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POLITICS OF SOUTH ASIA

Religion, Extremism and

Violence in South Asia
Edited by Imran Ahmed · Zahid Shahab Ahmed ·
Howard Brasted · Shahram Akbarzadeh
 Politics of South Asia

Series Editors
Sumit Ganguly, Department of Political Science, Indiana University
Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA
Ronojoy Sen, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of
Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Neil DeVotta, Department Politics and International Affairs, Wake
Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
Katharine Adeney, School of Politics & International Relations,
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
This book series focuses on the contemporary politics of South Asia. To
that end it covers a range of subjects including but not limited to elec-
toral politics, party systems, political economy, social movements, ethnic
and religious conflicts, foreign policy, inter-state dynamics and migra-
tion. Publications in the series are theoretically grounded with intellectual
rigor, combining propositions from the fields of political science and
international relations, with sound regional and area knowledge.
The series publishes full-length monographs, edited volumes, as well
as shorter Palgrave Pivots, that are cutting edge, as well as accessible.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15911
 Imran Ahmed · Zahid Shahab Ahmed ·
Howard Brasted · Shahram Akbarzadeh
Editors

Religion, Extremism
and Violence in South
Asia
Editors
Imran Ahmed Zahid Shahab Ahmed
Institute of South Asian Studies Alfred Deakin Institute
National University of Singapore Deakin University
Singapore, Singapore Burwood, VIC, Australia

Howard Brasted Shahram Akbarzadeh

University of New England Alfred Deakin Institute
Armidale, NSW, Australia Deakin University
Burwood, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2523-8345 ISSN 2523-8353 (electronic)

Politics of South Asia
ISBN 978-981-16-6846-3 ISBN 978-981-16-6847-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6847-0

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 Acknowledgements

We are thankful to all who have been involved in this project from
the beginning. This project started through panels on ‘Violent religious
extremism in South Asia’, organised parallel to the second biennial confer-
ence of the Middle East Studies Forum at Deakin University in 2018. We
appreciate the effort of all speakers who travelled from across Australia
and abroad to participate in our panels. We are indebted to the confer-
ence committee comprising of Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh, Dr. Zahid
Shahab Ahmed, Dr. Dara Conduit and Safiullah Taye for organising an
excellent event. This would not have been possible without the generous
financial support of Deakin University and University of New England,
Australia.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Howard Brasted, Imran Ahmed, Zahid Shahab Ahmed,
and Shahram Akbarzadeh
2 Colonial Transformations, Postcolonial Afterlives:
Extremism, Exclusion and Distrust in India
and Pakistan 25
Imran Ahmed
3 Religion, Extremism and Buddhist–Muslim Relations
in Sri Lanka 45
DB Subedi
4 Social Media and Hindu Extremism in India 71
Stuti Bhatnagar
5 Ram Was a Prophet Too: Syncretism as a Hindu
Nationalist Political Strategy 101
Felix Pal
6 Islamic State’s Recruitment Strategies: The Case
Study of Bangladesh 121
Shafi Md Mostofa and Howard Brasted

vii
viii CONTENTS

7 Religious Extremism and Terrorist Recruitment: The

Case of Al Qaeda in Bangladesh 143
Shafi Md Mostofa
8 Mobilising to Counter Violent Extremism in Pakistan:
Innovative Undertakings of Non-state Actors 165
Anita M. Weiss
9 Between God, the Nation, and the State: Paradoxes
of Islamisation in Pakistan 185
Imran Ahmed
10 Women and Violent Extremism in Pakistan: A Critical
Assessment of Policies and Actions 213
Farah Naz and Zahid Shahab Ahmed

Index 237
 Notes on Contributors

Imran Ahmed received his Ph.D. from the University of New England
(Australia) and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of South
Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Dr. Ahmed writes on
religion, law and politics in late-colonial India and contemporary Pakistan.
His current research projects focus on religion, constitution-making, and
blasphemy in South Asia. He has published in leading international jour-
nals in history, politics and law including South Asia, the Journal of
Contemporary Asia, Third World Quarterly, The Round Table, Griffith
Law Review and the Journal of Law, Religion and State.
Zahid Shahab Ahmed received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the
University of New England (Australia) and is a Research Fellow at Deakin
University in Australia. He studies politics, foreign affairs and regional
organisations in South Asia and the Middle East. During 2017–2019, he
was a non-resident research fellow with the University of Southern Cali-
fornia’s Center on Public Diplomacy. Prior to joining Deakin University
in 2016, he was an Assistant Professor at the Centre for International
Peace and Stability, National University of Sciences and Technology,
Pakistan. He is the author of Regionalism and Regional Security in
South Asia: The Role of SAARC (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013) and has
published in numerous international journals, such as Politics and Reli-
gion, Asian Studies Review, Third World Quarterly, and Territory, Politics,
Governance. He is the secretary of the South Asian Studies Association

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of Australia and an executive board member of the International Peace

Research Association Foundation.
Shahram Akbarzadeh is Professor of Middle East and Central Asian
studies at Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University (Australia). He
researches political Islam and regional politics. He has an extensive publi-
cation track record, including the Routledge Handbook on Political Islam
and the Routledge Handbook on International Relations in the Middle
East. He has recently completed a collaborative project on proxy wars in
the Middle East and Central Asia, sponsored by Carnegie Corporation
NY.
Stuti Bhatnagar is a Sessional Academic with the University of New
South Wales, Sydney and an adjunct fellow at the University of Adelaide.
She also serves as the Executive Officer—South Asian Studies Associa-
tion of Australia (SASAA) and as the Social Media Editor for South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies. With a Ph.D. in politics and international
relations from the University of Adelaide, she specialises in Indian foreign
policy and South Asian politics. She has several peer-reviewed academic
publications to her credit and is the author of India’s Pakistan Policy:
How Think Tanks Are Shaping Foreign Relations published by Routledge
in 2020.
Howard Brasted is Emeritus Professor of history and Islamic studies in
the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and co-Director of the
Asia Pacific Centre for research at the University of New England (UNE),
Armidale, Australia. A long-time Editor of the journal South Asia (1984–
2001) and coordinator of the postgraduate programme in Islamic studies
at UNE (1994–2020), he has published widely on a range of themes
including Indian nationalism, decolonisation in South Asia, labour stan-
dards in Asia, and Islam in South Asian politics. Currently researching in
the field of Islamic radicalisation, his recent publications on that theme
include: A New World Disorder in the Making?, Revisiting S.P. Hunt-
ington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” Thesis, and Recognition and Dissent:
Constitutional Design and Religious Conflict in Pakistan. He is currently
working with a collaborative team on a Routledge Handbook project on
‘Populism in Asia’.
Shafi Md Mostofa (Ph.D.) is a theologian and security studies scholar
with broad interests in political Islam, authoritarianism, modern South
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Asian history and politics, and international relations and clash of civil-
isations. He is an Assistant Professor of World Religions and Culture
at Dhaka University’s Faculty of Arts and an Adjunct Lecturer of the
University of New England, Australia. He has published extensively
with Routledge, Springer, Cambridge University Press, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, Wiley and Blackwell, SAGE; and the journals: Politics and
Religion, Politics and Policy, Asian and African Studies, Perspectives
on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Terrorist Analyses, and Peace and
Conflict Review. His forthcoming single-authored book with Palgrave is
on Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh: A Pyramid Root Cause Model.
Farah Naz received her doctorate in Government and International Rela-
tions from the University of Sydney and is an Assistant Professor at
the Department of Government and Public Policy, National University
of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan. She has presented and published
extensively on gender issues, radicalisation and violent extremism,
terrorism, militant groups and their target types and foreign policy issues.
She has recently published a book COVID-19 Challenges for Pakistan
and her another book Pakistan Under Hybrid War is coming soon. Dr.
Naz is also a member of the National Security Expert Advisory Group to
the Prime Minister Office Government of Pakistan. She has served as an
academic staff at the University of Sydney, Australian Catholic University
and Macquarie University.
Felix Pal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Australian National University’s
Department of Political and Social Change. They have a B.A. (Islamic
Studies) from the University of Melbourne (2015), and a B.A. (Asia-
Pacific Studies) (Hons) from the ANU (2016). Their academic interests
centre around the contemporary far-right Hindu nationalist movement
in India, focusing specifically on organisational ties within the move-
ment, and its relationship with India’s minorities. More broadly, Felix
is interested in contemporary Indian politics, ethnic conflict, far-right
organisational networks, and contemporary South Asian Islamic thought.
Felix’s Ph.D. dissertation explores the politics of pluralism within far-right
movements building on extensive fieldwork with the Muslim Rashtriya
Manch, the Muslim wing of the militantly Islamophobic Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Suggesting that pluralist ideals can be repur-
posed for bigoted agendas, Felix’s work proposes a rethink of how the
contemporary far-right engages with progressive thought.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

DB Subedi is a postdoctoral research fellow in sociology and peace

studies in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at
the University of New England in Australia. His current research
project examines the interface between right-wing politics and religious
extremism and its implications for peace, social cohesion, social justice
and statebuilding in South Asia. He is the author of Combatants to Civil-
ians (Palgrave, 2018) and co-editor of Reconciling in Conflict-Affected
Communities (Springer, 2018).
Anita M. Weiss received her doctorate in sociology from UC Berkeley
and is professor of International and Global Studies at the University of
Oregon. She has published extensively on social development, gender
issues, and political Islam in Pakistan. She has published eight books,
the most recent being Countering Violent Extremism in Pakistan: Local
Actions, Local Voices (Oxford University Press, 2020), which identifies
the various ways in which local people are responding to the violent
extremism that has manifested in Pakistan, recapturing their culture,
finding the ‘sparks of hope’ to counter extremism, and creating alternative
narratives about culture and identity. Professor Weiss is the former Head
of her department. She has been a member of the Research Advisory
Board of the Pakistan National Commission on the Status of Women,
a member of several editorial boards, and actively involved with the
International Studies Association.
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Explosions in Pakistan, 2010–2018 166

Fig. 8.2 Early stencils used to cover hate language, painted
late at night on the walls of Karachi, Rang de Karachi
(Courtesy Munawar Ali Syed) 171
Fig. 8.3 Larger stencils promoting peace in Karachi, Purskoon
Karachi 173
Fig. 8.4 Munawar Ali Syed checking the quality of a stencil,
Purskoon Karachi 173
Fig. 8.5 Various activities of Reimagining the Walls of Karachi;
Munawar Ali Syed sitting in front of a painting, lower right 175
Fig. 8.6 Before and after, reimagining the walls of Karachi project 176
Fig. 8.7 Walls of Peace 177

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Social media followers of prominent political parties

and figures in India 88
Table 10.1 Research participants 218

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Howard Brasted, Imran Ahmed, Zahid Shahab Ahmed,

and Shahram Akbarzadeh

Religious extremism is among the most pertinent challenges to state and

society in the contemporary world. While it is a global phenomenon and
the subject of considerable academic scholarship and journalistic inquiry,
in South Asia those challenges manifest in equally deadly but often decid-
edly different ways. Whether it is the coordinated suicide attacks allegedly

H. Brasted (B)
University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia
e-mail: hbrasted@une.edu.au
I. Ahmed
Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore,
Singapore
e-mail: iahmed@nus.edu.sg
Z. S. Ahmed · S. Akbarzadeh
Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia
e-mail: zahid.ahmed@deakin.edu.au
S. Akbarzadeh
e-mail: shahram.akbarzadeh@deakin.edu.au

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
I. Ahmed et al. (eds.), Religion, Extremism and Violence in South Asia,
Politics of South Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6847-0_1
2 H. BRASTED ET AL.

orchestrated by the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) on the Indian

parliament in 2001 and the central business district of Mumbai in 2008,
or the ‘epidemic’ of ‘mob’ lynching of Muslims in 2017–2018 carried
out by Hindu extremists in India under the guise of enforcing doctrines
of cow protection,1 or the murderous assault by Bangladeshi militants in
2016 on the Holey Artisan Café in Dhaka in which 29 people, mainly
tourists, were killed, or the Sinhala Buddhist attacks on Muslims in Sri
Lanka in the wake of the 2019 Easter bombings by an Islamist militant
group on Christian Churches that killed several hundred worshippers,2
few challenges create violent conflict as fervently as religious extremism
does in the region. The question is in what ways and why? The papers
in this collection are designed to provide some of the answers. While
religious extremism can manifest in a variety of forms—political, social,
theological—and be activated for quite different reasons, it is the political
dimension of religion and violence that informs much of their treatment.
To date Islamic militancy has been the focus of much of the literature,
and research has often been framed by questions and assumptions guided
by the West’s ‘war on terror’. While Middle Eastern reference points have
understandably attracted most attention because of this, in the context of
terrorism and counterterrorism it is Pakistan that has begun to be cited
as the epicentre of global terrorism.3 Because of Pakistan’s known ties
to Muslim terrorist groups the suspicion has grown that it is actually a
training entrepot for terrorists, and as such might better have qualified
for President George W Bush’s ‘axis of evil,’ than topping his ‘A list’
of anti-terrorist partners.4 Bangladesh, the third largest Muslim majority
country in the world, has been touted to join it as a comparable ‘hotspot’

