Wilson Chacko Jacob
It is true that gender and religion have always been interrelated; also true is the fact that the relationship as such did not exist until around the nineteenth century. This formulation is neither a paradox nor a historical puzzle given the outpouring of genealogical analyses of such discursive formations in the wake of Michel Foucault's interventions over three decades ago. The organising power and analytical value of what were once regarded as merely descriptive terms are now self-evident to many scholars. That an epistemological rupture, or, less radically, a shift in ‘the order of things’, occurred between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries is accepted as truth, no matter one's view of the relationship between knowledge, power and the human.1
Some of the silences generated by that historical truth, particularly the common presupposition of a liberal political order and sovereign subject, have been productively engaged by scholars working on the intersection of gender, sexuality and race in the context of empire or gender, religion and politics in postcolonial times.2 In short, these studies conclude that the power of discursive categories and biopolitical apparatuses are historically and geographically variable such that attending to older conceptions of political hegemony and economic dominance is still necessary to establish the specificity of their operations in particular places as well as their limits.3
In this study, I examine a problematic very central to the rise of modern states and the liberal regime of rights: sovereignty. The question of sovereignty, rarely considered in histories of colonial contexts except in terms of anti-colonial nationalism, has tremendous importance to the geographically differentiated formations of gender and religion that were produced in the nineteenth century. However, rather than argue that European imperialism and colonial rule brought new political notions to the rest of the world, the story of the Muslim Hadhrami Alawis in India examined below reveals a far more complex and interrelated process of delimiting the terms of a new global dispensation centred around sovereignty. In order to avoid confusing this with claims of authenticity, the argument is as follows. First, the historical narrative of the Alawis in South India during the British conquest of and consolidation of power in Malabar illustrates an encounter between two ostensibly divergent conceptions of sovereignty. Second, in that putative divergence was located a politics of gender and the constitution of religion as a separate sphere, with major implications for communal and individual identities. Third, that moment of encounter in which the political and religious were transformed, or emerged in terms of an aspiring colonial state, also witnessed gender's appearance anew as a discursive formation of power. In short, the article provides a view onto one theatre staging the global performance of gender's reconstitution through unprecedented battles over sovereign domains (territorial, spiritual, legal and political) waged in the nineteenth century, which in turn generated a new vocabulary of rights linked to reconfigured religious and secular identities.
Historians have traditionally studied sovereignty as a problem of state, which began to be resolved towards the middle of the seventeenth century with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the dawning of a system resembling an ‘international’ order. Even though this was largely a European affair (and has been most often theorised within those geographical limits), the borders of Europe were still grey in this period, particularly in relation to the Ottoman and Russian Empires. More recently, scholars have shown that the early modern phenomenon of state formation encompassed much of the Eurasian landmass and the British and Japanese isles. The study of the problem of sovereignty was further complicated with Foucault's investigations into ‘governmentality’, which he concluded was the real solution to the ancient and cyclical story of kings and kingdoms. The state was in this view an effect of the myriad of specific techniques and discourses centred on the concept of ‘population’ that proliferated by the eighteenth century. In other words, it was only as territorial sovereignty became less of a problem (in western Europe) that the permanence of state could be secured and through productive performances of power rendered the new locus of human belief and aspirations – that is, the condition of possibility for modern, secular subject formation.
