Marginal Muslims: maulawis, munsifs, munshis and others Avril Powell

Marginal Muslims: maulawis, munsifs, munshis and others
Avril Powell
(SOAS)
(Work in progress: not to be cited)
The paper will examine patterns of response to the events of 1857-58 among some Muslim
civil servants employed in the subordinate services in the North-Western Provinces in
positions such as sadr amin and deputy collector, and also as professors and teachers in the
Anglo-Oriental colleges of the region, notably in Delhi, Agra and Bareilly. Many were of
maulawi background and education, but unlike those ‘ulama more directly associated with
mosque and madrassa functions, whose involvements in 1857 have been examined
previously in several other studies, the responses of the ‘service’ category, with the exception
of some well known figures such as Saiyid Ahmad Khan, have had little critical attention so
far. The longer-term objective will be to disaggregate this service class to chart and evaluate
some specific perceptions of events and decisions on stances and involvement, before, during
and in the aftermath of rebellion. The present paper merely provides an entrée to this topic.
In returning to this subject for the purposes of this conference after about fifteen years it
should be considered whether studies completed in the interim now necessitate some
questioning of my own earlier conclusions on Muslim involvement in the rebellions. But in
fact, if anything, the more recent publications on Muslim issues in this period, have tended to
reinforce the two-fold division of views predominant in the 1950s to 1980s between those
arguing, either, that members of the religious class of ‘ulama spearheaded and acted in
unison during the rebellion; or, that although some Muslims of various classes and categories
can certainly be identified as committed ‘rebels’, there is little evidence of co-ordination
among them, nor did they belong to a specific ‘religious’ category’ within Islam. Like many
others who participated they were driven as individuals by a range of motives, secular as well
as religious. When writing on the relations between Muslims and missionaries in NWP in the
pre-1857 years, my conclusions placed me firmly in the latter camp, close overall, though
using some different examples, to the views of Peter Hardy and Barbara Metcalf. Thus
Metcalf’s conclusion on the qasbah of Thana Bhawan that ,‘even if ‘ulama figured
prominently in this place, the overall role of the ‘ulama in the revolt was at best fragmentary
and divided’, seemed to be confirmed by my own findings, even for ‘ulama and other
Muslims who had strongly contested the missionary publications and preaching against
Islam, and might therefore seem to have a strong ‘religious’ motive. 1
Meanwhile, it seems that the view of the ‘ulama as mujahidin continues to hold sway in
Pakistan. In a paper which Naeem Qureshi hoped to present to this conference (but which
unfortunately will now be postponed to another occasion), he intended to show in more
detail than I am in a position to do, the extent to which ideological agendas in recent decades
have resulted in a reaffirmation in Pakistan of ‘the role of the ‘ulama, especially their fatwa
1 Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton,
New Jersey, 1982), p. 83. See also Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge,
1972), pp. 62-70. Avril A Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond,
Surrey, 1993).

for jihad of 1857’, in ways that have assisted the concept of jihad to take on ‘a new meaning
in Pakistan’s political vocabulary’ which is now reflected ‘in the textbooks of the madrasas
and, from the time of Ziaul Haq’s Islamization programme, in the “secular” educational
institutions as well’. 2 A contesting ‘liberal’ view that Qureshi identifies with such as Faiz
Ahmad Faiz in the 1960s, no longer seems to find a voice.
But I am not aware of much recent effort elsewhere to provide either an alternative view or to
follow up the Hardy and Metcalf conclusions with some detailed case studies of individual
Muslims or ‘schools’ that might, in aggregate, allow a more comprehensive overview. This is
not to say that there have not been some new studies of particular centres of rebellion in
which Muslim participation loomed large, and one or two of the careers of some individual
Muslims whose parts in 1857 have thereby received some reassessment. Among these,
William Dalrymple’s Last Mughal has obvious implications, in its concentration on Delhi,
for the wider understanding of Muslim motives and patterns of participation. In representing
the build up to rebellion in Delhi as a clash of ‘two fundamentalisms’, Evangelical and
Islamic, Dalrymple brings back into the equation an emphasis on ‘religious factors’ which
has been missing in recent years except in the school of historiography dominant in Pakistan.
However, given the emphasis Dalrymple places on the clash of ‘two fundamentalisms’, it is
surprising that the ‘ulama and some other religiously disquieted Muslims remain only
shadowy figures in his new telling of the Delhi story. We seem to learn no more than we
knew already; that is nothing definite, about the alleged ‘Delhi fatwa for jihad’, or indeed
about the alleged pre-1857 ‘Wahhabi’ linkages. After a full trawl of the Persian and Urdu
‘mutiny documents’ in the New Delhi archives and elsewhere, unanswered questions still
seem to remain even for the Delhi arena of rebellion. For this reason, the two papers to be
presented at this conference which will also draw on this rich source are welcomed as likely
to address such questions on ‘ulama participation as well as, no doubt, on many others.
Others have also been adding to the documentary evidence, particularly in Urdu, which in
co-ordination with the official and private sources, mainly in English, further research must
take into account. Compiled and translated in Britain, and based largely on documents held
in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library, but published in Pakistan,
Salim Qureshi’s Cry for Freedom, a collection of ‘proclamations of Muslim revolutionaries
of 1857’, seems to support the mainstream of recent Pakistani historiography. However this,
and some other collections of ‘mutiny’ documents which Quraishi and others have published
in recent years, certainly now make accessible a wealth of raw material for others to examine,
which may in time cause some questioning of earlier, sometimes uncritical, conclusions.
Two or three other contributions to this field are also important generally, or have helped me
frame my own questions. Among these the recently published ‘Delhi College’ volume, edited
by Margrit Pernau, comprising some detailed studies of some of the leading scholar-teachers
of the city, up to and after the point when the college was closed down during the rebellion,
provides informed and balanced assessments of their places in the 1857 scenario. On the
British side too there has been an important recent contribution. Alex Padamsee’s revisionist
view of the genesis and evolution of British perceptions of ‘Muslim conspiracy’, although
2 M. N. Qureshi, abstract for paper, ‘What really happened in 1857? A synthesis of the
Pakistani perspectives on the uprising in Urdu literature’.
2