1 Cassie Adcock and Radhika Govindrajan, “Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking
Religion, Law and Ethics,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, no. 6 (2019):
1095–1107.
2 Siobhán O’Grady, “‘Hundreds of Pieces of One Person’: The Death Toll
in Sri Lanka Was Wrong—This Might Be Why,” The Washington Post, April
25, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/04/26/hundreds-pieces-one-
person-death-toll-sri-lanka-was-wrong-this-might-be-why/.
3 P. Sakthivel and P. Sakthival, “Terrorism in India: The Unholy Neighbours,” The
Indian Journal of Political Science 71, no. 1 (2010): 159–161.
4 Rohan Gunaratna and Khuram Iqbal, Pakistan: Terrorism Ground Zero (London:
Reaktion Books, 2012); Leon T. Hadar, “If Iraq, Iran, and North Korea Are the “Axis of
Evil,” Why Is Pakistan an Ally?,” Cato Institute, February 28, 2002, https://www.cato.
org/publications/commentary/iraq-iran-north-korea-are-axis-evil-why-is-pakistan-ally.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

for terrorist incubation and export.5 Supplying mujahideen (soldiers of

God) in helping eject the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s
and in aiding and abetting the Taliban to impose a fundamentalist form
of government in Kabul, Pakistan and Bangladesh have subsequently
faced increasing religious pressure themselves to radicalise along similar
lines. How they respond to this challenge is an unfolding story that will
doubtless impact South Asia as a whole.
But what also makes religious extremism in South Asia worthy of
investigation in its own right is that it is not only the home of the
largest concentrations of Muslims in the world, it is also the birthplace
of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. In Huntington-esque terms, South
Asia uniquely provides fault-lines of religious intensity and inter-action. A
study of religious extremism in South Asia that re-examines conventional
wisdom about its underpinnings and motivations has much to offer and
not simply in the cause of countering radicalisation and serving coun-
terterrorism. It also presents complex political, sociological, historical and
legal debates on the role of religion in politics and pertinent case studies
of the complex process of radicalisation.
In the generalist literature—especially in the aftermath of 9/11—much
of the investigative focus has centred on uncovering the ‘broad-spectrum’
nature of the relationship between religion and violence and identifying
the causal intersections between them. In this global project the exam-
ination of religious extremism and its association with terrorism and
violence has not to date extended to detailed geographic investigation.
This is certainly true of the monumental The Oxford Handbook on Reli-
gion and Violence (2016 ed.), which legitimately claims to be the first
‘Road Map’ of this particular field of study.6 In what is undoubtedly
a panoramic guide, this volume looks at every major religious tradition
through a range of disciplinary lenses and analytical angles to provide
generic clues about why religions can inspire and indeed justify various
forms of violent action. These can vary from individual acts of killing to
large scale outbreaks of warfare, including references to and depictions of

5 By Staff, “Bangladesh, New Epicentre of Terror: Jaswant,” OneIndia, June

2, 2008, https://www.oneindia.com/2008/06/02/bangladesh-new-epicentre-of-terror-
jaswant-1212406623.html.
6 Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts and Michael Jerryson, eds., The Oxford Handbook
of Religion and Violence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.
4 H. BRASTED ET AL.

the ultimate sacred battle predicted in both ancient and present-day apoc-
alyptic religiously inspired narratives.7 To be fought-out between good
and evil, between the forces of belief and the followers of the devil, this
cosmic battle is predicted to destroy the current world order and replace
it with a single religious civilisation. Depending on the origin of the end-
time story in question, the post apocalypse civilisation will be entirely
Christian, Islamic or Judaic.8
What emerges very clearly from the 40 chapters in The Oxford Hand-
book of Religion and Violence is that while violence may not be intrinsic
to any religion, it enduringly pervades their sacred texts, their images and
their practices, and can be invoked in the name of god or gods to legit-
imise or cloak often less than holy pursuits.9 Religion may not ‘ordinarily’
cause violence,10 but it is never far removed from worldly matters that
can.11 Issues such as, for example, the essence of national identity, the
basis of moral society, the place of religion in public life, the globalisa-
tion of secular international rules and standards are almost guaranteed to
generate religious, often violent, responses. Empirical evidence suggests
that there is a direct correlation between religiously inspired violence and
the growing apprehension, certainly in poorly governed countries, that
the world is going awry and needs to be put right and suitably in accor-
dance with the ways religious texts lay down. Secular forms of government
have been facing mounting pressure from religious parties, particularly in
Muslim majority states, demanding their eradication and the installation

7 Mark Juergensmeyer, “Religious Terrorism as Performance Violence,” in The Oxford

Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts and Michael
Jerryson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 281–286.
8 See Chapters 6 And 7 in this collection.
9 Juergensmeyer, Kitts and Jerryson, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence.
10 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence,
4th ed. (Oakland: California University Press, 2017), 10.
11 In a comprehensive review of literature on religious fundamentalism and religious
extremism, Ahmed and Bashirov trace roots of religious fundamentalism and religiously
motivated violence in some of the most prominent religions like Islam, Christianity,
Judaism and Hinduism. They argue that “in contrast to other religions, it is Islamic
fundamentalism that is widely considered to be prone to violence, so much so that Islam
equals fundamentalism equals violence in popular parlance”. Zahid Shahab Ahmed and
Galib Bashirov, “Religious Fundamentalism and Violent Extremism,” in The Difficult Task
of Peace: Crisis, Fragility and Conflict in an Uncertain World, ed. Francisco Rojas-Aravena
(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 245–260.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

of constitutions that enshrine the place and role of religion in politics

and society.12 These demands are increasingly being made not necessarily
through democratic channels but also and increasingly on the streets.
All this places a premium on relating actual outbreaks of violence in
the name of religion to the specific contexts in which they occurred.
What were the actual circumstances that led to these events, carried
them along, and conceivably explain them? This set of essays rests on
the basis that South Asia, as a geographic region, provides an often-
clearer testing ground for the application of theory and the provision of
specific disciplinary case studies than almost anywhere else in the world
of investigative scholarship. It arguably did so with respect to both the
phenomenon of decolonisation—a process deemed to have begun with
the ending of British empire in India—and the development of subaltern
studies or the study of nationalist politics from below, and the transfor-
mative part the peasantry and proletariat played in that history. That said,
the wide-ranging, ostensibly definitive The Oxford Handbook of Religion
and Violence hardly touches on South Asia at all. Apart from a general
overview of the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism
in the first part of the book, there are no specific chapters on South Asia
in this otherwise comprehensive volume.13
Much the same can be said of The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism
(2019). In a study of encyclopaedic scale, The Oxford Handbook of
Terrorism does mention the coordinated 4-day attacks in 2008 on a
variety of public places in Mumbai by the Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist
LeT. But in a book of 795 pages, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri
Lanka do not rate more than a few passing references.14 There is a chapter
on ‘Terrorism in Asia’, but its emphasis is on violent ‘Islamic extremism’
and its particular role in the ‘upsurge’ in the region of ‘militant ideology

12 Imran Ahmed and Howard V. Brasted, “Recognition and Dissent: Constitutional

Design and Religious Conflict in Pakistan,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 51, no.
2 (2021): 351–367.
13 Juergensmeyer, Kitts and Jerryson, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence.
14 Erica Chenowtha, Richard English, Andreas Gofas and Stathis Kalyvas, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
6 H. BRASTED ET AL.

that sanctifies violence’. While it is acknowledged that this kind of reli-

gious activism extends beyond Asia’s Muslim communities, non-Muslim
forms of it are really only pointed to in passing.15
In the latest 4th edition of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise
of Religious Violence (2017), Mark Juergensmeyer includes a new section
on Hindu violence to a chapter originally entitled ‘The Sword of Sikhism’,
which analyses the Sikh separatist movement and its involvement in the
assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the Chief Minister of Punjab,
Beant Singh, in 1995; although both acts emerge as more politically than
religiously driven. The updated chapter—‘The Spear of Shiva, The Sword
of Sikhism’—adds the story of the brutal murder and removal of thou-
sands of Muslims living on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in 2002 and the
role and possible complicity of Narendra Modi, formerly a Hindu nation-
alist hardliner and Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time, in fomenting
this ‘carnage’.16 Traced back to the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque
in 1992 by extremist Hindus and the months of communal violence
that ensued, the Gujarat massacre takes place against the background
of the Hindu nationalist ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Hindutva
agenda which they promoted. But whether this history and the ‘threat
of religious politics’ it presages can be classified in terms of ‘terrorism’,
‘religious violence’ or ‘ethnic cleaning’ Juergensmeyer leaves somewhat
open-ended.17

II
While providing the detailed regional contexts of violent conflict, the
South Asia specific literature does not normally extend its treatment
of religious extremism to the global sphere or venture a model of

15 Brahma Chellaney, “Terrorism in Asia: A Rapidly Spreading Scourge Tests the

Region,” in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism, ed. Erica Chenowth, Richard English,
Andreas Gofas and Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 590–606.
16 Mark Juergensmeyer, “The Spear of Shiva, the Sword of Sikhism,” in Terror in the
Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4th ed. (Oakland: California Univer-
sity Press, 2017); Zahid Shahab Ahmed and Rajeshwari Balasubramanian, Extremism in
Pakistan and India: The Case of the Jamaat-E-Islami and Shiv Sena (Colombo: Regional
Centre for Strategic Studies, 2010), 12.
17 Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 104.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

universal explanation based on any perceived trans-national ramifica-

tions. The exception, perhaps, is John Braithwaite and Bina D’Costa’s
Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peace-building Across South Asia
(2018), which uses South Asia to identify general preconditions and
patterns of violence.18 Drawing on dozens of multi-layered conflicts in
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan and
Myanmar since 1947, Braithwaite and D’Costa construct a conceptual
framework of ‘violence’ that has relevance not only to South Asia, but
also internationally beyond it.19 This model of violence, however, is not
so much about religious extremism per se as about how violence of any
kind tends to multiply and ‘cascade’ with cumulative effect.
By and large the literature on South Asia does confirm that religious
related violence manifests in as deadly a fashion as has been shown else-
where in the world, and arguably on occasion more so. Examples of
violent extremism in South Asia are always on a large scale, involving as
they do some of the most heavily populated countries in the world. None
was larger than the massacre of over 2 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims
during the 1947 partition of the Indian sub-continent and the creation of
the two separate sovereign states of India and Pakistan, which had osten-
sibly been formed because of irreconcilable social, cultural and religious
differences between Hindus and Muslims. In one of largest transmigra-
tions in history vast numbers of displaced peoples were killed as they
attempted to cross over newly formed borders into either India or West
and East Pakistan. Whatever the causal trigger of this tragedy, not only
were pent-up tensions arising from the politics of separation suddenly
released, but so also perhaps were long-standing if frequently dormant
religious enmities as well.
This foundation history has ever since cast a long and bitter shadow not
only over the relations between India and Pakistan as adjacent nations,
but also communally between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs living within
them. India and Pakistan continue to clash over the latter’s territorial
claim to Jammu and Kashmir, which acceded to India in 1947 despite
its predominantly Muslim population. Having gone to war on four
previous occasions—in 1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999—these two nuclear

18 John Braithwaite and Bina D’Costa, Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peace-
building Across South Asia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2018).
19 Braithwaite and D’Costa, Cascades of Violence, xv, 1–4.
8 H. BRASTED ET AL.

