“Revolution” – inqilāb – in their attempts to fathom the political changes rippling through India and the Indian Ocean, many hajjis and contemporary actors fell back on that keyword.

In 1787, for example, a pilgrim who had reached the Arabian Hijaz from the trans-Gangetic tracts of the Doab found himself pondering the historical progress of empires. Summarizing what the “lords of history” had written regarding the early Islamic caliphates, Rafiʿ-ud-Din Ahmad Faruqi Muradabadi (d. 1810) reoriented his thoughts to the historical present. On Ottoman rule over Mecca, he privileged that state’s oversight of the hajj. It was by dint of patronizing the pilgrimage, Rafiʿ-ud-Din insisted, that sultans like the current emperor ʿAbdul Hamid Khan (ʿAbdülhamid I, r. 1774–1789) managed to maintain their sovereign dignity. In contrast to the Mughals, whose rule had been rocked by “revolution,” Rum (the Ottoman empire) had thus yet to reveal any cracks of vulnerability in its “pillars of sultanate.” Truly, it was “felicitous that of all the emperors (padishahs) of the world, God has kept the Haramain with the Turkish sultan.”Footnote ¹ Rafiʿ-ud-Din was an ʿālim, an Islamic scholar. Within a generation of his death, a biographical compendium of South Asia’s ʿulama even recalled him as “among the most learned authorities of India.”Footnote ² His emphasis on the pious obligations of rulers as a key criterion of kingship, as indeed his buoyant encomium to an empire then struggling to keep fissiparous forces in check in Arabia, certainly owed to his specific cast of mind as a theologian. But, there were also others besides him.

Scribes, bureaucrats, poets, royals – the views of pilgrims from surprisingly different backgrounds now began to refract the myriad consequences of “a world turned upside down.” In turn, their firsthand accounts of hajj travel also began resonating with what historians, with increasing alacrity, are calling a “global age of revolutions.” Starting in the eighteenth century, trends that led to the breakup of old regimes and the formation of new powers worldwide were vividly evident in both South Asia and the Islamic world. Combined with developments in economies of long-distance shipping, which significantly added to the scale and complexity of interregional interactions, Mughal India and the Ottoman Middle East alike saw dissident provincial elites and brazen European conquests intensify their drift toward decentralization. But if historians have mainly studied these interregional developments through modular (or thematic) and comparative (or etic) perspectives, contemporary Indian pilgrims were both literally and figuratively connecting the Indian Ocean to weigh in on the most pressing problem of the era, namely, regime change, or “empire-making and empire-breaking.”Footnote ³ In the process, they were also supplying distinct intellectual vindications to the historians’ “converging,” “world,” “Eurasian,” and “oceanic” “age of revolutions,”Footnote ⁴ albeit in a vernacular idiom.Footnote ⁵

Muslim Pilgrims from Empire to Revolution

The perspectives that pilgrims brought to empire were unique. The ideas and moods they mobilized were not. It has been argued, after all, that “the ‘age of revolutions’ arrived early in India.”Footnote ⁶ Eighteenth-century men of letters looking to conceptualize the rapid decentralization of the Mughal world quite consistently landed on the Indo-Persian term inqilāb, meaning the inversion of order, or the reversal of fortune.Footnote ⁷ As early as the 1730s, vicious aristocratic infighting and the violent dethronement of multiple emperors in Delhi were being described as “the revolutions of this time of wonders.”Footnote ⁸ Frequency of use speeded up thereafter, and under the sign of inqilāb fell matters as disparate as Afghan warrior invasions around the Himalayan rims of the Punjab and the localization of nawabi proconsular power in the deltaic floodplains of Bengal.Footnote ⁹ With their historic victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British also began adding to the chorus. Rafiʿ-ud-Din’s oblique critique of the Mughals makes sense, moreover, when we consider the proliferation of new literary genres in this period, whether dynastic chronicles that gave “warning” (ʿibrat-nāma) or poetry whose focal tenet was sociocultural “tumult” (shahr-āshob).Footnote ¹⁰ Still, hajjis stood apart in that they understood that the gathering crises in the material and normative foundations of empire were of a piece with transformations coursing around the Indian Ocean. For them, inqilāb or revolution was unrestricted to India.

This chapter serves two purposes. It first clarifies the objective contexts for why the thought-worlds of pilgrims were implicated in imperium. It then examines the ways in which the first-person accounts of individual hajjis reckoned with imperial change in both South Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Instead of simply assuming that the relationship between power and pilgrimage was natural or self-evident, together with Chapter 2, my focus here falls on surveying the making, and remaking, of imperial cultures of hajj over the long durée. To this end, I reveal how the Mughals paved the passages of Indian hajj pilgrims through state support, and how patronage regimes fared as imperial authority broke down.

Scholars have typically turned to the institutional investments made by states in the hajj to highlight how kings and empires legitimated their rule. I argue that they had deeper ramifications still, as evidenced by the voices of those who took advantage of a Mughal infrastructure of buildings, ships, stipends, and texts meant for the hajj. As recent scholarship has stressed, states not only appropriated specific practices like pilgrimage to generate empire-wide traditions of religiosity. As subjects, hajjis laid their own expectations at the feet of mammoth empires.Footnote ¹¹ Nir Shafir has persuasively demonstrated, thus, that “mobility and materiality” came together at the main Middle Eastern pilgrimage route through Damascus in Syria to produce a uniquely “Ottoman hajj,” one that touched that “empire’s subjects at the community or individual level.”Footnote ¹² What follows contends that the Mughals similarly defined imperial identities through official patronage. This in turn made up the “institutional latticework,” to quote Jeremy Adelman’s thesis on “an age of imperial revolutions,” that informed the “embedded politics” of how pilgrims grasped the later unraveling of empire.Footnote ¹³ And where the Ottomans had Damascus, the Mughals had the Indian Ocean port city of Surat. To examine the birth of an imperial tradition, and the ruptures and continuities it experienced from the mid-eighteenth century onward, the first part of this chapter is mainly anchored at that Gujarati emporium.Footnote ¹⁴ From there, I move to survey the paradox of how, imperial decline notwithstanding, the hajj continued and even expanded after the Mughals.

Subsequent sections of the chapter scrutinize the written passages of individual South Asian pilgrims. Through the narrative accounts of a wide array of Indians who traveled to Arabia and the Middle East between 1739 and 1857, I explain how they each responded to, but were themselves also transformed by, transregional “revolutions.”

To begin, I foreground the interregional connections of pilgrims by noting that it was the hajj that afforded many contemporaries discrete views of the “world.” Thus, what was once primarily an artifice for elite ideologies of universal kingship in Mughal IndiaFootnote ¹⁵ now plumbed additional depths of meaning.Footnote ¹⁶ Against this broader framing, I note that the narratives of pilgrims can help us appreciate how historical actors themselves grappled with “the massive transnational transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”Footnote ¹⁷ Specifically, it is argued here that pilgrimage circulations – combined with imperial revolutions – produced new visions of agency and community among Muslims.Footnote ¹⁸ To extend the analytical meanings of the “age of revolutions” beyond Europe and the Atlantic, historians have elaborated thoughtful suggestions. Most will doubtless now shrink from advancing any progressivist history of democracy or industrialization. As C. A. Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel have instead noted, in its “global” iteration, the epoch’s most prominent hallmarks were: (1) changes in cultural realms like religion, which witnessed greater external homogenization but also additional internal fragmentations; (2) upheavals of social hierarchy in ways that did not necessarily translate to social equity; and (3) on top of it all, the first truly worldwide wave of European – but really, British – colonial expansion.Footnote ¹⁹

How can hajjis help us develop these schematic propositions? Broadly, but respectively, I suggest that pilgrims who were witnesses to revolutions voiced revivalist opinions on religiosity, revanchist attitudes toward social status, and increasingly, transimperial understandings of political subjecthood. Befitting a revolutionary age, some became involved in actual acts of revolt too.Footnote ²⁰ But before pilgrims themselves, I turn to the making of a Mughal hajj before inqilāb.