approachable independently of any evidence of what Muslims themselves actually thought or
did, has obvious relevance for a wider context of debate, and is to be welcomed as
introducing some new approaches, including the application of psychoanalytic theory to the
texts which have hitherto supported the old chestnut of ‘conspiracy’. The particular colonial
writings used in the present study may, however, suggest some counter imaginations or even
realities, that may not necessarily support his conclusions.
Some shorter studies also promise more to come in the future. David Lelyveld has recently
revisited Bijnor district in the context of some new work he is engaged in on the family of
Saiyid Ahmad Khan. His brief article, ‘Of mixed loyalties’, a re-examination of the Saiyid’s
agenda in compiling his History of the Bijnor Rebellion, promises a more nuanced
understanding not only of Saiyid Ahmad’s ‘mutiny writings’ but also of the wider scenario in
Rohilkhand after the restoration to temporary power of the region’s dispossessed Muslim
nawabs, to which little has been added since the concentration of studies on the doab region
in the 1970s and 80s. Similarly, an as yet unpublished paper on Azimullah Khan’s
significance in the Nana Sahib theatre of rebellion, promises to nail that individual’s mutiny
significance once and for all.
An alternative focus: Muslim government servants and 1857
An attempt is made here to find a new entrée into Muslim leadership and the divergencies in
stances during 1857 by considering a number of individuals initially not as ‘ulama (which
undoubtedly many of them were), but according to their service functions under the
Company. The hope is to go rather further than Hardy’s, ‘Some Muslim officials went one
way, some the other’, though that generalization is undoubtedly correct, and will be
reinforced, not questioned, in what follows. The categorisation follows the terminology used
in the Company’s own records for uncovenanted servants drawn up annually by the NWP
administration which gives years of service, age and current salary, as well as details about
the particular post held by individual Indian employees. 3 These lists have the advantage of
easy comparison of the ‘before and after’ 1857-8 situation for the various departments of a
particular district, answering questions such as to what extent a particular kacahri was, or
was not, swept clean in the aftermath of revolt, for example, of judicial or revenue officials;
of ‘new men’ or ‘old men’, or even of any alleged ‘Muslim conspirators’. Many lowerranking
officials are identifiable by name and personal details only in these lists. But I dub all
the uncovenanted Indian employees ‘marginal men’, irrespective of their relative places in
the overall ‘subordinate’ native hierarchy as a reflection of their inconspicuousness as
individuals in almost all other records, even though a significant proportion had acquired by
1857 a service record of between twenty and forty years. Except in the case of Saiyid Ahmad
Khan, to whom reference will be brief given the volume of previous studies on him, and
some of the more prominent college teachers, I am trying to tell some tales untold before.
It is very well known from the secondary sources that Muslims were well represented in the
revenue and judicial departments in proportion to their population in the North-West up to,
and also after 1857. In 1850 Muslims, approximately 12% of the province’s overall
population, held 72% of the judicial posts open to Indians, that is munsifships and sadr
3 ‘North-West Provinces Uncovenanted Servants, 1854-1862’: years 1856 and 1858.
3

aminships, in two-thirds of the districts. 4 That ‘they were equally dominant in the subordinate
revenue service’ 5 , is confirmed in the revenue proceedings, and shown too for serishtadars
and other miscellaneous minor revenue officers as well as for the highly coveted deputy
collectorships. That the employment position was, on the surface, so relatively ‘favourable’
for Muslims reflects that after the Company’s annexation of the north-west, the sons of many
scholarly families whose sons had served the Mughals or its successor regimes continued,
faute de mieux, to serve the Company, and were encouraged in so doing by many of their
British patrons. Many of the Muslims still in post in 1856 had first entered service in the
1820s and 1830s, long service with the Company being a characteristic that particularly
marks some of the individual cases to be taken up below.
Among the sources that ‘fill out’ the more bureaucratic data in the service records and the
government gazettes, self-statements by the employees themselves are clearly the most
valuable when extant in the form of letters, reports, petitions, and more rarely, retrospective
autobiographical material. However, in the cases cited below autobiographical accounts and
correspondence are only to be had for those highest placed in service, notably some sadr
amins, deputy collectors and assistant surgeons, and even then they are more often the legacy
of ‘loyal’ rather than ‘rebel’ employees.
In addition to the usual range of British official and unofficial sources that may be drawn on
concerning particular individuals, a source used intensively here, but little noted in previous
studies, is the collection of ‘Intelligence Records’ compiled by William Muir, who was
responsible between August 1857 and January 1858 for the communication of information
within and beyond the North-Western Provinces. A significant witness because of his
subsequent office as a lieutenant-governor who was particularly interested in ‘Muslim’
issues, Muir published his ‘Intelligence Records’ only in 1902, three years before he died,
and then partly to vindicate the actions in 1857 of some Agra civilians, including himself,
which had attracted criticism in the official histories. More important to this study than his
attempt to set the record straight on a couple of incidents affecting only individual British
reputations, is that Muir’s records provide an extensive source which is particularly vocal on
Muslim stances. 6 But how reliable is Muir as an eye-witness and co-ordinator of the
information of others, both British and Indian? He was of course privy to whatever the NWP
government got to hear through the reports of its own officers, including its Indian district
4
Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt, 1857-1870 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1964), p.
301.
5
Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge, 1972), p. 38.
6
The original 11 volumes and several boxes of manuscript records are deposited in the
Edinburgh University Library, reflecting Muir’s principalship of this university from 1885 to
1903. The manuscripts contain some information on individuals, including some local
Muslims, considered too impolitic to include in the published version (including details on
Muir’s own part in procuring after the fall of Delhi, some Arabic manuscripts from the
private libraries of leading scholars such as Azurda which now still grace the Edinburgh
University library collection!).
4

