On a monsoon day in 1917, precisely at a time when British troops were fighting the Ottoman army over the Sinai peninsula tooth and nail, Bengali Muslim litterateur–activist Ismail Hossain Siraji arrived by train in a small Eastern Bengal town called Bogra to attend a literary conference.Footnote 1 Once there, he took his seat onstage next to the presiding C. R. Das—a Hindu politician equally revered by both Hindus and Muslims—while Mr French, the British district magistrate of the town, arriving at the venue a little late, settled himself on the other side of the president. French flew into a rage as soon as he set eyes on Siraji’s attire: a cebkan (Turkish jacket) paired with a tall fez embroidered with a golden crescent, the emblem of the Ottomans! That he was sharing the stage in his own jurisdiction with a man donning what he dubbed “Turkoman’s dress”—the outfit belonging to the enemy of the Allied Powers in the ongoing war—drove him crazy. The organizers, in an attempt to assuage him, pointed out that Siraji was an eminent leader of the Muslim community who had received these garments from the Ottoman Sultan in recognition of his service in the Red Crescent Mission, but ended up infuriating him further. “It is of no consequence whether Indian Muslims consider the Ottoman sultan the caliph of Islam,” decreed the incensed magistrate, “for India belongs to the British,” and not the Ottomans. He commanded Siraji to either change his “Turkoman’s costume” or leave the jurisdiction of his town at once.Footnote 2 Challenging the magistrate’s underlying logic, Altaf Ali—one of the organizers—posed a question: “Is the British Empire’s territory in India limited to Bogra alone?” Implicit in his question was the contention that if Siraji’s outfit constituted an affront to the British supremacy in India, it should be considered likewise across the territory, and not merely within the confines of a peripheral district. In limiting his order to the bounds of Bogra, the magistrate, in effect, betrayed a discrepancy: that he was denying Siraji a privilege that the Raj itself had granted. The Bombay Chronicle, in their report covering the incident, echoed this contention. Labeling the entire episode “farcical,” they cast doubt on the notion that there was such a thing as “Turkoman’s dress.” Even if there were, the newspaper professed ignorance of “any official prohibition of the dress in question,” thereby suggesting that the magistrate imposed demands that went beyond the scope of the law.Footnote 3
The anecdote, widely publicized in the native press, anticipates some of the key themes of this article. First, it raises the problem of the emotive affinity to the “extraterritorial”—the Turkish Empire, in this instance, whose seat of power was separated from Bengal by nearly six thousand kilometers—an affinity that came to characterize Muslim politics in the fin de siècle. A corollary of this affinity, according to the logic of nationalism, was Muslims’ deviation from India, for allegiance to an extraterritorial entity erodes one’s sense of belonging to homeland, thus raising the specter of disloyalty. Finally, the anecdote intimates a curious contestation around the problem of sovereignty, betrayed by the magistrate’s wrath, accentuated further by Altaf Ali’s riposte. In the conventional historiography, which takes nation-state as its vantage point, Muslim veneration for the Ottoman Empire has been seen as an archaic, romantic, and vicarious venture—one that laid the groundwork for separatism in the subcontinent. In recent years, historians of Indian pan-Islamism have turned their gaze toward the global aspirations of this movement, retrieving from the onslaught of nationalist historiography what may be called a fluid imperial milieu and recovering the internationalist, socialist, and universalist visions that underpinned such mobilizations.Footnote 4 Much of this burgeoning literature, however, remains fixated on a small circle of north Indian Ashraf intellectuals, heir to Mughal service classes and trained in elite institutions in India and the West. Decentering north India, I draw on a number of Muslim thinkers of modest origins, residing mostly in mofussil towns in the province of Bengal—where two in every five Indian Muslims lived in the fin de siècle—in order to recover not so much an internationalist, universal modality of pan-Islamism as a distinct model of sovereignty. I will argue that neither did their affinity with the Ottomans entail a pan-Islamist geopolitical agenda, nor did they forswear their loyalty to British India. On the contrary, the extraterritoriality represented by the Ottoman Empire became, for them, a site for a distinct kind of sovereignty, predicated on cultivation of self, mobilization of the collective force of society, and the idea of simultaneous loyalty. In contrast to the more familiar juridical, state-centric notion of sovereignty—which takes violence as the true locus of sovereign power—this alternative sovereignty stands in line with a series of cognate South Asian ideals, most famous among these perhaps being Gandhi’s idea of swaraj. Building on the “New Intellectual History turn” in South Asian historiography, I will theorize what I call “vicarious sovereignty,” a form of authority that neither stems from the nation-state nor is actualized through violence; rather, it rests on the power of what anthropologists call charisma and functions as an empty signifier.
Probing a diverse body of unexamined sources—including periodicals, astrological almanacs, travelogues, autobiographies, poetry, history books—in present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal, I focus on the following historical moments: the Greco-Turkish War (1897), the construction of Hejaz Railway (1900–8), the silver jubilee of the coronation of the Sultan of Turkey (1900), and the Balkan war (1912–13). I begin by sketching out what I have called the fluid imperial milieu, followed by an account of how Turkey was conceived as a land of utopia by contemporary Muslim writers, so that it could afterward be made into a locus of sovereignty. Subsequently, I delineate through a series of illustrations how Turkey was maneuvered into a ground for enacting a non-statist, nonviolent, and charismatic form of sovereignty. It was a paradoxical vision of sovereignty, I further argue, simultaneously based on a repudiation of Turkey as a territorial destination, a frank recognition of the fantastic nature of the venture, and a resounding enunciation of loyalty to the British Crown.
