tayler never received the official apology he craved, British understandings of the Rebellion increasingly lined up with his interpretation. Despite the widespread participation of Hindu sepoys in the Rebellion of 1857, both official and unofficial opinion came to associate 1857 with a Muslim effort to throw off the yoke of Christian sovereignty.Footnote 22 The idea of a Wahhabi conspiracy came to embody a certain understanding of opposition to colonial rule as rooted in religious, and particularly Muslim, fanaticism. While in the 1850s officialdom in Calcutta brushed aside Tayler's warnings, in the following decade, colonial administrators embarked on an India-wide investigation into the activities of the Wahhabis. After an uneasy quiet settled over much of North India, disturbances continued in the northwest frontier region. Die-hard remnants of rebel forces from 1857, including Hindus and Muslims, joined forced with the tribal resistance that had continually plagued first the Sikhs and then the British.Footnote 23 In 1863, the British sent a large military force into the pass of Ambala, a rebel stronghold. They eventually seized the pass and surrounding areas, but with much difficulty and nearly 850 casualties.Footnote 24 In 1864 the parliamentary inquiry into the battle cited correspondence between the Punjab government and the government of India linking the frontier rebellion with networks of followers of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi and labelled the doctrine of this group Wahhabi.Footnote 25 The following year, W.W. Hunter, who would become one of the most important commentators on the Wahhabi trials, published an article in the Calcutta Review entitled, ‘The Indian Conspiracy of 1864’.Footnote 26 By the mid-1860s, the idea of a Wahhabi conspiracy, which could be isolated and rooted out, appealed to an administration still plagued by signs of disaffection but anxious to put the Rebellion behind it once and for all.
Police investigations led to trials in Ambala in 1864, Patna in 1865, Maldah and Rajmahal in 1870, and again in Patna in 1871.Footnote 27 The chief police detective charged with investigating the Wahhabis, J.H. Reily, showed an almost fanatical devotion to the task of securing convictions. Even some officials in Calcutta found Reily's zeal disturbing, one remarking that he ‘thinks of nothing but Wahabees sleeping or waking’.Footnote 28 Muhammad Jafar Thanesari, who was convicted and sentenced to transportation at the trial in Ambala, described the techniques the government used against the Wahhabis in an Urdu memoir he published after his release in 1883:
In this manner, fifty or sixty men, mostly mullahs and maulvis, were made witnesses against us but often when giving testimony they would look in our direction and start piteously crying. But they were helpless; if they did not give testimony, then they faced the prospect of a painful execution. . . There was a boy by the name of Abbas who was raised in my house for a period of time. When in the magistrate's court it came time for him to give testimony, on seeing me and being overcome with love, he recoiled from giving the false, rehearsed testimony against me. That same night the child was punished so badly that he died from the injury before he could appear in the sessions court trial.Footnote 29
The evidence gathered from such interrogations formed the backbone of the government's case against the Wahhabis. Officials intimately involved with the investigations also used material from the trials and police investigations to write a series of articles on the origins, development, and beliefs of the Indian Wahhabi.Footnote 30 Subsequent scholarly accounts of the Indian Wahhabis have relied heavily on these trial documents and colonial histories to chart the movement's anti-colonial activities.Footnote 31
The Great Wahhabi Trial
The case of the Khan brothers provoked wide-ranging debates about the nature of the conspiracy and the government's response to it. The extended period during which the government held the brothers without making formal charges against them raised doubts about the reality of Wahhabi conspiracy theories, and refocused attention on the danger posed by a colonial government that could arrest and detain subjects at will. Originally a symbol of the threat of religious fanaticism, the suspected Wahhabis came to represent the difficulty of combining executive privilege and the rule of law, and balancing the competing—and often opposing—imperatives of colonial security and imperial legitimacy.
The Khan brothers were wealthy hide merchants with trading interests in Patna and Calcutta. In 1870 when trial proceedings commenced, Amir was 75 and Hashmadad was 66.Footnote 32 While the government gave no reason for their initial arrest, eventually it argued that they had raised and transmitted money to jihadis fighting on the frontier between 1847 and 1869. Amir Khan had been initially arrested and temporarily detained in 1864 in connection with the Ambala trial, and the police seized his account books and the letters he purportedly exchanged with one of the men on trial. At that time, the judge ruled Amir Khan's arrest illegal and ordered that his papers be returned. For some unknown reason, however, the papers were never returned, and the government used them as key evidence against the brothers in 1871. The government claimed the books and letters contained coded references to money sent to the frontier via messengers and hundis (bills of exchange). The brothers’ lawyers protested that Amir Khan's connection to the convicted Wahhabi was purely a business relationship; the convicted man was a meat packer and Amir was a hide merchant.Footnote 33
The Khan brothers’ financial position allowed them to secure talented and well-connected legal counsel. Thomas Dunbar Ingram and Thomas Chisholm Anstey represented the brothers.Footnote 34 Dunbar was an Irish barrister and professor of jurisprudence in Hindu and Muhammadan law at Presidency College. Anstey was known for his radical politics and fiery rhetoric. He grew up in Tasmania and upon returning to Britain for higher education, joined the Oxford Movement, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism. During his early career as the member of the House of Commons for Youghal, Ireland, Anstey supported home rule for Scotland and Ireland. In 1856 he was appointed the attorney general of Hong Kong, where he continued building his reputation as a man of ‘energy, ability, and tenacity, combined with a tragic lack of balance and moderation’.Footnote 35 A zealous critic of corruption, Anstey quarrelled with the governor in Hong Kong and was suspended from his post. He shifted his legal practice to Bombay, where he briefly served as a judge in the High Court. Despite his often remarked upon ‘imperfections of temper’, Anstey acquired a reputation among his colleagues for his passionate defence of the legal rights of Indians.Footnote 36 Drawing on his own far-ranging imperial connections, Anstey transformed his defence of the Khan brothers into a political platform from which he argued that all British subjects, regardless of where they lived in the empire, had the right to equal protection of the law.
