HASP Journals (Univ. Heidelberg)
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From Courtesan to King: The Conversion of Farzana
Get PDFOne of the most interesting and famous women rulers of North India at the turn of the 19th century was known as the Begum Samru. Starting out as a dancing girl in Delhi, she became the sole ruler of the state of Sardhana for 30 years. This essay argues that her adoption of Roman Catholicism after the death of her husband played a key role in the begum’s personal and professional transformation into a king, in the mould of Indian sovereigns of the day. Having established herself as a military leader with the security afforded by revenue from a sizable tract of land, Farzana drew not only on the codes of Persian and Sanskritic sovereignty, but also on the affordances of 18th century-Catholicism to consolidate, exercise and expand her power
Diagnosing 'Ignorance': Conversion, Race, and Reform among Muslims in Madras and Ceylon
Get PDFThis article analyses the impact of colonial racialisation on Muslim reform movements in the Madras Presidency and Ceylon. It argues that that the internal racialisation of Muslims into ‘racially foreign’ ‘born Muslims’ and ‘racially Indian’ converts had direct consequences on the manner in which Muslim projects of religious reform in the colonial period were formulated. In the Madras Presidency, the Malayalam-speaking Mappilas and the Tamil-speaking Labbais were identified as communities of ‘converts’ with a thin ‘mixed-race’ elite, and consequently addressed by reform movements primarily as Muslim Malayalis and Tamils, who not only needed to purge their Islam of religious practices that were conceived of as remnants of their ‘Hindu’ identities prior to conversion, but also to remove ‘secular’ Arabic elements, such as the use of the Arabic script to write Malayalam and Tamil, in order to become properly ‘modern’ members of their respective ethno-linguistic groups. In Ceylon, in contrast, the claims to Arab-descent by local Tamil-speaking Muslims were recognised by the colonial state. Consequently, the Ceylon Muslim Revival, despite emerging from a similar social position as reform-movements in Madras, and similarly aiming at the upliftment of Muslims in terms of English-style education and the introduction of ‘modernity’, was more concerned with a quasi-secular Arabisation of its constituency rather than with religious purification