Pan-Islamism in an imperial milieu
A modern reconstruction of the classic, theological notion of ummah, pan-Islamism sprang up in the late nineteenth century when Muslims across many societies began to imagine—evidently under the twin strains of European hegemony and their mounting sense of decline—that they belonged to a global political unity. It has been described as a label for “the Islamic agitation calling for a Muslim union against Christian powers” and a form of “religio-political ideology.”Footnote 5 In the South Asian context, pan-Islamism has often been studied through the Khilafat movement, with critics deriding it for stoking Muslim disloyalty and indulging in nebulous fantasy. Muslim identification with the Ottoman in particular has been described as a “romantic adherence to an outdated theory of Khilafat, the apparently naïve championship of a pan-Islamic cause already dried up at its source”; “a fantastically vicarious identification with the freedom of their co-religionists abroad”; “a wrong and romantic ideology”; and a venture “highly romantic in terms of practical politics.”Footnote 6 In addition to its fantastical nature, the movement carried with it a threat to Indian nationalism. The Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, reflecting on his younger days, described himself as an “anti-Turk,” an antipathy his younger self rationalized through an “interpretation of Pan-Islamism as the greatest danger facing Indian nationalism.”Footnote 7 Highlighting the Muslim predilection to think that “they are Muslims first and Indians afterward,” Bipin Chandra Pal dubbed political pan-Islamism, as opposed to its lenient religious version, “a serious menace” which was bound to weaken “the legitimate and natural allegiance of every Pan-Islamist” to their non-Muslim host countries, such as “India or Egypt.”Footnote 8 Nehru reasoned that “a greater interest in Islamic countries” was a deviation from India’s present.Footnote 9 The underlying thesis is best expressed by Ayesha Jalal: that an “emotive affinity to the ummah was a barrier to Muslims identifying with patriotic sentiments in their own homeland.”Footnote 10 There were, of course, some exceptional voices. In an early generative gesture, Gail Minault suggested reading pan-Islamic movements as a self-constituting project of Indian Muslims: the Khilafat campaign, above all, was a bid to unite Indian Muslims “by means of religious and cultural symbols” in their quest for a “pan-Indian Islam.”Footnote 11 Ayesha Jalal foregrounded how “many Indian Muslims saw the preservation of the temporal power of Islam based in Constantinople as a necessary safeguard to their own political future.”Footnote 12
Notwithstanding the diversity of these viewpoints, they are united in the way they take nation-state as their vantage point. What is precisely obscured by a presentist vantage point is the conceptual regime that undergirded pan-Islamists’ rejection of the centrality of nation-states. In recent years, however, in line with a global surge in the study of empire—accounting for what has come to be known as the “imperial turn”—scholars of South Asia have painstakingly retrieved a fluid imperial milieu that had long been obscured by the ossified borders of modern nation-states. An unprecedented global mobility, together with the abolition of slavery, catapulted Indian laborers in the late nineteenth century to various British colonies scattered throughout the globe, furnishing the material contexts not only for movements like Gandhian satyagraha or the Ghadar movement, but also for a specifically unbounded experience for many Indians.Footnote 13 To these Indians, the empire represented both a peril and a promise, somewhat approximating the distinctions many nineteenth-century scholars drew between imperialism and empire.Footnote 14 Gandhi’s South Africa campaign, for instance, was predicated on an emancipatory vision of empire. When he claimed rights for his fellow migrants, Faisal Devji observes, he didn’t ground his case in their identity as South Africans or Indians, but rather “as citizens of empire.” Instead of trying to turn India into a dominion like Canada, he was seeking to transform the empire “into a worldwide commonwealth.”Footnote 15
The ethos of empire overshadowing the inchoate vision of nation-states is perhaps nowhere so vivid as in the writings of the Indian nationalist leader Surendranath Banerjea. While conceding, “We are not Englishman,” Banerjea nonetheless claimed that the Indians were British subjects, “the citizens of a great and free empire.”Footnote 16 His claim to citizenship was partly rooted in the idea of “protected fealty,” as historian Sukanya Banerjee rightly observes; “political subjecthood” entailed “an entitlement or protection based on fealty.”Footnote 17 But there was more to it: “We want self-government in the interests of the Empire,” wrote Banerjea, the politician. “Self-government is the cement of the Empire,” which has “converted hostile Boers into loyal citizens shedding their blood for the purpose of suppressing a revolution of their countrymen against the Empire.”Footnote 18 If nationalism represents, inter alia, a love for fellow countrymen—as Nehru passionately claimed in his famous pedagogic moment—then Banerjea’s statement here not only affirmed his allegiance to empire but also negated any centrality of the nation-state.Footnote 19 It is this precedence of empire which is erased in the historiography plagued by “an inability to think about the nation beyond a particular trajectory of form of statehood.”Footnote 20
Decentering nation-state in this manner is crucial for an apprehension of pan-Islamism, especially given the fact that, as an ideology, pan-Islam has defined itself, as per Javed Majeed, “in opposition to the European ideology of nationalism.” Muhammad Iqbal’s two poems “Tarana-e Hindi,” a patriotic paean of India, and “Tarana-e milli,” a celebration of Muslim universality, “imply each other through their opposition,” according to Majeed. Thus, together in their mutual opposition, they illuminate Iqbal’s “own internally diverse persona,” one part of it facing outward to the globe, the other inward.Footnote 21 In Faisal Devji’s reading, Iqbal threw his support behind the Muslim League because “they seemed to stave off the nation state in its liberal incarnation,” which he despised because of the way it glorified territorial belonging. Territorial belonging, bound up with the nation-state, is responsible for the destruction of ethical ideals, making for a parochial international regime.Footnote 22 Along this line, a burgeoning scholarship on South Asian pan-Islamism has stressed, in recent years, how such mobilizations during the interwar period were forged in the hybrid workshop of internationalism, socialism, and Islamic universalism. Ayesha Jalal underscores how global affinities of Indian Muslims catalyzed anti-imperial struggles across the globe, enabled in part by the principle of hakimiyat—the sovereignty of Allah over the entire world—which provided a basis for Islamic universalism, a vision somewhat attenuated by its inextricable link to the community of believers.Footnote 23 Abul Kalam Azad epitomizes, for her, this synthesis of Islamic universalism and anticolonial vision.Footnote 24 Similarly, John Willis argues that Azad’s emphasis on Mecca as Islam’s “earthly center” stemmed from his conviction that “Islam’s summons was a universal and international summons that was not limited to a particular people or land.”Footnote 25 The Khilafat years also bore witness to an alignment of pan-Islamism, Bolshevism, and Indian National Congress under the leadership of Gandhi, alarming the British establishment to the extent that officials feared the empire’s imminent collapse.Footnote 26
In her study of anticolonial struggle that defied what Har Dayal—founder of Ghadar—dubbed the “narrow views of nationalism,” Maia Ramnath identifies socialism and pan-Islamism as the two most influential transnational vehicles of anti-imperial mobilizations in early twentieth-century India.Footnote 27 The intricate link between the radical left Ghadar movement and pan-Islamism is exemplified by Barkatullah Bhopali—prime minister of the provisional Indian government-in-exile established in Kabul—who was regarded by the British official as a central conduit “between three different movements, namely, the Pan-Islamic, Asia for Asiatics, and Indian sedition.”Footnote 28 Notwithstanding his “retrieval of support from such politically diverse regimes as the German Reich, the Bolsheviks, and the Italian Fascists,” Humayun Ansari observes, Bhopali’s politics were consistently marked by the dual commitment to the political autonomy of Islam and the emancipation of the colonized people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.Footnote 29 If, on the one hand, an anti-imperial, pan-Islamic vision served as a centrifugal force, dragging Indian Muslims outward to forge global connections, it simultaneously exerted a centripetal pull, drawing the broader world into India. Such concurrent phenomena as the “Silk Letter movement” and the proclamation of a provisional government of India in Kabul, Shruti Kapila contends, not only signaled pan-Islamism’s arrival as a critical anti-imperial force but also sought to elevate India to the position of “the pivot of a new political Islam.”Footnote 30 Devji similarly observes that the Khilafat movement is best understood as “the first example of Indian nationalism’s claim to speak and indeed act within the area of international politics.”Footnote 31
This new historiography of pan-Islamism in British India, however, gravitates toward a handful of prominent figures—Sayyid Ahmad, Altaf Hussain Hali, Iqbal, Azad, Bhopali, Ubaidullah Sindhi, and the Ali brothers—most of whom hailed from the United Provinces or the Punjab. They belonged, by and large, to families with some combination of aristocratic lineage, inherited wealth, or connections with notable patrons, enabling them to attain sophisticated education and build extensive metropolitan networks.Footnote 32 By shifting attention away from these privileged intellectuals, I highlight a cohort of relatively obscure Muslim thinkers largely based in the mofussil towns of Bengal. Although a few among them received quality education, others were entirely self-taught. Limited in socioeconomic means and lacking transnational patronage, most of these Bengal-based writers never traveled beyond the boundaries of British India and therefore could not join the cosmopolitan networks that figures like Bhopali or the Khilafatist muhajirin navigated. In what follows, I examine their writings and activities to chart a distinctive mode of imagining the extraterritorial. I argue that these mofussil intellectuals operated within a fluid imperial milieu—marked by the British and the Ottoman Empire—very much like their north Indian, more mobile, counterparts, but unlike the latter, they conjured an “Ottoman Empire” largely through their own imaginations. It was precisely the fantastical nature of the Ottoman Empire, signified by its extraterritoriality—in other words, its emptiness as a concrete thing—that allowed these Bengali Muslim thinkers to make their pro-Turk sentiment into a basis for a vicarious sovereignty.
