Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface and acknowledgements
- A note on terminology
- Glossary of Urdu and Anglo-Indian terms
- Map Nizam's State and its cantonment towns
- Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society
- Introduction
- 1 Traditions of supernatural warfare
- 2 The padre and his miraculous services
- 3 Allah's naked rebels
- Conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Traditions of supernatural warfare
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface and acknowledgements
- A note on terminology
- Glossary of Urdu and Anglo-Indian terms
- Map Nizam's State and its cantonment towns
- Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society
- Introduction
- 1 Traditions of supernatural warfare
- 2 The padre and his miraculous services
- 3 Allah's naked rebels
- Conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
His hand a sabre; a dagger, his tongue;
His finger an arrow; his arm, a spear bright.
Kamāl Pāshazāda, Elegy on Sultan Selim (c. 1520)The sepoy's religious inheritance
In the wake of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, and the widespread perception that its provocateurs were the perpetually tumultuous Muslims, the North Indian schoolmaster Thomas Arnold wrote The Preaching of Islam to propose an alternative to the colonial historiography of Islam having spread in India at the tip of the soldier's sword. Projecting the missionary environment of Victorian India onto the medieval past, Arnold's alternative was to suggest that the majority of India's Muslims accepted Islam through the quiet preaching of the Sufis, spreading the simple tenets of Islam through rustic poems in the languages of the Indian peasant. Although modern scholarship has done much to refine and substantially reject both the sword and preaching theses, the connection between Islam and soldiering has remained a controversial topic. Fortuitously, much of the debate has centred on the region of India with which this book is concerned, namely the Deccan region which in large part became the territories of the Nizam of Hyderabad.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Islam and the Army in Colonial IndiaSepoy Religion in the Service of Empire, pp. 17 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009