officers, and through the network of spies he was responsible for recruiting. 7 On the other
hand, Muir was incarcerated in the Agra fort for much of the period he was recording, and his
critics said afterwards that he was often fooled by the very informants on whom he overconfidently
depended. Also significant, given his track record of publications on Islam,
would be his reputation as a particularly partial witness. To know the exact nature of his
likely biases is particularly important for what he chose to record about Muslim activities.
For Muir’s relations with Muslims, both before and after 1857, was on the one hand
unusually close, but on the other, highly controversial. The proofs of his book about the Life
of Mahomet which was so famously to ‘burn’ Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s heart that it triggered in
protest several of his own works on Islam, were corrected and signed off during Muir’s
incarceration in the Agra Fort in July 1857. 8 This biography of the Prophet, the first in
English to be based firmly on Arabic sources, but written quite openly, as the preface shows,
to support the evangelical agendas of some Agra-based missionaries, was deeply resented by
many other Muslim scholars besides Saiyid Ahmad. Taken in isolation, the way he explained
the expansion of Islam in the time of the Prophet, suggests an author more than usually
imbued with the conviction that Islam is a religion of the sword, wielded justifiably for the
expansion of the faith on Quranic precedent. Yet what is not usually recognised is that Muir
had shown in practice, over the decade he had taken to write the Prophet’s biography, an
unusually close interest in local Indian Muslim concerns, and a particular interest in higher
education for Muslims, which was to affect practical politics in the late 1860s and 1870s
when his influence as Lieutenant-Governor would be used in support of a neo-Oriental
college at Allahabad, which took his name, and more specifically for Muslim benefit, the
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. These aspects of his interests in Muslims
should be taken into account if any sense is to be made of the observations in 1857-58 by an
official who is usually pigeon-holed simply as the instigator of many of the late nineteenth
century’s most negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims. His comments on specific Muslim
office-holders, whether ‘loyal’, ‘rebel’ or fluctuating, and on alleged ‘Muhammadan
conspiracy’ in general, may prove to be more genuinely ‘informative’ than any reader of his
biography of the Prophet or his later histories of the Caliphate would expect of him.
Significantly, he rejected ‘Muhammadan conspiracy’ as groundless, and found evidence of
jihadi sentiments, and that late in the day, mainly only among the nawabi aspirants to the
restoration of their former status,
The higher stratum: deputy collectors, sadr amins and doctors
The case studies that follow are mainly of a number of Muslims who had reached middling
to high positions by 1856 notably as sadr amins, deputy collectors and sub-assistant surgeons,
though some had only received a very rapid promotion into such positions in the first weeks
of the rebellion, when for obvious reasons, many posts fell suddenly vacant.
Saiyid Imdad al-‘Ali, a longstanding member of the Company’s revenue department, opted,
like the much better known Saiyid Ahmad Khan, to remain at his post in his district
7 But note Christopher Bayly’s discussion of the failings and limitations of the Agra-based
information system. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge, 1996), especially pp. 324-7.
8 William Muir, ‘Postscript’ written Fort Agra, 18 July 1857, to The Life of Mahomet, vol 2
(London, 1858), between pp. 96-7.
5

throughout the rebellion. Yet a pattern of involvement very parallel to Saiyid Ahmad’s has
not received similar attention even though, very prone to blowing his own trumpet, Imdad al-
Ali recorded his rise in his own Urdu publications, making particular mention of the role he
played in 1857, which is also detailed in William Muir’s records. Although neglected so far
in studies of 1857, he later became prominent, in some opinions, notorious, for his role as a
leading member of the Ahl-i Hadith in the 1870s, and particularly for his vitriolic attacks on
Saiyid Ahmad’s modernist publications and the education curriculum proposed for Aligarh. 9
After higher education in the early 1830s in the Anglo-Oriental college at Agra, his family’s
home town, Imdad al-‘Ali had been appointed tehsildar at Kosi in nearby Mathura district. 10
He was still serving in this post when the rebellion erupted. By then he had shown an interest
in some projects very close to the hearts of his British superiors, earning a khillat in 1854 for
the assistance he had given to the establishment of halkabandi schools in his tahsil. After
long employment in the same tahsil for 17 years he had already reached the salary ceiling of
Rs 175 by 1857. 11 Yet when news of the uprisings further north spread to Mathura, he was
suddenly made Deputy Collector for the entire district on 27 May, with a hike in salary to the
going rate of Rs 250, but with an additional ‘personal allowance’, not often granted, of
Rs150. The confidence invested in him so early in the rebellion proved justified from the
British perspective, for Imdad al-Ali’s role then proved pivotal at various junctures in
Mathura district. Yet that this was the case would not be understood from a reading of the
most well publicized account of that district’s ‘mutiny history’. For the magistrate-collector
of Mathura, Mark Thornhill, who soon fled the scene himself, nevertheless managed to
contribute a heroic, not to say highly imaginative, retrospective account of happenings in his
district, which made his own activities, even in absentia, very prominent, but which included
no mention of Imdad al-Ali’s holding of the ground for the British when Mathura was several
times traversed and attacked by various groups of rebels. William Muir’s records, in contrast,
recorded as each event occurred, and partly from Imdad’s own reports to him, show this
newly promoted Deputy Collector taking sole responsibility, in similar mode to Saiyid
Ahmad in Bijnor, by making on the spot decisions, delegating tasks to subordinates, and
meanwhile continuing the collection of the revenue. He also engaged in hand-to-hand
fighting at various junctures, incurring a fairly severe chest wound in one of the last
encounters. Throughout the months from May 1857 to early 1858 he never left the district,
though he sometimes had to go into hiding within it.
Unsurprisingly, such a heroic, but ‘loyal’ Deputy Collector finds no place in the Freedom
Struggle volumes any more than in vainglorious accounts by British officers. William Muir’s
intelligence jottings are therefore particularly valuable for their circumstantial detail on his
movements. But in addition to detailing what Imdad al-Ali actually reported to him, Muir
made this ‘loyal’ deputy collector serve an important symbolic purpose, transforming him
from a lone Indian upholder of Company rule into a symbol of deep-down Muslim preference
for Company rule over any idea of a restored ‘Mahommedan rule’. For Mathura district, Muir
9 Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 325-6; Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, pp. 131-2.
10 ‘Kitab Janab Maulawi Haji Saiyid Imdad al-‘Ali Sahib CSI’, compiled 1883, on the
occasion of Imdad al-Ali’s retirement and sent to William Muir in Edinburgh. See p. 32 for a
summary of Imdad’s career in British service with dates of promotions and transfers.
11 ‘North-West Provinces Uncovenanted Servants’, 1856.
6