Mughals and Mecca: Before Inqilāb

The hajj from South Asia was patronized by the medieval Delhi Sultanate and its satellite polities. A lively traffic also existed from coastal Indian regions like Malabar.Footnote ²¹ Even so, it was with the Mughals, and especially with Emperor Akbar (r. 1542–1605), that organized administrative efforts began ensuring pilgrimage movements from north India. Not long after the Mughals annexed Gujarat and made it into an imperial province, the first imperial pilgrim qāfila or “caravan” was dispatched to Surat in 1576 from the then-capital of Agra. With only occasional interruptions, that imperial tradition continued down to Aurangzeb, during whose reign the empire reached its maximum territorial extents.Footnote ²² While substantial imperial investments were made in the hajj throughout, the precedents were ultimately set by Akbar. One chronicler at his court observed that the maiden Mughal hajj caravan had led to the establishment of pious endowments for the Holy Places (wuqūf-i Haramain), the creation of an office for the Commander of Pilgrims (imārat-i hujjāj), the organization of imperial ships to secure passage across the Arabian Sea (darya-yi ʿUmān), and the allocation of alms and offerings for pilgrims and notables in the Hijaz. As eulogy to the emperor, the chronicler added: “If the Kaʿba is the destination for the community of Islam/His Majesty, the King of Kings, is the benefactor to the community of the Kaʿba.”Footnote ²³ To be sure, practical and political problems alike sometimes unsettled Mughal efforts to transport hajjis through the Indian Ocean. On the whole, however, it was the success of the early modern hajj that remains remarkable.

The Mughal hajj was eminently oceanic. Mention of an overland route through Afghanistan was occasionally made in imperial records. Yet, as a royal letter from Akbar to the Sharif of Mecca itself made known, the empire’s Central Asian frontiers constituted troublesome terrain, bristling with hostile and obstreperous groups.Footnote ²⁴ In the mid-seventeenth century, a Mughal prince near Kabul was likewise told that pilgrims taking these “long hilly routes” to Mecca often fell victim to plunder, or worse.Footnote ²⁵ With the collapse of the neighboring Safavid empire in Iran in 1722, and the ensuing tribal revolts that led to the rise of the Afsharid and Durrani regimes, the situation likely only worsened in the eighteenth century. Though remaining vague on particulars, soon after Nadir Shah’s invasion of his hometown, the celebrated Mughal scribe Anand Ram Mukhlis (d. 1750) noted that there were “two routes to reach Mecca the Great” – maritime and terrestrial. He cautioned, though, that “it is said that in comparison to the sea route (rāh-i daryā), the dry route (rāh-i khushk) is more onerous.”Footnote ²⁶

The “overland” route to the Hijaz usually also had a maritime leg.Footnote ²⁷ Typically, this entailed an initial seaborne journey from India through the Persian Gulf. As one pilgrim, himself on his way to India from Najaf and Karbala, discovered in the early nineteenth century, Basra was especially favored as a port of call by Shiʿa hajjis, who were usually there to detour at the shrine cities of Iraq for “Visitations to the Threshold” (ziyārat-i ʿatabat).Footnote ²⁸ Illustrative of how it was through pilgrimage circulations that many from this part of the world engaged in narratives of “world-making,” this particular account by a traveler was titled Mirror of the Events of the World (Mirʾāt al-Ahwal-i Jahān-nāma). Certainly, there were the inevitable trips made by foot, mule, or bullock-cart from South Asia’s hinterlands to its different coasts, where pilgrims often spent weeks or months while awaiting the sailing winds of the monsoons.Footnote ²⁹ Hajjis remaining at the mercy of the mawsim, with ships becalmed or sailing seasons just missed, were consequently common refrains, from the Akbari era to the very ends of the age of sail.Footnote ³⁰

Over that long time span, the empire’s main commercial port was also its primary springboard for the hajj. Though experiencing economic downturns from the 1720s due to political turmoil in the hinterland, Surat’s resilience was reflected in the fact that colonial Bombay, Calcutta, or Madras only fully began to overtake the Mughal entrepot’s status as India’s “Gate of Mecca” in the nineteenth century.Footnote ³¹ Surat’s catchment area also extended beyond north India proper. As late as the 1820s, a Bengali pilgrim, who ended up voyaging back home via Chittagong in the Bay of Bengal, averred that “anyone wishing to go on hajj from India boards ships from Surat.”Footnote ³² Much of this owed to the investments the Mughals had made in Gujarat’s infrastructures of hajj travel. To this end, the Mughals added to the built environment of the city, even as they inherited parts of it, as for example Surat’s fortress, which had in fact been constructed by an Ottoman nobleman at the Gujarati Sultanate.

Apart from funding inns, ships, and soup-kitchens (langar), the Mughals also sought to defray the expenses of hajj travel by establishing perpetual tax-exempt endowments meant for Mecca (waqf, pl. auqāf), some of which were sufficiently important to require their own supervising officers (dārogha).Footnote ³³ Pilgrims congregating in Surat had several options for lodging, and much here depended on their personal or professional networks. An ʿālim or a Sufi might have bided their time at a shrine or a madrasa,Footnote ³⁴ whereas travelers to Arabia lucky enough to be on a state stipendiary (zād-i rāhila) could choose to rent their own lodgings.Footnote ³⁵ But as one hajji from late imperial Delhi noted, Surat and the roads leading to it from upper India were studded with rest-houses, built by the Mughals, their regional satraps, or wealthy merchants.Footnote ³⁶ Imperial passports, ordering officials to exempt road tolls or provide safe passage to overseas travelers with connections to the state, were also sometimes issued from Delhi.Footnote ³⁷

For Mughal buildings meant for hajjis specifically, pride of place went to Surat’s caravanserai (see Figure 1.1). Constructed in the large “imperial” style, it could very likely accommodate about a thousand guests, not to mention barbers, tailors, blacksmiths, and other ancillary attendants.Footnote ³⁸ Completed in 1644, the structure dated from the time of the great imperial building spree that saw “the crystallization of Mughal style” under Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), patron-constructor of the Red Fort in Delhi, and the Taj Mahal in Agra.Footnote ³⁹ The serai’s foundational stela defined its purpose narrowly. Worth quoting in its entirety, it also provided a richly condensed portrait of the concrete complexities that were involved in organizing long-distance hajj travel from Mughal India, and how the material planning of pilgrimage could even implicate the more rarefied ideologies of empire:

Figure 1.1 At the Gate of Mecca: Mughal hajj caravanserai, Surat, Gujarat, built in 1644. Built by the Mughal nobleman Ishaq Beg Yazid Haqiqat Khan (d. 1663–1664).

Source: Photograph by author.

State sponsorship of pilgrimage was thus clearly aimed at inspiring affective bonds of subjection and loyalty to the cult of the Timurid dynasty. As Akbar’s influential courtier-ideologue Abul Fazl affirmed, monuments like serais were “conducive to that dignity which is so necessary for worldly power.”Footnote ⁴¹ A chronicler in the early seventeenth century likewise remarked that building serais, making roads, and organizing hajj vessels were all exercises of “royal will” that were sure to leave an impression on travelers.Footnote ⁴² Significantly, the pastoral care of pilgrims was not just performed in the name of Mughal emperors. Appropriately for a “patrimonial-bureaucratic state,” which in its classical phase saw its subjects as members of a rambling household, the hajj also drew the patronage of lesser nobility and royal women.Footnote ⁴³ Among the latter, the hajj in fact had some of its most dynamic patrons and participants from early modern India.Footnote ⁴⁴ The builder of Surat’s serai, Yazid Khan (d. 1663–1664), was himself well-connected to the Mughal domestic world, having made his career first as a majordomo (khān-sāmān) and then as a palace steward (kat-khūda) under two noblewomen, including Shah Jahan’s queen-consort.Footnote ⁴⁵ The importance of imperial sponsorship can also be appreciated by how the Mughals continued to aspire to supporting maritime movements from Gujarat even after Delhi was convulsed by chaotic conflicts. Quixotically, thus, Farrukhsiyar (r. 1713–1719), eventual victim of regicide and “revolution,” persisted in promising his subject “flock” or raʿīyat in Surat new imperial buildings (never actually constructed) and security both “on sea and land” (arguably never achieved).Footnote ⁴⁶

The Mughals moreover financed corpuses of prescriptive didactic texts meant for the hajj. These explained the specifics of ritual (manāsik-i hajj) and provided information regarding pilgrimage itineraries (rāh-i hajj). The social context of its production is examined in detail in Chapter 3, but an imperial compilation of juridical opinions from 1679, the Fatāwa al-ʿĀlamgīrīya hence dedicated an entire section to the hajj. In ways at once formal and formative, it assembled legal judgments from a large body of authoritative texts from the Middle East (e.g., Fath al-Qadīr) and Central Asia (e.g., Fatāwa-yi Qāzi Khān) to elaborate for an Indian audience the canon law particulars of the hajj as per Hanafi jurisprudence.Footnote ⁴⁷ Texts like these were complemented, by the late seventeenth century, with more approachable (meaning less scholastic) Mughal hajj manuals, the most well-known of which was perhaps Safi ibn Wali’s Companion of Pilgrims (Anīs al-Hujjāj).Footnote ⁴⁸

By far the most popular hajj guide, however, was Muhyi-ud-Din Lari’s Futūh al-Haramain (Gifts of the Holy Places). Written in sultanate-era Gujarat and dedicated to its pre-Mughal ruler Muzaffar Shah II (r. 1511–1526), manuscripts of this text were widely copied and circulated in South, Central, and West Asia, including Mecca itself, over the next two centuries.Footnote ⁴⁹ Popular manuscripts such as these were not unaffordable, and when unilluminated, could sell at Indian book bazaars for as low as a rupee, or the weekly pay of an unskilled worker in Surat in 1700.Footnote ⁵⁰ Futūh al-Haramain’s popularity perhaps owed to the spread of Persian as an early modern Eurasian lingua franca, a process in which the Mughals of course played a lead role.Footnote ⁵¹ Or perhaps, its versified text proved a good mnemonic, both for hajj guides and for pilgrims constantly on the move. Whatever the case, into the late eighteenth century, the text continued to attract commentary in major Mughal metaliterary treatises.Footnote ⁵²

A fuller discussion of the maritime dimensions of the hajj will be taken up in the next chapter, which sheds light on state-owned and merchant ships that trafficked pilgrim passengers, as well as the material economies of South Asian exchanges with the bazaars of the Hijaz. Here it may be added that many from beyond Mughal courtly circles often drew attention to the empire’s support of the hajj pilgrimage, thereby revealing how the culture around it underwent a definite “Mughalization.” As Jorge Flores has recently defined it, Mughalization was the process through which the empire’s involvements in regionally specific cultures had a transformative effect on how contemporaries perceived and practiced those traditions. The hajj from South Asia was similarly absorbed into Mughal imperial culture. In this regard, contemporaries thus also often highlighted conflicts between the Mughals and rival early modern states. As imperial patronage of the hajj was often practiced with a competitive eye fixed at other empires, pilgrimage understandably also became a flashpoint for tense exchanges at the Subcontinent’s wider, “liquid frontiers.”Footnote ⁵³

In the 1570s, for example, a large qāfila of Mughal noblewomen and their almsgiving projects in Mecca provoked intense jealousy from the Ottomans, loath as they were to share with another dynasty the role of “Servitor of the Holy Places” (Ar., Khādim al-Haramain). From Istanbul, a flurry of decrees (Tr., ferman; Pers., firmān) were issued arguing that the altruism of the Mughal women was causing difficulties for the distribution of grain in Arabia, that the royal visitors were running afoul of Shariʿa norms, and that they should forthwith return home to India.Footnote ⁵⁴ As a result of this episode, an indignant Akbar momentarily even suspended the hajj from South Asia.Footnote ⁵⁵ Still, one of his subjects, who happened to be in Arabia at the time, only had fulsome praise for the ruler, without whose largesse “the felicity of hajj could not have been attained.”Footnote ⁵⁶ As it did a century later, frictions at times also flared between the Mughals and the political subordinates of the Ottomans in Arabia, the quasi-autonomous Sharifian rulers of Mecca. “Having heard of the great wealth of Hindustan, each year the Sharif of Noble Mecca sends here an envoy for his personal gain,” Aurangzeb noted testily in 1694.Footnote ⁵⁷ But for their part, even annals that were not directly commissioned by the Mughal court continued lavishing praise on that emperor for his support of both pilgrims and the pilgrimage.Footnote ⁵⁸

Pilgrims and Polities between Old and New

How, then, did the Mughal hajj change in the eighteenth century? Two features are here conspicuous. It is evident, first of all, that imperial decline equaled in a rather rapid fraying of patronage networks. Simultaneously, though, new states, both Indian and European, and for very different reasons, began to fill the vacuum left by the Timurids. In time, their efforts thus also began to expand the webs of the South Asian hajj.

“Previously the Mogul emperors maintained three or four vessels only for this destination,” reported a perceptive European observer in north India regarding pilgrim traffic to Jeddah. “It was in their principles very meritorious work and the most dignified use of their power.” By the 1770s, it was clear, however, that “the deterioration of their affairs of state has made it impossible to support this pious establishment.” Growing numbers of pilgrims were paying out-of-pocket fares to regional or European merchant ships to reach Arabia.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hajjis were themselves alive to these vicissitudes. By Rafiʿ-ud-Din’s count, exactly three ships once comprised the Mughal hajj fleet. Despite “state neglect,” even Emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748) continued sending charity to the Haramain. Times had changed. No Mughal ruler had since reaped the “bounty of this service.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In this section, I offer a summary of how the politics of hajj patronage evolved after the 1750s. Despite Mughal decentralization – owing both to internal problems and the advent of new polities in India – I show that the hajj from South Asia ultimately mirrored what has been described as “the outstanding paradox of the eighteenth century.” Like other precolonial traditions nurtured by the Mughals, pilgrimage therefore also persisted despite “political turbulence.” It, too, grew despite pockets of “economic decline” across late Mughal India.Footnote ⁶¹

However impressionistically, this was reflected in the numbers that journeyed to Mecca. As noted, an unprecedented 15,000 Indians traveled annually to Arabia in this period. M. N. Pearson calculated this figure from European accounts, but in this case, the restricted source-base cannot really be gainsaid. South Asians themselves did not venture any accurate statements on the matter.Footnote ⁶² So, as in the mid-eighteenth century, they might have simply referred to the “deep crush of people” in Medina;Footnote ⁶³ or as in the early nineteenth, they might have suggested, implausibly if proverbially, that “at the season of hajj close to ten lak [1 million] congregate at the mosque” in Mecca.Footnote ⁶⁴ Basing his estimate on seemingly extensive research, one scholar arrived at an annual total of 200,000 pilgrims from different parts of the world for the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ The same figure was cited by a contemporary commentator in India.Footnote ⁶⁶ That said, from the early 1800s, numbers did begin to drop due to disturbances and revolts in Arabia itself (on which more later). European adventurers traveling incognito as hajjis, like the Anglo-Swiss John Burckhardt (d. 1817) and the Spanish “Ali Bey” (d. 1818), noticed totals diminish by as much as a third in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