An empire of utopia
The closing years of the decade of the 1870s, marked by the ascension of Abdulhamid II to the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and the Russo-Turkish war that broke out the year next, have been identified for good reasons as a turning point in the Indian support for the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 33 This shift of attitude manifests itself during the war against Russia. Muslims were urged to “go to Turkey and to fight against the Russians as volunteers,” and guidelines were published for Bengal “volunteers who were willing to go to Turkey.”Footnote 34 But the most significant contribution of Muslims in Bengal took the form of subscriptions given to the relief fund. At a time when a famine was raging in several provinces, including Bengal, the campaign for the Turkish relief fund amassed a flabbergasting sum of money. Abdulhamid himself came forward to acknowledge Indian Muslims’ support, and many individuals, newspapers, and Muslim organizations received imperial recognition for their role in the effort.Footnote 35 Azmi Ozcan, in his detailed study of the Indo-Muslim attitude towards the Ottomans, which he tellingly began with the 1877 war, was perhaps right in concluding that the “Indo-Muslim interest in the Ottomans reached its peak” from the late 1870s onwards, as reflected in the newly developed Muslim press. He further observed that Indo-Muslim enthusiasm during the war was both unique and unprecedented since “nowhere else in the Muslim world was there such a large-scale and heartfelt sympathy for the Ottomans.”Footnote 36
One may discern in the fin de siècle a deliberate attempt on the part of Bengali Muslim writers to depict the Ottoman Empire as both ritually sanctified and materially modern, coming very close to rendering it a materialized utopia. The attribution of sanctity to Turkey was a new phenomenon, for Turkey has never been accepted as part of the sacred cosmography of Islam. For instance, Hajj narratives written during this era usually recounted an itinerary that covered Hejaz, Syria, Jerusalem, Egypt, and Baghdad, making no reference to Turkey.Footnote 37 Yet one may discern a sacralization of Turkey at the turn of the century. Envisioning Turkey as a utopian land, in terms of both sanctity and technological modernity, is illustrated in a work called Greek-Turashka Juddha (1899), written in the wake of the Greco-Turkish War (1897) by Mohammad Reyajuddin Ahmad (1862–1935), the first of the four Bengali Muslim intellectuals I focus on in this article.Footnote 38 Born in Kauniya, Barisal—a district in Eastern Bengal—Ahmad was orphaned at a very young age. His formal education was terminated before he cleared middle school, as both of his elder brothers—who had taken up the helm of the family after their father’s demise—also passed away.Footnote 39 He was subsequently sheltered in the residence of an affluent relative, where he set up a pathsala with their financial patronage. He took to writing from his adolescent years. In one memorable instance, he wrote to Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar—a towering figure of the so-called “Bengali Renaissance”—pointing out a few errors in his Bengali primer, Bodhoday. Vidyasagar corrected these errors in a later edition, acknowledging his debt to young Ahmad.Footnote 40 He moved to Calcutta in 1883, where he started to discuss with his friend Pundit Reazuddin Ahmad Mashhadi the prospect of founding a newspaper. After a stint of work that helped him gain experience with a less significant press, in 1889 they launched a newspaper called Sudhakar, arguably the most influential Muslim newspaper in the Bengali vernacular press of the nineteenth century.Footnote 41
Induced by the Ottoman victory in the war—for Indian Muslims a rare, joyful occasion—Greek-Turashka Juddha was intended to provide a detailed account of the war. Ahmad dedicated this volume to his deceased father Munshi Mayejuddin Ahmad—of whose family line he is the last remaining member, the final bangsher bati (the unceasing light of a lineage)—with a long dedicatory note written in the form of a letter. Having recounted his sad tale of love and loss, Ahmad dedicates the work to his father in this way:
Let it be stated that this pitiful, ill-fated son has been unable, up to this point, to carry out any religious rite for your spiritual well-being [paralaukik mangal]. Today, I take the opportunity to dedicate this insignificant work Greek-Turashka Juddha to your holy feet. I am not without hope that the blessings of those great men who have received martyrdom [shahadat-prapti] in this great [Russo-Turkish] war will not go in vain and will do a little to make your afterlife more blissful (x).Footnote 42
Two things stand out in this note. Ahmad’s language is steeped in Hindu imagery: his salutation, his repeated references to bangsher bati, and the final evocation of paralaukik mangal are all characteristically Hindu. Even though, in the Islamic tradition, rites performed for the dead are not entirely foreign—one would recall here the rite of isaale sawab, popularized in Bengal most notably by Abu Bakr of Furfura, in addition to the more common practice of fatiha (visiting graves)—Ahmad’s language is strongly evocative of the Hindu rite of the son’s duty to the deceased father.Footnote 43 Second, and more crucially for our purpose, he has inserted his book on the Greco-Turkish War—filled with military details—into a transcendental order of things. Considering his own upbringing as an orphan as if reminiscent of the prophet’s own life as an orphan, and the crushing memories of the death of every member of his family—which he recounted in painstaking detail—there is little doubt that this note was composed in a state of vulnerability. It is against this larger narrative of grief that we must read this act. Without this context we could all too easily take his last words as mere platitude. But within the orbit of familial grief, these same words resound with “trembling, and speechless humility of the creature,” a mysterium tremendum moment—the characteristic precursor of Rudolf Otto’s “holiness”—encircled by such evocatively religious images as one’s well-being in the afterlife, the blessings of the martyred, and the duty of the son to his deceased father.Footnote 44 The offering of his book on the Greco-Turkish War as the first homage of filial duty to his deceased father would have been impossible, I suggest, had there been a shred of skepticism on his part about the holiness of the war, the blood of those martyred Turkish soldiers, and the book that contains an account of this.
Turkey entailed a certain holiness for Bengali Muslims like Ahmad in this era. The sacrality of Turkey was a defining but insufficient condition for it to be considered a utopian empire. Equally important was its material image as a metropolis marked by technological modernity and cosmopolitan culture. Ahmad portrays Istanbul—the seat of the Ottoman Empire—as a city that “appears to be floating in the sea,” with “hundreds of small and large sea-going vessels … treading the water of the sea like aquatic birds,” and rows of majestic mansions along the shore. Trains crammed with passengers race “at the speed of air” like birds from paradise. “The primacy of Islam over Christianity” is manifested here by the Church of Hagia Sophia, now converted into the Hagia Sophia Mosque.Footnote 45 Ahmad further describes Istanbul as a melting pot of Turks, Arabs, Circassians, Iranians, Afghans, Moors, black Africans (Kafri), and many others, forming a veritable babel of languages. Europeans, including English, French, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Romans, Greeks, Russians, and Bulgarians, as well as Americans, Syrians, and Armenians, also visit or reside in the city of Constantinople to see to their material and other business purposes. Most interestingly, Ahmad notes, these Christian or Jewish visitors take pride in wearing Turkish clothes, presumably a jab at Bengali Muslims inclined to adopt English attire.Footnote 46
Ahmad conjures up the city as a utopia: geographically well poised, suffused with scenic beauty, a melting pot of cultures and civilizations. The conversion of the Hagia Sophia Church into a mosque is reminiscent of the enduring trope of the cross-supplanting crescent.Footnote 47 While this crusade-like thesis certainly contributes to Istanbul’s framing as a utopian ground, Ahmad places far greater emphasis on the city’s status as an embodiment of technological modernity. Istanbul is adorned with modern technological innovations like oceangoing battleships, printing presses, a variety of vehicles, tramlines, underground trains, steamboats, and grand mansions. It is a bustling cosmopolis, where Muslims of diverse origins navigate the city’s avenues side by side with Christians and Jews drawn to it by the opportunities it opens up to them. Living up to the adage “All roads lead to Rome,” Istanbul is the new Rome of the world. Absent this material prosperity, the capital city would not manage to sway Muslims on account of its sanctity alone—a fact most discernible in the reluctance of the Bengali Muslims to take a comparable interest in the two sanctuaries of Islam, i.e. the cities of Mecca and Medina.Footnote 48