Accepting the traditional or Foucaultian approach to sovereignty as a global explanation is problematic for several reasons.4 What concerns us here is the treatment of ‘religion’ therein as a receding phenomenon or discourse in the face of secular advances, which makes explaining events such as the Iranian revolution in 1979 or the rise of various kinds of religious fundamentalism since the late 1960s difficult.5 Even accepting Foucault's genealogical insight that renders ‘religion’ the product of the very self-same processes that were to have banished religious terms and practices to inner domains or far corners, one is confronted with the conclusion that ‘it’ nonetheless became a barred discourse in modernity.6
Without rejecting outright the historical accounts of the state system or Foucault's findings about governmentality, it is possible to open up the Europe-centred narrative to a global history of sovereignty through an examination of gender and religion as interrelated discursive formations that took shape in and against the new liberal imperialism of the nineteenth century.7 Perhaps one of the less striking discoveries is that sovereignty as invested in the state remained a fraught concept for much of the century, even as states and empires expanded their purview through the increasingly effective regulation of populations and disciplining of individuals; conversely, and perhaps more striking, at the same time, religion emerged as a self-consciously distinct discursive formation partially through the defence of women's rights.8
That gender is a regulatory and disciplinary discourse has been well established. Even the space of empire as central to the emergence of bourgeois conceptions of masculinity and femininity has been demonstrated in a variety of historical contexts.9 However, the ways in which gender, religion and empire were connected to sovereignty are less clear. The historical trajectories of the father-son duo Sayyid Alawi and Sayyid Fadl illustrate this point well.
Around the same time that the fledgling monarchies on the western edge of Eurasia were spreading outwards into the world, undertaking new projects of exploration and conquest departing from the pre-existing patterns of exchange among and between far-flung peoples, what was to become the Sufi pathway of the Alawis saw its members spreading from the region of the Hadramawt in Yemen along the Indian Ocean littoral. Their diaspora would come to span a vast area from the Arabian Peninsula, along the East African coast, and into South and South-East Asia. Engseng Ho has brilliantly mapped the remarkable parallels and disjunctures in world historical and political-theological terms between this expansion of a society based on a book and a prophetic genealogical tradition, and that of the merchant colonial states.10 However, despite the importance of genealogy to the formation of the Alawi order and to the possibilities (un)available to its members when negotiating the new exigencies of sovereign power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the role of gender has been largely overlooked.
When gender is treated, it is in a predictable way that presupposes a historical constancy conceptually and located in relation to marriage and kinship, even as those patterns themselves might be said to change over time. Marriage practices allowing male members to take foreign wives were of course essential to the reproduction of the Alawi order across transoceanic domains, as Ho has shown. While the anthropological treatment of gender makes possible a rich social historical accounting of this diasporic society, it does not show how gender itself was conceptualised or discursively effective and variable, thus making it difficult to parse the connections among gender, religion and sovereignty in the time of colonial modernity.11
Although it is impossible to generalise about ‘Sufism and gender’ throughout time, the case of the Alawis demonstrates at the very least that the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad's life so central to Sufi discourses could become a resource to be deployed in specific historical situations that may very well materialise gender as an object.12 Of course, the traditions of the Prophet's life and his revelations from God written down in the Quran constitute fundamental sources for the laws that would eventually regulate gender relations, and the reinterpretations of those sources now form a significant site of contestation among Muslim men and women.13 As the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran evinces, from its revolutionary foundation to the present, the very nature of state is often at stake.14 That question of the state and the concomitant problem of sovereignty, however, are not ancient, and it is here that a somewhat detailed recounting of a portion of the Alawi history of expansion, specifically involving the family of Sayyid Alawi, would be instructive.
One of the ‘authorising’ truths of the Alawi sayyids as spiritual guides and political figures is their documented genealogical claim of descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and the sons she had with Ali her husband; Hasan and Husayn.15 Their collective historical imagination, as Ho has persuasively shown, was linked to a series of migrations, going back to the Prophet's original hijra (622 CE) from Mecca to Medina, which marked the beginning of the Islamic calendar or year one of a new movement. Another foundational migration for the Alawis was the arrival in the Hadramawt from Basra of Ahmad bin ‘Isa, who established the new sayyid centre in Tarim in the tenth century. The figure who put the Alawis in position for the leap across the ocean was Abu Bakr al-‘Aydarus, ‘the Adeni’; he was a migrant from Tarim who died in Aden in 1508. This pattern of travel to another place, death, burial and the ensuing sacralisation of the gravesite ‘gave representational shape to [a diaspora]’ that spread from southern Arabia across the Indian Ocean.16
So by the time that Sayyid Alawi made his journey from Yemen to South India in the second half of the eighteenth century, this particular Sufi pathway had long established itself as a recognisable society with carefully fashioned markers of religious, political and cultural distinction. Indeed, when Sayyid Alawi reached the Malabar Coast of what is today the state of Kerala, other Alawis who had preceded him by many years, some of whom were close relations, received him.17 His arrival in India at this time complicates the old narrative of displacement and demise of the Arab networks that ostensibly followed the expansion of the Portuguese and Dutch and then French and English through the trading worlds of the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.18 Indeed just as a new economic logic and technical advancements were preparing to bring about a wholesale shift in the way things had always been done (that is, produced and exchanged) – something mercantilist incursions into Asian markets did not fully achieve – the Alawi diaspora was reaching its maturity as a social and political formation.