Travel picked up again after the Ottomans restored order in Arabia in 1818, the same year the British defeated the Marathas to begin consolidating power in India. While much has been made of the impact of steam travel on hajj, it was evidently rather slow to leave an impression. The voyage of a lone East India Company steamer in 1829 – the first to putter across the Indian Ocean, from Bombay to Suez – therefore had little apparent effect on the pilgrimage in the face of a decade-long economic depression in South Asia on the one hand, and civil war across the Levant between the Sublime Porte and its Egyptian vassal on the other.Footnote ⁶⁷ Pilgrim numbers rose to consistently maintain six-figure totals thereafter, with 140,000 reported to be in Mecca when the 1857 Rebellion shook India.Footnote ⁶⁸ Fluctuations aside, Indian pilgrims remained prominent throughout, and at one in five fractionally dominated well into the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ Astonishingly, aggregate figures of pilgrims would not equal eighteenth-century levels until after the Suez Canal was cut and steamers came to conclusively conquer Indian Ocean highways, and by the end of the nineteenth century the hajj was once more “the largest single movement” on Earth.Footnote ⁷⁰

For our purposes, perhaps the best point of departure from which to examine these trends of attrition and expansion is eighteenth-century Surat. The port captured in microcosm some of the contradictory dynamics that stamped the passing of the old regime in India. It thus experienced its own imperial “revolution.” Two years after the Plassey “revolution,” which carried the British to dominion status at their imperial bridgehead of Bengal, infighting among the Mughal nobility of Gujarat also led the East India Company to assume authority over Surat’s fortress, an event that contemporaries dubbed the “Castle Revolution.”Footnote ⁷¹ Meanwhile, the slow but certain flight of capital and commercial shipping from Surat to the colonial port of Bombay also began in earnest. As “troubles in the country” deepened in the ensuing decades – most proximately due to the stunning expansion of Maratha armies from the Deccan – Company servants responsible for levying Mughal imperial taxes from around Surat indicated that extensive stretches of the port’s immediate vicinities had been left “destroyed and devastated.”Footnote ⁷²

Even under such apparently strained circumstances, however, the Red Sea run stubbornly persevered. In part, this was driven by small but important developments in techniques of shipbuilding and navigation in western India, the most notable consequence of which was likely the general transition that carried South Asian seafaring away from large to medium-sized deep-sea vessels.Footnote ⁷³ The precarities produced by intensifying military conflicts across north India notwithstanding, as late as 1781, the picture of seagoing commerce from Surat was therefore still summed up as one of “considerable trade.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Hajjis sojourning at the port continued besides to evoke the image of a cosmopolitan city, bustling with foreign traders and émigré clans of Persians, Turks, and Arabs.Footnote ⁷⁵ This, despite the fact many of these latter, “original” families – which had once served “different Mogul kings” as salaried officials and administrators, and whose religious men were often regarded as the éminences grises of Surat’s political worlds – were now “being extinct” or absorbed into the expanding colonial order.Footnote ⁷⁶

Colonial engagements with the hajj did not occur willy-nilly, however. Always conscious of the bottom line, the East India Company remained reluctant to foot the bill for Indian pilgrims even after it became a conquering power. But when adopting a longitudinal perspective, as we are here, it becomes apparent that hajj circulations did play an important role in dictating the rhythms of European interactions with, and eventually, European expansion along, India’s western coastlines. For even when Mughal power had remained unchallenged on land, the hajj often led to fraught exchanges between the Timurid empire and its seaborne rivals. On balance, however, these tensions seldom descended into open hostilities, but were rather emblematic of what Sanjay Subrahmanyam has described as “an age of contained conflict” in India and the Indian Ocean.Footnote ⁷⁷ For example, Portuguese efforts to impose their notorious regime of naval passes (cartazes) on Mughal hajj ships were neither ever truly consistent nor entirely successful, but they did incite angry responses from Delhi. “Freeing Muslims from the Franks” at times even became a galvanizing call among Mughal pilgrims.Footnote ⁷⁸

At the turn of the eighteenth century, the blockade and capture of Mughal hajj ships by European vessels also led to heated confrontations.Footnote ⁷⁹ Between 1690 and 1710, a rash of European piracy dovetailed explosively with a reckless war that the Company had declared on the Mughals, and the security of hajjis again became an issue. The Mughals responded by bringing intense pressure on the English and Dutch companies in India, successfully demanding that the Europeans curb the predatory activities of their compatriots at sea. Suitably chastened, the latter even agreed to supply protective convoys for outbound Indian vessels, including hajj ships.Footnote ⁸⁰ While the convoys stabilized a maritime frontier for the Mughals, in one interpretation, they ironically also endorsed early ideologies of European jurisdictional authority in Asian waters.Footnote ⁸¹ By the 1730s, these interimperial arrangements took additional turns toward colonial ascendency. Pummeled by Maratha warships, the Afro-Indian Sidis, whose fleet once served as the Mughal empire’s navy, were rendered “no longer in a consideration of protecting the trade of this coast.” The British accordingly sought remuneration from a Mughal prebendal fief or jāgīr to take on that responsibility.Footnote ⁸² This would be capped off with the Company being officially granted the Mughal title of Admiral of the Imperial Fleet (Dārogha-yi Ārmad-i Bādshāhī) following the “revolution” at Surat (Figure 1.2).Footnote ⁸³

Figure 1.2 Locus of “revolution”: Rampart, Surat Fortress. Built in the mid-sixteenth century by an Ottoman Turkish grandee at the Gujarat Sultanate, the fort was taken by the Mughals during Akbar’s reign (1556–1604). The East India Company captured it with the Castle Revolution of 1759.

Source: Photograph by author.

If European, or rather British, involvements in the hajj were born of unintended consequences, the expansion of pilgrimage ultimately owed more to the deliberate investments of post-Mughal polities. Even so, a crucial contradiction may be discerned here. For, in the end, the continuation and indeed reinvigoration of one Mughal tradition led nevertheless to the gradual relegation if not irrelevance of another. The Mughals may have shored up a robust imperial culture of hajj along their oceanic frontiers. However, it would still be cavalier to contend that the forms of religiosity they promoted were entirely Meccan in orientation. To the contrary, we know that the Timurids devoted greater energy and resources to Sufi shrine cults within the Subcontinent, which in turn reinforced their quintessentially thaumaturgical views of kingship.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet, with imperial decentralization, new rulers anxious for legitimacy began turning in greater numbers to the sacred sites of the Middle East. Indians and Europeans alike noticed how regional kingdoms were stepping into the breach left by the old regime when it came to funding the hajj. This in turn not only led to reconfigurations in the institutional and symbolic pathways of pilgrimage. It also revealed how Mughal successor crowns – many of which otherwise continued to draw their nominal titles, investitures, and privileges as provincial rulers from Delhi – were now looking elsewhere for political sustenance.

Consider here the making of entirely new eighteenth-century pilgrimage avenues between the Subcontinent and the Middle East, the significant ramifications they had on Indo-Muslim political culture at the regional level, and the lasting institutional forms they consolidated across the Indian Ocean. The rise of Shiʿa nawabi kingdoms in provinces like Awadh and Bengal led to intensive investments into Muslim sacred sites beyond Arabia. Into Ottoman Iraq, millions of rupees were poured to sponsor clerical learning, subsidize Indian pilgrimage circulations, and even finance large-scale infrastructural projects like the aptly named Hindiya (or Asafiya) canal near Karbala, dug in 1775 with funds from Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah of Awadh.Footnote ⁸⁵ As in the Mughal era, such state efforts were obviously not meant to go unnoticed, and Awadh’s benefaction toward Iraq soon became a talking point in pilgrim travelogues,Footnote ⁸⁶ hajj manuals,Footnote ⁸⁷ and more predictably, courtly chronicles. As a testament to their durability, Awadh’s endowments in Iraq’s sacred sites continued well after the British annexed that kingdom in 1856.Footnote ⁸⁸

Indeed, as Meir Litvak and Juan Cole have shown, if the birth of a modern “Shiʿa international” centered in Iraq stood in hock to Indian money, Awadh too benefited from the in-migration of Middle Eastern Shiʿa legists and savants who went on to build the clerical corps of the provincial kingdom.Footnote ⁸⁹ Meanwhile, Hyderabad and Arcot in peninsular India, and Bengal, Sind, and various Indo-Afghan polities up north, continued steering redistributive investments toward Mecca.Footnote ⁹⁰ Besides paying for Meccan ships and alms, they also funded the construction of a dense network of lodges or ribāts meant for Indians in Arabia itself. A British consular survey later discovered thirteen to fifteen such buildings, all either owned or endowed by states that had emerged from under the Mughal carapace in the eighteenth century, such as Bhawalpur, Bhopal, Hyderabad, and Rampur. The structures ranged from smaller, four-room buildings to complexes that could house up to eighty pilgrims, complete with their own reservoirs, mosques, and staff of retainers.Footnote ⁹¹ Some welcome Indian pilgrims to this day.Footnote ⁹²

Into the eighteenth century, as well, Indian nobility continued “to order the issuance of counsel and advice,” meaning manuals, for hajjis.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, pilgrims themselves perpetuated a culture of providing instruction to aspiring hajjis. The contents of individual pilgrimage narratives will be examined presently. These texts ranged from travelogues to diaries, and from mystical dream discourses to oral recollections of the hajj recorded by amanuenses. Their generic heterogeneity aside, many of these accounts contained details that were clearly meant for the edification of aspiring pilgrims. Son and successor to the founder of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi order, Muhammad Maʿsum (d. 1668–1669) had precisely that aim in mind when he had a book of his hajj travels compiled in the 1650s, “bid that copies be made for perusal,” and even gifted a manuscript to Aurangzeb.Footnote ⁹⁴ Parts of the text focused on themes meant to express the supernatural ambience of the hajj (Maʿsum’s dead father comforting him with a shawl over a rough sea journey; sightings of houris and angels in Mecca). Other details were far more functional (exact dates of arrival and departure; listings of locations of pilgrim assembly or mīqāt in Arabia).Footnote ⁹⁵

Later, in the 1740s, ʿAbdul Karim, a Mughal scribe-accountant, graphed his itinerary from Iraq to Arabia via Syria in tabular form, deliberately translating into Indic idioms metrics of space-time that were “customary in the lands of Rum.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In the 1780s, the ʿālim Rafiʿ-ud-Din listed for an audience of “friends and dear ones” what he deemed were the premier seminaries and libraries of Medina.Footnote ⁹⁷ And, in the early nineteenth century, an eastern Indian hajji concentrated on orthopraxy, quoting in extenso the Qurʾanic invocations that were meant to be recited at successive stages of the hajj.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such, indeed, were the abiding tropes of South Asian hajj narratives, which continued to combine “enchanted” and “disenchanted” themes well into the modern industrial era.Footnote ⁹⁹

Ebb of Empire: Hajj and Revolution across the Indian Ocean

If some motifs endured in the writings of hajjis, on closer examination, we also find specific transformations that came with imperial change. The remainder of this chapter will offer dense descriptions of these transformations by turning to individual first-person hajj narratives, the “global” views they brought to relief, and the impact “revolution” had on individual pilgrim-authors. It will focus on three discrete periods: the immediate aftermath of Mughal decline (1739–1790), the period of intensified British expansion in India (1790–1820), and, finally, the decades leading up to the 1857 Rebellion. Though evincing immense internal diversity, themes that ultimately leap out from the pages of Indian hajj narratives are, for one, a sustained focus on Mughal crisis and the arrival of new powers, and two, a strong subjective undercurrent reflecting new visions of community – religious, political, and social.

The first set of changes may be attributed to Mughal success in creating corporate identities through imperial institutions, such that the “imperial revolutions” of the eighteenth century remained, in the final analysis, “imperial in nature.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Causal factors for shifts in individual thought patterns are of course more difficult to explain. Scholars have certainly noticed a more robust agentive thrust in Meccan travelogues from the turn of the nineteenth century, when “the hajji and not the hajj” became prominent in firsthand accounts.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Barbara Metcalf credited this to the advent of print technologies and the market demands they generated, but surely there were other reasons. Persographic lithography did not really begin in India until the 1820s, and whatever deus ex machina effect it had on hajj narratives only really became apparent some three decades after that.Footnote ¹⁰²

Anthropological insights into ritual and revolution offer other possible paths of inquiry. Through Victor Turner’s model of “liminal” rites like pilgrimage, it has been argued that the “in-between” nature of large-scale political changes could often generate “a sudden foregrounding of agency,” and in turn an intense concern with communitas.Footnote ¹⁰³ Uncoincidentally, thus, one historian has spoken of the creation of “felt communities” from amidst the turbulence of inqilāb in eighteenth-century India.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Additionally, scholars have argued that the writings of middling literate sorts in South Asia (among them I include an increasingly marginalized nobility) acquired greater social relevance in this period of imperial transitions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ When approaching pilgrims’ texts with these theoretical and empirical points in mind, one keynote we immediately find is an insistence on greater confessional consistency, as well as a need to preserve what we might call the political morality of the old regime.

To be certain, individual social backgrounds continued to inform how pilgrims took stock of Mughal crisis and decline, even when they did so from beyond South Asia. Take ʿAbdul Karim Kashmiri (d. 1784), a Mughal bureaucrat who witnessed firsthand Nadir Shah’s invasion of Delhi, an event that many in the Subcontinent, including the future advocate of an abortive French empire in India, Joseph François Dupleix, grasped as standing at the cusp of “a great revolution in this empire.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ When it withdrew from India, ʿAbdul Karim left with Nadir Shah’s siege train as it slowly heaved its way back to Persia.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Having entered the service of the Persians as a salaried accountant, ʿAbdul Karim, however, continued to avow loyalty to the Mughal imperial crown. So, even as he repeatedly accused Nadir Shah of malice and misrule, he maintained that his reason for departing with the Iranian Qizilbāsh (“Redhats”) was to fulfill a long-held desire to visit the Ka‘ba in Mecca, “to attain the honor of hajj to the manifest House of God” (sharf-i hajj-i baitullāh al-mubīn).Footnote ¹⁰⁸

On the road to Mecca, which took him eventually into Ottoman imperial territory, the Mughal mandarin then found himself captivated by the workings of that empire’s bureaucracy. After joining the imperial hajj caravan from Syria, ʿAbdul Karim wrote admiringly of the Damascene governor’s role in organizing the logistical arrangements (band-o-bast) of the Meccan pilgrimage, which in turn reflected for him “the excellence of administration in the Ottoman empire” (husni zawābit-i saltanat-i Rūm).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Similarly, in Jeddah, ʿAbdul Karim approvingly observed that Ottoman officials successfully managed power equations with regional Europeans merchants while also maintaining the sanctity of Mecca. The Red Sea port had its share of Franks. They had been allowed a toehold at Jedda for commercial purposes. But, added ʿAbdul Karim, “‘Truly the pagans are unclean; so let them not, after this year of theirs, approach the Sacred Mosque’ (Qurʾan 9:27). They are [thus] never allowed into Mecca the Great.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

At some odds with these views were the shifting imperial seascapes ʿAbdul Karim encountered on the journey home to India in 1743. As the European vessel ferrying him skirted up the Bay of Bengal, his focus could not but switch to the merchant bodies that now lined the southeastern littoral of India. Here, though, the presence of Europeans highlighted for him a roi fainéant Emperor Muhammad Shah, and so, “imperial weakness” (zaʿf-i saltanat). Pondicherry (Pahlachari) had become the seat of French power, though it was a Mughal firmān (decree) that had first allowed for that settlement; Madras (Chinapatan) was also in European hands, in this case of the British; and, in lower Bengal, an even greater medley of outsiders, “whose names all end with zā,” held sway – Farānsīs, Angrez, Olandīz, Partagīz. Everywhere, no less, Maratha troops swarmed like “ants and locusts.”Footnote ¹¹¹

If they betrayed something like a latent antipathy toward the encroachments of non-Muslim polities into Mughal domains, pen-pushing secretary-pilgrims like ʿAbdul Karim nevertheless laid the accent on the executive or coercive capacities of states to gauge their power, or lack thereof. Robert Travers has accordingly noted that among late Mughal officials, even matter-of-fact discussions on statecraft could, in this period, give way to vigorous “rearguard actions” that sought ideologically to defend the ways of the crumbling Mughal regime.Footnote ¹¹² That being said, other Indian hajjis ultimately emphasized themes that rang true with their own idiosyncrasies. Some forty years after ʿAbdul Karim, Rafiʿ-ud-Din also traveled to Arabia from the landlocked heartlands of Mughal north India.Footnote ¹¹³ Former student of Shah Waliullah, the most distinguished Islamic reformer of eighteenth-century India, Rafiʿ-ud-Din’s reflections on empire were, however, couched in very different structures of meaning.Footnote ¹¹⁴ He, too, praised the Ottoman empire’s management of the hajj, drew attention to recent Mughal shortcomings in this arena, and cast a beady eye toward the advancements of rival regimes.

All the same, it is clear that Rafiʿ-ud-Din’s account was much more concerned in appealing for a need to rejuvenate the practices and precepts of Islam. So, where other pilgrims from India often ornamented their pilgrimage accounts with, say, poetic flourishes (ʿAbdul Karim loved his Jami), Rafiʿ-ud-Din larded his narrative more heavily with quotations from the Qurʾan, Prophetic traditions (hadīth), and Shariʿa.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This triad of textual traditions was coming to serve as the touchstone of a powerful revivalist call in Sunni Islam. With respect to piety, it aspired to a pure form purged of apparent “innovations.” Politically, revivalism spoke of course directly to the existential problems that were buffeting Muslim empires. For the same reason, in Arabia itself Rafiʿ-ud-Din’s attention was not taken up by the workings of statesmen-bureaucrats, but rather the activities of people of his own professional ilk, namely religious adepts like Sufis and the ʿulama. That focus was all the more remarkable given that Rafiʿ-ud-Din’s endogamous caste (jātī) in India – the Shaikhs of Moradabad – maintained a storied tradition of claiming kinship links to the Mughal nobility.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Rafiʿ-ud-Din did end up spilling quite a bit of ink on the receding writ of the Mughals. Crucially, however, the burden his narrative carried was to train attention to the attenuation of a specifically Muslim empire. Thus, he claimed that Mughal fiscal sources in Gujarat once meant for the hajj were now being relentlessly embezzled. Worse, huge sums of that money were ending up in non-Muslim hands, both Maratha and European.Footnote ¹¹⁷ On the outbound journey to Surat from his hometown of Moradabad, Rafiʿ-ud-Din moreover rued the rise of Hindu kingdoms around north India. West of Delhi, he traveled through polities that had successfully defied Mughal overrule, as for instance Bundi, now under an autonomous Rajput dynasty, or Ujjain, which had fallen to Maratha occupation. In Kota, a Rajasthani kingdom that was then busy grounding its post-Mughal sovereignty through patronage of a pilgrimage cult centered on Krishna, Rafiʿ-ud-Din reflected on how regime change bore on regional Muslim piety.Footnote ¹¹⁸ He noted that “the regime (hikām) here is non-Muslim, and the Sultanate of Islam here is weak.” So much so, though, that Muslims living in these parts since “ancient times” had now ceased maintaining any outward “signs of Islam.” Citing a local informant, he was further horrified to report that even Kota’s Muslim magistrate (qāzī) had recently been sighted worshipping at the local Krishna temple, or “idol house.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Interestingly, it was only after arriving in Surat that this mood of Muslim decline lifted from the pilgrim’s account. Rafiʿ-ud-Din left unmentioned the colonial “revolution” at the city’s fortress, though he did reflect on the cross-cultural commerce that persisted there among Franks, Arabs, and Bohras. But for him, Surat’s main source of “blessings” was its “nearness” to the Holy Cities. “For this reason, Surat is called the Gate of Mecca” (Bāb al-Makka).Footnote ¹²⁰ For this reason, too, he wrote at length of the local Sufis that maintained links with Arabia, and of the many Arab scholars employed at the city’s madrasas. Nor did Rafiʿ-ud-Din fail to mention the ubiquitous groups of hajjis that sojourned at the city. “The honor and splendid integrity of Islam I have seen in Surat,” he concluded, “perhaps do not exist in the entirety of Hindustan.”Footnote ¹²¹ Consistent with the general discursive thrust of his narrative, which saw in men of religion the promise of a reversal of the degeneration of Islam, after reaching the Hijaz he once again sought out the company of fellow ʿulama.Footnote ¹²² On encountering a clique of Indian theologians in Medina, Rafiʿ-ud-Din could not however avoid relating a cautionary tale regarding empire. He noted that these people had left kith and kin, yār u diyār, to seek security here. Many of them had once held high official posts in Delhi, and so did not leave India without reason. Rather, they were pushed here following the recent “revolutions” at the Mughal capital.Footnote ¹²³

Transimperial Trajectories beyond the Mughals

Hajjis from the Subcontinent were far from an undifferentiated lot. Offering rhetorical resistance to Mughal decline was common enough in some of their narratives. But for those establishing ties to the Company Raj, the ken and content of “revolution” acquired additional insinuations. In fact, even as the new colonial regime increasingly distanced itself from its own initial attempts to preserve aspects of Mughal political culture,Footnote ¹²⁴ and even as it more forcefully broke from precolonial practices to assume the abstract, rule-bound, and self-segregating norms of a “stranger-state” governing alien traditions,Footnote ¹²⁵ mobile Muslims still continued to bring to it new ideas of political subjecthood. Some did so out of compulsion, others, willingly.

Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1753–1805/1806) took the latter course. An archetype of the itinerant service cultures that spawned across Eurasia at the time, here was another “transimperial subject,” a go-between whose political affiliations lay across shifting state frontiers.Footnote ¹²⁶ An ethnic Azeri Turk, Abu Talib was born in Lucknow in Awadh to an Isfahani father, who in turn had sought refuge in South Asia after Persia had again plunged into war following “the revolution of Nadir Shah’s assassination [in 1747],” as one Mughal author described that event.Footnote ¹²⁷ Abu Talib first served the nawabs of Bengal, and then of Awadh, as a revenue official (ʿamaldār). Later, he entered the employ of a British paymaster as the Company extended its influence into Awadh.Footnote ¹²⁸ As the pace of colonial expansion dramatically shot up in the 1790s, and as the Company began to successfully outflank both its European and indigenous rivals, Abu Talib’s professional ties to the British deepened further.Footnote ¹²⁹

So it was with his British patron that Abu Talib traveled to England between 1799 and 1803. By his own account, he left India due to a growing disillusionment with the morass of ineptitude that he felt was becoming the hallmark of governance at kingdoms like Awadh.Footnote ¹³⁰ The travelogue he wrote of his tours has drawn the attention of many historians for its rare, reversed, and “re-Oriented” observations of the Georgian imperial metropole (for which the author even became known, in his own lifetime, as “Landanī”).Footnote ¹³¹ Yet few have examined the connected views of revolution that the travelogue offered.Footnote ¹³² Fewer still have noted how, rather than going round the Cape again, Abu Talib chose to return home through the “overland” Eurasian route, mainly so that he could perform ziyārat in Iraq. If he did not end up going on hajj, it was only because of a major rebellion that coevally erupted in Arabia.