armed countries routinely engage in conventional military skirmishes

usually sparked by periodic incursions into Kashmir by Pakistan-based
Islamist terrorist groups, such as the LeT, though more recently Jaish-
e-Muhammed (JeM). Led by a Pakistani cleric, JeM aims to liberate not
only Jammu and Kashmir from Hindu rule, but also India itself.20
Sri Lanka too has experienced decades of violence since becoming inde-
pendent in 1948. In 1983 notably, a civil war broke out between the
Tamil Hindu minority and the Sinhala Buddhist majority, ending with
the military defeat in 2009 of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and
its objective of a separate homeland. In total, upwards of 140,000 people
were killed in the conflict that appears to have been fought, despite the
Aranthalawa killing of 33 Buddhist monks in 1987, largely along national
and ethnic, rather than religious lines. Not so the assault on a mosque by
a Buddhist mob in 2013 or the 2019 coordinated targeting of Christians
and tourists on Easter Sunday by Islamist terrorists linked to the National
Thowheeth Jama’ath. The 253 fatalities that were recorded in April 2019
shattered a relatively lengthy period of communal calm.21
In Myanmar the persecution of Rohingya Muslims by Buddhist nation-
alists and various governments dating back to the 1970s has seemingly
culminated in what the UN has labelled as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the mass
exodus of over 700,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh and other neigh-
bouring South East Asian states. Although many Rohingyas have been
able to trace their roots in Myanmar back centuries, both military and
civilian governments have considered them to be illegal immigrants orig-
inally from Muslim Bengal and over the years have refused to grant them
access to citizenship. Recently forced to carry national verification cards,
they are effectively classified as foreigners without basic political rights.22

20 Asad Hashim, “Profile: What Is Jaish-e-Muhammed?,” Al Jazeera, May 2,

2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/profile-jaish-muhammad-190215061
851082.html.
21 Michael Safi, “Death Toll in Sri Lanka Bombings Revised Down to 253,”
The Guardian, April 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/25/
death-toll-in-sri-lanka-bombings-revised-down-to-253; A. R. Imtiyaz, “The Easter Sunday
Bombings and the Crisis Facing Sri Lanka’s Muslims,” Journal of Asian and African
Studies 55, no. 1 (2020): 3–16.
22 D. B. Subedi and Johanna Garnett, “De-mystifying Buddhist Religious Extremism
in Myanmar: Confrontation and Contestation Around Religion, Development and State-
Building,” Conflict, Security & Development 20, no. 2 (2020): 223–246, https://doi.
org/10.1080/14678802.2020.1739859.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

That any of these outstanding examples of violence by majority reli-

gious communities against minority religious communities can be traced
directly to extreme religious ideologies and motivations remains problem-
atic. Recent examples of communal and ethnic intolerance in South Asia
need to be balanced and weighed up against previous periods of apparent
harmony between Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. Suffice to say that the
extent and brutality of current intercommunal violence throughout all the
countries making up South Asia fit the generalist overview that religions
themselves are seldom the cause of such violence, though when invoked
to further political agendas or whip up communal antagonisms they have
the propensity to fuel violence on a savage scale.23
While those antagonisms and agendas are likely to stem as much from
temporal as religious considerations and differ country by country and
region by region, the South Asia landscape of extremist religious violence
serves to confirm a number of common salient features. Terrorism
and theology do not generally go hand in hand. From his hideout in
Afghanistan Osama bin Laden, for example, may have based his concept
of offensive jihad against the non-Muslim West on contested passages in
the Qur’an and berated 153 of Saudi Arabia’s leading ulama for not being
able to see that there was no such thing as ‘non-violent’ Islam. There was
only Islam. But his declaration of war against the US and the West and
his call to Muslims to obliterate unbelief in the world, wherever it existed,
appeared conditional rather than ordained. If Europe and even the US
would withdraw completely from the Middle East and guarantee never to
return, Al Qaeda expressed its willingness to call a halt to its campaign of
violence against them.24
Though Jurgensmeyer and his team of researchers have interviewed
an impressive array of religious extremists around the world, the world
views they hold, rather than the particular theologies they may subscribe
to, seem to have underwritten the violent acts they carried out and are
remembered for. This is probably true as well of religious extremists and
the particular parties they belong to in South Asia, though there has been

23 Ishtiaq Ahmed, “The Politics of Religion in South and Southeast Asia,” in The Politics
of Religion in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Ishtiaq Ahmed (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011),
1–12.
24 Howard V. Brasted and Adeel Khan, “Islam and ‘the Clash of Civilizations’? An
Historical Perspective,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 283–285.
10 H. BRASTED ET AL.

no similar attempt to get into their minds and interrogate their motives.
That is a work yet to be done.
Again, in line with generalist trends, research seems to show that what
prompts religious violence, whether in the world at large or for instance
South Asia, is not necessarily any existential threat to Hinduism, Islam and
Buddhism as such, which are certainly not in danger where they are the
unchallenged markers of majoritarian national identity. More often than
not it is every-day economic, social and political factors such as poverty,
unemployment, inequality, state oppression and ethnic rivalry that lie at
the heart of religiously expressed discontent.25 Blame is easily attributed
to a godless world system that so openly privileges the corporate and
capitalist elites, but serves the interests of everybody else—including the
god-faring—so poorly.26
Disgruntled young South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and
Sri Lankans), not unlike aggrieved Middle Eastern Muslims, can be seen
turning to religion to confront an ‘alien’ secular modernity that glob-
alisation seemingly foists on them from the distant financial centres of
New York, London and Tokyo and which pays no heed to cultural and
customary practices.27 Globalisation in this guise is easily depicted as a
post-colonial form of Western imperial hegemony and exploitation. It
is in this context that the time-honoured calls of ‘Islam in danger’ or
‘Buddhism in danger’ appear to strike a galvanising chord.28

25 Sajid Haider, Carmen de Pablos Heredero, Munir Ahmed and Sumaira Dustgeer,
“Identifying Causes of Terrorism in Pakistan,” The Dialogue 10, no. 3 (2015): 220–236;
Shafi M. Mostofa, “Islamic Militancy in Bangladesh: An Examination of its Cause and
Trajectory (2009–2017)” (PhD diss., University of New England, 2020).
26 James Kenneth Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free
Market and Why Liberals Should Too (New York: The Free Press, 2008), 126ff; Joseph
Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump
(London: Penguin, 2017); S. Winchester, “Power, Ideology and Economic Change: An
Examination of Ideological Perdition Within Western Capitalism” (PhD diss., University
of New England, 2020), 1–18.
27 Jeffrey Haynes, “Religion and Terrorism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism, ed.
Erica Chenowth, Richard English, Andreas Gofas and Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019), 286–287; Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 280–281;
Jamal Malik, “Introduction,” in Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik
(London: Routledge, 2008), 1–22.
28 Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu
(New York: NYU Press, 2011); Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy,
Religious Violence, and India’s Future (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

On the other hand, while also responsive to grievances of this type, the
springs of violent religious extremism can be tapped by fundamentalist
ideology29 and revivalist attempts to restore a more conservative, purer
form of Islam.30 This has certainly been the case in the sub-continent
where madrasa or religious-based grass-roots education is concerned.
There are thousands of such schools in Pakistan and in Bangladesh,
where they are on the increase, but also in India as well.31 Featuring
in the popular imagination as the breeding ground and conduits of
terrorist ideology, madrasas are widely believed to teach a fundamen-
talist version of Islam that feeds into religious extremism and promotes
militancy of a jihadist kind.32 While recent research does not rule this
out, a lot depends on the particular South Asian Islamic sect madrasas
are funded and influenced by: whether the Deobandi who aggressively
promotes a puritanical interpretation of Islam and especially against the
Shias whom it regards as non-Muslims, the Barelvi who inclines to the
more mystical practices of Sufism and until recently eschewed the use
of violence, or the Wahhabi who promotes a Saudi brand of Islam that
strictly adheres to the original texts and the traditions of Muhammad and
is implacably opposed to Islamic modernism.33 With cultural pluralism an
anathema, madrasas have become ‘battlegrounds’ for contesting Muslim

29 Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: Democratic Peace and Euro-
Islam versus Global Jihad (New York: Routledge, 2008), 21, 24, 78, 81; Benjamin
Schreer and Andrew T. H. Tan, eds., Terrorism and Insurgency in Asia: A Contemporary
Examination of Terrorist and Separatist Movements (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
30 James Warner Björkman, Fundamentalism Revivalists and Violence in South Asia
(New Delhi: Manohar, 1988); Samina Yasmeen, “Pakistan and the Struggle for “Real”
Islam,” in Islam and Political Legitimacy, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh and Abdullah Saeed
(New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 70–87.
31 Zakir H. Raju, “Madrasa and Muslim Identity on Screen: Nation, Islam and
Bangladeshi Art Cinema on the Global Stage,” in Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching
Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008), 125–141.
32 Sakthivel and Sakthival, “Terrorism in India,” 160–161.
33 Arif Rafiq, “Sunni Deobandi-Shi’i Sectarian Violence in Pakistan. Explaining the
Resurgence Since 2007,” Middle East Institute (December 2014): 9, 21, 29, https://
www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Arif%20Rafiq%20report.pdf.
12 H. BRASTED ET AL.

identities—what is ‘true ‘or ‘false’ Islam34 —and for the dissemination of

anti-minority propaganda.35
Hindus, Sikhs and Christians may not escape demonisation, but the
religious minorities commonly targeted in Pakistan, for instance, are
invariably sectarian: Shia for the most part, the outlawed Ahmadis—both
of whom are regarded by Sunnis as exercising ‘seductive’ power36 —but
also Sufis and any group whose Muslimness is considered question-
able.37 Sectarian violence is fast becoming an ‘indelible’ feature of the
Pakistani landscape.38 Constantly disparaged as non-Muslims by Sunni
extremist groups, the Shias have begun to fightback with force and the
Barelvis, through the recently formed Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, have
employed hate speech against religious minorities and taken to the streets
in furtherance of their views. They spectacularly did so in 2017 when
2,000 supporters marched from Lahore to Islamabad, laying siege to the
capital and securing the resignation of Law Minister Zahid Hamid on the
grounds of blasphemy.39
What emerges very clearly in South Asia is that religious extremism
is not limited to Islamic radicalisation and within the region’s unique
context of contiguous religious cultures can register very violently for
reasons that are characteristic of the region and indeed specific to it.
Prime among these is the unfinished search for the bases of national iden-
tity: by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka almost three quarters of a century

34 Arshad Alam, “Making Muslims: Identity and Difference in Indian Madrasas,” in

Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008),
45–60.
35 Tariq Rahman, “Madrasas: The Potential for Violence in Pakistan,” in Madrasas
in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008), 61–84;
Christopher Candland, “Pakistan’s Recent Experience in Reforming Islamic Education,”
in Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008),
102–112.
36 Faisal Devji, “Changing Places: Religion and Minority in Pakistan,” South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2020): 171.
37 Maria-Magdalena Fuchs and Simon W. Fuchs, “Religious Minorities in Pakistan:
Identities, Citizenship and Social Belonging,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
43, no. 1 (2020): 52–67.
38 Rafiq, “Sunni Deobandi-Shi’i Sectarian Violence in Pakistan,” 23, 98.
39 Sara Mahmood, “The Barelvis’ Tilt Towards Extremism in Pakistan,” South Asian
Voices, June 8, 2018, https://southasianvoices.org/the-barelvis-tilt-towards-extremism-in-
pakistan/.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

after gaining their independence from Britain, and by Bangladesh since it

violently separated from Pakistan in 1971. That search has involved the
close interaction between religion and politics, the intensification of both
ethnic and sectarian rivalries, and the blurring of the boundaries between
religiously engendered and politically engendered violence.40 In fact, the
politicisation of religion appears to have entered a highly volatile phase
in South Asia with the generation of nationalist sentiment in religious
form—whether Islamic, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist.
Although it was created in the name of Islam, Pakistan never Islamised
‘to anyone’s satisfaction’,41 but especially mainstream religious parties
like the Jamaat-e-Islami, and increasingly Sunni militant groups like the
Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) who have joined
forces to rid Pakistan of anyone they consider to be ‘unclean’ or
‘impure’.42 Bangladesh, which as East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan
over its failure to recognise the former’s demographic superiority or
respect its Bengali culture, now seems to be retreating from its founda-
tional secular constitution and re-orienting to Islamic, rather than Bangla,
culture as the basis of national unity. India, which also embraced secu-
larism at the start, has ‘launched a significant attempt’ to redefine itself as
a Hindu nation.43 And in Sri Lanka, Buddhist nationalism has come to
the political forefront as an anti-Muslim, anti-minority movement in the
cause of Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian supremacy. A number of Buddhist
monks have proceeded to join the ultra-nationalist Bodu Bala Sena (BBS)
or Army of Buddhist Power,44 which has taken up a decidedly anti-
Muslim stance and strongly campaigned in the 2019 Presidential elections