One sign of that maturity could be seen in Sayyid Alawi's move from the coastal town of Calicut into the interior of Malabar, where he established a mosque and attracted a community centred around the small village of Mampuram. His fame as a man of special spiritual gifts and noble genealogy spread quickly, attracting followers including converts from other parts of Malabar. One of the stories of conversion that is remembered by Mappilas and recorded as part of the colonial investigations into the family of Sayyid Alawi is most intriguing. First, a cursory examination of the macro-political context is necessary to make sense of the story.
Sayyid Alawi, considered the patron saint of Mampuram today, arrived in the fabled trading city of Calicut around 1766. This was a time of shifting fortunes for the fabled seat of the prosperous Samudri Rajas (Lords of the Sea), the Zamorins. The vicissitudes of transoceanic trade and the relatively successful state-building projects to the north and south of Calicut lessened the fortunes of the latter in the last half of the century with the rise of competing ports and the increasingly restricted access to its own hinterlands.19 That change of fortune and lessened enthusiasm among Calicut's Hindu rulers for their historic courting of Arab merchants might be another reason why Sayyid Alawi moved his family into the interior. He settled his people along the Kadalundi River, established the first mosque, and as mentioned, quickly attracted converts and a following of Mappilas (Muslims) from areas even further afield. Mampuram was the birthplace and in a sense the site of Sayyid Fadl's patrimony – material and spiritual.20 The hagiographies of his father written in Malayalam attest to the miraculous powers that he possessed and passed on to his son; while the colonial record attests to the efforts of Fadl and his heirs to regain their lands and other property in Malabar after they were exiled in 1852.21
The migration to the interior, however, only forced these Alawis to confront another aspect of the economic transformation afoot at the time in much of the world; as trade balances shifted permanently in favour of a north-western Europe poised for the industrial revolution, other regions saw the rise of new feudalisms.22 The expansion of the Mysore and Travancore rajas was in part predicated on novel fiscal regimes introduced when the states they sought to build became players in long-distance trade beyond the level of customs enforcers.23 As a result of interventions at the level of local production, feudal-like relations in land were established across the south west. Malabar, in particular, had been a region of independent small farmers and larger households, which had made their own decisions about what to sow and what to sell, viewing their land as private property avant la lettre.24 These were now subordinated to a new dispensation characterised by an onerous system of taxation, the implementation of which put private property in land more firmly in the hands of the largest owners – princes, Nair military chiefs and Brahmins – even as nascent centralised states were taking shape.25
It was into this context of shifting relations of property and rule that the British East India Company inserted itself in 1792, restoring and re-entrenching the position of Hindu elites over and against the Muslims.26 The latter's numbers had increased in Malabar coincident with the rising rates of dispossession of farmers from the subaltern ranks coupled with expectations of a new social and political order that grew up in the preceding decades. The invasions of Malabar between 1766 and 1790 by Hayder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan had seemingly privileged Muslims, particularly in the last several years.27 At the very least, the state projects surrounding and imposing on Malabar created a space however unstable for a re-negotiation of the prior terms of authority and control over resources. Perhaps the sudden reversal again in the balance of power in a time of rising expectations explains the ferocity, frequency and duration (over a century) of ‘Moplah outrages’ and ‘outbreaks’ that ensued upon British annexation of the region and the supposed restitution of janmi rights to property.28
Unable to grasp, or wilfully denying, that a genuine political mobilisation of Muslims was taking place, British officials on the ground identified all of the various uprisings as the product of one force, fanaticism.29 No matter the statement of leaders explicitly declaring their dissatisfaction with the current political dispensation, particularly in terms of property regime, their own explanations for rising up were dismissed as unintelligible in light of the real underlying motive for their actions: fanatic adherence to a barbaric interpretation of Islam.30 The motivations, ironically, were deemed individualistic; that is, claims of collective solidarity were merely rhetorical masks for hatred and savagery since what the insurgent really sought was martyrdom, thereby securing for him entrance to paradise.31 Nonetheless, the political importance of Sayyid Alawi and Fadl, whether as instigators of ‘fanaticism’ or serious contenders for sovereign power in Malabar, unwittingly made its way into the colonial record.