stressed to the military authorities, is now held for us in peace and tranquillity by a Native
Deputy collector and Magistrate, a Mahommedan’. 12 In a private letter to his brother, slightly
later, William used Imdad as a ‘most remarkable proof of the people being not opposed to
us’, for in Mathura and Bindraban he wrote, ‘Our Native Officers, under charge of Imdad
Ally, Deputy Collector and Deputy Magistrate, have regularly maintained authority there
whenever not driven out by the enemy in strength. Over and over they have retired when the
mutinous forces occupied the place, and as often returned to rule over a willing and obedient
people’. 13 He was recognised, according to William, ‘as the ruler of the submissive city’, and
in spite of completely misinforming Agra of the fall of Delhi as early as mid-June, was used
throughput as a main conduit for news of events north of Agra. 14 He was still regarded with
equal approbation by the end of January 1858, by when the tide had turned, but when his
injury in a scurmish with rebels only added to the aura of his single-handed ‘saving’ of this
district.
Not surprisingly, Imdad was well rewarded for his role. If it was too soon for much further
promotion given that he had only risen from tahsildar to DC during the course of the
rebellion, he and his family gained greatly in kind, including titles to land, khillats and
money. Like others similarly placed, especially if they were Muslim, he took the precaution
of securing letters from the various Europeans whose lives he had saved during the rebellion,
publishing them later in Urdu in one of his many onslaughts on Saiyid Ahmad Khan. 15 That
he had been noticed so favourably byWilliam Muir bore fruit a decade later when William
was appointed lieutenant-governor. He advanced to the highest grade within the DC grading,
spending more than twelve years in Moradabad, regarded since 1857 as a sensitive district to
which only the most reliable officials should be posted. His ‘friendship’ with Muir continued
after the latter’s retirement to Scotland with correspondence between them into the early
1880s, when Imdad also retired.
Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s own ‘loyal’ stance in 1857 is much better known than Imdad al-Ali’s,
being well documented both in his own publications and in biographical accounts written by
his colleagues and friends, both Muslim and British. 16 His blow by blow account of the
rebellion in Bijnor where he had only recently been posted as sadr amin after almost twenty
years in the Company’s judicial service, undoubtedly provides one of the most detailed extant
records of events in a mofassil theatre of rebellion from an Indian perspective. That there is
rather more than meets the eye in what purports to be a straightforward narrative of events is
suggested, however, in David Lelyveld’s recent short article, ‘Of mixed loyalties’. Lelyveld
returns to this Bijnor text to uncover what it reveals not only on Saiyid Ahmad Khan’s
shifting relations with the various contenders for control of the region (in which he supported
some local Rajput chaudhuris against the ‘restored’ Muslim nawab), but relevant for this
particular study, he draws attention for the first time to Imdad al-Ali’s subsequent criticism
12 William Muir to Gen. Havelock, Agra, 30 August, 1857.
13 William Muir to John Muir, Agra, 15 October, 1857.
14 W. M. to Sherer, Agra, 6 Oct., 1857; 19 Oct, 1857; WM to Sherer, 20 Sept. 57.
15 Imdad al-Ali, Imdad al-afaq (Kanpur, 1290 AH), p.7.
16 Altaf Husain Hali, Hayat-i Javed, Eng. trans. David J. Matthews ( New Delhi, 1994), vol.
I, pp. 69-84; G. F. I. Graham, The Life and Work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (London, 1885;
2 nd ed., London, 1909).
7