40 Douglas Allen, Religion and Political Conflict in South Asia: India, Pakistan, and Sri
Lanka (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 34; Joseph Chingyong Liow, Religion
and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
41 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia. A Comparative and
Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 233.
42 Rafiq, “Sunni Deobandi-Shi’i Sectarian Violence in Pakistan,” 48.
43 Howard V. Brasted, “Islam and Identity in South Asia: At the Crossroads of Confu-
sion and Confrontation?,” in Islam in World Politics, ed. Nelly Lahoud and Anthony H.
Johns (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 117–120.
44 Rosie Dimanno, “Sri Lanka’s New Public Enemy No. 1?,” Toronto Star, January
11, 2014, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1476501547?accountid=12528; Nirmal
Rajith Dewasiri, New Buddhist Extremism and the Challengers to Ethno Religious
Coexistence in Sri Lanka (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2016).
14 H. BRASTED ET AL.

for Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who when Secretary of Defence is credited with

leading Sri Lanka’s armed forces to victory against the Tamil Tigers.
Underpinning much of the religious violence in all these countries is
the phenomenon of religious nationalism, which to a significant extent
has been generated politically and divisively from above. No matter where
religious nationalism has manifested and in what form—Islamic, Hindu or
Buddhist—it has been essentially exclusionary in nature and engendering
of communal and sectarian tensions on a rising scale. That religion is
increasingly being advanced as the basis of nationhood is because the issue
of national identity, which took on a critical importance with indepen-
dence, remains hotly contested at the constitutional, political and street
levels.45
What, for instance, has fuelled religious conflict in Pakistan’s case is,
as Rafique Zakaria has put it, its continued ‘ambivalence’ over the role
and place Islam should play in national life.46 While proclaiming itself to
be an Islamic republic, Pakistan has fallen short of ratifying the constitu-
tional centrality of Islam or providing the governmental mechanisms to
make this a reality. This is one of the reasons the Pakistani Taliban and
the LeJ have given for their resort to religious violence and their advocacy
of Sharia law as the only authentic hallmark of Islamic order.47 Resisting
this demand thus far, although paying lip-service to it, Pakistan’s polit-
ical leaders have not hesitated to call on Islam in order to legitimate their
regimes and suppress the voices of regional, ethnic and sectarian discon-
tent that began to be raised soon after independence.48 What Islamisation
has occurred since then, however, has tended to direct violence against
not only the ethnic interests of Bengalis, Baloch, Sindhis and Mohajirs,49

45 Ahmed and Brasted, “Recognition and Dissent.”

46 Rafique Zakaria, The Struggle Within Islam: The Conflict Between Religion and Politics
(London: Penguin, 1988), 228–240.
47 Matthew J. Nelson, “Islamist Politics in South Asia After the Arab Spring:
Parties and Their Proxies Working With—And Against—The State,” Brookings Institute:
Rethinking Political Islam Series (2015): 14, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/
uploads/2016/07/Pakistan_Nelson-FINALE.pdf.
48 Howard V. Brasted, Imran Ahmed and Saira Orakzai, “Whither Pakistan: The
Ambivalence of Constitutional Road Mapping?,” in Governance and Political Adapta-
tion in Fragile States, ed. John Lahai, Karin von Strokirch, Howard Brasted and Helen
Ware (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 167–194.
49 Adeel Khan, Politics of Identity: Ethnic Nationalism and the State in Pakistan (New
Delhi: Sage, 2005).
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

but also the religious beliefs of Shias, Hazaras, Ahmadis or anyone the
militants accuse of tarnishing Islam. Emblematic of Pakistan’s troubled
relationship with its religious minorities has been the backtracking under
Islamist pressure of Imran’s Khan’s government, not only to help fund
the construction of Islamabad’s first Hindu temple, but also to stick to its
post-election promise of delivering religious co-existence.50
Making religious co-existence extremely difficult in the case of
Pakistan’s approximately 6 million Hindus, and problematic for India’s
more than 200 million Muslims is the ever-present reality that Hindu
India constitutes Pakistan’s omnipresent enemy and Muslim Pakistan
India’s. In part because of this, respective national discourses on terrorism
have proceeded to pinpoint Hindu and Muslim minorities as security risks
or the potential enemy within. Impacting on trans-national relations too
are the respective origin stories of India’s, Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s
formation as modern states given that they are based on a mutually sensi-
tive and factually contested common history.51 Indeed, the way India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh treat their respective Hindu and Muslim minori-
ties tends to reverberate across their heavily militarised, if historically
shifting borders. It is in this context that the emergence of Hindu funda-
mentalism in India and the rise to political ascendancy of the BJP has
helped to fertilise the very conditions for religious extremism to thrive in
and to feed off across the sub-continent.
No country better exemplifies the relationship between violence and
religion than India in its recent attempts to alter the shape of nation,
state and citizenship by redefining Indian identity in terms of majori-
tarian Hinduness.52 Bursting on the political scene at the time the
world watched on as fundamentalist Hindus stormed the Babri Masjid at
Ayodhya and tore it down, the BJP rose to prominence and ultimately
power by promoting the philosophy of Hindutva to launch a distinct
shift in India’s political and national orientation. Whether this reflected

50 Maria Abi-Habib, “Islamists Block Construction of First Hindu Temple in Islam-

abad,” New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/world/
asia/hindu-temple-islamabad-islamists-pakistan.html.
51 Rowena Robinson, “The Politics of Religion and Faith in South Asia,” Society and
Culture in South Asia 3, no. 2 (2017): viii.
52 Robinson, “The Politics of Religion and Faith in South Asia,” vii–xx.
16 H. BRASTED ET AL.

the failure of a constitutionally derived secularism, or the marginal-

ising impact of other, particularly economic, forces at play,53 the BJP
successfully played the religion in danger card to outdistance the once
dominant secular Indian Congress party and question the ‘Indianness’
of the minority Muslim community.54 If Modi’s move in 2020 to alter
India-controlled Kashmir’s special constitutional status and potentially
strip Assam’s 4 million Muslims of Indian citizenship are any indications
of the BJP government’s policy direction, all of India’s 200 or more
million Muslims face the prospect of being rendered second class citizens
or worse foreigners.55 This is virtually the fate Hindu and other minori-
ties earlier suffered in Bangladesh when the Vesting of Property and Assets
Order of 1972 dispossessed them of their property.
That Bangladesh has faced rising religious pressure and suffered recur-
ring bouts of extremist violence from almost day one of its independent
existence ostensibly parallels the trajectory followed by South Asia as a
whole and for much the same reasons. The secular identity it assumed
in 1971 did not sit well with either the mainstream religious parties or
more militant rank and file members of fundamentalist groups such the
Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) and Harkat-ul-Jihadal-Islami (HuJI); the
latter claiming responsibility for also launching violent attacks in India.
Even more so than the Muslim League and the Pakistan Peoples Party
in Pakistan, in Bangladesh the two main political contenders for govern-
ment, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, which
currently holds office, have variously integrated Islam into their nation-
alist ideologies. Standing initially on a platform of secular democracy,

53 Riaz Ali, “Religion as a Political Ideology in South Asia,” in The Politics of Religion
in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Ishtiaq Ahmed (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 13–25;
Surya Prakash Upadhyay, “Secular Democracies, Governance and Politics in South Asia,”
Society and Culture in South Asia 3, no. 2 (2017): 247–248, 257–258.
54 John McGuire, Peter D. Reeves and Howard V. Brasted, eds., Politics of Violence:
From Ayodhya to Behrampada (New Delhi: Sage, 1996); John McGuire, “The BJP and
Governance in India: An Overview,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no.
3 (2002): 1–17.
55 Rebecca Ratcliff, “‘A Nightmarish Mess’: Millions in Assam Brace for Loss of
Citizenship,” The Guardian, August 30, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-dev
elopment/2019/aug/30/nightmarish-mess-millions-assam-brace-for-loss-of-citizenship-
india; The Economist, “Modi’s Dangerous Moment: India and Pakistan Should Stop
Playing with Fire,” The Economist 430, no. 9132 (March 2019), https://link.gale.com/
apps/doc/A576257804/AONE?u=monash&sid=AONE&xid=27f2c574.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

the Awami League has begun to patronise a number of militant Islamist

groups through the gradual Islamisation of society and the support of
madrasa education.56 Not that this or the fact that Bangladesh has consti-
tutionally transitioned into an Islamic state has put an end to religious
violence. If anything, the reverse has happened as Bangladeshi off-shoots
of Al Qaeda and Islamic State (IS), with their ‘extremist religious preten-
sion’,57 have actively sought to radicalise disenchanted youth to actively
prepare for cosmic battle—especially against India prior to the day of
judgement—and fulfil a prediction attributed to Muhammad. According
to Juergensmeyer, end-time conflict is a case where war and religion are
unequivocally ‘fused’.58
In Sri Lanka, violence has increasingly stalked the issue of national
identity since independence. In the long drawn-out civil war between the
minority Tamils in the far north and the majority Sinhalese, the discourse
of who was Sri Lankan and who was not centred on the ethnic and
linguistic differences separating them. But with the defeat of the Tamil
Tigers (LTTE) in 2009 and their separatist challenge seen off, a new
strain of Sinhala nationalism emphasising religion (Theravada Buddhism)
emerged with a decidedly extremist outlook.59 Appearing in Buddhist
form this nationalism proceeded to polarise society according to religious
difference and it found a new enemy: Sri Lanka’s Muslims. Reminis-
cent of the RSS-led attacks on the Ayodhya mosque in India, a Muslim
shrine in Anuradhapura was destroyed by Buddhist monks in 2011, and
a year later over 2,000 Buddhist nationalists forced the removal of a
mosque in Dambulla on the grounds that it too stood on a Buddhist
sacred site. Since then the BBS, which came to prominence in 2014,
has been targeting Muslims and whipping up anti-Muslim hostility—with
renewed intensity after the Easter killings—though not it would appear
because Buddhism was considered to be in any immediate danger from

56 Mubashar Hasan, Islam and Politics in Bangladesh (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

2020).
57 Mark Juergensmeyer, “Thinking Sociologically About Religion and Violence: The
Case of ISIS,” Sociology of Religion 79, no. 1 (2018): 21.
58 Mark Juergensmeyer, God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 74.
59 Peter Lehr, Militant Buddhism: The Rise of Religious Violence in Sri Lanka, Myanmar
and Thailand (London: Palgrave, 2019).
18 H. BRASTED ET AL.

Islam.60 Historic, economic, political and international grievances have

been pointed to as the likely motivation.61 But, another possibility is
that, as the head of the BBS told The Hindu in October 2014, the
BBS was seeking an alliance with the Indian RSS officially to create a
Buddhist-Hindu peace zone in South Asia—which presumably would
exclude Muslims and Christians—but unofficially to create a Buddhist
equivalent of Hindutva.62

III
Many explanations have been put forward to explain the current relation-
ship between religion and violence and to identify the causal links between
them. These, as earlier mentioned, can range from the legacy of religious
traditions63 to the ‘clash’ of hegemonic ‘world views’ based on religion.64
These elements are certainly present in the case of South Asia. As if in re-
enactment of a sacred text the followers of the Shiv Sena, for example,
conjured up the image of Shiva’s sword in waging war on Ahmedabad’s
Muslims in 2002 as the ‘army of Lord Shiva’.65 And the 1992 destruc-
tion of the Ayodhya Mosque was conceivably the concrete evidence S. P.
Huntington seized upon in formulating his thesis that the cultural wars

60 John Clifford Holt, “Introduction,” in Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities:

Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka, ed. John Clifford Holt (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 8–10.
61 Bruno Marshall Shirley, “The Bodu Bala Sena: Sinhalatva Origins and International
Influences,” South Asia Journal, April 12, 2016, http://southasiajournal.net/category/
all-issues/issue-16-spring-2016/; Holt, “Introduction,” 8.
62 Holt, “Introduction,” 11; PTI, “Sri Lanka’s BBS ‘In Talks’ with RSS for Tie-Up,”
The Hindu, October 7, 2014, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/
Sri-Lanka%E2%80%99s-BBS-%E2%80%98in-talks%E2%80%99-with-RSS-for-tie-up/articl
e20881752.ece.
63 Juergensmeyer, God at War, 70–73.
64 Juergensmeyer, “Thinking Sociologically About Religion and Violence,” 20, 27;
Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World
Disorder (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 7, 15, 89;
Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe; Bassam Tibi, Islam in Global Poli-
tics: Conflict and Cross-Civilizational Bridging (London: Routledge, 2012), 55–58;
Thomas Hegghammer, “Introduction: What Is Jihadi Culture and Why Should We Study
It?,” in Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamist, ed. Thomas
Hegghammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1–21.
65 Juergensmeyer, God at War, 72; Devji, “Changing Places,” 173.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

that he envisaged breaking out in the twenty-first century were already

well underway in the sub-continent. A ‘Hindu Rage’, he posited, was in
the process of dividing India along ‘civilizational fault-lines’.66 But what
arguably stands out in recent times has been the politicisation of reli-
gion, particularly in reformulations of nationalism, not only by incumbent
governments from above, but also militant religious parties from below.
The stereotypical demonising of minorities in the cause of confirming and
reinforcing already existing majoritarian dominance along religious lines
has become a common feature throughout South Asia.
As a theatre of fruitful investigation into the relationship between
religion and violence, South Asia continues to provide both clues and
puzzles. Why have religions that co-existed in peace for large stretches
of history begun turning on each other with unmitigated hostility? Is it
that extremist or fundamental versions of religion have come to the fore
armed with narratives that promise a better life if other religions are totally
marginalised and unbelief of any kind is rooted out? For their part govern-
ments have sought to harness religious militancy by mobilising religion
‘in the name of the people’ and by directing the nationalist sentiment
thus generated against political and class opponents. Since nationalism
and populism have been deemed to ‘overlap’ in Europe67 a possible expla-
nation for the recent variants of religious nationalisms in India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka might be found within the framework of a
‘South Asian’ populism.68 As distinct from the Western European expe-
rience,69 in South Asia not only does religion play a central role in both
populism and nationalism, but so also does political leadership through