The local political tensions were further heightened by a difference between Hindu and Muslim traditions surrounding women's dress and in some sense rights.32 The controversy surrounds a custom among Hindus requiring lower-caste women to appear topless before upper castes as part of a complex set of rituals related to maintaining social distinctions but also linked to property, marriage rights and kinship ties.33 When conversions to Islam did occur, as they seemed to in significant numbers at the turn of the century and after, one of the rights accrued by these women was the right to cover their bodies and, at least theoretically, access to a more egalitarian order. The specific case, discussed below, appears in the colonial record as one incident in a series of what were termed ‘outrages’ for which the dominant explanation remained fanaticism, at least through the mid-nineteenth century.
Although various forms of opposition to the British incursions into Malabar occurred from the very beginning of the contest for the area in the 1760s, colonial officials defined a discrete period of unrest, riots and uprisings beginning in 1836 and dubbed them collectively ‘the Moplah Outrages’.34 The correspondence on the matter throughout 1859 was later published under that title and helped give shape to the idea of a dangerous trans-regional Islamic ‘bigotry’ spawned in Arabia.35 Accordingly, T. L. Strange, in his influential report as Special Commissioner investigating the incidents, characterised the case of the women forced to convert back to Hinduism and expose their upper bodies as a ‘case of the purest fanaticism’ and linked it to Sayyid Alawi's preaching.36
The details are sparse, but more revealing for our purposes is how the evidence of fanatical outrage is organised. In Strange's report, the case in question appears as number ten of thirty-one ‘events’ beginning with the knifing of four Hindus resulting in one death on 26 November 1836. Only sixteen of the events were deemed proper outrages, wherein fanaticism and violence were joined, resulting in terror and murder.37 The thirty-one events were first summarised, similar to number ten below; then, they were categorised according to various criteria (location, number of attackers, number killed, intent, results and so on); finally, each of the outrages and potential outrages were examined in detail for causes.
X. On the 19th October 1843, one Koonancherry Aly Attan and six others, killed one Kaprat Krishna Pannikar, took post in the house of another individual, and were put an end to by a party of Military and Police on the 24th idem.38
He goes on to offer a fairly extensive discussion of outrage number ten, but the question of gender and rights is entirely downplayed and explicitly so.
Strange points out from the start that there was a controversy prior to the murder, which involved twenty-six ‘leading Moplahs’ lodging what seems to have been a formal petition (given there was an official inquiry) against Kaprat Pannikar in which he was accused of violating the rights of two lower-caste women and their four children. The women worked on his land. He was said to have refused to acknowledge their conversion to Islam and forced them to remove their ‘Moplah garments’; moreover, the accusers charged him with intimidating and physically assaulting the women. Strange immediately dismisses the accusations declaring that the ‘evidence was clearly concocted’ on the grounds that there could not have been a Muslim witness to such attacks. In other words, if the women had been mistreated, he assumed, the Hindu landlord would never have done so in the presence of Muslims.
