Making History: The State's Intervention in Urban Religious Disputes in the North- Western Provinces in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the nineteenth century the towns and cities of the North-Western Provinces witnessed a huge expansion in public expressions of Hindu identity: temples mushroomed, new processions graced the streets and the cow attained new prominence as a symbol of Hindu piety. Rarely, if ever, were such activities motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment, but they could provoke ill-will between Hindus and Muslims, especially in the towns where Islamic government, buildings and festivals had previously set the tone for the public life of their inhabitants. The colonial administration was a powerful but ill- informed force, able either to suppress or to protect the new display, and its responses were crucial in determining people's understanding of their rights to public religious expression.For the first half of the nineteenth century the British tried to preserve the balance of religious display in each town and city as they had found it, but this goal required that individual officers piece together a local history from imperfect sources and then invest it with the authority of the new state. It is easy enough to delineate the simplistic and sometimes crass categorizations that the agents of colonialism employed to explain Indians' religious sensibilities. What I want to do here, however, is show how their fundamentally novel reconstructions of a town's history of public religious display could feed back into Indians' own reading of their past and hence their future, even long after the British had abandoned their pursuit of a locality's ‘established usage’.