of the biases of this fellow Muslim loyalist through the access he obtained to Saiyid Ahmad’s
records when he in turn was posted to Bijnor in the 1860s. 17 One government servant’s
particular brand of ‘loyalty’ was clearly not another’s.
Saiyid Ahmad’s own compilation, An Account of the Loyal Mahomedans of India, might also
seem purpose-made to provide data for this study, given its author’s intention that Muslims
all over the province should submit for publication evidence of their own ‘loyalty’. Yet it is
disappointing in what it delivers, for the journal closed after two issues, having brought to
attention only about a dozen individuals, few of whom were in the higher grades of
government service. It was transparently a propaganda piece, aiming to secure further
honours and rewards for Muslims whose main claim to the government’s attention was to
have assisted in the escape of Europeans in their districts. 18
Saiyid Ahmad was certainly well rewarded himself, receiving immediate promotion to
principal sadr amin, a Rs 200 pension for his own lifetime and that of his eldest son, and a
donation of Rs1000 in lieu of titles to lands, a khillat and jewels. In the aftermath of the
rebellion he developed a symbiotic yet strained relationship with William Muir which would
last into the 1870s, with much ground in common, but also intermittent misunderstandings,
especially over government education policy. If Bijnor had shown British officialdom,
including William Muir, another example of a versatile and dependable Muslim civil servant
at work, Saiyid Ahmad too had recognised that in spite of his hurtful biography of the
Prophet, Muir’s probing and perception of Muslim stances during the rebellion had proved
unexpectedly objective.
The latter point can be exemplified if attention turns to some other DCs and sadr amins
whose appearance in the British records was more fleeting, and in the absence of any detailed
‘self-statements’, sometimes defy easy unravelling. William Muir seems to have made more
effort than most of his colleagues to give the benefit of the doubt when hard information was
lacking. He was particularly insightful in showing understanding of the considerations which
must have weighed on many a ‘marginal’ employee before taking a stand on one side or the
other.
The case of two brothers, Muhammad Husain Khan, Principal Sadr Amin of Agra, and
Muhammad Hamid Husain Khan, a Deputy Collector in Shahjahanpur district, illustrates the
kind of problems. Muhammad Husain Khan, by then aged about 49, had held the top ranking
judicial post in Agra only since 1852, earning a salary of Rs 600, but had been known to
Muir for the previous 20 years in his earlier judicial capacities. 19 His younger brother had
only very recently been promoted from tahsildar to DC in Shajahanpur district and was
scarcely known to Muir. In an item headed ‘Difficulties of a loyal Mahommedan official’,
Muir’s description of what he had heard concerning the events that preceded the killing of
17
David Lelyveld, ‘Of mixed loyalties: Sayyid Ahmad Khan;s account of the Uprising in
Bijnor’, Biblio (March-April, 2007), pp. 32-33. See also, Hafeez Malik and Morris Dembo
(trans), Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s History of the Bijnor Rebellion (Michigan, n.d.).
18
Saiyid Ahmad Khan, An Account of the Loyal Mahomedans of India, 2 parts (Meerut,
1860).
19
‘North-West Provinces Uncovenanted Servants’, 1856
8

the two brothers on the orders of Khan Bahadur Khan, recently restored to nawabi status in
Bareilly, highlights typical difficulties:
We knew that they had long been held under surveillance and exposed to indignities
for their rumoured loyalty to us. The Principal Sudder Ameen has been spoken
against for not coming to Agra when invited back; but it is impossible to overestimate
the difficulties a man with a family of helpless women and children would encounter
in attempting flight. Whether the unfortunate old man has been guilty of any
disloyalty since he left this will be decided [later]. He certainly induced his brother,
Hamid Hussan Khan to withdraw from Khan Buhadur’s service when he (the
Principal Sudder Ameen) returned home. 20
Other reports seem to confirm a rumour doing the rounds, that after a show of support to the
Shahjahanpur magistrate, Hamid had in fact decided to join Khan Bahadur Khan’s
government as naib nazim, on a salary of Rs 500, very similar to his pay under the Company.
However, he resigned soon after, possibly under the pressures exerted by his brother, as Muir
had conjectured, but the incident clearly ended fatally for both brothers when Khan Bahadur
retaliated forwhat would have appeared as double-dealing. 21
Another deputy collector over whom suspicion likewise hovered without resolution for a
time, was Shaikh Wahid al-zaman, serving since 1843 in William’s old settlement district of
Hamirpur where the two had probably first met during the settlement operations of the early
1840s. In 1857 Wahid al-zaman was aged 56, earning Rs 450, after 16 years service. He
proclaimed the Peshwa’s rule in Hamirpur, in the name of the Nana Sahib, but by early
October 1857 was claiming in an ‘exculpatory address to Government’ that this was only for
a week and as a deliberate ‘put off’, after which he reaffirmed his loyalty only to discover
that a neighbouring raja had informed on him as a rebel. He then tried to get out of his
predicament by, in turn, providing proof to the British of the raja’s own disloyalty. 22 Such
charges and counter-charges continued in some cases until the 1870s when the oversight of
the final resolution of their fates would often fall to Muir, by then the lieutenant-governor. In
this particular case Wahid’s efforts to save himself were fruitless, for a list of rebels drawn up
in March 1858, treats Wahid al-zaman as one whose disloyalty was by then beyond doubt. 23
Some British observers seemed to make a correlation, which often turned out in practice to
be unreliable, between length of service and the pattern of likely responses in 1857. Muir
certainly tended to think initially that particularly long service guaranteed the ‘loyalty’, for
example, of those he had worked closely with when he was himself a young recruit to the
Company’s service. Such men included, as he mentioned in a letter to his brother in Scotland,
a munsif he had worked with in the early 1840s, ‘old Asadoollah … a native Judge, a very
20 W. M., to Beadon, 26 Jan. 1858.
21 For details on Hamid Hasan Khan, see FSUP, V, pp. 207; 297; 299-300.
22 W. M., to Sherer, Agra, 3 Oct. 1857.
23 ‘List of persons who have taken a leading part in the present rebellion prepared from
papers on record in the Home Department’, 5 March, 1858. Foreign (Secret), no. 361, 30
April, 1858. National Archives of India.
9

