Introduction

In the last chapter, we examined the career of a Muslim ‘padre’ among Hyderabad's sepoys in the middle years of the nineteenth century. In this chapter, the focus shifts from the Hanamkonda garrison in the east of the Nizam's territories to the larger cantonment beside the second city of the Nizam's State, to the west in Aurangabad. After Bolarum on the outskirts of Hyderabad, Aurangabad was the most important of the cantonment towns in which the forces of the Hyderabad Contingent were stationed under British command. In this sense, our shift of focus pursues the ‘deployment’ of barracks Islam along the cantonment network through which it was disseminated, for the faqīr examined in this chapter was himself a protégé of Afzal Shāh. While the latter's fame remained intact in the early twentieth century through the ongoing association of his son and successor Sarwar Biyābānī (d. 1331/1913) with the sepoys who continued to visit his father's shrine, the closer ‘patrimonial’ relationship that had evolved between Hyderabad and British India in the decades since Afzal Shāh's death in 1273/1856 had had a range of effects on the religious life of the sepoys.