The following participant’s report was submitted by Sri Sathvik Rayala, a ’24 at Dartmouth College, interested in South Asian History, Politics, and Economics.
On September 29, 2020, the South Asia Studies Collective at Dartmouth College hosted its first event in the new “Conversations on South Asia Series,” featuring Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont, discussing her book Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2017). Following the theoretical frameworks presented in the book, the conversation centered on the racialization and minoritization of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, particularly following the 1857 Rebellion against the British East India Company. During the event, which was moderated by the series coordinator, Elizabeth Lhost, Morgenstein Fuerst discussed several points related to her argument about the racialization and minoritization of South Asian Muslims and its implications for the study of race and religion today—drawing from and extending the central arguments of her recent book.
The event began with a brief presentation by Morgenstein Fuerst outlining her argument that the Rebellion of 1857 marked a shift in how people, particularly the British colonial officials, talked about and saw Muslims and their religion. In particular, Morgenstein Fuerst suggested that the 1857 Rebellion caused British colonial officials to question the loyalty of Muslims, who they believed were religiously obligated to conduct “jihad” against the Crown’s rule. As Morgenstein Fuerst explained during her presentation (and elaborates in the book), one British official, Sir William Wilson Hunter, went so far as to claim that “Muslims are a problem to be solved” for the Crown, a remark that inherently and quite explicitly placed Muslims squarely in the camp of traitors to the Crown. Indeed, throughout Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, Morgenstein Fuerst examines how Hunter framed this “problem” in his assertions that “it is hopeless to look for anything like enthusiastic loyalty from our Muhammadan subjects” (59). Simply put, Morgenstein Fuerst argues that the British saw South Asian Muslims, particularly those in North India, as inherently violent, disloyal, and untrustworthy—despite the evident loyalty of figures like Syed Ahmed Khan, another figure whose writings and reflections on 1857 feature in Morgenstein Fuerst’s work.
To provide evidence of this view, Morgenstein Fuerst opened her talk with a photograph of a mosque in Meerut taken by Felice Beato (see inset above), an Italian-British photographer, in 1858. The caption of this photograph, taken just a year after the 1857 Rebellion, read “a mosque in Meerut where some of the rebel soldiers may have prayed.” Analyzing this photo and its caption, Morgenstein Fuerst pointed out that there was no evidence to support the caption’s claim and that its glib reference to “rebel soldiers” perfectly encapsulates how British views framed Muslims of North India as disloyal and people prone to rebel due to their supposed religious commandments. Extending the photo’s implications, Morgenstein Fuerst suggested that instead of viewing this mosque as just a mosque, Beato made an unfounded interpolation to consider it a site that in some fashion aided rebellion, clearly indicating an implicit view that Muslims are supposedly commanded by Islam to conduct “jihad” against their British rulers. It is worth noting that Morgenstein Fuerst acknowledges that stereotyping of Muslims occurred before 1857 too, but that in the aftermath of 1857, two processes emerged that have immense ramifications today: minoritization and racialization.
To support her central arguments further, Morgenstein Fuerst explained her decision to use minoritization and racialization as theoretical frameworks. Minoritization, as she explains it in Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, “does not refer solely to the demographic realities of a particular location, but instead to the systematic process by which elites deny power or access to a group through the implementation of power, be that local, linguistic, economic, or political” (6). In brief, minoritization is the process by which elites from a dominant group deny marginalized or minority communities access to various resources, strip them of power, or make them even more powerless. This was the experience of Indian Muslims in the post-1857 period. The process of minoritization impacted both rich and poor Muslims alike. To the surprise of some in the audience, as Morgenstein Fuerst explained, even wealthier and well-connected Muslims experienced minoritization as they, too, lost access to resources and positions that provided them with a stable place in society.
Racialization—a process precipitated by the British that adversely affected Hindus and Muslims and the second core concept in Morgenstein Fuerst’s monograph—accompanied the process of minoritization. In Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, Morgenstein Fuerst describes “racialization” as “the process through which a group is made or marked as a race; it is the process through which individuals are made manifest as both belonging to one cogent group as well as possessing those inherent, hereditary, and prognostic characteristics” (7). British colonial officials racialized Muslims as inherently violent, dangerous, traitorous, and untrustworthy. (They equally racialized Hindus but classed them as weak, subservient, and effeminate.) Racialization, which Morgenstein Fuerst suggested during the “Conversation” was developed in part to further divide and inflame communal relations between Hindus and Muslims, still has ramifications today, reverberating in modern American politics as Islamophobia, for instance. To use Morgenstein Fuerst’s words in Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion, “a lasting and evident aspect of contemporary discourse about Muslims directly evokes assumptions that became solidified, popularized, and primary as a result of the Great Rebellion of 1857” (158).
By drawing attention to the emergence of “minoritization” and “racialization” in photographic, administrative, and scholarly sources, Morgenstein Fuerst draws parallels between anti-Muslim rhetoric surrounding questions of loyalty and rebellion in British India and discourses that evoke similar concerns today. For scholars and students interested in the origins of racialized and minoritized conceptions of Muslim minorities, her book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is a recommended read.
(Page numbers refer to the paperback edition of the book.)
The Conversations on South Asia Series returns on December 3, 2020 for the second event of the year, featuring Dinyar Patel’s Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2020).
To stay up to date with the series, follow us on twitter (@sasiaconverse) or subscribe to our email newsletter for updates about future events: https://tinyurl.com/y24fdrbx .
The Conversations on South Asia series is supported by the Bodas Family Academic Programming Fund | Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program | Department of History | and the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows.