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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

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Elvele Images Limited/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
 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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of the treacherous woman, and Dorothy’s head resting on her
shoulder.
“I don’t know what to say to you, madam. Your duplicity, your double-
dealing, is known to me. I shall take the first opportunity to disclose it
to your victim. Meantime you must assist me in getting her home—
do you hear?”
She bows her head. This double break in her plans has taken all the
confidence out of the woman who could plot against her best friend.
She now fears the result—for if Samson Cereal is once aroused
against her she may well tremble for her fate.
“Claude, see that she comes; we will find a carriage outside,
perhaps.”
“Oh, I’ll get one for you, boys,” cheerfully declares the young
roysterer, as he endeavors to walk a straight line to the exit.
With a strange feeling thrilling him through and through Aleck bends
down and takes the young girl in his arms. She is not entirely
senseless, for though her head droops upon his shoulder, he hears a
fluttering breath and the words:
“Oh, my father!”
Reverently he raises his burden.
“Make way, friends,” he says to those in front, and the crowd parts
before him. They have by this time managed to get an inkling of the
truth through their heads, and between the dark-skinned Turk and
the frank-faced Canadian their sympathies are wholly with the latter.
Strange to say, no Columbian guard has put in an appearance
during the extraordinary fracas. They were everywhere when not
wanted.
The exit is close at hand, and as they pass through Aleck sees a
figure with waving arms, a figure he has no trouble in recognizing as
their quondam partner in the late deal.
“This way! here’s your coach; step up lively now, gentlemen. We’re
off over the divide.”
His incoherent jumble is enough to attract Aleck’s attention to the
carriage, and he carefully deposits his burden inside.
“Enter,” he says to the woman beside Wycherley. She would refuse,
but his voice terrifies her, and she obeys.
“Claude, tell the driver where to go. Then get in with me,” he adds
calmly, and it is evident that even more than the strange events of
this night of nights is needed to rattle Aleck Craig.
A moment later Wycherley gets in.
“Jove! that chap insists on sitting beside the driver, and rather than
have a row I let him.”
“Who the deuce is he?”
“Give it up! Muttered something about Happy Jack, and as he’s
always singing snatches of songs or laughing. I reckon he means the
name for himself. Happy Jack—well, he’s to be envied such a
disposition in this vale of tears.”
“Hello! what’s wrong now? I thought you were about as free from
care as the next one?”
“In times gone by. As luck would have it I just saw the adorable
Inez.”
“Oh! the pretty Spanish cigar girl.”
“It is too true—perfidious Inez.”
“Come, come, remember your philosophy.”
“But she was with another—a dashing young chap with the strut of a
huzzar. I shall have to reduce him to the humble gait of a cork leg.
Her glance was freezing. I am still like a cake of ice.”
“Perhaps she saw you had company—that it was jealousy influenced
her.”
“Aleck, bless you, my dear boy. I take heart, I breathe again.”
Craig turns his attention to the woman who sits opposite, next the
actor. The vehicle is making good progress, but it will be a
wearisome journey to the North side.
“Before we reach this young lady’s home, madam, it is but fair that
you and I should have some sort of explanation. You were supposed
to be her protector; you betrayed your trust. I know all: your alliance
with Aroun Scutari, and everything that followed. You must quit her
service to-morrow, for I mean to expose you.”
“I shall do as you say, sir. There is no need of explanations on my
part. You would denounce my story as a fabrication; but I had cause,
I had cause. What do you wish me to do to-night?”
“Assist in getting the young lady under her father’s roof, from which
she should never have ventured on any such Quixotic errand.”
“You blame me for it, I know; but it was her own idea—she planned it
all, and what followed the pasha took advantage of,” she insists.
It is on the tip of his tongue to ask about the young miner, but he
suddenly shuts his teeth together and changes his mind. Aleck Craig
has a fine sense of honor.
“You have placed yourself in a position where you are liable to
criminal prosecution,” he says sternly.