66 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New
York: Simon & Shuster, 1996), 137–138, 195.
67 Benjamin De Cleen, “Populism and Nationalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and
Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 435; Rogers Brubaker, “Populism
and Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 1 (2020): 1–23.
68 Christophe Jaffrelot and Louise Tillin, “Populism in India,” in The Oxford Handbook
of Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo
and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 232–247; Priya Chacko,
“The Right Turn in India: Authoritarianism, Populism and Neoliberalism,” Journal of
Contemporary Asia 48, no. 4 (2018): 541–565.
69 Michael Minkenberg, “Religion and the Radical Right,” in The Oxford Handbook of
the Radical Right, ed. Jens Rydgren (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 534,
540, 550.
20 H. BRASTED ET AL.

the means of top-down mobilisation. Certainly, on the eve of the 2019

Indian general election, TIME captioned a portrait of Narendra Modi
on its front cover as ‘India’s Divider in Chief’ and ran an article that
portrayed him as ‘a friend of the mob’. Time will tell if history bears
out this judgement.70 Whether Imran Khan, Sheikh Hasina or Mahinda
Rajapasksa follow him down a similar path, what seems to be beckoning
in South Asia are expressions of populist sentiment in religious form,
whether Hindu, Islamic or Buddhist.
By examining religion, extremism and violence in a number of different
South Asian contexts, this volume is designed to throw light not only on
the complexity, but also the causative drivers of the relationship between
them in recent times. With incumbent governments ‘riding the tiger’ of
communalism, however, it remains to be seen how they are going to
rein in the forces of religious bigotry and violence that they have helped
unleash.

IV
The second chapter of this collection emphasises the importance of under-
standing the colonial past in order to make sense of the phenomenon of
religious extremism in South Asia. In this chapter, Imran Ahmed surveys
some of the profound and unprecedented religious transformations which
took place under colonial rule and concludes that it is difficult to overes-
timate the impact of colonialism on South Asian religious traditions and
communities. As India and Pakistan wrangle over the meaning of their
national identities and struggle to reconcile the role and place of religion
in the state, Ahmed maintains that contemporary debates on religion at
the centre of extremist discourses not only have colonial origins, but also
embody colonial assumptions about religion and religious identities and
communities.
The remaining chapters in this volume examine individual country case
studies. In Chapter 3, D. B. Subedi examines the dramatic rise of violent
religious extremism within a section of the Sinhala Buddhist and Muslim
communities in Sri Lanka. Studying violent extremism and its effects
on societal relationships between the Sinhala Buddhists and Muslims, he

70 Aatish Taseer, “India’s Divider in Chief,” TIME, May 20, 2019, https://time.com/
5586415/india-election-narendra-modi-2019/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=
socialflowtw&xid=time_socialflow_twitter&utm_campaign=time.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

contends that the recent manifestations of violent extremism have histor-

ical as well as political and structural roots. These must be traced in the
processes of state formation and social change in post-independence Sri
Lanka. Subedi argues that the perpetuation of non-violent (or occasion-
ally violent) conflicts between the Buddhists and Muslims over several
decades, coupled with religious revivalism within the Sinhalese and
Muslim communities, the globalisation of Muslim identity, the nation-
alist politics of Sinhala Buddhism and the economic competition between
the two ethno-religious groups, have created a favourable condition for
the simultaneous rise of religious extremism and concurrent religious and
cultural polarisation of Sri Lankan society.
Chapter 4 focuses on the political dominance of the Bharatiya Janata
Party and the party’s shrewd political acumen in harnessing and capi-
talising on the sociological and technological transformations of Indian
society for political advantage. Since 2014, social media has become a
prominent tool used to deepen polarisation among communities in India
and spread misinformation on religious minorities. Stuti Bhatnagar high-
lights the increase in religious extremism in India since 2014, focusing
specifically on the political use and abuse of social media in propagating
and intensifying religious differences. In this chapter she focuses on the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s particular perspective on nationalism that calls
for the revival of a Hindu nation. While the BJP was elected in 2014
with hopes for a development oriented socio-economic agenda, after the
election the apprehensions regarding its Hindu nationalist ideology soon
resurfaced. And Bhatnagar maintains that this has had significant rami-
fications for India’s non-Hindu populations. The influence of Hindutva
is evident in institutional appointments, the free rein afforded to radical
groups and an increase in violence against religious minorities under
the guise of cow vigilantism and religious conversions. The party and
its associated Hindu nationalist groups have benefited from the strong
parliamentary position and in addition to the traditional print and TV
mediums, social media has been used as a crucial method for propaganda.
The BJP’s election campaign relied heavily on social media to promote the
party’s message and present an acceptable and often exaggerated image
of its leaders.
Responding to the escalation of Indian communal violence in the
1980s and 1990s, many social scientists documented syncretic beliefs as a
way of rejecting the exclusivist logic of Hindu nationalism. But Felix Pal’s
contribution in Chapter 5 demonstrates how religious syncretism can
22 H. BRASTED ET AL.

operate in the service of violent religious extremists. Far from being the
straightforward demonstration of peaceful intercommunal engagement
that characterises many descriptions of syncretism in India, sometimes
religious mixing can be used as a political strategy by a dominant reli-
gious community. This strategy is visible in the Muslim Rashtriya Manch,
the Muslim wing of the violently anti-Muslim paramilitary corps, the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Within the Manch the RSS choreographs
performances of Muslim syncretism like Ram worship or cow reverence as
a way of shedding their image as rabid communal bigots. In an India still
shaped by the traces of liberal pluralism, syncretism is the most potent
symbol of communal peace, a marker the RSS adopts to make their
exclusivist agendas less visible. Building on work that views syncretism
as profoundly political, Pal explains how the charismatic leadership and
clientelist networks of Hindu RSS leaders produce the authority to chore-
ograph Manch syncretism, and how this syncretism is used to project
the RSS as tolerant and even-handed, because the Manch is syncretic.
When violent Hindu nationalists promote syncretism, they do not look
like violent Hindu nationalists. In this way syncretism furnishes a political
strategy of obfuscation.
In Chapter 6, Shafi Mostofa and Howard Brasted look at Bangladesh,
the third largest Muslim majority country in the world, and its struggle
against Islamist militancy, which now attracts considerable media as well
as academic examination. Islamic militancy is not a new phenomenon in
Bangladesh. Indeed, a number of Islamic militant groups have been oper-
ating in Bangladesh since the mid-1990s and even earlier. Islamic militants
are reported to have killed around 156 people in the country between
March 1999 and January 2005. And on 17 August 2005, the country was
deeply shocked by a series of 459 bomb attacks that took place in 63 out
of the 64 districts in the country. While Islamic militancy has clearly posed
a serious challenge in the past, it constitutes an even more obvious and
present danger to Bangladesh now. While Al Qaeda has been operating
in Bangladesh for a decade or more, it has recently been joined by Daesh
or Islamic State whose recruitment campaign has ‘upped the stakes’ and
seen it begin to outdistance rival extremist groups and indeed move signif-
icantly ahead of them. Using data from interviews with not only expert
observers of this new phase of Islamic radicalisation, but also representa-
tives of a number of traditional religious parties, this chapter sets out to
explore how Bangladesh has become a fertile ground for Islamic State,
who have been radicalised, and by what means. This chapter will include
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

an examination of how the IS is impacting on and exploiting religious

beliefs, which religious groups are being targeted, and the content and
thrust of its religious message.
The militancy which has existed in Bangladesh has always had inter-
national connections. More recently, in 2014, Al Qaeda began focusing
on the country through the creation of a new organisation ‘Al Qaeda in
the Indian Subcontinent’ (AQIS). In Chapter 7, Shafi Mostofa suggests
that this creation opened a new era which began with the emergence of
new militant organisations directly aligned with international ones. These
new militant organisations are now receiving support from pre-established
local Islamist groups such as the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) and the
Jamaatul Mujaheedin Bangladesh (JMB). They are also recruiting youth
within secular educational institutions who are from upper middle class or
upper-class backgrounds. Mostofa focuses on the recruitment strategy of
AQIS and the challenge it represents for the Bangladeshi state, looking
at their online pamphlets, statements and magazines like Azan, Resur-
gence and the Bengali magazine Al Balagh. His study makes an important
contribution on radicalisation in Bangladesh by outlining the ideological
tools successfully used by AQIS to attract urban youth. Mostofa also high-
lights the limitations of the purely militaristic counter-terrorist approach
used by the current Bangladeshi government.
Violent extremism has manifested in a myriad of ways over the past
decades in Pakistan. In response, the Pakistan state and military have
sought to counter this extremism through different strategies. However,
these have been fraught with problems, and the violence continues, some-
times escalating with such agitations as those by Khadim Hussain Rizvi
and his Tehreek Labbaik Pakistan in November 2017. More importantly,
many non-state actors are engaging in various kinds of social negotiations
and actions to lessen the violence and recapture indigenous cultural iden-
tity and religious values. In Chapter 8, Anita Weiss addresses one of many
local efforts currently underway to counter violent extremism in Pakistan.
Her chapter derives from a book project, Countering Violent Extremism in
Pakistan: Local Actions, Local Voices, and is based on research conducted
in Pakistan between 2017 and 2019. The project focuses on innovative
ways that religious leaders and practitioners, throughout the country, are
promoting interfaith harmony and mobilising their constituencies and
others in these efforts. These include efforts to mobilise communities in
the event of an attack, to educate communities about other faiths, to
revise syllabi at madrasas and other religious schools. The chapter also
24 H. BRASTED ET AL.

questions the impact such efforts are having on countering extremism in

Pakistan.
The role and place of Islam in the state is perhaps the oldest, most
contested and ostensibly unresolved political debate in Pakistan and Imran
Ahmed, in Chapter 9, looks at the question of why this problem has been
irresolvable and a source of tension driving violent religious conflict in
Pakistan. Ahmed suggests that scholars should place greater focus and
scrutiny on the ideological framework of the nation-state in order to
understand why Pakistan has yet to reconcile its tensions with Islam. He
argues that the framework of the nation-state introduced several para-
doxes which have proved difficult to resolve for Islamic thinkers. The
chapter demonstrates the problems and contradictions of Islamisation as
a means of arriving at an agreed upon Islamic destination for the country.
It also argues that because Pakistan has been unable to resolve the locus
of its sovereign authority, the tensions and contradictions of this issue
remain at the heart of any discussion on the relationship between religion
and politics.
At the start of the US-led ‘War on Terror’ in 2001, violent extremism
in Pakistan came under international spotlight. Due to this atten-
tion, countering violent extremism (CVE) programmes, mostly focusing
on madrasas (Islamic seminaries), were initiated in the country. A
major limitation of CVE programmes is their limited scope in terms of
geographical, institutional and gender focus. The majority of programmes
focus on male madrasas in the north-west of the country. However,
Pakistani women’s involvement in violent extremism and CVE is an
under-researched topic. In the final chapter of this volume, Farah Naz
and Zahid Shahab Ahmed examine the extent to which extremist organi-
sations target women in Pakistan and are successful in accomplishing this
agenda. Their research also focuses on women’s role in CVE. The chapter
argues that women have not only been exposed to extremist ideologies
but have also been recruited to carry out fundraising, recruitment and
terrorist activities. Based on the primary data collected through inter-
views of CVE experts in Pakistan, this study examines CVE policies and its
approaches, and the causes and consequences of women’s recruitment by
violent extremists. The analyses of civil society and state-run approaches
show the neglect of women in terms of vulnerability to violent extremism
and potential in CVE efforts.
 CHAPTER 2

Colonial Transformations, Postcolonial

Afterlives: Extremism, Exclusion
and Distrust in India and Pakistan

Imran Ahmed

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun 1

Introduction
This chapter provides a brief discussion of the religious transformations
which took place under British colonial rule and outlines some of the
ongoing postcolonial political consequences of these transformations. The
chapter reviews some of the colonial attitudes, ideologies and policies

1 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953), 85.