He quickly glosses over the formal inquiry conducted by a Muslim and Hindu official and the Magistrate H. V. Connolly's removal of Pannikar from his post as adhikari (village head) in order to support his assumption that any disturbance to the order as it was could only be the fault of Muslims and their hatred of Hindus. The thin veil of objectivity displayed while sifting through the events since 1836 falls here, revealing what Conrad Wood has pointed out was an agenda set in Madras, the southern seat of Company rule. ‘He [Strange] was to bear in mind that his “grand object” should be “to secure to the Nair and Brahmin population the most ample protection and safety possible against the effect of Moplah fanaticism”’.39 Scholars have carefully dissected the byzantine politics of bringing Malabar under East India Company rule, going as far as to reveal the conceptual refiguring of the terrain and the character of its major players along colonial lines.40 However, the possibility of other conceptual grids on which the nineteenth-century changes to power relations were mapped has been little studied in their own right.41
It is this possibility that the case of conversion and re-conversion might open up if viewed through the lens of gender and the two women's stories – albeit impossible to know in full – are pried from the clutches of the colonial records that privileged the narrative of Mappila ‘outrages’. This does not mean turning to the Mappila version of things in order to provide the subaltern perspective or the indigenous voice.42 Rather, since our objectives are slightly less modest, it requires trying to tease out from the records of Alawi expansions and of British rule the ways in which religion and politics were mediated by gender, which in turn produced a new conception of all three as the question of sovereignty was worked out in the new context of liberal empire and its government of men.43
The two tiyya women who converted to Islam then seemingly apostatised under duress along with their children, are lost to history. Stories have nonetheless been spun around their subjecthood whether the subjection was to class, caste, religion, gender or state. It is in the government's efforts to subject the population of Malabar to a relatively new dispensation that brings to light the case of the two women, Strange's event number ten.44 Indeed, the colonial state's process of becoming such is thoroughly entangled with the terms chosen, and not chosen, to inscribe these women into the official record.45
Terms that were explicitly refused in this case included truth, justice, and equality as they might relate to the rights of women.46 Despite Mappila insistence that these were indeed the appropriate terms through which to decide the case and that ‘the cause justified the deed’, for Strange and his superiors, who sought to establish colonial rule as the new dispensation, those very same terms appeared differently. To the extent that there were any virtues or rights that existed beyond the personal private sphere, they were to be solely determined by the party responsible for public order – a distinction Strange used to distinguish outrage from ordinary crime.47 In this context, gender and religion emerge as new discourses forming subjects who were ambivalently located in relation to the emerging political sovereignty that was centred on the idea of state and effected through new governmental techniques.
The self-conscious Mappila tradition recounts the conversion episode differently. First, the converts do not seem to have been related, they are simply noted as three men and three women. Their names after conversion – the ceremony was officiated by Sayyid Alawi himself – were changed to Ahmad, Husayn, Salim, Aisha, Khadija and Halima. They all hailed from the same village and worked on Pannikar's lands. As soon as he saw the women wearing the tops symbolising their conversion, he apparently flew into a rage, tore them off, and commanded all of the converts to return to their proper rite and station. When one of the women defiantly returned the next day fully clothed, he assaulted her and tore off her blouse. The offences of Pannikar against the religion and against the rights of the women to modest dress and respect sparked a communal outrage, which resulted in his murder.
Interestingly, before rehearsing the details above, the official Mappila record in Malayalam as far as there can be one, is careful to indicate that though forming part of Muslim collective memory, these were only the immediate circumstances of Pannikar's murder. The real cause of this instance of protest, one among many, was deep levels of social inequality, particularly in relation to land tenure – the same explanation colonial officials had arrived at while still desperately ‘seeking’ the roots of Mappila unhappiness and unrest at the end of the nineteenth century.48
The memory of Sayyid Alawi is preserved and carefully managed by the Mappila community in Kerala. What interests us here is how that memory aligns with the colonial archive and hence reflects a modernist bias that obscures the historicity of the moment at which the community as such was materialised. The figure of Sayyid Alawi served communal purposes, indeed helped forge an identity, but the life lived by that person should not be reduced to historical determinations, if our aim is to recuperate another conceptual grid of gender and religion. Indeed the clue to read the form-of-life inhabited by Sayyid Alawi as greater than particularistic communal happenings, especially occurrences of violence, is given in the efforts of the Mappila official narrative to shield the venerable saint from that very same everydayness of ordinary folk.