special friend’. 24 When events proved his judgement misplaced, that ‘I grieve over the
defection of so many of our old settlement Dy. Collectors’ was typical of the confidences he
expressed to some like-minded British colleagues. 25
Lest too sentimental a portrayal of Company officers should be conveyed, it should be
stressed that other individuals stirred no such sentiments, even when knowledge of each other
went back an equally long way. Muhammad Hikmat Allah Khan, for instance, a deputy
collector based in Fatehpur District, had had longstanding connections with Muir, dating
back to Muir’s own years as magistrate-collector in Fatehpur in the mid-1840s. In 1857,
Hikmat Allah, then aged 53, with nearly 35 years service, the last ten in Fatehpur, was
recommended by one British officer to another, as ‘intelligent, tried, and entirely to be
trusted’. 26 Having encountered Hikmat Allah for the first time while touring Fatehpur district
on behalf of the Revenue Board, J. W. Sherer recalled him over fifty years later as,‘a person
astute rather than frank’ who ‘reminded me of the Italian secretaries one sees in a picture
gallery, with their black velvet doublets and delicate lace collars, and their calm, mask-like
faces’. Such a portrait of menace in waiting, no doubt actually reflects events that occurred
shortly afterwards when the judge of Fatehpur, Robert Tucker, notorious for the setting up of
pillars in his district inscribed with the Ten Commandments in Hindi and Urdu, was killed
allegedly by Muslims. Hikmat Allah, it was represented by Sherer, would have been able to
give Tucker safe passage if he had chosen to intervene. With a reward on his head of R5000,
Hikmat Allah then evaded capture for months. 27 Still at large in March 1858 he was listed as
having taken a ‘leading part in the present rebellion’, and must be captured. This was one DC
over whom William Muir did not trouble to ‘grieve’: when news of the magistrate’s murder
in Fatehpur reached Agra, he merely commented laconically and inaccurately,
‘H.O.K.[Hikmat Allah Khan] killed Tucker, and reigns’. 28 Clearly there some limits to the
bonds created even by long and previously exemplary service.
Another government employee, working in the medical department, whose defection likewise
roused his employers unmitigated anger but no trace of any sentimental regret for his loss to
the service, was Dr Muhammad Wazir Khan, posted as sub-assistant surgeon in the Medical
College and hospital at Agra. After training in Calcutta, he had joined the newly established
hospital in Agra in the early 1850s, working variously in dispensaries, vaccination clinics and
the medical college. The medical records confirm his excellent professional standing, though
his correspondence suggests he was suffering from depression just prior to the risings. That
he then joined the rebels in July 1857 was not as surprising to his employers or to other
British residents in Agra, as were the defections of some others. For Wazir Khan had been
closely involved during recent years in debates and correspondence with a group of Agra-
24
W. M. to J. M., Agra, 15. Oct. 1857. [Not identifiable from the list of uncovenanted
government servants.]
25
W. M. to J. W. Sherer, Agra, 3 Oct., 1857.
26
J. W. Sherer, Daily Life during the Indian Mutiny: Personal Experiences of 1857 (London,
1910).
27
William Muir, ‘Intelligence Diary’, 21 July, 1857.
28 William Muir,
10

ased missionaries whose own publications and bazaar preaching directly targeted Islam. 29
Where self-statements are lacking for many of the individuals considered so far in this paper,
Wazir Khan’s detailed refutation of the missionary claims in a lengthy correspondence in
Urdu, leaves no doubts about exactly where he stood on the religious front, and the depth of
his anxieties about the possible future undermining of Islam. 30 William Muir, it should be
added, had been closely involved with the missionary side of these debates, and no doubt
Muir’s own publications on Islam, including some articles in the Calcutta Review throughout
the 1850s that had heralded the completion of his Life of Mahomet, had added to Wazir
Khan’s growing unease.
Once Agra was under imminent rebel attack, Wazir Khan’s movements, his correspondence
and connections, mainly in Delhi during the siege, and in Bareilly and Awadh afterwards, and
with leaders such as Bakht Khan, Feroze Shah, Khan Bahadur Khan and the Nana Sahib,
mark him firmly as ‘rebel’. After capture, he tried to exonerate himself, like many others,
partly by blaming others such as the ‘Maulawi of Faizabad’, while disclaiming any part
himself. His deposition provides useful information about the role of such others, but being in
the form of a disclaimer, fails to add much to the understanding of his own motives. 31
However, sufficient is known in detail about his unease with British rule generally, and with
missionary activity in particular, during his medical hospital years just prior to 1857, to be
more than usually certain that religious factors, allied perhaps to growing professional
disgruntlement, had decided his course of action.
But clear though his actions were in 1857, Wazir Khan cannot be said to be representative of
a particular sub-category of government servants, his own medical profession, because there
is no sign that others at that particular hospital, or in other medical posts in the province,
joined him in rebellion. His associates before the rebellion seemed to belong to two other
rather broader groupings. First, other government employees in the Agra provincial capital,
notably munsifs, munshis and vakils at the courts, and second some ‘ulama from outside
Agra, as well as from the mosques of the city, with whom he had participated in the series of
religious debates with the missionaries in the mid-1850s. While firm evidence is generally
still lacking for co-ordinated ‘Wahhabi’ activity in 1857, Wazir Khan, with his many contacts
with ‘ulama networks, remains a candidate for further investigation within that context.
Teachers in government colleges:
The second broad category of government servants consisted of Muslims employed in the
distinctive higher educational institutions of this province, the Anglo-Oriental colleges.
29 For full details, Avril Powell, ‘Muslim-Christian Confrontation: Dr Wazir Khan in
nineteenth-century Agra’, in Kenneth W. Jones (ed) Religious controversy in British India:
Dialogues in South Asian Languages (New York, 1992), pp. 77-92.
30 Letters between Dr Wazir Khan and Rev. G. Pfander, May-Aug. 1854, in Sayyid ‘Abd-
Allah Akbarabadi (ed) Murasalat-i mazhabi: dusra hissa mubahasa-i mazhabi ka (Agra,
1271/1854-5).
31 His name occurs in numerous ‘mutiny’ accounts; particularly useful is ‘Deposition of
Wazir Khan, late Sub. Assistant Surgeon of Agra Dispensary’, Foreign Political Proceedings,
30 December 1859, No. 312, National Archives, New Delhi, quoted in S.A. A. Rizvi (ed),
Freedom Struggle.
11