I. Ahmed (B)
Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore,
Singapore
e-mail: iahmed@nus.edu.sg

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
I. Ahmed et al. (eds.), Religion, Extremism and Violence in South Asia,
Politics of South Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6847-0_2
26 I. AHMED

towards managing, classifying and organising religion and governing reli-

gious communities in colonial India. It also sketches the connections
between the imperial project and the colonial production of knowledge
and surveys some of the ways in which the legacies of British rule continue
to profoundly shape the discourse on religion, politics and nationhood in
postcolonial India and Pakistan. In other words, the chapter traces the
colonial origins of some of the broader contemporary debates on reli-
gion and politics in the region and spotlights sources of contention and
controversy.
A fundamental source of contention in both India and Pakistan is the
place of religion in the state and this chapter historicises the significance
of this issue. Whether India is a Hindu nation and Pakistan an Islamic
one is a recurring point of contestation and admittedly, raises tensions
which foment agitation and violence, inspire extremism and evade clear
resolution or consensus in both countries. Indeed, the legacies of colo-
nial rule, the politics of the anticolonial struggle and the subsequent
partition of the British Raj shadow postcolonial developments in the two
states. Questions concerning the identity of the state are inextricably tied
to the politics of disputed borders, the policies of governing religious
communities and defining the minority. Colonialism has not only shaped
territorial borders, communal identities and how the nation is imagined
and debated, it continues to structure the discourse on these issues and
shape its political lexicon. In other words, colonialism has not only shaped
what matters when it comes to religion, it has also shaped why it matters
and how these issues are framed and discussed. This is because the colo-
nial construction of the category of “religion” continues to experience a
postcolonial afterlife. And this chapter aspires to briefly sketch some of
the details of these developments.

Orientalism and the Colonisation

of Indian Religions
It is difficult to underestimate the impact of colonialism on the Indian
subcontinent. Europeans produced an ahistorical construction of India
over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which assisted
them in their ambition to govern the region, subdue its indigenous
 2 COLONIAL TRANSFORMATIONS, POSTCOLONIAL AFTERLIVES … 27

populations and justify colonial occupation.2 In India, British colonial

occupation bound European scientists, ethnographers, philologists, trav-
ellers, adventurers, artists and colonial officials together in the project of
imperialism. The conquest of India enabled the subcontinent to emerge
as a bustling hub in the production of new knowledges, academic disci-
plines and scholarship. And intimate knowledge of the workings of Indian
society, cultural traditions, languages, religions, laws and political institu-
tions facilitated colonial governance.3 The depictions of India, however,
were far from consistent but nevertheless remained instrumental in the
impetus for and defence of empire.
The Indian subcontinent also provoked European imaginations to
articulate European selfhood in relation to an Indian “Other”.4 This
involved the establishment of commonalities as well as differences
between the East and the West. Sir William Jones, a renowned English
philologist, argued that the languages of India and Europe possessed
a common origin.5 This implied that perhaps as peoples, Indians and

2 Elisa Giunchi, “The Reinvention of “Sharı̄a” Under the British Raj: In Search of
Authenticity and Certainty”, The Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (November 2010):
1124.
3 “The conquest of India”, Bernard Cohn writes, “was a conquest of knowledge”. Or
as Warren Hastings asserted in 1784: “Every accumulation of knowledge and especially
such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise dominion
founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state”. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism
and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), 16, 45.
4 Orientalism set up a binary between a European “Self” and an Oriental “Other”.
Orientalism, Said explained, “helped to define Europe (or the West)” by providing it with
“one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other”. The Orient delivers the
West with its “great complementary opposite since antiquity” and a “sort of surrogate and
even underground self”. Said contends that Orientalism has “less to do with the Orient
than it does with “our” world”. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978), xii, 1–3, 12, 58. Roger Joseph points out in his review of Orientalism, that
Orientalism “is not a mirror on the East but one on the West”. Roger Joseph, “Review
of Orientalism by Edward W. Said”, American Anthropologist 82, no. 4 (1980): 948.
5 Jenny Sharpe notes: “William Jones is best remembered for his discovery of an Indo-
European family of languages … Jones’s so-called discovery, and the science to which
it gave birth, signals the emergence of a discourse sanctioning a colonial expansion into
Asia”. Jenny Sharpe, “The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; Or, How William
Jones Discovered India”, Boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 26–46.
28 I. AHMED

Europeans could also trace their lineages back to a shared ancestor.6 The
question of how India came to differ from Europe, and how the British
had come to rule over India, would form a foundational problem driving
the development of the so-called racial sciences in the late nineteenth
century.7 The issues which emerged from this problem of divergence
occupied later generations of orientalists who not only posited Indian
cultures, customs and religions as inferior, but focused on difference.8
India, Europeans argued, had no history9 : it was, in other words, time-
less and unchanging. If India was immutable, then Europe was dynamic.
If the Mughals were despots, then the British were enlightened, rational
and moderate rulers.
The Orientalist production of India as a static ahistorical construction
had far reaching and often detrimental consequences for Indians. The
pursuit of maintaining romanticised notions of Indian social life helped
preserve or transform aspects of Indian societies the British perceived
as authentic to an Indian social, economic and political order so long
as it also furthered British interests. These assumptions, however, were
often projections of Europe’s own social and historical realities.10 The
policies the British directed towards the administration and ownership of

6 Rama Sundari Mantena, “Vernacular Futures: Colonial Philology and the Idea of
History in Nineteenth-Century South India”, The Indian Economic & Social History
Review 42, no. 4 (2005): 529–530.
7 Thomas Metcalf writes: “Throughout the later nineteenth century, as they constructed
their ‘India’, the British had always to negotiate this disjuncture: between an acknowl-
edgement of similarity, and an insistence upon difference”. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of
the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66.
8 Metcalf further notes: “the history of India was made to accommodate not just the
existence of the Raj, but a course of historical development that made the imposition of
British rule its necessary culmination”. Ibid., 67.
9 As Thomas Trautmann explains: “It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orien-
talists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical
writings”. Thomas R. Trautmann, “Does India Have History? Does History Have
India?”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no.1 (2012): 174.
10 Muhammad Qasim Zaman maintains: “In India the British constantly encountered
situations and institutions where no clear distinctions between the religious and the secular
or non-religious were made. To many, this situation was reminiscent of Europe’s own
medieval history, where such distinctions were frequently blurred, often to the advantage
of the Church. For all the horrors that this parallel suggested, viewing India dominated,
or determined, by religion meant that the Indians could be seen as not only different
from post-Enlightenment Europeans but also inferior to the colonial rulers and therefore
in need of the latter’s enlightened governance and liberating reform”. Muhammad Qasim
 2 COLONIAL TRANSFORMATIONS, POSTCOLONIAL AFTERLIVES … 29

land across India sought to create and maintain a more rigid class system
of landlords and peasants that reflected the feudal and class realities of
England with the hope of extracting a more consistent flow and larger
portions of taxable agricultural revenue. This manoeuvre was grounded
on the logic that Indian social life was given to social hierarchies and class,
like caste, was assumed to be another timeless and permanent feature of
Indian societies.11
Orientalism also shaped the colonial outlook on Indian law, the admin-
istration of justice and dispute resolution. The wars of religion had shaped
European societies and the British perceived Indian social and religious
life through this lens. Not only did orientalism emphasise religious differ-
ence but it also periodised Indian historical development in fixed religious
terms. James Mill, for instance, contrasted Mughal rule as an era of
Islamic rule distinct from Hindu rule which preceded it in his famous
book The History of British India.12
The issues concerning the ownership and administration of land and
the processes of implementing an efficient taxation scheme required
colonial authorities to approach law and legal reform with considerable
caution and focus.13 If the composition of Indian society consisted of
distinct religious communities known for their separate bodies of reli-
gious laws, the British simply had to learn what these laws were in order
to administer Indian society in accordance with their indigenous legal
traditions.14 But colonial assumptions about Indian law and society did

Zaman, “Religious Education and the Rhetoric of Reform: The Madrasa in British India
and Pakistan”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999): 296.
11 Bernard Cohn writes: “It was felt by many British officials in the middle of the
nineteenth century that caste and religion were the sociological keys to understanding
Indian people”. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 242.
12 James Mill, The History of British India, Vol. 1 (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and
Joy, 1817).
13 Julia Stephens writes: “Driven by the practical necessity of imposing order and
extracting profit, [East India] Company officials also introduced significant revisions to
laws governing land rights and crime, jettisoning older Indo-Muslim legal practices when
they conflicted with the Company’s strategic interests”. Julia Stephens, Governing Islam:
Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018), 24–25.
14 Eleanor Newbigin also points out: “From the outset of British rule, India had been
seen as compromising not a society of individuals but a collection of different commu-
nities, bound first and foremost by religious identity”. Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu
30 I. AHMED

not match the reality and complexity of actual local and living Indian legal
systems.15 While local religious legal experts were sought as informants to
understand what the actual content and sources of the law was, the actual
operation of the law in society was far more fluid, dynamic and flexible
than the mere application of some list of legal rulings.16 Indian law was
shaped and given to local customs and contexts. This meant that it varied
quite widely region to region and relied less on centralised political power
to adjudicate cases or resolve disputes. This proved problematic for colo-
nial officials and orientalist scholars.17 Islamic and Hindu law enabled
considerable scope for bargaining and negotiations between parties based
on unwritten, diverse and changing local customary norms which made
it difficult for colonial authorities to control legal outcomes, society at
large and consequently state revenues from agrarian activities. The legal
text-based outlook of colonial officials and orientalist scholars found local
legal practices wanting and an obstacle to their goal of exercising control
over Indian societies and economies.
The objective to govern India according to its own set of laws was
flawed in its assumptions and ideological at the outset. The complexity
and unwritten nature of Indian legal traditions disturbed the colonial
imagination of India as a land of distinct religious communities living
simply in accordance to their own distinct set of religious laws. The
British, rather than changing their perception of Indian law, laboured
instead to change Indian law altogether. They searched for canonical
legal texts of the Islamic and Hindu legal traditions. “There was”, Sugata

Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3.
15 “The first question the newly empowered British administration faced” in India,
Rosane Rocher explains, “was which laws should be applied in their new courts”. Rosane
Rocher, “The Creation of Anglo-Hindu Law”, in Hinduism and Law: An Introduction,
ed. Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr. and Jayanth K. Krishnan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 78.
16 Stephens, Governing Islam, 26.
17 Rachel Sturman notes: “The British colonial state in India was continually forced
to grapple with the forms of law and governance appropriate to Indian society”. Rachel
Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and
Women’s Rights, Vol. 21 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.
 2 COLONIAL TRANSFORMATIONS, POSTCOLONIAL AFTERLIVES … 31

Bose and Ayesha Jalal explains, “a bias towards studying the more exclu-
sivist high traditions of both Hinduism and Islam”.18 The colonial state’s
reliance on Brahmins and the ulema in order to discover the law set
in motion a scripturalist frame to approaching religious law that has
continued into present day.
A rigorous campaign of translating religious legal texts and an impetus
towards the codification of religious legal rulings found in these books
ushered in a new Anglicised Indian legal order under British colonial
rule.19 Codification relieved colonial authorities from their reliance on
local indigenous experts.20 It also circumvented custom, narrowed legal
possibilities and brought more firmness and certainty to legal outcomes.
It papered over the complex relationship between cultural sensitivities and
local customs as a source of law.21 In doing so, codification also did away
with the informal aspects of legal settlements and dispute resolution for
strict adherence to the letter of the written law. It moved law from the
prerogative of local communities to the mandate and responsibility of the
political centre. The state would come to intervene in local affairs like
never before.22 The Hindu legal code displaced customs and local norms
as the preeminent legal reference for resolving disputes.23