As the bearer of an Islamic prophetic tradition, both as lineal descendant and learned scholar, in a South Asian frontier space, the sayyid was a ‘stranger-king’ with strong claims of universal sovereignty.49 If we regard the ‘Moplah outrages’ narrative, event number ten specifically, from this perspective, then we might have another view on the global emergence of the government of men as a resolution to the problem of sovereignty.
Mappila and colonial records agree that the case represented a personal affront to Sayyid Alawi. Here is Strange:
The Tears [tiyya], whose dresses are said to have been removed are described as having owed their conversion to him (which was doubtless the case), and he is represented as having taken to heart the removal of these badges of their conversion by the Pannikar, and to have roused up one of the criminals to declare that he would avenge the dishonour thus put upon the Tangul [Sayyid] and the faith. The Tangul is made to have had miraculous intimation of the accomplishment of the Pannikar's death, to the extreme relief of his soul, and throughout his interest and agency in the affair are strikingly set forth.50
Strange goes on to suggest that all of the ‘facts’ he has learned about the case correspond to those given in the Mappila song composed in ‘celebration’ of the ‘outbreak’, and he believes the song's association of Sayyid Alawi with the case to be ‘true’. According to K. K. Mohammed Abdul Sathar, the war song ‘Cherur Pada Pattu’ and Mappila tradition hold that it was Sayyid Alawi's miraculous appearance on the scene that resulted in deaths on the British side.51 Sathar notes how improbable that was, given he was around ninety-three and died the following year, however, it is worth reflecting on the superhuman character of his ‘role’ in the history of the region.
This rare piece of primary evidence, the ‘Cherur Pada Pattu’, affords an insight into the Mappila perspective that puts the ‘outrages’ squarely in the register of war. Striking the note of war correlates with the religious opinions that Sayyid Alawi is said to have issued on questions pertaining to invasion, foreign domination and occupation of lands inhabited by Muslims.52 Indeed it would not be shocking to assume that Sayyid Alawi, who had arrived in Malabar in the last third of the eighteenth century at a time of war between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, continued to view his reality as dar al-harb [the abode of war].53 The conversion controversy and subsequent violence occurring one year before his death might have been especially sensitive as the case engendered the essence of the modern struggle for sovereignty: the government of souls.
In this struggle, it was not a kingdom in the ancient territorial sense that was at stake. Sovereignty, according to Foucault's genealogy, finds in the government of men a radical solution to the perennial problem of reproduction. Hence, it was that additional claim to power, or powerful claim, the new colonial rulers added to the mix, which sustained the conflict with the Alawis long after the wars with the kingdom of Mysore had been settled. It is fair to assume that Sayyid Alawi genuinely regarded his relationship to his flock as one of care and that he saw the Christians as pretenders. From his perspective, it was impossible for them to offer access to the same Truth and promise salvation, as that required a specific set of disciplinary knowledge and techniques they did not possess – not to mention a special noble genealogy.
Thus, gender in this case was not merely a descriptive category but a powerful vehicle for the worldly performance of Islamic universality. It appeared on the stage of history at a moment when religious discourse – hailed as religion through a juridico-scientific measure of fanaticism – was asked to take account of itself in relation to a new power, ostensibly more modern and secular. Accordingly, the conversion of lower-caste women to Islam was given a different signification in the face of a Hindu-Christian / landlord-merchant agreement on the terms of sovereign power in Malabar. The right to convert in this case could not be disentangled from a question of women's rights. Given the prior history of Brahmin and Nair men's access to lower-caste women's bodies – even if only to gaze upon them – and given the political dispensation in Malabar since 1792, it became possible for a religiously mediated gender politics to subtend acts of conversion. And for Sayyid Alawi and his heir, the question of gender was also a question of sovereignty to the extent that it was literally their God-given duty to care for and cultivate members of an Islamic society, to engage in the government of souls and to expand the domain of such government. Society is the apposite term here, since Malabar for the Alawis was only one node of a far-flung geographical network. So even as the British viewed the Mappilas as a ‘community’, the conceptual grid on which the Alawis located gender, religion and women's rights was far more expansive than that localising term indexed.
