Representations of Muharram in British Fiction and Memoirs from the Raj

Abstract

Sir Arthur Lothian, one-time British Resident at Hyderabad representing the Empire’s interests in that Native State, recalled in his autobiography his first arrival in India in 1911. Fresh from Oxford and newly landed at Calcutta as a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the young Lothian received somewhat of a jolt when he tried to leave Calcutta to begin his first assignment: After a day or two spent in collecting the necessary kit for my life up country I set off by train for Jessore in the evening. The great Moslem festival of Mohurrum was then being celebrated, and the route to the station lay through Sealdah Square, which the police had made the turning-place for rival processions that reached that nodal point from all directions. Unfortunately the police arrangements had broken down somehow, and the various processions had got mixed up and started fighting. When I arrived at the square in an old ticca gharry [a hired closed cab], it was a seething mob of men belabouring each other with swords and lathies [weighted bamboo cudgels]. They did not attack me, but the gharry was badly jostled, and it was a very scared driver and bewildered young civilian that got through to the relatively quiet oasis of the station. The sea of dark excited faces, without a white one visible amongst them, brought home to me, as nothing which I had read had done, how relatively few white people there were in India, and the narrowness of the margin on which law and order depended.1