18 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political economy
(New York: Routledge, 2017), 63.
19 See Chapter 9 of this volume for more details and discussion of the process
of codifying and Anglicising Islamic law.
20 Rocher explains: “When applying Hindu law, British judges were at the mercy of the
pandits who served as law officers of their courts, and who quoted diverse authorities for
their vyavasthās according to their lights and to occasionally contradictory results. Going
from frustration to suspicion was an easy step”. Rocher, “The Creation of Anglo-Hindu
Law”, 81.
21 “It was a fundamental and persisting British policy”, Marc Galanter writes, “that, in
matters of family law, inheritance, caste and religion, Indians were not subject to a single
territorial law. Hindus and Muslims were to be governed by their own personal law, ie
the law of their religious group”. See Marc Galanter, “The Displacement of Traditional
Law in Modern India”, Journal of Social Issues 24, no. 4 (1968): 18.
22 Stephens notes: “One of the most important legal changes the [East India] Company
made, in comparison to its Mughal predecessors, was to expand the judicial authority of
the state”. Stephens, Governing Islam, 24.
23 “With the support of British power”, David Washbrook writes, “Hindu law expanded
its authority across large areas of society which had not known it before or which, for
a very long period, had possessed their own more localized and non-scriptural customs”.
Another random document with
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between the leaves. These gillbearing appendages can be flapped to
and fro, and they seem to be at times held apart by the flabellum, a
spatulate process which Patten and Redenbaugh regard as a
development of the median sensory knob on the outer side of the
coxopodite of the last pair of walking limbs.
Limulus has no trace of
Malpighian tubules, structures
which seem often to develop only
when animals cease to live in
water and come to live in air. The
Xiphosura have retained as
organs of nitrogenous excretion
the more primitive nephridia, or
coxal glands as they are called, in
the Arachnida. They are redbrick
in colour, and consist of a
longitudinal portion on each side
of the body, which gives off a lobe
opposite the base of the pedipalps
and each of the first three walking
legs—in the embryo also of the
chelicerae and last walking legs,
but these latter disappear during
development. A duct leads from
Fig. 155.—Diagram of the first gill of
Limulus, from the posterior side,
the interior of the gland and
showing the distribution of the gill- opens upon the posterior face of
nerve to the gill-book (about natural the last pair of walking legs but
size). After Patten and Redenbaugh. 1, one.
Inner lobe of the appendage; 2, outer The nervous system has been
lobe of appendage; 3, median lobe of
appendage; 4, gill-book; 5, neural nerve
very fully described by Patten and
of the ninth neuromere; 6, internal Redenbaugh, and its complex
branchial nerve; 7, gill-nerve; 8, nature plays a large part in the
median branchial nerve; 9, external ingenious speculations of Dr.
branchial nerve. Gaskell as to the origin of
Vertebrates. It consists of a stout
ring surrounding the oesophagus
and a ventral nerve-cord, composed—if we omit the so-called fore-
brain—of sixteen neuromeres. The fore-brain supplies the median
and the lateral eyes, and gives off a median nerve which runs to an
organ, described as olfactory by Patten, situated in front of the
chelicerae on the ventral face of the carapace. Patten distinguishes
behind the fore-brain a mid-brain, which consists solely of the
cheliceral neuromere, a hind-brain which supplies the pedipalps and
four pair of walking legs, and an accessory brain which supplies the
chilaria and the genital operculum. This is continued backward into a
ventral nerve-cord which bears five paired ganglia supplying the five
pairs of gills and three pairs of post-branchial ganglia; the latter are
ill-defined and closely fused together. As was mentioned above, the
whole of the central nervous system is bathed in the blood of the
ventral sinus.
The sense-organs consist of the olfactory organ of Patten, the
median and lateral eyes, and possibly of certain gustatory hairs upon
the gnathobases. The lateral eyes in their histology are not so
differentiated as the median eyes, but both fall well within the limits
of Arachnid eye-structure, and their minute anatomy has been
advanced as one piece of evidence amongst many which tend to
demonstrate that Limulus is an Arachnid.
Both ovaries and testes take the form of a tubular network which is
almost inextricably entangled with the liver. From each side a duct
collects the reproductive cells which are formed from cells lining the
walls of the tubes, and discharges them by a pore one on each side of
the hinder surface of the genital operculum. As is frequently the case
in Arachnids the males are smaller than the females, and after their
last ecdysis the pedipalps and first two pairs of walking legs, or some
of these appendages, end in slightly bent claws and not in chelae. Off
the New Jersey coast the king-crabs (L. polyphemus) spawn during
the months of May, June, and July, Lockwood states at the periods of
highest tides, but Kingsley[217] was never “able to notice any
connexion between the hours when they frequent the shore and the
state of the tide.” “When first seen they come from the deeper water,
the male, which is almost always the smaller, grasping the hinder
half of the carapace of the female with the modified pincer of the
second pair of feet. Thus fastened together the male rides to shallow
water. The couples will stop at intervals and then move on. Usually a
nest of eggs can be found at each of the stopping-places, and as each
nest is usually buried from one to two inches beneath the surface of
the sand, it appears probable that the female thrusts the genital plate
into the sand, while at the same time the male discharges the milt
into the water. I have not been able to watch the process more closely
because the animals lie so close to the sand, and all the appendages
are concealed beneath the carapace. If touched during the
oviposition, they cease the operation and wander to another spot or
separate and return to deep water. I have never seen the couples
come entirely out of the water, although they frequently come so
close to the shore that portions of the carapace are uncovered.”[218]
Fig. 156.—A view of the nervous system of Limulus from below.
(About natural size.) After Patten and Redenbaugh.

The carapace is represented as transparent. The appendages have

been removed, but the outlines of the left entocoxites (6) have
been sketched in. The positions of the abdominal appendages are
indicated by the external branchial muscles (17), the branchial
cartilages (19), the tendinous stigmata (18), and the abdominal
endochondrites (21). In the cephalothorax (1) all the tergo-coxal
and plastro-coxal muscles have been dissected away, leaving the
endosternite (11) with the occipital ring exposed. One of the left
tergo-proplastral muscles (4) and the left branchio-thoracic
muscles (16) are represented. The longitudinal abdominal muscles
are also seen. All the muscles of the right side have been omitted
except the haemo-neural muscles (23), of which the last two are
represented upon the left side also. At the base of the telson the
flexors (29) and extensors (27) of the caudal spine are represented
as cut off near their insertions. The sphincter ani (26), levator ani,
and occludor ani (25), and their relations to the anus (28), are
shown.

The oesophagus runs forward to the proventriculus (3). From this

the intestine (20) passes posteriorly.

The brain lies upon the neural side of the endosternite, and the
ventral cord (22) passes back through the occipital ring. The
neural nerves are cut off, but the left haemal nerves and those
from the fore-brain (12) are represented entire.

The first pair of neural nerves go to the chelicerae. The second to

sixth pairs go to the next five cephalothoracic appendages, which
are represented by the entocoxites (6). The seventh pair of neural
nerves go to the chilaria, and the eighth pair to the operculum.
The neural nerves from the ninth to the thirteenth arise from the
abdominal ganglia and innervate the five pairs of gills.

From the fore-brain a median olfactory nerve (9) and two lateral
ones (8) pass forward to the olfactory organ; a median eye-nerve
(2) passes anteriorly and haemally upon the right of the
proventriculus (3) to the median eyes; and a pair of lateral eye-
nerves pass to the lateral eyes (15).

The first haemal nerve, or lateral nerve, follows the general course
of the lateral eye-nerve, but continues posteriorly far back on to
the neural side of the abdomen.

The haemal nerves of the hind-brain radiate from the brain to the
margins of the carapace, and each one passes anterior to the
appendage of its own metamere. The integumentary portions
divide into haemal and neural branches, of which the haemal
branches (5) are cut off. Each haemal branch gives off a small
nerve which turns back toward the median line upon the haemal
side of the body.

The haemal nerves of the accessory brain pass through the

occipital ring to the sides of the body between the operculum and
the sixth cephalothoracic appendage. The seventh innervates the
posterior angles of the cephalothorax, the eighth the opercular
portion of the abdomen. The next five haemal nerves arise from
the five branchial neuromeres, pass out anterior to the gills to the
sides of the abdominal carapace, and innervate the first five spines
upon the sides of the abdomen.

The first post-branchial nerve innervates the last abdominal

spine; the second post-branchial nerve and one branch of the
third post-branchial innervate the posterior angles of the
abdomen and the muscles of the telson; and the caudal branch of
the third post-branchial nerve innervates the telson.

Intestinal branches arise from all the haemal nerves from the sixth
to the sixteenth, and pass to the longitudinal abdominal muscles
and to the intestine.

Cardiac nerves arise from all the haemal nerves from the sixth to
the thirteenth. Six of the cardiac nerves communicate with the
lateral sympathetic nerve (24), which innervates the branchio-
thoracic muscles (16).

Two post-cardiac nerves arise from the first two post-branchial

nerves, and passing to the haemal side anastomose with a branch
from the last cardiac nerve, and innervate the extensors (27) of the
telson and the epidermis behind the heart.

1, Cephalothorax; 2, median eye-nerve; 3, proventriculus; 4, tergo-

proplastral muscles; 5, haemal branch of integumentary nerve; 6,
entocoxites; 7, 2nd haemal nerve; 8, right olfactory nerve; 9,
median olfactory nerve; 10, intestine; 11, endosternite; 12, fore-
brain; 13, origin of 4th neural nerve; 14, lateral nerve; 15, lateral
eye; 16, branchio-thoracic muscles; 17, external branchial muscles;
 18, tendinous stigmata; 19, branchial cartilages; 20, intestine; 21,
abdominal endochondrites; 22, ventral cord; 23, haemo-neural
muscles; 24, lateral sympathetic nerve; 25, occludor ani; 26,
sphincter ani; 27, extensors of telson; 28, anus; 29, flexors of
telson; 30, lateral projections of abdomen; 31, nerves of spines;
32, external branchial muscles.

The developing ova and young larvae are very hardy, and in a little
sea-water, or still better packed in sea-weed, will survive long
journeys. In this way they have been transported from the Atlantic to
the Pacific coasts of the United States, and for a time at any rate
flourished in the western waters. Three barrels full of them
consigned from Woods Holl to Sir E. Ray Lankester arrived in
England with a large proportion of larvae alive and apparently well.
According to Kishinouye, L. longispina spawns chiefly in August
and between tide-marks. “The female excavates a hole about 15 cm.
deep, and deposits eggs in it while the male fertilises them. The
female afterwards buries them, and begins to excavate the next
hole.”[219] A line of nests (Fig. 157) is thus established which is always
at right angles to the shore-line. After a certain number of nests have
been formed the female tires, and the heaped up sand is not so
prominent. In each “nest” there are about a thousand eggs, placed
first to the left side of the nest and then to the right, from which
Kishinouye concludes that the left ovary deposits its ova first and
then the right. Limulus rotundicauda and L. moluccanus do not bury
their eggs, but carry them about attached to their swimmerets.
The egg is covered by a leathery egg-shell which bursts after a
certain time, and leaves the larva surrounded only by the
blastodermic cuticle; when ripe it emerges in the condition known as
the “Trilobite larva” (Fig. 158), so-called from a superficial and
misleading resemblance to a Trilobite. They are active little larvae,
burrowing in the sand like their parents, and swimming vigorously
about by aid of their leaf-like posterior limbs. Sometimes they are
taken in tow-nets. After the first moult the segments of the meso-
and metasoma, which at first had been free, showing affinities with
Prestwichia and Belinurus of Palaeozoic times, become more
solidified, while the post-anal tail-spine—absent in the Trilobite larva
—makes its first appearance. This increases in size with successive
moults. We have already noted the late appearance of the external
sexual characters, the chelate
walking appendages only being
replaced by hooks at the last
moult.
Fig. 157.—The markings on the sand
made by the female Limulus when
depositing eggs. Towards the lower end
the round “nests” cease to be apparent,
the king-crab being apparently
exhausted. (From Kishinouye.) About
natural size.

Fig. 158.—Dorsal and ventral view of the last larval stage (the so-
called Trilobite stage) of Limulus polyphemus before the
appearance of the telson. 1, Liver; 2, median eye; 3, lateral eye; 4,
last walking leg; 5, chilaria. (From Kingsley and Takano.)