The political-theological contours of Alawi society and the conceptions of gender within it were historically shaped in ways that deeply reflected movements across space, geographical and mystical. This Sufi pathway's spiritual quest for perfection, for the Absolute, was entwined, among other things, with a universal mission to enlighten others as to the truth that would secure salvation.54 The late eighteenth- / nineteenth-century colonial encounter in southern India between a branch of an expanding Arab Muslim society and a branch of an expanding British Christian company generated a unique yet in no way singular engagement with the question of sovereignty that was negotiated in part via a politics of gender.55
The changes in the early modern world that made possible such an encounter have been analysed now from numerous angles, with economic historians especially interested in explaining the reasons for the ‘European miracle’ or the ‘great divergence’.56 However, the conditions of asymmetry were in themselves asymmetrical, far more striated and intercalated across space than the traditional east-west dichotomies allow.57 Correspondingly, movements of protest questing after salvation through spiritual discipline and material changes were certainly not the sole provenance of Sufis.58 Nonetheless, the particular configuration of gender, religion and empire in Malabar foregrounded women's rights in a way that was uncanny. According to conventional gender or world historical paradigms, the defender of women's rights in this context is a surprising agent and the content of the right seems dubious.
If we refuse liberal, linear and geographically bounded understandings of the passage into modernity and historicise the overly generalised notion that ‘indigenous’ discourses were all subordinated to, and thoroughly transformed by, colonialism, then the possibility of a gender politics in Islam that forwarded the rights of women in modern times becomes not only conceivable but deeply historical.59 Transcending tropes of submission and oppression by treating rights as a political-theological issue in Islam does not mean overlooking the regulatory dimensions of gender as a discursive formation activated and deployed in a new historical context. In fact the former is contingent on showing the latter.
The right of women to cover their torsos, which may from the vantage point of the twenty-first century constitute an ironic end, became, in the context of a caste-based social order, a hotly contested issue. Overlaying the dynamic was a political and economic alliance of Hindu landlords and British merchants, which intensified and inflected the politics of gender with problems of sovereignty that were being negotiated at the same time. In that historic moment, Islam's representatives in the form of the Alawi society fell on the side of women's rights, while the Hindu elite staunchly opposed it, and the English company chose a position of ‘willed ignorance’. Gender in turn became a forceful apparatus.
As in other contexts of gender's materialisation as a means of disciplining and regulating and consequently forming a subject, event number ten reveals more than a politics of identity. It partially illuminates a history of the gendered, sovereign subject's emergence in India. That is a history that cannot be written from the subaltern perspective for all of the reasons Spivak and others have masterfully demonstrated. Nevertheless, the problem of conversion here was coupled with the problem of sovereignty, and when regarded through the lens of gender, histories of Islam, Hinduism and colonialism appear entangled in ways that do not presume to know the play, characters or ending before they were written.
The gender politics endorsed by Sayyid Alawi can only be appreciated as a discursively embedded phenomenon. As such, the religious tradition to which the sayyid was beholden and of which he was (according to the records, quite literally) possessed is revealed through event number ten as a transforming and transformative discourse. The conversion trouble involving the tiyya women was not exclusively a story of gender nor caste nor religion nor politics; it was a story also of ethics and sovereignty. Notions of justice, right and good were at play. Sayyid Alawi in this vein was not a representative of an orthodox Islam fixed in time or centred on the juridical; as a Sufi, he was an interpreter of and guide on the way to God. Furthermore, as a man of noble descent he was a figure of worldly authority. The form-of-life engendered here by this member of the Alawi society bespoke another sovereignty but one nonetheless that shared with the English company a notion of government that took as its object individual souls. It is through gender and its politics – activated once gender appears as an apparatus of power – that this ground of sovereignty ironically shared and contested by religious society and secular company enter history.