After the Khan brothers had languished in prison for 14 months, the High Court in Calcutta took up their case in the form of an application for writs of habeas corpus. The hearing revolved around the legality of Act No. III of 1858, which clarified and extended legislation originally passed in 1818 allowing the governor-general to detain state prisoners without pressing formal charges. The counsel for the government argued that to deny the government extraordinary powers in handling suspected cases of treason would risk that ‘the empire may be convulsed to its very foundation’.Footnote 37 Evoking memories of 1857, and the growing tendency to see the conflict in religious terms, the government's case made ominous references to fanatics, ‘who believe that the extermination of the British Government from this country, is what their religion requires’.Footnote 38
Anstey protested that the government's case rested on conspiracy theories, not admissible evidence. He turned the government's argument on its head in order to argue that barbaric legal measures approved in the wake of the Rebellion were far more of a threat to the empire than supposed fanaticism. The Mutiny, he claimed, had thrown ‘not the natives, but their masters, backwards in the scale of civilization. Terror and hatred took possession of every department of the land. There was a change in the language even of our Courts of Justice.’Footnote 39 Anstey cautioned that this mentality of panic was now embodied in Act No. III of 1858, which ‘empower[ed] any despot, or his representatives of the hour, to seize on, and remove for ever and ever any person, guilty of any crime or perfectly innocent, whether suspected of a crime or unsuspected not only under colour of the law but without being made responsible to the law’.Footnote 40 How, he asked, could such despotic powers co-exist with the Queen's proclamation of 1858, which promised Indians the same protections as other British subjects, without regard to race or creed?Footnote 41
In the course of the hearing, the two sets of lawyers constructed opposing visions of colonial rule. Anstey and Ingram argued that the legitimacy of the empire depended on maintaining a uniform rule of law that guaranteed all British subjects the same legal protection. In contrast, the government emphasized the imperatives of colonial security, arguing that the colonial executive needed broad discretionary powers to police a turbulent population. In his decision, Justice Norman steered a middle path between these two extremes. He drew parallels between Act No. III of 1858 and the well-established parliamentary power to suspend the right to habeas corpus in times of emergency. According to Justice Norman, the colonial setting necessitated that a measure that was strictly temporary in Britain should be extended indefinitely in India. Referring to the existence of ‘fanatics, whose conspiracies or preachings might, if they were allowed to continue them without interference cause great danger to the peace of the community at large’, Justice Norman resolved that:
The Regulation differs from Acts passed for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in this, that it is not a temporary Act; but if the danger to be apprehended from the conspiracies of people of such character as those I have mentioned, is not temporary, but from the condition of the country, must be permanent, it seems to me that the principles which justify the temporary suspension of the Habeas Corpus Acts in England justify the Indian Legislature in entrusting to the Governor-General in Council an exceptional power of placing individuals under personal restraint when, for the security of the British dominions from foreign hostility, and from internal commotion, such a course might appear necessary to the Governor-General in Council.Footnote 42
Thus, while comparing the powers enjoyed by Parliament and the Indian Legislature, Norman ultimately drew a sharp line of distinction between colonial India and domestic Britain. The principles behind colonial and English law might be similar, but the government in India faced a constant state of emergency, permanently embattled as it beat back the intertwined threats of foreign hostility and internal dissidence.