Limulus casts its cuticle several times during the first year—
Lockwood estimates five or six times between hatching out in June
and the onset of the cold weather. The cuticle splits along a “thin
narrow rim” which “runs round the under side of the anterior
portion of the cephalic shield.”[220] This extends until it reaches that
level where the animal is widest. Through this slit the body of the
king-crab emerges, coming out, not as that of a beetle anteriorly and
dorsally, but anteriorly and ventrally, in such a way as to induce the
unobservant to exclaim “it is spewing itself out of its mouth.” In one
nearly full-sized animal the increase in the shorter diameter of the
cephalic shield after a moult was from 8 inches to 9½ inches, which
is an indication of very rapid growth. If after their first year they
moult annually Lockwood estimates it would take them eight years to
attain their full size.
The only economic use I know to which Limulus is put is that of
feeding both poultry and pigs. The females are preferred on account
of the eggs, of which half-a-pint may be crowded into the cephalic
shield. The king-crab is opened by running a knife round the thin
line mentioned on p. 275. There is a belief in New Jersey that this
diet makes the poultry lay; undoubtedly it fattens both fowls and
pigs, but it gives a “shocking” flavour to the flesh of both.

CLASSIFICATION.

But five species of existing King-crabs are known, and these are
grouped by Pocock into two sub-families: (i.) the Xiphosurinae, and
(ii.) the Tachypleinae. These together make up the single family
Xiphosuridae which is co-extensive with the Order. The following is
Pocock’s classification.[221] The names used in this article are printed
in italic capitals.

Order Xiphosura.

Family 1. Xiphosuridae.

Sub-Fam. 1. Xiphosurinae.

This includes the single species Xiphosura polyphemus (Linn.) (=

Limulus polyphemus, Latreille), “which is said to range from the
coast of Maine to Yucatan.”

Sub-Fam. 2. Tachypleinae.

Genus A. Tachypleus includes three species: (i.) T. gigas, Müll. (=

Limulus gigas, Müll., and L. moluccanus, Latreille), widely
distributed in Malaysia; (ii.) T. tridentatus, Leach (= L. tridentatus,
Leach, and L. longispina, Van der Hoeven), extending from British
North Borneo to China and Southern Japan; and (iii.) T. hoeveni,
Pocock (= L. moluccanus, Van der Hoeven), found in the Moluccas.
Genus B. Carcinoscorpius with one species, C. rotundicauda
(Latreille) (= L. rotundicauda, Latreille). It occupies a more
westerly area than T. gigas or than T. tridentatus, having been
recorded from India and Bengal, the Gulf of Siam, Penang, the
Moluccas, and the Philippines.
With regard to the affinities of the group it is now almost
universally accepted that they are Arachnids. The chief features in
which they differ from other Arachnids are the presence of gills and
the absence of Malpighian tubules, both being features associated
with aquatic life. As long ago as 1829 Straus-Dürckheim emphasised
the points of resemblance between the two groups, and although the
view was during the middle of the last century by no means
universally accepted, towards the end of that epoch the painstaking
researches of Lankester and his pupils, who compared the King-crab
and the Scorpion, segment with segment, organ with organ, tissue
with tissue, almost cell with cell, established the connexion beyond
doubt. Lankester would put the Trilobites in the same phylum, but in
this we do not follow him. With regard to the brilliant but, to our
mind, unconvincing speculations as to the connexion of some
Limulus-like ancestor with the Vertebrates, we must refer the reader
to the ingenious writings of Dr. Gaskell,[222] recently summarised in
his volume on “The Origin of Vertebrates,” and to those of Dr. Patten
in his article “On the Origin of Vertebrates from Arachnids.”[223]

Fossil Xiphosura.[224]

Limulus is an example of a persistent type. It appears first in

deposits of Triassic age, and is found again in the Jurassic,
Cretaceous, and Oligocene. In the lithographic limestone of
Solenhofen in Bavaria, which is of Upper Jurassic age, Limulus is
common and is represented by several species. One species is known
from the Chalk of Lebanon, and another occurs in the Oligocene of
Saxony. No other genus of the Xiphosura appears to be represented
in the Mesozoic and Tertiary deposits, but in the Palaeozoic
formations (principally in the Upper Silurian, the Old Red
 Sandstone, and the Coal
Measures) several genera have
been found, most of which differ
from Limulus in having some or
all of the segments of the
abdomen free; in this respect they
resemble the Eurypterida, but
differ from them in the number of
segments. In Hemiaspis (Fig. 159,
A), from the Silurian, the
segments of the abdomen are
Fig. 159.—A., Hemiaspis limuloides, divisible into two groups
Woodw., Upper Silurian, Leintwardine,
Shropshire. Natural size. (After (mesosoma and metasoma) in the
Woodward.) B., Prestwichia (Euroöps) same way that they are in
danae (Meek), Carboniferous, Illinois, Eurypterids; the first six
× ⅔. (After Packard.) segments have broad, short terga,
the lateral margins of the sixth
being divided into two lobes,
probably indicating the presence of two fused segments; the last
three segments are narrower and longer than the preceding, and at
the end is a pointed tail-spine. In Belinurus (Fig. 160) from the
Carboniferous, the two regions of the abdomen are much less
distinct; there are eight segments, the last three of which are fused
together, and a long tail-spine. In Neolimulus, from the Silurian,
there seems to be no division of the abdomen into two regions, and
apparently all the segments were free. On the other hand, in
Prestwichia (Carboniferous), all the segments of the abdomen, of
which there appear to be seven only, were fused together (Fig. 159,
B).
In the Palaeozoic genera the median or axial part of the dorsal
surface is raised and distinctly limited on each side, so presenting a
trilobed appearance similar to that of Trilobites. In Neolimulus,
Belinurus, and Prestwichia, lateral eyes are present on the sides of
the axial parts of the carapace, and near its front margin median eyes
have been found in the two last-named genera.
In nearly all the specimens of Palaeozoic Xiphosura[225] which have
been found nothing is seen but the dorsal surface of the body; in only
a very few cases have any traces of the appendages been seen,[226]
but, so far as known, they appear
to have the same general
character as in Limulus.
Aglaspis, found in the Upper
Cambrian of Wisconsin, has been
regarded as a Xiphosuran. If that
view of its position is correct,
then Aglaspis will be the earliest
representative of the group at
present known. Other genera of
Palaeozoic Xiphosura are
Bunodes, Bunodella, and
Pseudoniscus in the Silurian;
Protolimulus in the Upper
Devonian; and Prolimulus in the
Permian.

Fig. 160.—Belinurus reginae, Baily,

Coal Measures, Queen’s Co., Ireland, ×
1. (After Woodward).
 EURYPTERIDA

BY

HENRY WOODS, M.A.

St. John’s College, Cambridge, University Lecturer in Palaeozoology.
 CHAPTER XI
ARACHNIDA (CONTINUED)—
DELOBRANCHIATA = MEROSTOMATA
(CONTINUED)—EURYPTERIDA

Order II. Eurypterida.

The Eurypterida or Gigantostraca are found only in the Palaeozoic

formations. Some species of Pterygotus, Slimonia, and Stylonurus
have a length of from five to six feet, and are not only the largest
Invertebrates which have been found fossil but do not seem to be
surpassed in size at the present day except by some of the
Dibranchiate Cephalopods. All the Eurypterids were aquatic, and,
with the possible exception of forms found in the Coal Measures, all
were marine. The earliest examples occur in the Cambrian deposits,
and the latest in the Permian; but although the Eurypterids have
thus a considerable geological range, yet it is mainly in the Silurian
and the Old Red Sandstone that they are found, the principal genera
represented in those deposits being Eurypterus, Stylonurus,
Slimonia, Pterygotus, Hughmilleria, Dolichopterus, and Eusarcus.
From the Cambrian rocks the only form recorded is Strabops;[227] in
the Ordovician the imperfectly known Echinognathus[228] and some
indeterminable fragments have alone been found. In the
Carboniferous deposits Eurypterus and Glyptoscorpius occur, and
the former survived into the Permian.[229]
Fig. 161.—Eurypterus fischeri, Eichw. Upper Silurian, Rootziküll,
Oesel. Dorsal surface. a, Ocellus; b, lateral eye; 2–6, appendages
of prosoma; 7–12, segments of mesosoma; 13–18, segments of
metasoma; 19, tail-spine. (After Holm.)
 The Eurypterid which is best known is Eurypterus fischeri (Figs.
161, 162), which is found in the Upper Silurian rocks at Rootziküll in
the Island of Oesel (Gulf of Riga). In the Eurypterids from other
deposits the chitinous exoskeleton has been altered into a
carbonaceous substance, but in the specimens from Oesel the chitin
is perfectly preserved in its original condition; and since these
specimens are found in a dolomitic rock which is soluble in acid, it
has been possible to separate the fossil completely from the rock in
which it is embedded, with the result that the structure can be
studied more easily and more thoroughly than in the case of
specimens from other localities. Consequently Eurypterus
fischeri[230] may, with advantage, be taken as a type of the
Eurypterida.
The general form of the body (Fig. 161) is somewhat like that of a
Scorpion, but is relatively broader and shorter. On the surface of
many parts of the exoskeleton numerous scale-like markings are
found (Figs. 162, 163).[231] The prosoma or cephalothorax consists
of six fused segments covered by a quadrate carapace with its front
angles rounded. This bears on its dorsal surface two pairs of eyes—
large kidney-shaped lateral eyes and median ocelli (Fig. 161, b, a).
The margin of the dorsal part of the carapace is bent underneath to
form a rim which joins the ventral part of the carapace.
On the ventral surface of the prosoma (Fig. 162) six pairs of
appendages are seen, of which only the first pair (the chelicerae) are
in front of the mouth. The chelicerae are small, and each consists of a
basal joint and a chela, the latter being found parallel to the axis of
the body; they closely resemble the chelicerae of Limulus. The
remaining five pairs of appendages are found at the sides of the
elongate mouth, and in all these the gnathobases of the coxae are
provided with teeth at their inner margins and were able to function
in mastication, whilst the distal part of each appendage served as an
organ of locomotion. The posterior part of each coxa is plate-like and
is covered (except in the case of the sixth appendage) by the coxa of
the next appendage behind. A small process or “epicoxite” is found at
the posterior end of the toothed part of the coxae of the second,
third, fourth, and fifth pairs of appendages. The second appendage
consists of seven joints, whilst the remaining four consist of eight
joints; none of these appendages end in chelae. The second, third,[232]
and fourth pairs of appendages are similar to one another in
structure, but become successively larger from before backwards.
These three pairs are directed radially outwards; each consists of
short joints tapering to the end of the limb, and bearing spines at the
sides and on the under surface, and also a spine at the end of the last
joint.
Fig. 162.—Eurypterus fischeri, Eichw. Upper Silurian, Rootziküll,
Oesel. Restoration of ventral surface; 1–6, appendages of
prosoma; m, metastoma. Immediately posterior to the metastoma
is the “median process” of the genital operculum. (After Holm.)
 The fifth appendage is longer than the fourth and is directed
backwards; its second and third joints are short and ring-like; the
others (fourth to eighth) are long and similar to one another, each
being of uniform width throughout; the last joint is produced into a
spine on each side, and between these two is the movable end-spine;
the other joints do not bear long spines as is the case in the three
preceding pairs of appendages.
The sixth appendage is much larger and stronger than the others,
and like the fifth, is without long spines. The coxa is large and
quadrate; the second and third joints are short, like those of the fifth
appendage; the fourth, fifth, and sixth joints are longer and more or
less bell-shaped; the seventh and eighth joints are much larger than
the others and are flattened.
The metastoma (Fig. 162, m) is an oval plate immediately behind
the mouth; it covers the inner parts of the coxae of the sixth pair of
appendages, and represents the chilaria of Limulus. But, unlike the
latter, it is not a paired structure; nevertheless the presence of a
longitudinal groove on its anterior part renders probable the view
that it is derived from a paired organ.[233] The front margin of the
metastoma is indented and toothed. On its inner side in front is a
transverse plate, the endostoma, which is not seen from the exterior,
since the front margin of the metastoma extends a little beyond it.
Behind the prosoma are twelve free segments, of which the first six
form the mesosoma (Fig. 161, 7–12). The tergum on the dorsal
surface of each segment is broad and short, the middle part being
slightly convex and the lateral parts slightly concave; the external
margin is bent under, thus forming a narrow rim on the ventral
surface. The tergum of each segment overlaps the one next behind.
The segments increase in breadth slightly up to the fourth segment,
posterior to which they gradually become narrower.
On the ventral surface the segments of the mesosoma bear pairs of
plate-like appendages, each of which overlaps the one behind like the
tiles on a roof. On the posterior (or inner) surfaces of these
appendages are found the lamellar branchiae, which are oval in
outline (Fig. 165, d). Between the two appendages of the first pair is a
median process which is genital in function; this pair are larger than
the other appendages, and cover both first and second segments, the
latter being without any appendages, and they represent the genital