* * *
The two empires—the overarching colonial empire and the conjured image of the Ottoman Empire—came to structure the experience of Bengali Muslims in these decades. The first Muslim astrological almanac in vernacular Bengali, titled Brihat Muhammadiya Panjika (1892), edited by the same Reyajuddin Ahmad, offers a vivid illustration of how these two empires coexisted.Footnote 49 In addition to providing the usual astrological details and everyday essential information, Ahmad explicitly intended the Panjika as a compendium of Islam’s basic religious tenets, including historical and geographical accounts of Muslims, as he explained in his “Preface” to a surviving 1899 edition.Footnote 50 It is by way of this latter objective that the Ottoman Empire found its way into Ahmad’s Panjika. Reconceived as a hybrid genre—combining elements of a traditional panjika and what we would now call an almanac—the work was modeled on contemporary Hindu almanacs. An examination of the Nutan Panjika Directory—a widely circulated Hindu panjika—reveals that it was neatly divided into two parts: an astrological part followed by a directory. The directory consisted of useful information on railway schedules, legal matters, leisure activities, and a comprehensive guide to the mofussil regions.Footnote 51 In a large section devoted to politics, it also offered a brief overview of India, followed by a complete inventory of the British royal family. Ahmad largely emulates this format with two notable exceptions. In a sharp divergence from the Hindu panjika, he reduces the account of the British Crown to a mere few pages and minimizes the almanac portion dealing with everyday information, while devoting most of his directory to a meticulous account of the Ottoman Empire. Whereas the compiler of the Hindu panjika evokes an imperial milieu that is recognizably British, Ahmad ensconces his reader at the confluence of two empires, where the colonial sovereign is radically scaled down in order to allow a majestic portrayal of the Ottoman. The Sultan of Rum is presented as the sovereign authority (sarbabhaumik pradhanya) of the entire Muslim world, fittingly known as “Amir al-Mu’minin” (commander of the faithful).Footnote 52 “Go and allude to the name of the Badshah of Rum to an ordinary cooly or a peasant,” you will surely see this “unlettered man” come alive with devotion for him.Footnote 53
What is perhaps of more critical interest is the fact, as reported by Ahmad, that the Muslims of India, along with the Pathans of Afghanistan, read their khutba in the name of the Sultan.Footnote 54 The reading of the khutba and the striking of coins were two of the most common indices of political sovereignty in the Islamic world.Footnote 55 In the wake of the fall of the Mughals, the predominant practice in Indian mosques was to invoke the Sultan al-Islam in the khutba, without referring to any specific ruler.Footnote 56 It was only in the nineteenth century, according to Naeem Qureshi, that the Ottoman Sultan “came to be mentioned in the Friday khutba in some Indian mosques.”Footnote 57 Syed Ahmed Khan, who rejected the idea that Indian Muslims ought to be loyal to the Ottoman Sultan, as late as 1876 maintained that “religiously it was not incumbent upon Indian Muslims to mention the name of the Ottoman caliph in the khutba.”Footnote 58 By the early twentieth century, as Ahmad testified in the almanac, the reading of the khutba in the name of Turkish Sultan appeared to have become the predominant practice. When the Great War broke out, officials attempted, in some areas, “to get the sultan’s name omitted from the Friday khutba.”Footnote 59 In Bengal, when Nawab Salimullah Khan sought to expunge the name of the Sultan from the khutba, he was severely criticized by the press.Footnote 60 In a 1914 report The Mussalman censured some Indian Muslims who had denounced, of course under official inducement, the Sultan and the caliphate. “Attempts are said to have been made,” the newspaper further observed, “to omit the name of the Sultan from the Khutba and Juma prayers.”Footnote 61
Ahmad’s Panjika’s directory section is filled with administrative, survey-like data on the Ottoman Empire, its geographical stretch, demography, revenues, education, agriculture, trade, and military strengths. An accompanying theme is the person and virtues of Abudlhamid II, the present Turkish Sultan, along with detailed reports of the progress achieved under his rule in virtually all state departments.Footnote 62 What were the supposed benefits, one might ask, of these exhaustive administrative details for the consumers of the panjika? Why would, say, a peasant in the eastern delta purchase an almanac of this kind, when—unlike the Hindu panjika mentioned earlier—it offered little, if anything, that would help navigate daily life fashioned under the Raj? I will argue that one way to gain a deeper understanding of the Muslim fascination with the Turkish Empire—most readily understood as a sign of pan-Islamism—is to pay closer attention to their fondness for producing census-like data and relaying the day-to-day operations of the empire. The spawning of survey-like data and the mimicking of the operation of a distant bureaucracy were conducive, as I will show, to the generation of a specific kind of sovereignty.
Non-statist, nonviolent, charismatic sovereignty
To appreciate alternative, non-juridical forms of sovereignty, we first need to clear some conceptual space by severing this concept from the two attributes commonly taken as intrinsic to it: the enclosure of the nation-state and the state’s monopoly on physical violence. “When the political scientist stumbles upon the state as a unit of analysis,” Jens Bartelson noted, “he will once again become entangled in a discourse of sovereignty as its defining property.”Footnote 63 Sovereignty is inexorably bound up with the idea of state. Carl Schmitt hinted at this conjoined relationship when he discerned that the word nomos—conventionally translated as “law”—was originally a spatial term, indicating that “law and peace originally rested on enclosures in the spatial sense.”Footnote 64 In Wendy Brown’s gloss, “There is first the enclosure and then the sovereign.”Footnote 65 Conversely, Max Weber centered his theory of the modern state on its capacity for violence, positing that the state can be defined only sociologically, “by the specific means that are peculiar to it,” which is “physical violence.” It is the only human community that effectively lays claim to “the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory.”Footnote 66 This is the conventional way of understanding juridical sovereignty; it entails supreme and perpetual authority within an enclosed territory.Footnote 67 Foucault argued that the juridical notion of sovereignty was supplanted by biopolitical models of power at the threshold of modernity, with the reincorporation of zoē into the political order, originally excluded by Aristotle, who thought that the distinction between included bios (qualified life) and excluded zoē (bare life) was crucial to the political realm.Footnote 68 In an influential rejoinder, Agamben argued that zoē has never really been excluded from the political but was presumed all the while through a relation of exception. With the rise of modern regimes of biopower, sovereign authority has transmuted itself into the underbelly of modern liberal governments.Footnote 69 Agamben’s intervention has inspired later historians to study de facto sovereignty, going beyond the confines of nation-states. Caroline Humphrey, for instance, has identified “localized forms of sovereignty” that are “nested within” higher sovereignties, most commonly wielded by bandits, warlords, mafiosi, and so on.Footnote 70
Anticolonial thinkers in British India were trying to develop a distinct paradigm of antistatist sovereignty which in recent years has attracted scholarly interests.Footnote 71 Perhaps the best-known formulation of this register of sovereign power is Gandhi’s idea of swaraj, which emphatically repudiated the assumed correlation between political sovereignty and the expulsion of the British. “If we become free,” argued Gandhi, “India is free,” regardless of the alien British rule: “It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.”Footnote 72 Gandhi envisioned his method of nonviolent resistance as a “sovereign method,” because, if sovereignty entails the authority to ask people “to kill and die,” as Faisal Devji explains, then the “capacity of dying”—embodied in the satyagrahi’s willingness to accept suffering and death—can itself become a catalyst for “retrieving sovereignty from the state.”Footnote 73 Gandhi was one of several anticolonial thinkers, as political theorists of South Asia have shown, who sought to wrest sovereignty away from the state. This vision of sovereignty was rooted, as Karuna Mantena shows, in the work of Henry Maine, who posited the Indian village community or republic as an autonomous social domain which served as a standing critique of the universality of the modern state.Footnote 74 Indian thinkers like Radhakamal Mukerjee’s and Gandhi’s invocation of the trope of village republic coincided, Mantena observes, with a global turn to antistatist thought in the early twentieth century, collectively known as “pluralism,” which had refused to concede any privileged status to the state, regarding it as one form of social association among many competing ones.Footnote 75
