A MISSIONARY MARKETPLACE IN NATAL

In the course of the nineteenth century, Bombay developed numerous connections with the new port city of Durban on the southern reaches of the African continent. The traffic between the two ports has usually been framed in the familiar terms of colonialism and modernity, a role in which the transit of political forms – of imperialism or nationalism, of the apparatus of empire or new democratic associations – has loomed largest. Imperial careers certainly played a large part in trans-ocean exchanges, whether in the elevated ranks of such personnel as Henry Bartle Frere (1815–84), sometime Governor of Bombay and High Commissioner for Southern Africa, or the humbler offices of Sikh and Pathan sepoys in the policing of British Africa. The key example of the anti-colonial side of the same modern coinage is the founding of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in 1885 and its echo across the ocean in the establishment of the Natal Indian Congress in Durban in 1894. The most famous figure to connect the two movements was Mohandas Gandhi, who departed India through Bombay on his journey to South Africa. Having helped found the Natal Indian Congress, at the end of this book's period it was at Bombay's Apollo Bunder that Gandhi disembarked in 1915 to join in the struggles of its Indian sibling.

ON THE TRAIL OF THE MIGRANT WORKER

While the last two chapters examined the maritime dimensions of the religious economy by way of Iranian migration to Bombay, the following pages turn towards the religious entrepreneurs and consumers who entered the market from the city's continental hinterlands. An essential element of this pattern of demand and supply was the migrant Muslim workforce from Hyderabad and the Konkan who from the 1860s made up the largest proportion of the city's Muslim workforce. Working in Bombay's textile mills and dockyards, these migrants constituted the new social entity that was a Muslim industrial labour force. Through tracing the teachings of one of the religious ‘patrons’ of these workers and connecting his doctrines to the conditions of workers' lives, this chapter examines how, in a religious economy in which labourers formed an important part, the reproduction of custom acted as a successful response to the social change of industrialization. Bereft of the support networks of their village homes, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy of the industrial metropolis, migrant workers found themselves in greater need than ever of patrons and protectors. This socially driven demand in turn helped fuel a particular type of religious production by way of a theology and brotherhood of intercession that placed the miraculous powers of the holy man at the service of the uprooted labourers who pledged allegiance as his disciples.

SHRINES FOR A MIGRANT WORKFORCE

The self-conscious modernism that was symbolized by the hybrid Anglo-Oriental architecture of the Anjuman-e Islām School ultimately played a limited role Bombay's religious economy. For the members of the labouring classes who made up the majority of the city's Muslims the appeal of a scientific and scriptural Islam was limited, and their own patterns of religious consumption were as distinct as they were widespread. For many of these labourers from rural and small town backgrounds, the growing number of shrines that emerged in Bombay as the nineteenth century progressed offered the chance to reconnect with the secure roots of custom and so enter a more reassuring cityscape enchanted with the powers holy men made available at their gravesides. This chapter traces the role played in the increasing religious productivity of Bombay by migration from the city's continental hinterlands in Gujarat and the Konkan, whence most of its Muslim labour force originated. On the trail of these demographic shifts, ‘franchises’ of older inland pilgrimage centres in Gujarat and the Konkan were established in Bombay, some of which were especially associated with particular ethnic groups such as Afro-Indian Sīdīs, others with specific activities that typified the city's new way of life, such as the specialist ‘traveller shrines’ beside the sea and railways. As Rodney Stark has observed, ‘To the degree to which a religious economy is pluralistic, firms will specialize.’

A RUMOUR OF MIRACLES

At 10.15 on the night of 31 May 1903, the D-block of the recently completed Sita Ram Building in Bombay ‘suddenly came down with a crash’. Most of the multi-storey building was unoccupied, but on the ground floor was a saloon bar which over the past months had done a brisk and boozy trade with the port's many British sailors. It was mainly the customers of the bar who made up the dead and injured when the building collapsed. Because the Windsor Bar stood right across the road from the shrine of a Muslim saint, rumours spread quickly that the disaster occurred through an insult to the holy man by the Hindu bar-owner and his bibulous Christian patrons. But for all his defence of the anti-alcoholic norms of sharī‘a, the saint in question was himself something of an oddity. His name was Pedro, and according to urban legend he was a Portuguese sailor who had converted to Islam two centuries earlier. This Pēdrō Shāh was no more commonplace a saint than his feat of levelling a tower block was an act of everyday grace. From his shrine's location in the heart of Bombay's bazaar district, his spectacular miracle was symptomatic of the larger pressures of cosmopolitan modernity that helped create a marketplace of religions in the city surrounding him.