Viewed from the perspective of the imperial state, the case presents an example of the ideological and political shifts which, scholars have argued, characterized colonial rule in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857. Historians such as Thomas Metcalf have described the decades after the Rebellion in India as a period of liberal retrenchment.Footnote 43 Colonial officials increasingly saw India as governed by tradition and unchanged social hierarchies, incapable of appreciating the benefits of progressive British governance. Mired in irrational superstition, India required traditional forms of government. Influenced by new anthropological and sociological models of cultural development and racial classification, colonial officials, following the lead of James Fitzjames Stephen and Henry Maine, advocated the use of ‘native’ power structures, including landlords, village elites, and Indian princes, to control the colonial population.Footnote 44 When traditional structures were unequal to the task, the colonial state applied swift repression, relying on violence to inspire obedience. Outside of India, colonial officials in the Caribbean and Africa embraced similar strategies of governance, emphasizing colonial difference and authoritarianism.Footnote 45
A reading of the history of the Great Wahhabi Case that limits itself to the recorded decisions in the case supports this view of the growing influence of ideas of colonial difference and authoritarian strategies of governance in the decades following the Rebellion. As Nasser Hussain has argued in his work on the jurisprudence of emergency, Judge Norman's decision left a crucial legacy in the case-law that legalized extra-legal executive powers in times of public danger.Footnote 46 The decision reflected the power of ideas of colonial difference within the administration, which increasingly saw race and religion as marking fundamental civilizational boundaries. Legal protections of subjects’ rights had to be circumscribed in the colonial context, where imperial security ultimately rested on rule by force.Footnote 47 Yet, during the course of the trial, Anstey and Ingram also articulated another interpretation of imperial power, one in which colonial security rested on maintaining the legitimacy of a rule of law. In order to understand the significance of their critique, and its place in histories of imperial ideology, we have to broaden our analysis beyond the state's own justification of its power. The public reaction to the Khan brothers’ legal ordeal suggests a multi-stranded history of liberalism in colonial India, pointing to differing interpretations of the relationship between fanaticism, imperial power, and colonial security.
Liberalism and the court of public opinion
After the Khan brothers’ lawyers failed to secure a writ of habeas corpus, their case continued through a series of appeals and, eventually, a criminal trial. In December 1870 the Privy Council in London, the highest court of appeal for the British colonies, reviewed the case and set it aside for further consideration.Footnote 48 In January 1871, however, the government released the brothers and immediately rearrested them under proper warrants.Footnote 49 Since they were now imprisoned on charges of conspiracy and waging war against the queen, the Privy Council appeal over the issue of habeas corpus was moot. By the early months of 1871, the government was anxious to resolve the matter of the Wahhabis, and pressure mounted within the administration to bring the men to trial. Legal battles, however, continued over the trial venue. The defence lawyers wanted the trial to take place in Calcutta, while the government wanted it in Patna, presumably to remove the proceedings from the limelight of the imperial capital.Footnote 50 Finally, from the end of May until mid-July 1871, the Khan brothers stood trial along with six other suspected Wahhabis in the Sessions Court of Patna.
As the case moved between courtrooms in Calcutta, London, and Patna, debates occurring outside the courtroom created a court of public opinion in which the government's response to the Wahhabi conspiracy, as much as the men standing trial, became the object of public scrutiny. The newspaper coverage of the trial placed the specific issues at hand within the broader context of debates about the nature of imperial governance. The question of the rights of subjects in colonial territories had implications across the empire. News coverage of the Great Wahhabi Case made these links explicit through comparisons with the declaration of martial law in Jamaica in 1865 and the rising tide of Fenian unrest in Ireland.Footnote 51 (During the course of the trials, the Irish Nationalist purportedly declared, ‘Long life to the Wahabees’.Footnote 52) Thus, rather than isolating and containing the supposed Wahhabi threat, the trial brought into focus conflicting tendencies within British colonial ideology and projected these debates onto an empire-wide stage.
This ideological contest took place through the circuits of a newly emergent, or at least radically transformed, colonial public. During the years following the Rebellion of 1857, the vernacular press exploded in size. Debates about imperial policies increasingly circulated through interconnected spheres of publications in Indian languages, the English-language press in India, and imperial news networks reaching beyond India.Footnote 53 The press coverage of the case provides a window into the circuits of this colonial public. Newspapers reported on the large crowds of people that gathered to hear the trial proceedings, and the English-language press in Calcutta noted ominously that the case was seriously undermining the legitimacy of the colonial regime in the eyes of the native public.Footnote 54 The government followed commentary on the case in the Bengali and Urdu press in some of the earliest existing reports on native newspapers, a system of surveying vernacular newspapers that would become a mainstay of the government's attempt to keep abreast of native public opinion.Footnote 55 Newspapers in Calcutta were deeply sensitive to how local events played out on the broader imperial stage. When Ingram published a pamphlet in London protesting Justice Norman's decision, The Indian Observer complained that Ingram was passing off his ‘counterfeit’ version of events as the ‘current coin of the realm’ in London.Footnote 56
At the outset of the Khan brothers’ ordeal, only a few papers, whether English or Indian, expressed sympathy for the Wahhabis. In the autumn of 1870, while the Khan brothers were in prison, the Bhaskar, a Bengali paper, raised a cry of alarm about Wahhabis in Calcutta. The paper warned: ‘In some portions of the town the majority of Mahomedans have entered their ranks, and some of the lower order of Hindoos have also joined them. In different places they have marked out their circles; they insult women and respectable men; speak treasonably against the Government; gamble; and practise other evils.’Footnote 57 By portraying the Wahhabis as rabble-rousers, defined as much by their class as their religious identity, many Indians—at least initially—supported the actions the government took against the Wahhabis, aligning the cause of public respectability with the political stability of the British government.Footnote 58
Yet the Khan brothers’ case broke down the boundaries that marked off the Wahhabis as a loathsome sect of Muslim fanatics. The brothers’ upper-class status and the weakness of the government's case against them made many people in Calcutta wonder if it might be their door the police showed up at next. As the Amrita Bazar Patrika lamented in the days following Justice's Norman's refusal to grant a writ of habeas corpus, ‘It is clear that no one here has the power to do aught against the wishes of the Governor General. Whether we be guilty or innocent, he can, if he pleases, and as long as he please, leave us to rot in prison.’Footnote 59
The legal community in Calcutta was particularly attuned to the broad implications of Justice Norman's decision to defend the government's power to suspend the right to habeas corpus. Lawyers in Calcutta collected transcripts of the court proceedings and arranged quick print runs with local newspapers.Footnote 60 One such pamphlet stated that the case raised the question of ‘whether the Government-General of India in Council has the power, at any moment, without cause shown to arrest any Englishman or native subject in this country’.Footnote 61 The concern of the legal community in Calcutta was quickly echoed elsewhere in India. The Madras Jurist emphasized the broad implications of Justice Norman's decision: ‘If, therefore, the Governor General in Council were to issue an order confiscating the property of every man, woman, and child in the three Presidency towns, no responsibility would attach to those who carried out the order, and the only chance of redress would be in proceedings in England.’Footnote 62
In criticizing the new draconian powers the colonial regime was invoking, many critics of the government's actions in the Khan brothers’ case turned to liberal rhetoric and discourses, drawing on arguments and styles of criticism linked to liberal causes and thinkers. Ingram wrote two letters to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, which he later published as a pamphlet entitled Two Letters on Some Recent Proceedings of the Indian Government. The pamphlet mirrored Gladstone's Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen, on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government (1851), which exposed the horrible conditions under which Carlo Poerio, a leading participant in the Revolution of 1848 in Naples, was confined.Footnote 63 By using William Gladstone's pamphlet as a model (both the titles and layout of the pamphlets are similar), Ingram criticized the government's actions in the language of liberal opposition to the excesses of state power. Attempting to shame the government, he demanded: ‘Am I speaking of a British dependency in which English law prevails, or of some remote province of an Eastern despotism?’Footnote 64
Coverage of the case in Indian newspapers made comparisons that at first seem unexpected, such as an article in the Times of India which declared that the ‘mysterious and super-legal precautions’ taken against the Wahhabis ‘is, in politics, on a par with the wisdom in finance which devised and threatens to carry through a 3 ⅛ income tax’.Footnote 65 Such comparisons, along with Ingram's political rhetoric, become more comprehensible when framed in the context of mid-century popular liberalism. Held together by the persona of William Gladstone and the ideology of John Stuart Mill, mid-century liberalism embraced a range of political causes, including anti-statism, free trade, and the rule of law.Footnote 66
The scholarly literature on popular mid-century liberalism has concentrated on domestic movements in Britain.Footnote 67 Liberalism in India is most often associated with Utilitarian reform in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and initiatives instituted under later viceroys appointed by Liberal Party governments.Footnote 68 Studies of liberal nationalism generally focus on the later decades of the nineteenth century after the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. The use of liberal rhetoric in the 1860s and 1870s in response to the increasing authoritarianism of the colonial executive represents an additional, less-studied strand of liberal thought in India. Criticism of the introduction of an income tax in 1860 and the passage of Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code in 1870, which extended the government's ability to prosecute seditious speech, deployed critiques of the expansion of state power that had a distinctly Gladstonian tone. This brand of liberalism differed significantly from the ideology underpinning reforms initiated by the colonial administration, which stressed the role of imperial bureaucracy in fostering social progress among ‘backward’ peoples. In contrast, after 1857, groups outside the circuits of the colonial administration, including both Indian and British commentators, embraced the liberal language of rights to criticize the expanding powers of the imperial executive which, they argued, were hindering rather than promoting liberal values, including the rule of law.