Building on Agamben-inspired scholarship on de facto sovereignty and Mantena’s insight regarding the impact of pluralism on Indian anticolonial thinkers, I propose a broader theory of alternative sovereignty in South Asia, a framework equally suited to Gandhian swaraj and the variant I discern in the practices of Bengali Muslims in this era. That Gandhi refused to conceive of sovereignty as rooted in violence and tethered to the nation-state has already been hinted by Mantena: his critique of the modern state rested on the assumption that it was essentially “founded on violence,” and that the antidote to it was the “associative solidarities of village.”Footnote 76 A more explicit theory of nonstatist, nonviolent sovereignty maybe found in the work of Harold Laski, who traced the origin of absolute sovereignty to political philosophers’ proclivity for what he called “mystic monism”: first imagining the state as “a vast series of concentric circles,” then positing that “all parts of the State are woven together to make one harmonious whole,” thereby laying the groundwork for the idea that the “state must triumph” over all other associations.Footnote 77 This paramountcy of the state, recognized by jurists as sovereign authority, is a counterfactual supposition, according to Laski, for the true meaning of sovereignty resides not in the “coercive instruments” of the state—as the monism of the jurists assumes—but in the “fused goodwill,” or the consent, of “members of the state,” who belong to multiple non-state associations.Footnote 78
In addition to repudiating the state and violence as central to sovereign authority, what I term “alternative sovereignty”—within the context of South Asia—is characterized by a third trait, the notion of charisma, excised from modern scholarship in part due to an influential transition narrative. Historians depict the transition from royal to popular sovereignty in the age of democratization as a categorical departure from the visual regime of absolute monarchy of the ancien regime, centered on the two bodies of the king: the living mortal body and the eternal corpus mysticum.Footnote 79 In contrast to the premodern ritualized spectacle that “blinded the people with splendor” in order to reduce them to submission, the age of democratic revolutions, Habermas famously argued, introduced a “new order of epistemic transparency and consensus,” rendering the display of a mystifying pomp obsolete.Footnote 80 This accords with the contractualist notion of rationalized sovereignty advanced by Laski, who categorically rejected the idea that there was anything “sacred or mysterious” about it.Footnote 81 What is obscured by this tale of democratic disenchantment, argues Jason Frank—a tale driven in no small part by the fear of committing the sin of “organicism”—is the persistence of spectacles, or “political aesthetics,” as he calls it, during the era of democracy.Footnote 82
In Mughal India, echoing the tradition of high medieval Europe, ritual enactment of authority through public drama, organized around the person of the emperor, was pivotal to the routine sustenance of sovereign power. An early eighteenth-century painting depicting the arrival of the Emperor Farrukh Siyar’s imperial procession at the Jama Mosque of Delhi to hear the khutba in his name serves as an illustration. As Abhishek Kaicker reads it, Farrukh Siyar, readily identifiable by his halo, is “accompanied by a panoply of objects laden with symbolism,” including fly whisks and golden parasols. The broad canvas of the work also depicts the onlookers, enthralled by the “seductive allure of the court’s glittering rhetoric and otherworldly allusions.”Footnote 83 The ruler’s own body, sacrosanct as the bearer both of the miraculous genealogy and of daulat—a concept intimately linked to the circle of justice and sovereign authority in the Islamic tradition—formed part of the mise en scène of the enactment of sovereignty. Akbar’s palace in Fatehpur featured a “window of presentation” (jharoka), mimicking the alcoves for idols in temples.Footnote 84 This is reminiscent of what Habermas has described as the publicity of representation within the context of medieval Europe, where representation—in contrast to its modern meaning of acting as delegate in someone else’ name—was primarily a status attribute, inseparable from medieval lord’s concrete existence, his aura, staged through such personal attributes as insignia, dress, demeanor.Footnote 85 With the advent of British colonization in India, Bernard Cohn shows, many of the Mughal court rituals, including the holding of Darbar, presenting khelat and receiving nazar, were retained by the colonial administration, diverging sharply from the transition tale narrated by scholars of Europe. Moreover, when the British finally decided to do away with this inheritance, they supplanted it with an elaborate drama of imperial assemblage in 1877, introducing a new staging of authority.Footnote 86
If what anthropologists call the “collective force of society”—known variously as mana or charisma—is common to all human societies, and if ritual involves Anstoss, or a live calling forth of “the collective force of society,” then we may trace a sociological underpinning for the production of sovereignty in the staging of these dramas.Footnote 87 If sovereignty is not an “ontological ground of power” but a tentative and always emergent form of authority, as many of the recent studies have underscored, then both generation and regeneration of sovereign power deserve acute attention.Footnote 88 Shenila Khoja-Moolji, for instance, has characterized sovereignty as “a relationship that has to be cultivated,” an “ongoing attachment between claimants of sovereignty and their publics.”Footnote 89 It is congruent with the anthropological notion that the charismatic authority of the magician “relies on the public potential,” that they can only work their magic by “appropriating to themselves the collective forces of society.”Footnote 90
To sum up, alternative sovereignty is a non-state-centric, nonviolent, charismatic form of power, manifested in and generated through the intents and practices of non-state actors, one that unfolds not within the enclosure of the nation-state but rather in the fluid milieu of empires. By suspending the haughty image of a sovereign as the one who decides on the exception and monopolizes legitimate violence, and by stripping the state of its privileged status to regard it as one among many competing social associations in the manner of the pluralists, we can appreciate that the production of sovereignty takes place in a dispersed field, where state and non-state actors alike strive to cultivate sovereign relationships in their favor. From the vantage point of this alternative sovereignty, the brawl caused by Siraji’s Turkish outfit—the anecdote with which we began—was not so much due to the eccentricity of the magistrate as to his intuitive recognition in it of the shadow of a new sovereign claimant, dressed up in the insignia of an enemy allied power. Siraji’s outfit was a far from isolated reference to the Ottoman Sultan; similar invocations were to be found, let us recall, in Ahmad’s publicization of the Caliph as the Islamic world’s “sovereign authority” and the prevalent practices in Indian mosques of reciting the khutba—a central marker of political sovereignty in Islam—in the name of the Ottoman Sultan. While the British Raj often turned a deaf ear to such provocations, guided by the same pragmatism that allowed them to institute divisible sovereignty in variegated forms—most notably in princely states—in more trying times, they could see, almost as clearly as our magistrate, the specter of a countersovereign in these invocations.Footnote 91 In fact, their efforts during World War I to excise the Sultan’s name from the khutba amounted to an implicit acknowledgment of the sovereign aspirations that these symbolic acts embodied.
Reminiscent of Habermas’s notion of aura—staged through insignia, dress, demeanor—we discern in these instances an invocation of sovereign authority by non-state actors in a bid to call forth, through a ritualized drama, the collective force of society, a ritual no less vital in the democratic era than in the medieval age of monarchy. The spawning of survey-like data and staging of spectacles devoted to the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, are resonant with what Adom Getachew—discussed later—has seen in parade, pageants, and public festivals in the context of Garveyism. In subsequent sections I will delineate how the alternative register of sovereignty in Muslim imaginations took on a specifically vicarious character, owing to the idea of simultaneous or radical loyalty, a vision of the Muslim world as Respublica Moslemica, and an inheritance of the vestige of Mughal sovereignty. To elaborate on this vicarious sovereignty, I will begin by charting two events, associated with Abdulhamid II, that triggered a general euphoria in the Muslim press: the construction of Hejaz Railway and the silver jubilee of the Sultan’s ascension to the throne.