The woman laughs scornfully.
“You would not dare proceed against me,” she says.
“And why?”
“Because my sweet mistress would have to testify in court, and
expose her own actions. I know them to be entirely innocent—that
her motives were actuated by the holiest feelings of the heart, but
the public would choose to believe otherwise. And to defend myself I
would have to unearth family secrets that would make the name of
Samson Cereal the talk of the town. Now, will you prosecute, sir?”
“We shall be content if you leave your place in the morning,” replies
Aleck discreetly.
 CHAPTER XII.
THE PROTECTORATE ABANDONED.
Dorothy is recovering; already she has moved, and it is evident that
the influence of the drug, whatever it may have been, is wearing
away. The jolting of the carriage may have something to do with her
coming back to her senses, for they have not yet struck the
boulevard pavement of Michigan Avenue, and the street is in bad
order.
“Oh, where am I?” she suddenly cries out.
“With friends, I trust, Miss Dorothy,” says Craig.
They pass an electric arc—she bends her eyes upon his face, and
an exclamation announces that she has recognized him.
“You? I thought it was that terrible Turk. What have you done this for,
Mr. Craig?” and he is delighted to discover a tremulous undertone to
her voice—it tells of anxiety.
“I see you fail to understand the situation, Miss Dorothy. Compose
yourself. You are now on the way home. My friend and I chanced
along just in time to put the Turk and his followers to flight, to the
amusement of the crowd. We knew no other course to pursue than
to engage a carriage and take you both home.”
“And Mrs. Merrick—was she injured?” eagerly.
“I am here, my dear, and unhurt,” purrs the companion, her manner
reminding Craig of the house cat that has sheathed her claws.
“Oh, it has been indeed fortunate! Then again we owe you a debt of
gratitude, Mr. Craig. How strange!”
“How delightful!” he echoes cheerily, desiring to arouse her to
something like her old self.
“You are very kind. What could it all mean? I am so puzzled. That
odious Turk with the eyes that make me think of a rattlesnake—what
did he mean to do with me?”
“I can only hazard a guess, Miss Dorothy. In his country they have
strange customs, you know. Wives are bought, not wooed.
Sometimes they are stolen and the settlement made later on.
Perhaps this pasha has imagined he can bring his heathen habits
over to America. He has evidently fallen in love with you, and desires
you for his wife.”
“The wretch! Why, they have a dozen or two. I have seen the inside
of a harem at Algiers,” she says indignantly.
“That is very true; but, looking at things from his standpoint, he was
probably offering you the highest compliment he understood.”
By degrees he manages to interest her in other subjects. She does
not seem to suspect that it was Mrs. Merrick who held the
handkerchief over her face, and robbed her of her senses, but
believes the Turk himself did this.
It is a strange ride. Wycherley has been introduced, and manages to
put in a word now and then, though unusually quiet for him. Perhaps
he is thinking of how near he came to occupying the position the
Canadian has taken—or it may be he speculates on the possibilities
of his great deal for the morrow.
At length they cross the State Street bridge and reach the North Side
of Chicago, but quite a stretch still intervenes, for the old speculator
has his mansion out near Lincoln Park, being one of the favored few
whom fortune allows to gaze upon the magnificent lake from his
library windows.
Dorothy has become reserved. She realizes that this gentleman,
who has several times been of such assistance to her, must look
upon her escapade of the night with curiosity at least. True, she is
not responsible for what occurred on the Ferris wheel, or near the
exit of the Midway; but somehow her participation in such scenes
reflects upon the wisdom of a young lady attending the Fair at night
with only a companion of her own sex.
Her lips are sealed with reference to a certain subject, and she
evidently does not suspect that Craig has seen her in company with
the young miner.
On his part Craig feels a genuine regret to remember what the
Colorado sheriff told him in connection with John Phœnix, whose
downfall is bound to suddenly occur. Perhaps, when he comes to
know her better, he may be able to learn what peculiar bond there is
between these two—who can tell the vagaries that flit through the
mind of a bachelor in love. If this young fellow has won her regard,
and his true character comes out with his arrest for embezzlement,
perhaps—well, hearts have before now been caught in the rebound.
At length he forces himself to speak again upon the subject of her
return. Perhaps she might not like to drive up to her father’s house?
She laughs for the first time since entering the carriage, and it
pleases Craig to hear her.
“If you knew me better, Mr. Craig, you would never suspect me of
being afraid in anything that concerns the dear old governor. He
idolizes me. If I say I’m going to Japan to-morrow he would never
throw an obstacle in my way. Though a bear to others, he’s the
dearest and best man in the world to me. That is why I have dared to
undertake this task—through love for him.”
He wonders what task, but is not rude enough to ask. They roll
between elegant mansions on Dearborn Avenue, and will soon be at
their destination.
“Then you will alight in front of your door?”
“If you please, sir.”
No more is said, each being busy with thoughts that come unbidden
into the mind. The driver has been coached and knows where to
turn. At length the carriage stops. Dorothy looks out.
“It is home,” she says quietly.
Immediately the gentlemen are out to assist the ladies. One glance
Craig gives at the huge pile of masonry and he has impressed the
location of the princely mansion on his mind. It rather staggers him to
think of this young girl, the sole heiress to great wealth, having
passed through such singular adventures on this night. Craig is a
Canadian, and, in a measure, accustomed to English ways. He
wonders what his people would think of such an escapade, and
smiles at the recollection of his austere aunt, so proud of her blue
blood and of an unblemished name. It is the destiny of Canadians to
draw nearer the American, while separating from the English, and
the younger generation feel this more and more in the drift of
commerce.
So Aleck, while brought up with a keen perception of the proprieties,
can even pardon such a breach of the same under certain
circumstances. Somehow he lays much stress on the personal
declaration that her motives are governed by sacred purposes. Not
that he can understand it—he does not attempt to do so—but there
is a charm in Dorothy’s presence that makes him believe whatever
she may say.
’Twas ever thus. A man in love is fain to pin his faith on the
goodness of the ethereal being who has charmed him. All others
may be false, deceptive, and born flirts, but this one bright, particular
star is an exception. That is the subtle glamour love dusts in the
eyes of his votaries. Whom the little god would secure in his net, he
first makes blind.
“I cannot thank you for your kindness, Mr. Craig. Perhaps by to-
morrow night I shall be in a better condition to talk upon this subject.
I feel that an explanation is due you,” she says, giving him her hand.
“I don’t know about that, Miss Cereal,” he says.
“But you will come?” she adds eagerly.
He tries to keep his feelings in subjection by remembering the
strange companion with whom Dorothy sauntered about the Midway,
and who certainly took upon himself all the airs of a lover. Only in
this way can he subdue the sudden spasm of exaltation that sends
the hot blood leaping through his veins at the solicitude of her voice.
“I promised, and unless something prevents me I shall be there, glad
of the opportunity to meet your father.”
Then she says good night, and runs up the steps. A light burns in the
hall. Mrs. Merrick lingers a minute to say a few words.
“I will keep my promise, depend upon it, young sir. Some time you
may know my story, and perhaps you will believe I have not been
wholly actuated by a love of money.”
Then she follows her young mistress up the steps. A servant has just
opened the heavy door, and Aleck can see the handsome hall.
The young reveler on the seat beside the driver has reached the
pavement.
“Beg pardon, gents, but is there room inside for a chap of my size?
Devilish hard seat up there, you know. Here, driver, 's your pay,”
handing him a bill with the air only a royal prince or a roysterer half
seas over can assume.
Under these circumstances what can Aleck do—objections to the
stranger paying would be useless, and possibly stir up his fighting
blood, for men in his condition are exceedingly touchy. He feels an
interest in the fellow, since he came to their relief in time of need, so
they all enter the vehicle, giving the name of the hotel at which they
stop. It chances that Aleck names the Sherman House, and the
stranger bursts out with:
“My hotel—singular coincidence—something of a pleasure. Glad to
know you, sir. Wake me up when we arrive, kindly. Good. Find
shares sixteen above par—Hecla two hundred and three. Oceans of
money—no cares—a jolly life—see you later perhaps——”
And he sleeps the fitful slumber that follows over-indulgence in drink.
Aleck manages to settle him in a corner, and seats himself beside
the actor, who has been regarding the scene with something like
amusement.
“Pretty far gone, aint he?” remarks Wycherley.
“Disgusting. What a shame; looks like a bright young fellow, too.”
“Well-loaded with long green,” asserts the actor.
“Excuse me, I don’t quite understand.”
“I mean smartly heeled.”
“I’m still in the dark.”
Wycherley laughs.
“I forgot you were from over the border and not up to our
professional terms. What I would imply is that he is a man of means,
of money.”
“How do you know?”
“He took the bill from a great roll. The driver’s eyes stuck out of his
head at the sight.”
“It’s a shame, then, that he puts himself in a condition to be robbed.
Judging from his talk I should say he was from the West.”
“Singular we should run across so many persons from that quarter.
And this isn’t Colorado day, either. There’s the sheriff, then Phœnix,
who is wanted out in Denver, and finally this young chap.”
“Phœnix! yes, I know him,” utters the man in the corner, as if the
name has caught his ear, deaf to all other sounds.
“Talk lower, Claude. Where do you put up?”
“Oh, I have a room,” carelessly.
“Won’t you stay over with me at the Sherman to-night?”
“Couldn’t think of it, my dear boy. Very fussy about my quarters;
cranky bachelor, you know. Have to be just so.”
“Oh, I see! and a room in a hotel is a cheerless waste in comparison.
I can see the cozy chair, the papers and magazines at hand, pipes
on the tables, in fact, a comfortable den.”
“That’s it; you just describe the very thing, Aleck. Nothing like home
comforts. Only apt to unfit us for the rough experiences of life; that’s
the only fault I’ve got to find. Here’s the Sherman—take care of the
young chap—and good-night.”
 CHAPTER XIII.
A BACHELOR’S “DEN.”
After leaving the Sherman House Wycherley has the driver take him
down Michigan Avenue. He produces a cigar, one of Aleck’s choice
weeds. Then comes a match.
“Ah! this is solid comfort,” he muses, stretching his legs out on the
front seat as if eager to fill the whole vehicle; “it is my dream
realized: a private carriage, a fine weed—perfect happiness. When
my million comes home, I’ve got it all laid out. It won’t take me long
to spend it. I can shut my eyes and imagine I’m a McCormick or a
Cereal going home to my palatial abode. It’s just elegant, you know.”
Thus he chuckles and interviews himself after a habit peculiarly his
own, until suddenly the vehicle draws up to the curb.
“Twenty-first Street, sir,” says John, who is especially good-natured
after receiving the fat fee from the young roysterer.
Wycherley alights with great dignity.
“Good-night, my man,” he says, and the driver, impressed with his
air, answers respectfully.
The ex-actor saunters along the avenue until the hack has vanished.
Then he turns on his heel and retraces his steps to the corner. Along
Twenty-first Street he walks. At this hour of the night, the dividing line
between two days, there are few people abroad, and Wycherley
meets no one on his tramp.
As he advances the neighborhood grows more squalid, until he is in
one of the poorest sections of the city, not far from the railroad.
At length he pauses in front of a dilapidated frame, evidently a
tenement—pauses with a dramatic gesture, and mutters:
“Behold! the Hotel des Vagabonde, where thieves never break
through and steal; where no one rolls and groans from an
overloaded stomach; the home of the highway prince, the boot-black
cavalier, and the jolly old bachelor. Waive all ceremony and enter, my
dear boy. I’ll not arouse the janitor, poor fellow. And as I’m a wise
man I’ll extinguish this cigar for a double reason—it’ll give me a
morning smoke, and prevent a sensation in the princely hotel, for a
Havana is unknown in this region of powerful clay pipes, and the
odor might offend the fastidous nose of some lodger, when there
would be the deuce to pay.”
No sooner said than done.
At the door no keeper challenges his entrance; day and night it is
free to all. Wycherley climbs various flights of rickety stairs. It is very
dark, but he seems to know from intuition just where every broken
board lies, and the higher he gets, the lighter his spirits grow. He
hums an operatic air and changes it to “After the Ball.” Really this
man makes light of care—troubles sit upon him like bubbles.
Now he stops in front of a door, fumbles in his pocket, finds a key,
and enters.
“Where the deuce is that electric button? very queer I fail to find it.
Well, making a virtue of necessity I’ll have to fall back on Old
Reliable.”
A match crackles, the flame shoots up. Then he applied it to the wick
of a candle stuck in the neck of an old beer bottle.
The scene is a remarkable one! Rarely did candlelight illumine a
more destitute room. From the wall large pieces of plaster are gone,
ditto the ceiling. A general survey of the place would result about as
follows: imprimus: the lone bachelor himself; item: one trundle bed,
scantily clad and sadly in need of smoothing; item: a carpet bag with
a tendency to falling over on one side because of constitutional
leanness; items: a piece of looking-glass fastened to the wall, a
single wooden chair, a tin basin, a bare table on which the candle
holds full sway.
That is the sum total.
Wycherley, merry dog that he is, glances around him with the air of a
king. He has a faculty of seeing luxury behind misery, of making
much out of little.
“Ah! Aleck was a shrewd one to guess what comforts I enjoy. There
is my luxurious armchair; this my heap of magazines and papers,”—
picking up a penny afternoon News—“and the whole scene one of
comfort. Ah, this is living. Now for my meerschaum, my slippers.
Hang the luck! I believe that valet has misplaced them again. Never
mind, this will do.”
He kicks off his shoes, opens a drawer in the table and takes out a
clay-pipe minus half the stem. This he fills with scrap tobacco, holds
it to the candle and puffs away with an enjoyment that cannot all be
assumed.
“A strange night it has been. To think I’d meet Aleck and Bob Rocket
so near together—two fellows I regard so highly. It’s a queer world,
and a mighty small one, too, when you come down to it. Heigho! my
chances of wedding the heiress are nil. Upon the whole I must
confess to a certain relief. How foolish for a man to give up the free
life of a gay bachelor, with its delightful uncertainties, for double
harness and the harassing cares of stocks and bonds. Ugh! deliver
me. See how cozy I am! Who would care to change it?”
Then he consults his memorandum book and makes a few notes on
the market, gaining his points from the closing sales as reported in
the newspaper. After this he yawns.
“Heigho! I feel weary. My sumptuous couch invites repose. It calls
not in vain. To sleep, to dream, perchance to discover in second
sight how to-morrow’s market will jump. ’Tis a consummation
devoutly to be wished.”
His preparations for going to bed are simple indeed. He removes his
coat and vest; his collar and necktie follow; then he crawls under the
army blanket.
“The deuce! I forgot to douse that ten candle electric light. Shall I call
Robert to press the button? Let the weary retainer sleep. Thus bright
genius overcomes all obstacles.”
One of his shoes flies through space with unerring accuracy, over
goes beer bottle and candle, and, rolling off the table, lands with a
thump on the bare floor.
“Eureka! score one for Sir Claude de Wycherley. Must practice that
little game; save immense amount of trouble. Hard on the bottle,
though. Now to woo the gentle goddess of slumber. Think of the
untold thousands rolling on feather beds and hair mattresses. Little
they know of the genuine luxury of a shuck bed. This is comfort now,
you bet.”