The relationship between the Khan brothers’ case and the passage of Section 124A demonstrates how the language of liberalism knit together diverse protests into a broad defence of liberty. Official correspondence on Section 124A cited the threat of Wahhabi fanaticism to justify greater powers to punish anyone believed to be spreading disaffection.Footnote 69 The press in India saw the amendment as a threat to freedom of expression. A few months before the amendment passed, the Bengali paper Som Prakash, in language reminiscent of J.S. Mill's On Liberty, warned:
Where the press is not free it has all the more power, as is evidenced in the history of France. It is vain to expect that if the liberty of the press is denied, rebellion will cease. Before the mutiny were not the chapaties circulated? Are not the Wahabees able to communicate their plans to one another? The Indian Government ought to know that they who speak out are their true friends. The papers that point out their errors have no intention of creating a disturbance; they only seek the welfare of the country.Footnote 70
To critics, the police powers the government invoked in the name of putting down Wahhabi fanaticism put the rights of all Indians at risk. Thus, ironically, fear of Muslims as being particularly prone to sedition translated into policies that caused Indians who might otherwise have felt little sympathy with the Khan brothers to share a common sense of grievance.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, Anglo-Indians, as contemporaries referred to the European population in India, expressed concern that Justice Norman's decision threatened the legal rights of all subjects residing in colonial territories, whether Indian or British. Historians have often associated the Anglo-Indian public with demands to bend the rule of law to uphold white privilege and enforce Indian subordination. Examining the suppression in the early 1860s of an English translation of the Bengali drama Nil Darpan, which exposed the exploitative nature of forced indigo cultivation, Partha Chatterjee has argued that the Anglo-Indian public claimed the exclusive right to criticize government policy and demanded censorship of the vernacular public.Footnote 71 Elaborating on Chatterjee's concept of the ‘rule of colonial difference’, Elizabeth Kolsky has documented the systematic suspension of the rule of law in cases involving white Britons perpetrating violence against Indians.Footnote 72 The press coverage during the Wahhabi trials, however, suggests the permeability of the boundaries between the Anglo-Indian and Indian public and the wide and vacillating spectrum of discourses on the relationship between the rule of law, race, and empire. As Amir Khan's legal ordeal dragged on, press opinion—even in some of Calcutta's conservative Anglo-Indian papers—generally shifted in his favour. Although some papers supported the government, many lamented the use of extra-legal methods. They compared the proceedings to ‘witch-finding’ and ‘Star Chamberl-ike [sic]’ and expressed consternation that, ‘Such a mountain, a very Himalaya, has been made out of this Wahabee molehill.’Footnote 73
Criticism of the government's actions in the Anglo-Indian press drew on a liberal discourse that emphasized the importance of law and public opinion acting as a check on the despotic tendencies of the colonial government. While the Englishman fiercely defended the government's actions throughout, papers such as the Indian Daily News and the Times of India seized upon the trial as an example of the incompetent and unchecked powers of the colonial executive. In the autumn of 1870, the correspondent for the Times in Calcutta described the government's attitude to the case as ‘one of strong indifference to ordinary maxims of justice, in the belief that they are impregnable by law’.Footnote 74 The paper denounced the Bengal government's obsession with pursuing ‘the obsolete Wahabi phantasy’ and lambasted sections of the press for ‘inordinate pursuit of the phantom’.Footnote 75 The Indian Daily News initially defended the necessity of the brothers’ detention but later described the government's response as overblown and expressed concern that it was undermining the credibility of the colonial state in the eyes of the Indian public. In the autumn of 1871, the paper lamented:
Unfortunately, the Government has adopted a course which has converted justice in more than Mahomedan opinion into something very like persecution, and has out of criminals, suspected by the masses, made martyrs they are now inclined to reverence. The Government, however, seem to consider that long-winded trials, and a species of despotism, is the best way of being prompt in asserting authority, and making swift punishment wait on treason.Footnote 76
Two years into the brothers’ legal ordeal, even newspapers that supported the government's legal position were calling for greater leniency, arguing that, ‘There must be generosity where there is such enthusiasm and devotion even to mad and devastating principles.’Footnote 77
Critics of the government in the Anglo-Indian press generally maintained a pragmatic view of the rights of Indians under the colonial regime, emphasizing that the government had used excessive measures in the Khan brothers’ case, rather than defending Indians’ right to legal equality outright. Populated by lawyers, professionals, businessmen, and newspaper editors, the Anglo-Indian public that commented on the case often saw a conflict between their own interests and the official policies of the colonial administration. The increasing criticism of the government during the course of the trial suggests that, at times, segments of the Indian and Anglo-Indian publics found common cause in their opposition to a colonial government they considered a threat to their safety and interests. In the course of the trial, far from ignoring the Indian public, the Anglo-Indian press regularly cited the trial's impact on ‘native’ opinion and the adverse effect of the proceedings on the legitimacy of British rule. As the colonial administration increasingly defended autocratic government as necessary in the colonial setting, the Indian and Anglo-Indian publics selectively deployed liberal ideology and rhetoric to assert their own opposing interpretation of the colonial project. During the Great Wahhabi Case, this strand of liberalism unsettled racial boundaries by underlining that the suspension of habeas corpus presented a potential threat to both Indian and British subjects. In other situations, however, Anglo-Indian newspapers used much the same rhetoric to criticize government attempts to expand the legal rights of Indians at the expense of Anglo-Indian privilege. In her analysis of the Ilbert Bill controversy, Christian Dobbin has argued that the Anglo-Indian public framed their opposition to the government's decision to allow Indian judges to try Europeans in mofussil courts in terms of the government's failure to consult its white subjects about a legislative change that adversely affected their interests.Footnote 78 Although arguing against an expansion of Indian rights, Anglo-Indian newspapers used rhetoric, including denouncing the colonial government as despotic and immune to public criticism, that was remarkably similar to articles criticizing the government's actions during the Khan brothers’ extended detention. The similarities and differences between the two events suggest that the power of liberal rhetoric in mid-Victorian India lay less in its ideological consistency than in its ability to accommodate and vocalize the shifting interests of diverse groups.