Public self-fashioning
Generally credited as the defining influence behind the Ottoman Empire’s explicitly pan-Islamic turn, Abdulhamid II ascended the throne at the age of thirty-four during a period of major upheaval, including cumulative loss of territories in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War and ongoing crises in the Balkans. These circumstances led the Sultan to adopt the already brewing ideology of pan-Islamism as his first line of defense. Reflecting this new ideology, the empire’s first Constitution of 1876—largely prompted by the agitation of the Young Ottomans—promulgated “the Ottoman Sultanate, as the exalted Caliphs of Islam,” and named the reigning Sultan “the protector of the religion of Islam.”Footnote 92
Among Abdulhamid II’s most ambitious projects was the Damascus–Hejaz Railway, connecting Damascus, Syria, and Medina.Footnote 93 Intended ostensibly to facilitate global Muslims’ travels to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina—many of them had to embark hitherto on a perilous journey to perform hajj—the underlying political object was to consolidate the empire through a gigantic rail network. The construction of the main line of the railway (1900–8) sparked notable enthusiasm in India, where many Hejaz Railway Funds were formed to raise subscriptions.Footnote 94 In 1899, the Bengali periodical Islam Pracharak, edited by Reyajuddin Ahmad, took up the cause of the Hejaz Railway. It provided continuous coverage of the project’s progress, including essays, news, extracts, and appeals for financial support. In the November–December 1899 issue, the editor suggested that readers contribute to the Damascus–Hejaz Railway Fund “as a mark of respect” to the Sultan.Footnote 95 By January–February 1902, the paper reported on a Hejaz Railway Fund Committee in Calcutta, led by Prince Mohammad Bakhtiyar Shah.Footnote 96 At the same time, Manirujjaman Islamabadi, a prominent Bengali alim, toured Rangpur to solicit donations, and his 1903 book Turashker Sultan (The Sultan of Turkey) garnered wide acclaim.Footnote 97 Islamabadi later traveled to Myanmar to collect additional subscriptions in response to the Sultan’s call.
A May–June 1904 article in Islam Pracharak emphasized the railway’s spiritual significance by noting that the “proposed route of the Hejaz Railway—connecting Syria, Medina, and Mecca—coincides with the same sanctified route traversed by the Prophet Muhammad, thrice, in his travel to Syria.”Footnote 98 Prophet Ibrahim—the namesake of Abrahamic religions—journeyed across the same route as he arrived in Mecca from Canan, taking Ismail along with him. The piece argued that pilgrims making use of the railway would earn abundant rewards by retracing these sacred footsteps. After underlining these spiritual associations, the report detailed the railway’s administrative and financial specifics: between 1900 and 1903, the Hejaz Railway Fund had collected 1,326,300 liras, with expenditures at 780,639 liras. It outlined the lengths of completed track segments and enumerated constructed bridges, stations, engines, and bogies.Footnote 99 The account is highly reminiscent of the administrative details that we encountered earlier in the discussion on the almanac. It was both their prerogative and their duty to report on the progress of the railway, on account of the large subscriptions sent from India to the railway fund. More crucially, Islam Pracharak’s emphasis on meticulous detailing mirrored the day-to-day bureaucratic operation of a sovereign entity. It was an attempt to create a miniature print replication of a real but distant bureaucratic machinery as one of their own.
* * *
In the late nineteenth century, the Bengal province, particularly its Eastern part, witnessed a marked increase in peasant prosperity, largely driven by expanding jute cultivation. Scholars such as P. K. Datta, Andrew Sartori, and Tariq Omar Ali have shown that this economic rise in rural East Bengal was intertwined with a specifically Islamic conception of self-cultivation. Datta observes the proliferation of a literary genre, which he dubs “improvement literature,” largely authored by village inhabitants, which sought to improve the condition of Muslim peasantry in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 100 In a similar vein, Sartori argues that in this body of works an intrinsic link was forged between “Muslimness and the political aspiration of self-determination.”Footnote 101 Ali has illustrated, in his recent work, how the growth in jute acreage and the attendant rise in jute prices fueled rural prosperity, encouraging the consumption of modern commodities as part of a wider project of self-fashioning.Footnote 102 Building on these insights, I propose that the daily chronicle of the Ottoman Empire in print and the ascent of self-fashioning—ultimately leading to material freedom—were co-constitutive of each other. As an illustration, consider Ibn Maazuddin Ahmad’s memoir, My Domestic Life (Amar Shangshar Jiban), subtitled “The Blazing Sway of Islam” (1914). In the Preface, Maazuddin explains that he compiled these writings—originally serialized in Islam Pracharak—into a single volume at the request of several highly educated literary friends. The book opens by introducing the narrator as Sharfudding Ahmad.Footnote 103 Born in the village of Enayetpur in rural Bengal, Maazuddin’s father Munshi Bashiruddin Ahmad was a small-scale taluqdar who held a few lakhiraj (rent-free) lands—divulging perhaps his family’s pietistic inheritance—and a modest estate (taluq).Footnote 104 Taking advantage of Bashiruddin’s pietistic nature and corresponding aloofness from worldly affairs, his Brahmin gomasta (rent collector) gradually siphoned off his family taluq.Footnote 105 Eventually, the taluqdari estate was auctioned off to cover unpaid taxes—an outcome engineered by the gomasta—reducing the family to the status of ordinary raiyats, much like those Sartori discusses in his work. At sixteen, abandoning his educational pursuits, Maazuddin decided to farm the family’s remaining seven acres himself, rather than leasing it out to a sharecropper. From that point onward, the memoir traces two parallel developments. First, Maazuddin emerges as a hardworking, resourceful cultivator—growing rice, raising cattle, and tending vegetables with help from a family servant named Asmat. At the same time, he launches a range of public religious initiatives, including organizing waz mahfils (public religious sermons), founding a Juma mosque, establishing a maktab, and creating an anjuman (religious association). Together, these activities herald a broader wave of Muslim self-fashioning in his locality.
What stands out in this interplay between self-cultivation and Muslim identity is Maazuddin’s special attachment to the Ottoman Empire, largely mediated by print materials. He describes reading extensively about two topics in periodicals: the Caliph’s plan to construct the Hejaz Railway and the anniversary of his accession to the throne. Maazuddin decided both to raise subscription for the railway and to observe the silver jubilee of the Sultan’s accession.Footnote 106 With the help of his father, he planned a public assembly for the jubilee on 31 August 1900, combining a commemoration of the enthronement with a fundraising drive for the railway. At a preparatory meeting—where Maulvi Khalilur Rahman, the local madrasa chief, was invited—newspaper excerpts describing both the celebrations of accession in Turkey and the railway’s progress were read aloud, stirring enthusiasm among the participants.Footnote 107 The first day of observation began with a waz mahfil, where Maulvi Rahman drew on the Quran and Hadith to expound upon the railway’s potential to ease the suffering of hajjis and to exhort the assembled crowd to contribute, promising ample sawab (divine reward). Moved by his appeals, many in the audience were brought to tears, and a hefty sum was raised on that day. On the second day—the official silver jubilee—Maazuddin and one Munshi Abdul Gaffar offered brief eulogies to the Sultan, followed by another sermon by the maulvi. The highlight was the milad sharif, followed by the distribution of seventy-five kilograms of sweets to the attendees, along with an equal amount of rice and four rupees in coin given to the poor.Footnote 108 The final day of celebrations featured a series of bayans on various topics. Altogether, around three hundred rupees in subscriptions, plus two hundred rupees contributed by Maazuddin’s own family, were remitted to the Railway’s Central Committee in Constantinople, with Maulvi Saheb personally overseeing the money order. “Words cannot adequately convey,” Maazuddin wrote in closing, “the joy that this holy ceremony’s successful completion brought to father and son.”Footnote 109
No attentive reader would fail to notice how public demonstration of reverence for the Caliph animated the laboring body of these Muslim cultivators. It is also noteworthy that a prerequisite of the three-day rural spectacle was a newfound material prosperity, in part enabled by a discourse of Muslimness grounded in a devout claim to the Ottoman Empire. Invoking Amartya Sen’s notion of development as freedom, one sees in these events a manifestation of Muslim freedom. The organizational labors underpinning this celebration—from initial planning and the three-day festivities to collecting subscriptions and dispatching the money order—reveal a microcosm of administrative operation that anticipated a broader sense of self-rule (swaraj). As Adom Getachew has shown in her study of the 1920 annual convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the parade, pageants, and public festivals in the convention’s proceedings were mobilized to cultivate a new habit of “reverential self-regard” among its members. She further observes that owing to the inherent instability in the dispersed body of the sovereign people—in contrast to the natural, embodied existence of the monarch—it is required that the people “cultivate an internal sense of their authoritative standing.”Footnote 110 An analogical constitution of the Muslim self was taking place, I argue, in the public display of reverence for the Ottoman Empire. That this critical self-constituting act was being performed in the name of an extraterritorial place divulges another aspect of vicarious sovereignty: sovereignty as an empty signifier, a theme I elaborate on in the next section.