The night wind sighs through a hole in a window pane, and lulled by
this music, supplemented by the ringing of engine bells, and an
occasional shriek from a switching locomotive, Wycherley falls
asleep.
For an hour or two only his stentorian breathing can be heard in the
tenement room.
Then the man on the cot suddenly sits up. His room is no longer in
darkness.
“Jove! that was a beastly dream I had. What a pleasure to awaken
and find it was only a dream. Can it be morning? What the devil is all
that racket outside, people shouting? Bless me! I believe it’s the
engines pumping. There must be a fire in the neighborhood. I’m
sorry for the poor wretches; never took any enjoyment seeing a
house burn. Tchew! bless my soul, the room’s half full of smoke.
Think I’ll get up and investigate. Too bad to have a gentleman’s
slumbers disturbed in this way, but I’m interested now, because, you
know, it might be the Hotel des Vagabonde that is ablaze.”
While he thus communes with himself he gropes around for the lost
shoe, and draws it on. Then he goes to the door. As he opens it a
volume of smoke pours in. He instantly closes the door again.
“I declare, it is this house, after all. Another experience, my boy. My
palatial mansion is doomed, I fear. Ho! for the salvage corps. Is my
account book, the repository of millions, safe? Then let the fire
demon do his worst.”
He even stops to button his collar; then seizing the lean grip, he
waves his hand around him in a majestic way.
“The best of friends must part. Many happy hours have I spent here.
Alas! that it should end thus. Farewell, farewell, and if forever, then
forever fare thee well.”
He opens the door and steps into the hall.
“Great Scott!” he exclaims.
Dense smoke fills the hallway. The crackling of flames makes mad
music, and when this is supplemented by the shrieks of terrified
women, shouts of firemen, the throbbing of engines, and a dull roar
from the dense crowd that collected like magic under such
circumstances, the result is a combination that once heard can never
be forgotten.
Wycherley looks down the stairway and immediately draws back
again. Even his remarkable nerve is shaken by the sight. Besides,
he hears cries near by that tell him he is not the only one imprisoned
in the upper story of this old tenement, now in flames—cries that can
only come from a terrified woman.
“Think, old boy, and if ever you cudgeled your brains, do so now. It’s
useless trying to get out below—rather too warm for comfort. How
about the other way?”
The flames are roaring up the stairway, and whatever is done must
be done quickly, or else it will be too late. He remembers some sort
of ladder leading to a trap in the roof. It offers a chance. Whether the
situation will be improved or not, who can say?
Groping his way through the terrible smoke, he lays hold on the
ladder. Just then from a room near by comes the wail:
“Oh, God! help me, save me, and I will undo the past. I swear it.
Help! help!”
Wycherley recognizes a woman’s voice. He is not a hero, lays no
claim to be such, but if death is the inevitable consequence he
cannot try to save himself and desert a fellow creature. Down goes
his carpet bag, and in five seconds he is at the door of the other
room in the upper story of the burning tenement.
“Who’s here?” he shouts.
A figure at the small window, almost in the act of casting herself out,
turns to him.
“Oh, save me, sir! It is too horrible! I am not fit to die. Save me!” she
pleads wildly.
“Be quiet! I’ll do the best I can, but you must obey orders. Come with
me,” he says.
“Not down there! no, no. I looked—it was like the fires of hell!”
“To the roof! we must get out of this smoke or we’ll suffocate before
the fire touches us. Come, and I will save you or we’ll die trying.”
His cheering words reassure the poor woman, and she clings to his
coat. They reach the stairs leading upward, and Wycherley
mounting, opens the trap. What a blessed relief—here they can at
least get a breath of air.
Once upon the roof of the tenement the ex-actor casts about him for
some means of escape, some method by which to cheat the hungry
flames that must speedily burst through and envelop the whole
tenement in their rapacious maw.