If mid-Victorian liberalism lacked ideological consistency, it also faced competition from other political and philosophical discourses that offered different means of articulating similar demands, including upholding the rule of law. During the course of the Wahhabi trials, debates about British and colonial law intersected with debates about Islamic law and its applicability in the colonial setting. Most Indian Muslims were anxious to distance themselves from the radical Wahhabis, and many prominent Muslim leaders drew on Islamic legal vocabulary to simultaneously discredit Wahhabi reformers and to prove to the colonial administration that Islam did not pose a threat to British rule. They authored articles in Urdu and English arguing that opposition to British rule was prohibited under Islamic law since the British guaranteed Muslims the right to practise their religion.Footnote 79 These pamphlets, with titles such as Fatawa-ul-Makiyya fi Ikhraj-ul-Wahhabia (Fatwahs of Mecca on the Expulsion of Wahhabism), purported to bring together the opinions of ulama from across India and the Muslim world.Footnote 80 Several authors declared that although British India was not technically dar-ul-islam, it could be considered as dar-ul-aman, or a land of security, where loyalty to the existing regime was incumbent on all Muslims.Footnote 81 They therefore rejected the argument that India was a dar-ul-harb, or land of war, in which it was incumbent on Muslims to wage jihad against the infidel rulers or to migrate.
Classifying India as a dar-ul-aman challenged the government's assertion of colonial difference as a justification for suspending the normal rule of law, presenting arguments that overlapped with liberal defences of the rule of law but which emerged out of a separate and well-developed tradition of Islamic legal debate. Indian Muslims’ writing on the subject presented Islam as a rational religion, emphasizing its ability to adapt to different conditions. They opposed the idea that Muslims were fanatics whose religion was fundamentally at odds with Western civilization. By insisting that colonial India was a ‘land of security’, Indian Muslims suggested that treating India as perpetually in a state of emergency was unjustified. The Indian and Anglo-Indian publics became increasingly familiar with this seemingly esoteric Islamic legal vocabulary from reading reports about the debates in the English-language press, culminating in W.W. Hunter's famous commentary, The Indian Musalmans: Are they Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? In the courtroom Anstey and Ingram were able to harness Islamic legal vocabulary to their own framing of the case as a violation of the principles of liberal government. Anstey argued in the final appeal hearing that, ‘It is asserted that the preaching or waging of jehad must be either strife or Islam, and that jehad in either case is making war against the ruling powers. It is not so. There is a third class or condition of things under which the preaching of jehad means no such thing, and that is in a land of security. British India is not dar-al-harb.’Footnote 82
Despite his lawyers’ impassioned defence and public calls for his release, in July 1871 the judge in the Sessions Court in Patna convicted Amir Khan and sentenced him to transportation for life (the Court released his brother due to lack of evidence). Three of the four assessors advising the judge on the case voted for an acquittal, causing some newspapers in Calcutta to call for Amir's release, demands repeated when the High Court acquitted three of the five prisoners convicted with Amir in Patna on appeal.Footnote 83 Yet Justice Norman's assassination in September 1871, just before he was supposed to hear the appeal, and Lord Mayo's assassination by an Afghan assailant while touring the Andaman Islands in February of 1872, provoked a new wave of Wahhabi conspiracy theories. Even in this renewed atmosphere of panic, however, the government decided not to send Amir to the Andaman Islands. Eight years after his initial arrest, the government released him in 1877 as one of several official pardons it made in the period leading up to Queen Victoria's coronation as empress of India. (In a final stroke of misfortune, Amir was struck down and killed by a hackney carriage soon after his release.Footnote 84) The government released several other convicted Wahhabis in 1883.
James O'Kinealy, the government prosecutor in the Wahhabi trials and the author of several articles in the Calcutta Review on the Wahhabis, was one of the most ardent advocates for the prisoners’ release. He cited the beneficial effects it would have on public opinion in Bengal—a correct, if much belated, assessment of the public's verdict on the trials.Footnote 85 Yet even as officials privately acknowledged the role of public opinion in shaping their decision to release Amir Khan, they masked the impact of liberal critique by publicly couching the release in the language of the imperial mercy of the new empress.
