Islam and the Army in Colonial India
Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire

A study of the cultural world of the Muslim soldiers of colonial India in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nile Green (Author)

9781107404632, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 July 2012

238 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.36 kg

'Its research and its approach are both ground-breaking. Nile Green deserves to be congratulated for his contribution to a neglected field of modern Indian history.' The Telegraph

Set in Hyderabad in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book, a study of the cultural world of the Muslim soldiers of colonial India, focuses on the soldiers' relationships with the faqir holy men who protected them and the British officers they served. Drawing on Urdu as well as European sources, the book uses the biographies of Muslim holy men and their military followers to recreate the extraordinary encounter between a barracks culture of miracle stories, carnivals, drug-use and madness with a colonial culture of mutiny memoirs, Evangelicalism, magistrates and the asylum. It explores the ways in which the colonial army helped promote this sepoy religion while at the same time attempting to control and suppress certain aspects of it. The book brings to light the existence of a distinct 'barracks Islam' and shows its importance to the cultural no less than the military history of colonial India.

Introduction: Islam and the army in colonial India
1. Traditions of supernatural warfare
2. The padre and his miraculous services
3. Allah's naked rebels
Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Islam [HRH], Military history [HBW], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Asian history [HBJF]