Colonizing the Sacred: Allahabad and the Company State, 1797–1857

Abstract

This article rethinks the complicated encounter between the East India Company and the built heritage of India in the early nineteenth century. Through an extended case study of the imperial mosque in Allahabad, which was periodically subject to British intervention over some sixty years, it traces vicissitudes in attitudes towards history, religion, and the social existence of Muslims in India generally and Allahabad in particular. The article argues for the need to look beyond the narrative of Britain's relationship with architecture as artefact or heritage—a relationship that took on institutional form in the 1860s—to the comparatively less familiar story of the Company State's prolonged and serious interest in the built environment, and specifically religious buildings, as part of the political economy of its rule. It demonstrates that such an interest was simultaneously a logical outcome of and a tension within the legitimating discourses that the Company State fashioned during the last half-century of its rule in India.