Particular efforts had been made in the northwest since the 1820s to draw the learned elites
into government education of a hybrid kind, allowing a choice between older established
‘Oriental’ departments and newer English departments, with a hope for future amalgamation.
They were usually grafted on to already existing educational institutions, but with European
principals, teachers and local committee members very influential in decision making.
Members of the ‘ulama and pandit classes connected with these colleges were not listed with
the rest of the province’s ‘uncovenanted civil servants’, but whatever the teaching and other
commitments they continued with meanwhile in their own communities, they were clearly
government employees.
Recently there has been renewed interest in the Delhi Anglo-Oriental College (and also in the
Benares Sanskrit College). The Agra and Bareilly colleges still await similar attention. The
separate biographical studies of several of the teachers, students and ‘local committee’
members associated with the Delhi College before 1857 that constitute Margrit Pernau’s
recently edited volume now tell us much about the fates of its leading scholars during 1857,
after which the college was closed down as a hot-bed of disaffection. One highly respected
employee, Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i, the Persian professor since 1840, was shot or
drowned during the first frenzied onslaught by the British in mid-September 1857, without
time for any enquiry into his actual affiliations. 32 Others, such as the young mathematician
and historian, Zaka Allah Khan, who would later write eulogistic accounts of British rule, and
deny any inclination among Delhi’s scholarly class for rebellion, managed to keep low
profiles and then resumed employment in other government educational institutions in the
1860s. 33
The fullest investigations of ‘mutiny connections’ in the Delhi college so far undertaken
concern another longstanding employee of the Company, Muhammad Sadr al-din Khan,
known by his takhallus, ‘Azurda’. He is important to this enquiry for several reasons. His
main connection with the British was as principal sadr amin for the city of Delhi, having first
being taken on as a sadr amin as early as 1816. But he had also been crucial to the Anglo-
Oriental college since the 1820s, playing a mediating role very successfully on its ‘local
committee’ and as an examiner of its Arabic classes. But thirdly, he was one of the members
of the ‘ulama class who is still frequently cited as having signed a fatwa for jihad in July
1857, thus providing ‘evidence’ of longstanding and widespread mujahidini sympathies
among Delhi’s religious scholars. Contrary views argue that if he did actually sign such a
document, his signature and seal were forged, or pressure was put on him. However, Swapna
Liddle’s recent full and careful re-examination of all this ‘evidence’ is still unable to unearth
either the fatwa itself, or any hard and fast confirmation of Azurda’s membership of, or even
inclination towards such a group of mujahidin. Rather the opposite, Azurda is to be seen, as
he had been for decades in his various college functions, as a mediating figure who gave
advice to the restored emperor during the siege, but refused to actually join his
administration, and who regarded the rebellion as ill-advised, not least because it was bound
to fail. Although the British put him on trial, even their most revenge- thirsty officers
32 See C. M. Naim, ‘Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i: Teacher, Scholar, Poet, and Puzzlemaster,
in Pernau, Delhi College, pp. 145-85.
33 See Mushirul Hasan, ‘Maulawi Zaka Ullah: Sharif Culture and Colonial Rule’, in Pernau,
Delhi College, pp. 261-8.
12

emained uncertain of his inmost thinking. Puzzled by the ambivalence of his actions, and
without any conclusive proof, they released him, but confiscated half his property. 34 During
the prolonged uncertainty over whether to dub him ‘rebel’ or ‘loyal’, frequent messages had
passed from William Muir in the Agra fort to the British authorities in Delhi urging that if
Azurda was found ‘guilty’, then his valuable library of Arabic and Persian manuscripts
should at once be protected and confiscated. 35 Some of the Arabic manuscripts now owned
by Edinburgh University formed part of the ‘half’ of the property of which he was
dispossessed by the prize agents! He lost too, his post of forty years standing in the British
judicial service and his government educational responsibilities, though he continued to teach
privately until his death in 1868.
No individual teacher at any of the other government colleges can be brought to life as fully
as Azurda, notwithstanding the remaining disagreements over his ‘mutiny’ stance. However,
there are sufficient snippets of information to be able to attempt a provisional overview of
some other, possibly ‘collegial’ responses to events. Bareilly College has had the least
attention to date, but what information does exist is strikingly diverse in the cases of two of
its teachers’ alleged behaviour patterns. For Barbara Metcalf tells us that Muhammad Ahsan
Nanautawi, head Persian teacher at Bareilly College, ‘spoke out against rebellion in the city’s
Masjid-i Nau Mahallah, challenging in particular the position of one of his colleagues at the
school whose publishing house was disseminating revolutionary material’. 36 His alleged
protagonist was almost certainly a teacher whom William Muir reported in his own
Intelligence Diary, but without any further details, as engaged in preaching against the
Company in Bareilly. This was, the education reports confirm, Professor Qutb Shah, the
Arabic teacher who, it seems, commandeered the college’s own press for the dissemination
of his views. 37 The German principal and several of the European teachers were killed, and
some 14 students apparently then joined Khan Bahadur Khan’s forces. Qutb Shah himself
was later transported for life. Given these incidents, some further contextualization of this
college’s place in the wider Bareilly risings is clearly needed.
Though there are no detailed studies of the Agra College, the education records yield some
specific data on 1857. In contrast to Delhi College, it had been founded on a Hindu
endowment, and with a concentration on Sanskrit and Hindi rather than the ‘Islamic’
languages dominant in Delhi and Bareilly. Hence most of its teachers, and other employees,
were Hindus. However, there had been some famous scholars among the earlier teachers of
Arabic, and considerable competition in the 1840s and 50s to succeed to these posts. 38 In
1857 the department of Arabic, Persian and Urdu numbered six teachers, all Muslim. The
first education report after the rebellions noted under a telling heading, ‘Misconduct of the
34
Swapna Liddle, ‘Azurda: Scholar, Poet, and Judge’, in Pernau, Delhi College, pp. 125-44.
35
‘In a previous letter I asked about the preservation of rare Arabic and Persian MSS.,
particularly a copy of the Seerut-Hishami belonging to the Principal Sudder Ameen’. William
Muir to C. B. Saunders, Agra, 1 Oct., 1857. There are many letters on this subject.
36
Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 82-3.
37
Report on the State of Popular Education in the North-Western Provinces for 1858-59
(Benares, 1859), p. 7.
38
Avril A. Powell, ‘Scholar manqué or mere munshi? Maulawi Karimu’d-Din’s Career in the
Anglo-Oriental Education Service’, in Pernau, Delhi College, pp. 215-19.
13