Radical loyalty and Respublica Moslemica
Among the ramifications of the “crisis of sovereignty” in the wake of the collapse of the Mughal Empire were the rise of numerous Islamic reform movements, new debates about what constituted sovereignty in this altered reality, and a search for the extraterritorial sovereign.Footnote 111 “The desacralization and deportation in 1858 of Bahadur Shah”—the last Mughal Emperor—Sugata Bose observes, compelled Indian Muslims “to search for a khalifa beyond the border of Hind.”Footnote 112 Before the fall of the Mughal order, Devji explains by drawing on F. W. Buckler’s 1922 perceptive essay on the Khilafat, the Mughal emperors styled themselves “khalifas of the age,” as one of the key protagonists of the three-pronged Respublica Moslemica, alongside the Safavid and the Ottoman Empires.Footnote 113 With the demise of the Mughal authority, and the subsequent violation of the shared norms of this respublica by the East India Company, Indian Muslims took recourse to external authorities like the Afghans, Persians, or Ottomans, who were perceived, crucially, not as new sovereigns, but as “instruments of an ‘international intervention’ by the Respublica Moslemica to reestablish India’s political order.”Footnote 114
Complementing this corporate—as opposed to hierarchical—imaginaire was a conceptualization of sovereign authority as an empty signifier. Even as Mughal claims to sovereignty were hollowed out of any meaning, first by the East India Company’s assumption of the role of “protector” of the Mughal emperor after the capture of the Mughal capital in 1803—reducing the Mughal emperor to a titular authority—and second by desacralizing the person of the sovereign by bringing him to trial in 1858, the vestige of this old authority nonetheless continued to be invoked in subsequent decades.Footnote 115 But the invocation of this authority was of a very special kind, as Salmoli Choudhuri observes: if mutineers in 1857 proclaimed Bahadur Shah as new sovereign, it was not because they relied on the shah for legitimacy, but rather because they were drawn to him due to his “reduced power,” guaranteeing that “the space occupied by him was sufficiently empty to enable [the rebels] as a united force.”Footnote 116 In Devji’s articulation, what lent legitimacy to the shah was not so much “the much-tarnished sanctity” of his dynasty as “the constitutional position he occupied, one that was augmented by his very powerlessness.”Footnote 117
In keeping with these dual qualities—the Islamic world as a corporate body and sovereignty as an empty signifier—there emerged a radical vision of loyalty. Instead of repudiating overarching colonial sovereignty, anticolonial Muslim politics sought, argues Devji, to set “limits to British authority by refusing to obey only certain orders while acceding to others.” This is seen in Mohamed Ali’s stance during the 1921 Karachi trial: while approving Muslim soldiers’ deployment to quell fellow Muslims rioters, he categorically forbade the same soldiers from fighting a fratricidal war against Muslims.Footnote 118 This form of loyalty, moreover, allows allegiance to multiple claimants of sovereignty, as already seen in the foregoing discussion on the almanac. To illustrate how Muslim invocation of a vicarious sovereignty played out in a force field defined by these notions, I draw here on two contemporary sources, a versified work and a travelogue.
Presumably written by an expatriate Bengali Muslim residing in the capital of Burma, the anonymous Sultan Jubilee (1900)—a long poem—was “read out in the Moslem Library, Rangoon, in honor of the twenty-fifth year of the reign of His Highness, adored by the entire world, Ghazi Abdul Hamid Khan II.”Footnote 119 A copy of this work was dedicated to the library, the author notes, as an act of reverence to the Sultan. What makes this slender booklet so striking is its deviation from the usual tropes of the hyperbolic praise for the Sultan, coupled with a candid examination of the perplexing attachment its author feels—like many of his coreligionists—toward the Turkish Empire. For a study of the political import of pro-Turkish sentiment, the value of this text can hardly be overstated.
Right from the start, the poem is bedeviled by a sense of bewilderment: “Who are you, O great Soul? / By what authority have you acquired such earthly renown? / By what virtue have you moved millions of Muslims to sing your glory?”Footnote 120 Where other contemporary hyperbolic poems would readily resolve this puzzle by extolling the Sultan’s grandeur, the anonymous poet of the Sultan Jubilee only deliberates in vain. A large portion of the poem deals with the peculiar nature of his sentiment, expressed early on in the following way: “You [the Sultan] dwell in a distant land— / as do we—yet some strange bond unites our hearts.”Footnote 121 Although separated by vast territories, the poet reckons that, mentally, they coexist in a shared realm, for “otherwise why would our hearts rejoice and mourn at your every action?” It is this affective response to the sultanate of Turkey which exercises the mind of the poet, for there appears to be no reasonable grounds for such outpouring of emotion. The incongruity surfaces everywhere: “We don’t know— / if your deeds bring us any gain / nor if your might ever comes to our aid. / Yet, with heartfelt prayers, we beseech God / to grant you more strength and greater wealth.”Footnote 122 Whether the Sultan cares about the welfare of Bengali Muslims, reflects the poet, remains unknown, since His Highness never inquires, as far as he can tell, how they fare. Nevertheless, they eagerly follow news of the empire: “When we find a newspaper / we scour it for reports about you,” inevitably provoking a barrage of emotions. As to the actual state of affairs, the poet is under no illusion:
You are the king of kings, yet not our king.
Nor do we dwell within your realm.
The prosperity of your reign
Brings neither hope nor joy to us.Footnote 123
This open repudiation of any territorial–jurisdictional basis for their affinity with the Turks—along with its dismissal of any future unification—is no hindrance, however, to their devout prayer for the Sultan. “You are opulent / wielding coffers of precious gems,” the poet contemplates, “but none shall ever be spent for our sake.” His considered opinion on this matter is this: “There is not even a shred of [material] tie / that binds us together.” Yet, the author recalls, “When news of the harrowing war/with the Greeks reached us, / O poor soul— / countless Muslim hearts quaked with foreboding.”Footnote 124 Their lives seemed to grind to a halt, wholly absorbed by the war and its outcome. Days were spent poring over newspapers, intently prattling on the fate of Turkey. When the Ottoman forces finally prevailed, Indian Muslims were elated beyond words. What explains this spontaneous fervor for the Ottoman Sultan? True, the Ottomans are a Muslim power, but they are not the only one: the amir of Kabul, the nizam of [Hyderabad], and the khedive of Egypt also rule over Muslim subjects, but to none of them do “our hearts reach out so earnestly or devoutly.” After a thorough deliberation, the poet deduces that it is neither Ottoman wealth nor military prowess but their steadfast commitment to Islam that inspires such devotion. Other Muslim sovereigns may adhere to religion within their own realms, but only the Ottoman Sultan has become the custodian of Islam’s sacred sites. Emphasizing their significance to the Muslim ummah, the poet writes,
Muslims are ever prepared to face the worst calamities,
ready to forsake their homelands if necessary—
Yet would sooner die, striking their heads against the wall
than see the holy Arab land fall under infidel sway.