Writing in Bombay around 1890, the colonial administrator James Douglas recounted tales of former times, when, far from hearth and home, spirits of the Anglo-Saxon dead warned friends and family of impending danger or rescue in supernatural ways that were strongly reminiscent of Muslim seaborne miracle stories heard in previous chapters. All such stories, and the anxieties that fed them, were products of circumstances that fed religious demand. But near the century's end Douglas was convinced that Bombay could no longer harbour such fantasies:

Like other Victorian champions of scientific progress and the rational utility of technology, Douglas saw in the industrializing city around him an arena of disenchantment, an urban workshop for the dismembering of old religions and customs. Such attitudes have weathered surprisingly well: Thompsonian Methodism and the occasional study of plebeian Liverpudlian séances aside, the nineteenth-century city continues to be policed by the historiographical heirs of Bentham and Weber.

CHRISTIANIZING CATALYSTS: THE IMPACT OF THE MISSIONARY SOCIETIES

Before turning towards the new Reformist firms that emerged among Bombay's Muslims in the mid-nineteenth century, we must first trace the activities of the ideological and organizational catalysts in the city's transformation into a competitive and pluralizing religious economy. These were the Christian missionary organizations whose great assault on the religions of Bombay formed the background to the emergence of the first Parsi, Hindu and Muslim Reformist groups in the city. While the Christian missions did not influence every group among the city's Muslims alike – Bombay's Iranian Muslims, for example, remained largely unaffected – their importance cannot be overlooked for the earlier part of the century, when the missions were the first substantial importers of unfamiliarly new religious productions to the city's growing populace. In triggering a set of defensive responses from Reformist organizations from across the spectrum of Indian religions, the missionaries played a key role in triggering the increasing pluralization and increasing production that would typify the religious economy of Bombay Islam. As an imperial port city, Bombay was intrinsically connected to developments in the imperial centre, even as its parallel existence as an Indian Ocean port ultimately held the potential to wash colonial influences beneath stronger tides of more regional cultural provenance. In religious terms, the most important example of these interconnections between Britain and its empire was the development of the missionary society.

ALTERNATIVE TRAJECTORIES OF COMMUNICATIONAL MODERNITY

The industrialization of communication among Muslims was one of the major overall characteristics of Bombay's religious economy. Powered by the spread of cheap mass-produced paper and inexpensive iron printing-presses, Bombay's industrialization enabled the city to become the most important Muslim printing centre in the Indian Ocean. Not only did this industrialization of communications mean that the varied textual productions of Bombay's religious economy were mass-produced in a period in which printing was comparatively underdeveloped in Bombay's oceanic and continental hinterlands, it also enabled the distribution of both the textual and embodied productions of the religious economy through the export of books and holy men on the steamship networks that Bombay similarly dominated. While this was an industrially enabled pattern of reproduction and distribution, such reliance on machines and steam-power no more led to a disenchanted religiosity in Bombay than it did in mill-towns such as Manchester or Ashton-under-Lyne in the age of such ocean-going charismatics as the ‘Shaker’ Ann Lee and the Yorkshire prophet John Wroe, whose heaven-sent visions were filled with steam-belching engines and flying iron sky-trains. With regard to Muslim contexts, the spread of printing and the acceleration of travel through the development of steamships and ocean liners have usually been associated with the emergence of Islamic Reform. In contrast to the abundant literature associating the spread of modern communications with Modernist, Protestant or Pan-Islamist Islams, this chapter argues that such communications as printing and travel were neutral technologies that could be and were made use of by the full range of religious firms operating in the religious economy of a given region.

THE ĀGHĀ KHĀNS AND THEIR NEO-ISMĀ‘ĪLISM

Among the many Iranian exiles attracted to Bombay was the most important figure to leave Iran for India during the nineteenth century. This was the would-be leader of the disconnected Ismā‘īlī Shi‘i Muslims of India and Iran: Āghā Khān I (d. 1298/1881) of Mahallat in central Iran. Before moving into exile in India, Āghā Khān I had served Iran's Qājār rulers as governor of the southern frontier province of Kerman, and was more widely regarded as a provincial notable and soldier than a religious figure. The last chapter showed how Iranian Sufis such as Safī ‘Alī Shāh, sponsored by the wealthy Iranian merchants who settled in Bombay and making use of the city's printing and travel opportunities to spread their authority, were able to use Bombay as a platform for their extraordinary leap to prominence in Iran in the second half of the nineteenth century. By similar means, after settling in Bombay in 1848, Āghā Khān I was able to use the city's communication, mercantile and administrative facilities to expand his authority over nominal Ismā‘īlīs to a degree without precedent in history. As with Sufi entrepreneurs, in the career of the Āghā Khān and his sons and successors, Bombay's religious economy was put to the service of an expansive mission for an Islam of living intercessors and the miraculous powers lent them by their proximity to God.