Muhammadan teachers’, that after the ‘battle for Agra’ in early July 1857, no pandit or other
employee had deserted, but of the six Muslim teachers only 2 had remained at their posts, the
other four all falling under suspicion. 39 Ultimately, ‘evidence’ was put forward on only two
of them. Muhammad Azhar, the teacher of Arabic, was said to have joined the king’s forces
in Delhi, where he was injured during the British onslaught. The brother of Ali Asghar, to
whose house the latter had fled in early July was found to be in ‘treasonable correspondence’.
This was enough to refuse Ali Asghar reappointment on the staff when he later sought it. A
third, Abul Husain, against whom nothing incriminating was alleged, was also refused
reinstatement, merely for having returned to his home when it was feared that Agra was
about to be attacked. Information from other sources, notably from his own retrospective
account, concerning the fourth teacher, shows how lack of hard information easily tended to
lead inexorably to a presumption of disaffection. For Maulawi Imad al-din, in the very
subordinate position of ‘3 rd Urdu teacher’ at the Agra College, had indeed abandoned his
post, but not in order to join the rebels as the education report implies, but in search of a
resolution of some spiritual worries that had troubled him ever since taking a proactive role
against missionary preaching in the bazaars of Agra in the early 1850s. He headed, therefore,
not for Delhi, but for the desert fringe of Rajasthan to engage in a long period of religious
meditation, before joining his brother in the Punjab, where he finally converted to
Christianity. 40 H. S. Reid, the education officer in Agra who had thus blanketed all these four
Muslim teachers as probable rebels, in spite of years of previous close contact with them,
had jumped to conclusions which were in Imad al-Din’s case completely unjustified, and in
the other cases, based on mere suspicion, but which certainly ended all hope of future
government employment for the individuals concerned. In contrast, the 13 Hindu ‘native
masters’ and the two Muslims who stayed at their posts, were rewarded with gratuities equal
to two months’ salary.
To put this scattered information on the responses of some college teachers into some
further perspective, it might be noted that in Benares Sanskrit college, classes and
examinations continued as though nothing untoward was happening, and even in Bareilly and
Agra, the education officers prided themselves on resuming teaching in improvised buildings
almost immediately. It was only in Delhi that it was deemed impolitic to reopen the college in
its old form, the other colleges surviving in their present form into the 1880s.
Postscript:
To separate off, as has been attempted here, the secular functions and outlook of men in
government employment, most of whom (with the exception of such as Dr Wazir Khan) were
in most respects members of a wider ‘ulama class, is clearly an artificial exercise, that may
39 H. S. Reid to W. Muir, 28 Sept. 1858, published in Report on the State of Popular
Education in the North Western Provinces for 1856-57 (Benares, 1859), pp. 7-8; appendix B.
40 Imad al-Din’s state of mind and movements are based on his own subsequent ‘conversion’
autobiographies, which must of course be read critically, but together with other external
evidence, suggest the beginning of his religious volte-face before, rather than as a result of,
the rebellion. Avril A. Powell, ‘”Pillar of a new faith”’: Christianity in late nineteenthcentury
Punjab from the perspective of a convert from Islam, in Robert Frykenberg (ed)
Christians and Missionaries in India (Michigan and Cambridge, 2002), pp. 223-55.
14

not be justified by any immediately significant results. But what it does help to do, is to place
individuals, about many of whom little else is known, into a particular context over
significantly long periods of time (in many cases from the 1820s to the late 1850s and
sometimes beyond), so that whatever stances were adopted in 1857 have a pre-history in
relation to the Company, its policies and impact, recoverable in part through interactions over
time with particular British and Indian colleagues. To take this exercise further, other
categories of ‘subordinate service’ should also be examined, for example the various legal
functionaries below the level of the sadr amins, and also the police. Such findings might then
be reintegrated into studies that have so far tended to treat ‘Muslims’, and even ‘the ‘ulama’
as blanket, catch all categories, frequently employed at such a broad level of definition as to
be almost meaningless, and opening the trap door to the kind of often unsubstantiated
generalizations about a ‘Muslim’ or ‘ulama’ role in events at various points in history that
the historiography of the subject shows, are all too often projected in secondary studies.
15