Through his travels, Abu Talib also gave a panoramic view of how the “age of revolutions,” as Bayly memorably argued, “ricocheted around the globe.”Footnote ¹³³ Indeed, revolution appeared to follow revolution in his narrative, and each apparently added a new perspective to the root idea of inqilāb. In India, there were thus the volatile politics of states like Awadh, which were busy battling the British, who in turn were fighting the French.Footnote ¹³⁴ In Europe, Abu Talib wrote of how a kingless state, a “rīpablik,” had recently arisen from a “great revolution” (inqilāb-i ʿazīmī), though during a brief stopover in Paris, he found aspects of French culture wanting relative to what he had discovered across the Channel.Footnote ¹³⁵ Crossing the Mediterranean to reach Istanbul, he reflected on the waning powers of the Ottomans in the face of both internal rebellions and Napoleon’s recent invasion of Egypt. Through the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, he even acquired an audience with Sultan Selim III (r. 1780–1807),Footnote ¹³⁶ whose military-administrative reforms were then bringing about a crucial transition away from the old empire and toward a “New Order” (Nizam-ı Cedid). While it did provoke conservative backlashes, and even led to the sultan’s deposition in a revolt by the old Janissary corps, the New Order nevertheless laid the groundwork for the more rigorous restructurations of the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839). In a word, it ushered in that empire’s own “age of revolutions.”Footnote ¹³⁷

Finally, on arrival in Iraq, Abu Talib witnessed firsthand the repercussions of the rise of the Wahhabis, a collection of Arab Bedouin tribal bodies that had grouped together under the Saudi House of Najd to wage holy war against the perceived irreligiosities of Ottoman imperial rule in Arabia. In 1803, they had burst out of the peninsula itself to raid the Shiʿa shrine city of Karbala, where apart from carrying out a sectarian massacre, they also destroyed the tomb of Imam Husain as their strict interpretation of Islam held both Shiʿa religion and shrine veneration in contempt. Indeed, of all the “revolutions” Abu Talib witnessed, it was also this, the sight of the desecration of a sacred site, that cut Abu Talib most to the quick, and left the most profound impression on him as a Shiʿa pilgrim.Footnote ¹³⁸

Wahhabism would in time implicate Indians via hajj routes, a theme that will be taken up later in the book. But note here that it did briefly amount to a serious revolt against the Ottomans, who completely lost Mecca and Medina to Wahhabi insurgents between 1805 and 1813.Footnote ¹³⁹ Struggle to regain control of Arabia would continue until 1818, when the “first” Saudi emirate was finally destroyed by the forces of the Ottoman Egyptian viceroy Mehmed ʿAli (r. 1805–1848). More pertinent for us, though, is that onlookers seeking to grasp the sudden ascendance of Wahhabism were quick to recruit that generation’s watchword. What is more, they did so with unequivocal reference to its interregional implications, to wit, as “the considerable revolutions in this part of the globe.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This “global” perspective on the Wahhabi revolution also dovetailed from observations on Indian hajj circulations.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Pilgrims themselves noticed what was becoming painfully clear to Ottoman statesmen, namely that their “Wahhabi problem” (Vehhabi gaʾilesi),Footnote ¹⁴² and the “disorder and dissent” (fesad ü fitne)Footnote ¹⁴³ it was throwing up at their Indian Ocean frontiers, was triggering a rapid decline of hajj traffic.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

But in the interim, not everyone shied away from the Haramain. Between 1815 and 1816, a southern Indian hajji who braved the central Arabian desert tracts to reach the Hijaz left a rich account of his travels through “Wahhabi country” (sarzamīn-i Wahhābī). The value of what the pilgrim described as his “little day-to-day diary” (rūz-nāmcha-yi yaum-ba-yaum) does not end there. When studied alongside the life of its author, it adds to our understanding of how South Asian pilgrims were carving out new visions of imperial identity after the Mughal empire. As well, it offers empirical footing for an inquiry into how this transitional or “saddle” period in the history of empires was being defined by reconfigurations of social status and hierarchy.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For inqilāb, as Rajat Kanta Ray argued, was also “a revolution of the classes” in India, whose consequences were perhaps most keenly felt by the Subcontinent’s Muslim nobility.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

In the exordium to his hajj diary, Hafiz Muhammad ʿAbdul Husain Karnataki (d. 1830) specified a proud royal pedigree connecting him to “one of the vast kingdoms of Hindustan.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The hajji was a prince from the nawabi state of Arcot. He had first left Madras in India in 1814 on a British vessel bound for Basra.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ A kingdom located in the Karnatak (or Carnatic) region by the Coromandel Coast, Arcot had first risen in the context of Mughal decentralization but consolidated amidst Anglo-French conflicts in southern India during the global Seven Years War.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ And, well before the publication of his Reflections bewailing the revolutions of Europe, it was also this Indian kingdom that had served as the subject of a British philosopher-statesman’s cautionary remarks on another “grand revolution,” this one spanning “one half of the globe.” “The British empire in India,” argued Edmund Burke, by invoking what was still a novel political idea in 1785, was being traduced by a rogue Company. Yet the “mystery of state” in which that body of merchant-cum-rulers had shrouded its government had failed to conceal its despotic subjugation of the “ancient” Indian aristocracy at native kingdoms like Arcot.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

In ways that more-or-less justified that critique of early colonial hubris, by the time ʿAbdul Husain departed for hajj, another Company-engineered “revolution,” as it was called, had indeed reduced Arcot to the status of a colonized kingdom for some thirteen years.Footnote ¹⁵¹ But even as they were now constantly being reminded that when “proceeding on a pilgrimage,” they cannot simply assume that “they can make these excursions in a style of comfort, and even splendour, at the Company’s expense,” Indian royals like ʿAbdul Husain were still coming to regard the ascendant colonial state as the natural backer of the hajj.Footnote ¹⁵² For the same reason, they were also seeing themselves as expatriate colonial subjects in the Middle East, or as ʿAbdul Husain put it in a letter to colonial Bombay, pilgrims traveling “under the British protection.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Such discursive gestures highlighted not only how expectations of patronage persisted even as power changed hands. They additionally revealed the ways in which the Company’s limited support of Indian hajjis prefigured the rise of the later Raj as a self-avowed “protector of pilgrims,” an imperial posture that after 1857 would even lead the British to argue for extraterritorial rights over their South Asian Muslim subjects in Ottoman Arabia.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

In the more intimate narrative space of ʿAbdul Husain’s hajj diary, however, it was the theme of how imperial change had consequences for his self-worth as an old regime grandee that stood out. For despite colonial subjugation, or likely because of it, members of the Indian aristocracy like ʿAbdul Husain still made it a point to stress social distinction, noble comportment, and royal largesse, although as pilgrims they did so against a transregional backdrop.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ ʿAbdul Husain was hence extremely eager to proclaim his titular eminence as Arcot’s “Chief of Nobility” (see Figure 1.3). He wrote extensively regarding how the hajj caravan (qāfilaʾ-yi hujjāj), transporting him from Karbala to Mecca, was no ordinary pilgrimage train, but rather one that allowed him to rub shoulders with fellow nobility (aʿyān) from the Qajar and Ottoman empires.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ By the same token, in Arabia from 1815 to 1817, he kept up practices of “courtesy and reverence,” delivering gift packages (shawls and sugar-loafs) to members of Mehmed ʿAli’s dynasty, whose troops were then stationed in the Hijaz.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Besides, ʿAbdul Husain was also at some pains to talk up his own dynasty’s persistence in patronizing the hajj pilgrimage from India, Mughal decline notwithstanding.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Figure 1.3 Stamping royal status: ʿAbdul Husain’s autographed hajj diary, 1815–1816. Ex libris seal on righthand margin bears the author’s aristocratic title, Raʾis al-Umarā (Chief of the Nobility). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Nr. 359).

Source: Photograph by author.

Nevertheless, ʿAbdul Husain’s doling out of gifts and charity in the Middle East was still regarded as excessive by his nominal protectors, the British in India. To his superiors in Bombay, the Company’s agent in Iraq even described how locals thought of ʿAbdul Husain as a “person of greater wealth than understanding.” He complained that while in Baghdad, “the Nuwaub showed a decided preference for the Turks over the English.” The agent sarcastically added that for the “distinguished honour” of sipping coffee with an Ottoman Pasha, the prince had also “actually paid the sum of thirty thousand piastres!!!”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In fact, after his death in a plague outbreak in Iraq, British officials very swiftly distanced themselves from ʿAbdul Husain’s apparently profligate, “improvident and discreditable conduct.” The Company argued that it was no more responsible for extending money from his royal pension either to his creditors or legatees (two children from a “slave mother”). Unsentimentally, colonial authorities additionally observed that the prince had spent his final years shuttling between Qajar Tehran and Ottoman Baghdad, “in pecuniary distress, having dissipated all his property.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Needless to add, Company bureaucrats taking issue with the “excesses” of Indian nobility failed to grasp how power and prestige in Muslim political culture hinged crucially on munificence, as we saw was the case with the Mughals. But with the growing royal insolvency that came with colonial overrule, other attempts to reclaim noble dignity emerged, even when away from India.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Glimpses into ʿAbdul Husain’s life immediately after his hajj thus revealed his apparent attempts to organize a royal court (majlis) around his person. In Baghdad, he had reportedly assembled a ragtag body of emigrant Indians (from the “bazaar”; of the “lowest description”), offered them titles, and styled them as his “‘Members of Council.’”Footnote ¹⁶² In his hajj diary, he similarly maintained a self-consciously genteel air, and so cast an appropriately jaundiced eye on those arrivistes, the Wahhabis. They were but “thieves and criminals,” “disbelievers fearing neither God nor His creatures,” whose hordes of “zealous” and “savage” Bedouins fleeced and harassed “sinless, helpless, and faultless pilgrims.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Grudgingly, though, the prince conceded that the Wahhabi amir, ʿAbdallah bin Saʿud (r. 1814–1818), was not lacking in etiquette, the shibboleth of “manners” (taʿāruf) he took as the sine qua non of rank.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

In fact, almost exactly a year before the Wahhabi stronghold of Diriyah was besieged by Egyptian forces, ʿAbdul Husain even visited the site and had a courtly meeting with the Saudi amir. Their conversation centered on British India. “I gave him much information on the activities of the English,” ʿAbdul Husain went onto record in his diary, for the Saudi amir was curious to know about “their wars, the quality of trust and security in their domains, and their pleasant conduct towards their subjects.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The amir had reasons to pry. Tensions between his emirate and the Company in India were coming to a head over the issue of “Wahabee piracy” in the Gulf. Two years after the meeting, in 1819, a seaborne expedition would be dispatched from Bombay to overwhelm the “pirates” of Ras al-Khaima (today’s United Arab Emirates). The Company’s act of military aggression in the Gulf would not only secure for it an important maritime channel. As Sugata Bose noted, it would also bring about a more profound transition, a “sea change,” from a precolonial to a colonial Indian Ocean world.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Conclusion

In applying a canonical historiographical category to global history, recent scholarship on the “age of revolution” has importantly expanded our understanding of how the early modern era transitioned into modernity. Against Eurocentric assumptions, it has revealed the conjunctural complexities that punctuated the passage from old to new empires. As a result, the rise of colonial hegemony in India or the Indian Ocean appears much less inexorable, given that we are now also compelled to consider what it provoked – “a surge of indigenous and non-European politics.”Footnote ²⁰² By the same token, the globalizing reach of British expansion appears much less exceptional when we account for how it was reliant “on connections forged in an earlier phase of globalization,” and how “South Asian merchants, sailors, labourers, scholars, and pilgrims continued to make their own global networks under the surface of, or even in competition with, European globalism.”Footnote ²⁰³

As this chapter has argued with the case of hajjis from the revolutionary age, the premises and perspectives of global history may still require qualification in two critical ways. For one, I have suggested that it is by teasing out specific interregional connections that we can perhaps best appreciate how contemporaries perceived their “worlds.” Said differently, when exploring circulatory regimes like the hajj, or any of the other “fragile threads that connected the globe,” we ought also to try and understand how “the globe came to be defined as such.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ Second, it is by adopting such contextualist approaches to the narratives of transregional travelers like pilgrims that we can best appreciate how individuals coped with large-scale political transformations. Because for all its world-spanning range and reach, there was ultimately nothing intrinsically universal about the idea of revolution, as Samuel Moyn has pointed out.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Even when they brought to bear the concept of inqilāb to parse the passing of old regimes beyond South Asia, many from the late Mughal world therefore continued drawing on older imperial, and transimperial, formulations. From Lucknow to Paris, Abu Talib made sense of a postrevolutionary Europe through neologisms like “parlamant” and “rīpablik,” to be sure, but also through a Mughal vocabulary (raʿīyat for the Third Estate, as an instance). Based by the Bay of Bengal yet casting his mind’s eye to the Atlantic, Ghulam Husain Tabatabaʾi concluded his great history of inqilāb in eighteenth-century India, perhaps not innocently, with the case of a recent revolution against the British in “a new land known as Amrīga,” which he also identified through an old Ottoman moniker, Yangī Dunyā (after Yeni Dünya, “New World”).Footnote ²⁰⁶

But in the end, much did change of course, and by virtue of its longstanding position as one of the most important circulatory regimes that carried Indians into the Indian Ocean world, it was through hajj that many also came to recognize the interregional implications of revolution. As pilgrims, South Asians also fashioned specific responses to the unraveling of the Mughal empire. The ʿālim argued for the renewal of religious norms after visiting the holiest sites of Islam; scribal administrators held up an idealized Ottoman mirror to the predicaments of Mughal and post-Mughal governance; the royal was intransigent in his old-regime status even when away from home; quite a few hajjis voiced the idea of being transimperial subjects; and, of course, some returning pilgrims even became involved in the making of a global and indeed reactionary “Muslim” culture. The significance of these changes may also be appreciated by the remarkable relevance they had for modern Muslim political thought. As Javed Majeed has argued, even among late colonial Indians, it was thus pilgrimage, and the passages it paved beyond South Asia, that ultimately cut the grooves of a twentieth-century “planetary consciousness.”Footnote ²⁰⁷ But again, none of these developments can be adequately understood without attention to the connections that were forged between empire and hajj in an earlier era. In the next chapter, I explore those connections further by turning to a unique sphere of material exchange between South Asia and the Arabian Hijaz – the hajj bazaar economy.