The case seems desperate; no friendly roof offers a refuge. On one
side a great warehouse, fire-proof and grim, rears itself; on the other
lies a smaller building, with the roof far below. If he had a rope
Wycherley can see how he might escape. Without one the case is
almost hopeless. Already ladders have rested against the building,
but none are long enough to reach to the top. They see him. Shouts
in the street below announce this fact—encouraging cries that give
him hope. A stream of water breaks above and showers them.
Wycherley turns up his coat.
“Pardon—it is my last collar,” he says calmly.
They have placed a ladder against the smaller house. Brave firemen
are bringing another which will be carried up the sloping roof, and
used to reach those above.
All that now may be considered is the question of time. Will they
succeed, or be too late? The fire is having everything its own way.
These old tenements burn like match wood. Already the flames have
eaten a hole through the roof, and curl and twist wickedly as though
stretching out eager hands for new victims.
The heat is growing unbearable, and yet the ladder is not in position.
He realizes that the case is desperate, and casts about for a chance
to lessen it. The woman lies there groaning. They are dragging the
ladder up the roof, and in a couple of minutes it will be in place, but
that time is an eternity under such conditions. Just now, to remain
means death. He sees one chance, takes the woman—she is a
slight creature—in his arms, slips over the edge of the roof, and with
feet braced on a ledge, exerts his whole strength to maintain his
position, while the encouraging shouts of the firemen below give him
hope. It is a picture for an artist—the race between life and death,
between the greedy flames and the uplifting ladder, but the ladder
wins.
 CHAPTER XIV.
THE MAN OF THE WORLD.
When the man who hangs there with such a weight upon his left arm
feels that he cannot endure the strain five seconds longer, a voice
shouts out just at his feet:
“Drop her down to me!”
Brawny arms are outstretched, and the woman, falling from his
nerveless clasp, is caught and held. Now that he can change his
position Wycherley is not so hard set, and manages without
assistance to lower himself.
It has been an exceedingly narrow escape, for hardly has he
reached the lower roof when, looking up, he beholds the greedy
tongues of fire crawling over the edge at the very point where he
held on with such grim resolution.
A scuttle has been torn open, and through this the woman has been
taken. Wycherley would linger, but the firemen tell him nothing can
save this house from sharing the fate of its neighbor, and that he had
better lose no time in making good his escape.
So he, too, crawls through the scuttle. Even in such dire distress and
under such peculiarly unromantic conditions his sense of humor
does not desert him, and he chuckles more than once while making
his way to the street. When tenements burn there are sad enough
sights, Heaven knows, but at the same time many comical ones crop
up, for people in the mad excitement may be seen hugging feather
beds, while tossing pictures, mirrors, and every fragile object out of
the window.
Hardly has he reached the street than someone near by says:
“There he is.”
Immediately hands are laid upon his arm, and turning he beholds a
woman.
“God bless you, sir. You saved my life. I cannot find words to thank
you,” she says, between her hysterical sobs.
“Then don’t worry about trying. What I did wasn’t much,” is his
characteristic answer.
“Oh, sir! my life is not of much value to me, but to another it may be.
Tell me your name—where I can find you after I have seen him.”
He notes curious glances cast upon them, and desires to break
away.
“A letter to Claude Wycherley at the Sherman House would reach
me. But I beg of you to forget all about it,” he adds.
Reporters are as thick as peas, and he would avoid them if possible,
not wanting to figure in a sensation. Wycherley is so retiring in his
disposition, so modest withal, that any such notoriety might
embarrass him exceedingly.
“Where have I seen that woman before? Don’t ever recollect meeting
her in the Hotel des Vagabonde, now, alas! no more; and yet her
face seems so familiar to me. Give it up. Where now, my dear boy?
The clock strikes four. Daylight will be along—even now I see it
creeping up over the lake. To pass the time until then—ah! here’s a
bootblack’s chair. Quite an idea. I’ll keep it warm until it’s time for
breakfast,” saying which he sits down and dozes.