These repeated shifts in public perceptions of the threat posed by the Wahhabis and the appropriate government response suggest that the decades following the Rebellion of 1857 were characterized by ideological instability, rather than an irreversible hardening of racial boundaries or a coherent turn from liberal empire to authoritarian imperialism. Press coverage of the trial demonstrates that liberalism, far from disappearing, remained a potent—if chameleon-like—element of public debate. It offered a language for defending the rule of law and asserting the role of public opinion as a check on government despotism that had wide resonance across the British empire. This mid-Victorian liberalism often lacked ideological consistency, strained by the increasingly diverse collection of groups deploying its rhetoric in defence of their own projects and interests. The imperial administration was sometimes able to co-opt liberal critique by selectively incorporating public opinion into imperial governance to propagate its image as a benevolent despot, while keeping the door to true democratic participation firmly closed.Footnote 86 Circulating in a wider field of debate, liberalism also competed—and intersected—with other legal and political discourses that promoted overlapping ideological positions. The important role Islamic legal vocabulary assumed during debates about the Wahhabi trials cautions against a simplistic approach to classifying all defences of reason, law, or representative government in the mid-nineteenth century as derivative of a Western liberal project.
Postscript—liberalism and the Wahhabi revisited
As a narrative of the encounter between liberalism and the fanatic Wahhabi, it is tempting to conclude the history of the Great Wahhabi Case with the release of Amir Khan, declaring a victory, however pyrrhic, for the elderly Wahhabi and the liberal discourses that transformed him from a looming threat to imperial security into a long-suffering old man caught in the web of colonial paranoia.
Yet, the Great Wahhabi Case was never really about Amir Khan, or if so, only marginally. The trial was a contest over the fate of the Phantom Wahhabi and its relationship to imperial ideologies of law, security, and control. The conclusion of this narrative is far more elusive, as the Phantom Wahhabi remained a remarkably persistent, if unstable and inconsistent, trope in representations of colonial difference and imperial legitimacy. During the course of the Great Wahhabi Case, the figure of the Phantom Wahhabi became an important site for a contest between two ideologies of empire—one that linked colonial difference with the need for autocratic and repressive governance and another that defined colonial legitimacy in terms of a universal regime of rights and limits on government despotism. Yet, the figure of the Phantom Wahhabi evoked emotions of fascination, fear, and sympathy that ultimately blurred the boundaries between these two ideologies. In British writings on the Wahhabis from the late-nineteenth century, orientalist fantasy inspired calls for lenient treatment for the Wahhabis, and identification with anti-colonial protest fuelled greater anxiety about the threat posed to imperial security. The construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the Phantom Wahhabi in the second half of the nineteenth century highlight the complex and often unstable interaction between these strands of colonial ideology.
While Indians had used the term Wahhabi against their opponents from the early nineteenth century, during the last decades of the century Indian Muslims used the term with increasing frequency and force, coupling it with the accusation of kufr, or heresy, and the adjective shaitani, or coming from Satan.Footnote 87 Labelling an opponent a Wahhabi brought together the dual accusations of preaching fitna, or moral and social chaos, and political sedition. For example, Nawab Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan, the husband of the begum of Bhopal and a religious scholar, was plagued by accusations that he was a Wahhabi, in large part due to the factions within the Bhopal court who opposed his marriage to the widowed begum. The nawab fiercely denied that he harboured any feelings of disloyalty towards the British. In 1883 in a book entitled Tarjuman-i-Wahhabiyyat (Translation of Wahhabism), he bitterly complained that, ‘all men of experience know that when a man is enemies with another man or with a group and he is unable to entrap his opponent by other means he harms him by exposing him to the government as a Wahabi’.Footnote 88 By the late 1880s, the term Wahhabi had taken on such negative connotations that Muslims in the Punjab petitioned the government to discontinue the use of the term in official correspondence.Footnote 89 Yet, despite the concerted effort of Indian Muslims to disassociate calls for religious reform from the taint of political sedition, the spectre of a Wahhabi conspiracy continued to haunt the British imagination well into the twentieth century, resurfacing with renewed vigour as anti-colonial and nationalist resistance to British rule mounted.Footnote 90
The resilience of the Phantom Wahhabi demands further investigation into the nature of the support for Amir Khan's release and raises questions about whether liberalism ultimately triumphed over constructions of the threat of Muslim fanaticism. During the Khan brothers’ legal ordeal, a group of supporters for their release emerged who neither denied their guilt nor the legality of the government's response. Instead, these supporters, which included government officials who investigated the Wahhabis and commentators in conservative Anglo-Indian newspapers, argued that the valour of the Wahhabis argued for lenient treatment. Public support for the brothers’ release, therefore, relied at least as much on the affective bond forged between the public and the men on trial as on reasoned arguments about upholding the rule of law. James Routledge, editor of the Friend of India and the India correspondent for the Times of London, captured the nature of this bond in his description of the case of a convicted Wahhabi: ‘that the history will some day be read with just pride in India, when India knows its own most honourable records, I take to be among the certainties of life’. Routledge did not question that the man was guilty, but provocatively suggested: ‘We may be bound, for the safeguard of society, to punish rebellion, whatever its cause or justification; but are we not also bound by the highest laws to admire such heroism and self-sacrifice as these men evinced?’Footnote 91 Routledge, in appealing to a higher law beyond the mundane workings of the colonial judiciary, fractured the concept of the rule of law. Ultimately, appeals to the affective laws of honour and sympathy may have been as influential in pressuring the colonial government to release convicted Wahhabis as arguments about the legality of their detention and imprisonment.