Muslims everywhere vow that Arabia must remain invincible,
and you [the Sultan] are our last recourse in this world to that end.
Hence all Muslims wish you well.Footnote 125
In addition to offering an explanation for the Muslim sentiment toward the Ottomans, the poet here advances an incipient theory of sovereignty: so long as Mecca and Medina remain secure from foreign incursion, Muslims are free as far as their spiritual life as a community is concerned. This, needless to say, was no substitute for political sovereignty as such, but a suitable fiction—one that during the pilgrimage season could feel tangibly real. It was, therefore, those returning pilgrims who became the most reliable narrator of a vicarious sovereignty, whose recollection of the Hejaz Railway and the sanctuaries could contrive a world of freedom before its audience. Critical for our purpose is to note how the poet simultaneously partakes in a vicarious sovereignty—represented, above all, by the Ottoman Empire—and repudiates Turkey as a territorial destination. Turkey is no more than an empty signifier, one that comes alive only within the affective landscape of the Muslim ummah, which neither envisions establishing a political caliphate nor stipulates forswearing allegiance to the British Empire.
* * *
My second text is the travelogue Turashka Bhraman (1913), written by Ismail Hossain Siraji—with whom I began this article—on the basis of his travel to Turkey during the Balkan War as a member of the All India Medical Mission. Notwithstanding his academic promise and growing prospect as a poet, Siraji’s education did not proceed beyond high school as his hakim (medic) father was financially broke. An expanded second edition of his poetry anthology Anal Prabaha—originally written by him at the age of twenty—provoked the government and he was sentenced to two years in prison, making him the first ever Bengali poet to be jailed for seditious writings.Footnote 126 Soon after he was released from prison, the Balkan War broke out. Having tried unsuccessfully to recruit Bengali Muslims for M. A. Ansari’s All India Medical Mission, Siraji signed up himself—precisely on the night of 28 November 1912—for the mission, for otherwise his mind would not know peace.Footnote 127 His wartime travels to various regions of Turkey appear to have been financed by donations. Selected as the Sirajganj anjuman’s representative, he secured money in Calcutta from Akram Khan before heading to Delhi, where he also solicited more funds from a friend in Sirajganj and Akram Khan in Calcutta.Footnote 128
Siraji’s prose in the travelogue is imbued with a radical loyalty, showing fidelity to the Muslim ummah, to motherland, and to the British. Consider these snippets: he recounts how in Delhi Jama Mosque, the entire congregation broke out in tears after hearing Iqbal’s “China and Arabia Are Ours,” considered Muslims’ national anthem. Dressed in uniform, Siraji and his companions paid a visit to India’s viceroy Lord Hardinge, whom he found remarkably “simple and cordial.”Footnote 129 At Aden, he marveled at Britain’s maritime power, noting how most ports at critical junctures of Asia, Europe, and Africa lay under British control.Footnote 130 Then, when halted by a Greek warship, Siraji proudly retained his Rumi headdress, even as most of his fellow travelers quickly removed theirs for fear of antagonizing the Greeks.Footnote 131 Having arrived in Turkey, he and his companions visited the Çatalca front. Sitting atop a mountain, at the golden hour of sunset, he surveys the mountain range ahead, dotted with Turkish camps, and the swaying chiba plants in the adjacent field, in the midst of relentless cannon blasts. The beauty of this mountainous region calls to his mind the riverine, plain landmass of the Bengal delta, its dusk-tinged, lush, crop-filled fields, bringing to his lips Tagore’s famous Swadeshi-era song—later adopted as national anthem by an independent Bangladesh—“My Golden Bengal, I Love You.”Footnote 132 In a separate incident, while enjoying local hospitality at a field hospital, he encounters an elder pasha who is visibly moved to tears upon discovering “Hindi kardas”—brethren from Hindustan—in this distant region. That evening, the mission members dine under the open sky, seated side by side with the Turks. Siraji feels as though brothers separated for ages—yuga-yuganter bhai-hara bhai—have at last reunited.Footnote 133
His vision of the Ottoman Empire—whose insignia he wore so proudly, as noted at the outset of this article—aligns with the corporate notion of Respublica Moslemica and the image of sovereignty as an empty signifier. Responding to Indian critics who opposed the mission, Siraji defends its purpose by highlighting its role in fostering direct contact between Indians and Turks.Footnote 134 The symmetry drawn here between the two nations is further accentuated by his call to Indian Muslims “to raise 250 million rupees to rescue the Ottomans from dire financial hardship.”Footnote 135 During his time in Istanbul, Siraji met Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish, an Egyptian intellectual, journalist, anticolonial activist, and disciple of the reformer Muhammad Abduh.Footnote 136 In an article appearing in Al-Hilal al-‘Uthmani, edited by Jawish, Siraji presents an eight-point proposal. While some of his points concern ways of consolidating the unity of the ummah, the key tenor here is fostering cultural exchange between India and Turkey: launching a steamship route linking the two countries, inaugurating Urdu courses at Turkish universities, sending enterprising Turks to India for trade, and instituting exchange programs between Indian and Turkish seminaries.
In light of the Balkan War—which drastically reduced the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim population to a mere 12 million, comparable to the population of Bengal’s Rajshahi Division—Siraji urges Bengali Muslims to migrate to a large stretch of vacant land lying between the Tigris and Euphrates, thereby swelling the ranks of Ottoman Muslims. Casting this migration as a return to an ancestral homeland—since many Indian Muslims were descendants of early migrants who left medieval Iraq in search of a new home in India—Siraji conceives this new colony as a laboratory for Muslim revival.Footnote 137 Far from pledging exclusive allegiance to the Ottoman Caliph, Siraji’s adoption of what Mr French referred to as “Turkoman’s dress”—the anecdote mentioned at the beginning—was little more than a nod to an empty signifier. The future he conceives is one in which India realizes its world-historical possibility, and it is Indian Muslims who remake Turkey by establishing a utopian community there.
Conclusion
As scholars like Gary Wilder and Adom Getachew have recently argued, empires remained important sites for the political imagination of colonized people, who often sought to mobilize received imperial structures to their own advantage.Footnote 138 In Bengal, as this article had demonstrated, the Ottoman Empire—precisely on account of its externality—represented a utopian horizon for newly prosperous Bengali Muslims, many of whom were peasants. This vision allowed them to escape the enclosure of sovereignty within the bounds of a demarcated territory. Severed equally from the enclosure of the nation-state and instruments of violence, it was a vicarious form of sovereignty, one that conceived the locus of the sovereign as an empty signifier and summoned it into existence through dramatic staging of charismatic authority, embodied in insignia, dress, public festivals, and administrative functions associated with the Turkish Empire. The Caliph’s role as the custodian of Mecca and Medina as well as Turkey’s perceived prestige as an exemplar of technological modernity rendered the empire an ideal site for enacting vicarious sovereignty, a sovereign authority that was conducive, above all, to the cultivation of a reverential self-regard and the invocation of the collective force of society.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Rochona Majumdar, Lisa Wedeen, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Miriam Bilsker, and Mohammad Azam for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Portions of this article were presented at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting and the University of Chicago Graduate Conference in Political Theory; I am grateful to the participants at both venues for their feedback. I am also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers, whose comments were immensely helpful.
Open access