The great city is waking up. As day comes wagons rumble by and
working people with buckets in hand swing past to their labors. Soon
the shrill cry of the newsboy is heard in the land.
“Tribune—Times—Inter-Ocean!”
Wycherley sinks a hand in his pocket, and after a thorough and
systematic search in order that he may corner all fugitive pieces, he
draws out sundry nickels and coppers, which, upon being marshaled
upon the palm of his hand, he counts.
“Twenty cents, sum total; not a fortune, it’s true, but better than I’ve
known many a time. Let’s see how I’ll divide it: five for a paper, ten
for breakfast, and the last nickel brings a cigar. There’s luxury for
you; a prince could have no more. Hi! boy, come here.”
In another minute the paper has changed hands.
“Now to feed the inner man, who clamors for attention. Over a cup of
coffee and some rolls in a beanery near by, I’ll read my fortune. What
a delicious state of uncertainty—it’s heads or tails whether I win or
lose a million. Then I enjoy all the sensations of the greatest plunger
and never risk a dollar. I must copyright my scheme. Hello! what’s
this?”
He has come upon a little girl crying—a child who belongs in the
poorer walks of life, for her clothes are scanty, and her face thin. She
sobs as though her heart would break.
“Come, come, what is the matter, my child?” he asks, touched by her
despair.
“I can’t find it, and it was all granny had.”
“What have you lost, then?”
“She sent me out last night to buy something to eat, and I fell down
and lost the money. I came early this morning to look, but I can’t find
it. She won’t have any breakfast, poor old granny. I’ve cried nearly all
night, but she told me never to mind, that God would find it for me in
the morning, but I guess he forgot.”
Indeed, her swollen eyes give evidence that what she says is true.
Wycherley makes a grimace, but sturdily puts his hand in his pocket.
“How much was it, my dear?”
“Only fifteen cents, sir, but it was all granny had, and she won’t get
any more till to-morrow.”
“A mere trifle, my child. There you are. Don’t mind saying thanks, but
be very, very careful not to drop any.”
Her looks are eloquent enough as she goes skipping along toward
the grocery. Wycherley watches her and then chuckles.
“There goes my breakfast, and the cigar, too. Well, what of it? ’Tisn’t
the first time you’ve fasted, my boy, and may not be the last. Good
for the digestion, don’t you know. Besides, you’re invited to dinner at
the Sherman House with Aleck, and a sharp appetite will give you
more of a chance to enjoy the good things of life. It’s brought relief to
one small heart, anyway. Now, I might as well return to my chair and
settle this question of a million. If I’ve won I can lay back and imagine
a royal banquet fit for the gods.”
Presently he is scanning the reports.
“What’s this? Unexpected advance in Golconda mining stock—I was
deep in that. Decline of Reading. I skipped that, glad to say. How
about the Consolidated on which I spread? I can hardly see for
excitement. What’s that, advanced two cents? Hurrah! and I only
hoped for one. Sell out, sell out, don’t hold anything a minute later.
I’ve gone and done it. Yes, sir, as sure as fate, I’m a millionaire. No
thirteen dollars this time; all previous losses wiped out and
something like a million to my credit. Think of it, a cool million, too.
Champagne—no, that wouldn’t do on an empty stomach. I’ll hie
away to Kinsey’s, and scan his bill of fare. This settles it. I’m cut out
for a broker. The whole secret is to stand by your colors long
enough, and success is certain.”
Someone grasps his foot, and looking down he sees the bootblack
commencing operations.
“Hold on there, boy! just gave the last fifteen cents I had to a little girl
who lost her money. You’ll have to trust me or take this paper in pay.”
The boy grins and says the paper will do him, so Wycherley makes
some notes from it.
“Haven’t time to figure, now. May be a difference of a hundred
thousand or so either way, but that doesn’t matter. There’s that
woman’s face before my mind again. Where have I seen her? Stupid
in me to forget asking her name when I gave mine. Well, let it pass—