The Wahhabis evoked a potent cocktail of fascination, fear, sympathy, and respect in both Indian and British audiences. Historical analysis of these emotions complicates boundaries between different ideological positions. Colonial interest in the Wahhabis was sometimes little more than morbid fascination. An exhibition in an art show in South Kensington featured a signet ring, formerly belonging to Ahmadullah, one of the convicted Wahhabis, and on loan from William Tayler.Footnote 92 Yet orientalist fascination with the Wahhabis inspired scholarship on Indian Muslims that ultimately paved the way for new British efforts to cultivate them as Indian allies. In his influential commentary on the Wahhabi trials, The Indian Musalmans, W.W. Hunter sympathetically aired the grievances of the Indian Muslim community against the colonial government. Hunter called for greater investment in educating Indian Muslims and advocated securing their loyalty by giving them a greater share of government positions. Yet, as Sayyid Ahmad Khan astutely countered in his reply to Hunter, this apparent generosity came at the cost of painting the entire Muslim community with the damning brush of suspected disloyalty, a high price to pay for a few more government appointments.Footnote 93
In the more open imaginary space of a fictional narrative, in his novel The Afghan Knife, published in 1879, Robert Armitage Sterndale explored the events of 1857 through a cast of interconnected Anglo-Indian and Muslim characters. In the novel, Sterndale set up an opposition between two Muslim characters, one a Westernized deputy magistrate and the other a pious Wahhabi who fought with Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi. Inverting the politics of loyalty, at the end of the novel the Wahhabi saves a young Englishwoman from her rebel captives, while the deputy magistrate proves a duplicitous villain concerned only with himself.Footnote 94 These forms of fascination—and even identification—intersected with the reasoned liberal defence of the Wahhabis’ rights as legal subjects of the empire, but they combined ideas of colonial difference and imperial security in different and often unsettling ways.
Muhammad Jaffar Thanesari, the convicted Wahhabi, offered a striking commentary on the complex politics of sympathy the Wahhabis evoked both for Indian and British observers:
By eroding the ulema through anger and ten years of intimidation, the government's design was that they should be rooted out of India and their seed should be exterminated. But when I returned from the Andaman Islands, I observed the opposite. When I was in India there were perhaps not even ten Muslims in all of Punjab who were followers of the Wahhabi sect. Now I see that there is not a village or town in which at least a quarter of the Muslims are not Wahhabi followers of Shah Ismail. Day after day, this sect is spreading just as at one time the Protestants suddenly spread over all of Europe, and no punishment, torture, impalement, hanging, banishment, or burning alive prevented their growth. But from experience it is known that forbidding the growth of a sect or using violence to do so is the most powerful contributor to its growth and fame.Footnote 95
The comparison that Thanesari drew between Protestants and Wahhabis, a parallel that many British commentators also noted, further demonstrates the complex feelings that could be evoked by identification. Rather than soothing British fears, Thanesari raised the spectre that the Wahhabis could prove dangerous to the British, not because of their religious differences, but because of their common histories of religious protest.
The affective bond between the public and the Phantom Wahhabi thus defies easy classification in terms of either the ideology of colonial difference or the language of liberal universalism. The sympathetic portrayal of the Wahhabi in press coverage, contemporary scholarly articles, and fictional accounts was deeply orientalist—fixated on the Arabian origins of the Wahhabis, emphasizing the religious over the political dimensions of the movement, and evoking a titillating aura of danger. Yet, the product of orientalist fantasy could provoke identification and sympathy, ultimately undermining any clear boundary between the colonial subject and the ‘oriental Other’ and casting doubt on the moral integrity of repressing the Other, even as it underlined its practical necessity. Intellectual histories of empire often associate ideas of colonial difference with repressive policies and the universalizing worldview of liberal ideology with calls for well-intentioned, if patronizing, strategies of reform. Defying these binaries, the Phantom Wahhabi suggests that ideas of difference could inspire calls for liberality. Conversely, identification with anti-colonial resistance as a just cause could fuel anxiety that justified harsher repression. Drawing a binary division between the universalizing and progressive rhetoric of liberal reform and the conservative and authoritarian assertion of colonial difference effaces complex interplays between fantasy, identification, sympathy, and fear. The many lives of the Phantom Wahhabi were born out of the ongoing, and often complex, interactions and amalgamations of liberal and authoritarian strategies of governance and colonial ideologies of universalism and difference.
