Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T09:58:24.588Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Mark Condos
Mark Condos*
Affiliation:
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of History, Queen Mary, University of London
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

During the past decade, discussions of religious extremism and “fanatical” violence have come to dominate both public and academic discourse. Yet, rarely do these debates engage with the historical and discursive origins of the term “fanatic.” As a result, many of these discussions tend to reproduce uncritically the same Orientalist tropes and stereotypes that have historically shaped the way “fanaticism” and “fanatical” violence have been framed and understood. This paper seeks to provide a corrective to this often problematic and flawed understanding of the history of “fanaticism.” It approaches these topics through an examination of how British colonial authorities conceived of and responded to the problem of “murderous,” “fanatical,” and “ghazi” “outrages” along the North-West Frontier of India. By unpacking the various religious, cultural, and psychiatric explanations underpinning British understandings of these phenomena, I explore how these discourses interacted to create the powerful legal and discursive category of the “fanatic.” I show how this was perceived as an existentially threatening class of criminal that existed entirely outside the bounds of politics, society, and sanity, and therefore needed to be destroyed completely. The subjectification of the “fanatic,” in this case, ultimately served as a way of activating the colonial state's “sovereign” need to punish and kill. Finally, I deconstruct these reductive colonial representations of fanaticism in order to demonstrate how, despite British views to the contrary, these were often complex and deeply political acts of anti-colonial resistance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 717 - 745
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, Nicholas Cronk, ed., John Fletcher, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 [1764]), 138.

2 “Ottawa Shooting: Harper, Mulcair, Trudeau Speak about Attack,” CBC News, 22 Oct. 2014: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-shooting-harper-mulcair-trudeau-speak-about-attack-1.2809530 (accessed 22 Oct. 2014).

3 “How Michael Zehaf-Bibeau Went from Petty Criminal to the Face of Homegrown Terrorism,” National Post, 7 Nov. 2014: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/11/07/how-michael-zehaf-bibeau-went-from-petty-criminal-to-the-face-of-homegrown-terrorism/ (accessed 20 Nov. 2014).

4 Doug Saunders, “When Troubled Young Men Turn to Terror, Is It Ideology or Pathology?” Globe and Mail, 24 Oct. 2014: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/lone-wolf-ideology-or-pathology/article21293910/ (accessed 24 Oct. 2014); Jeet Heer, “The Line between Terrorism and Mental Illness,” New Yorker, 25 Oct. 2014: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/line-terrorism-mental-illness (accessed 25 Oct. 2014).

5 Mark Gollom, “Ottawa Attack: Was Michael Zehaf-Bibeau's Attack a Terrorist Act,” CBC News, 30 Oct. 2014: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa-attack-was-michael-zehaf-bibeau-s-attack-a-terrorist-act-1.2818329 (accessed 31 Oct. 2014).

6 See Letter 490F from the Government of India (GOI) to the Punjab Government, 20 Feb. 1896, National Archives of India (NAI), Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32.

7 Letter 37-C from the Political Agent in Zhob to the Agent to the Governor-General (GG) in Baluchistan, 9 Jan. 1901, NAI, Foreign/External A/Sept. 1901/nos. 9–21.

8 Telegram from the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, to the GOI, 11 Jan. 1901, NAI, Foreign/External A/Sept. 1901/nos. 9–21.

9 Letter 37-C from the Political Agent in Zhob to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 9 Jan. 1901, and Letter 3665 from C. E. Yate to the GOI, 3 Apr. 1901, both in NAI, Foreign/External A/Sept. 1901/nos. 9–21. Doulat later died in prison of pneumonia before he was brought to trial: Statement of Fanatical Outrages in the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan (Simla: Intelligence Branch, Quarter Master General's Dept., 1905), India Office Records (IOR), London, L/PS/20/203, p. 7.

10 For more on the history of this law, see Mark Condos, “License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925,” Modern Asian Studies 50, 2 (2016): 479–517: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X14000456 (accessed 1 June).

11 For a relatively recent and prominent example of this, see Charles Allen, God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (London: Abacus, 2007).

12 Kim A. Wagner, “‘Thugs and Assassins’: ‘New Terrorism’ and the Resurrection of Colonial Knowledge,” in Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven, eds., Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), published online: http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858569.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199858569-e-006) (accessed 13 Nov. 2014).

13 As William T. Cavanaugh points out, this dichotomy between an “irrational,” “fanatical” other and a “rational,” “secular” political subject effectively functions as the “friend-enemy” distinction in politics described by Carl Schmitt, and is used to justify the violent and coercive treatment of the “fanatical” other at the hands of the “secular” state: William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–5. For the idea of the “friend-enemy” distinction in politics, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, George Schwab, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

14 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Stoler, Ann Laura, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18, 1 (2006): 125–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, 1 (2003): 11–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

15 Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), xviii.

16 Voltaire, Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, 137–38.

17 Toscano, Fanaticism, 152–54.

18 David Motadel, “Introduction,” in D. Motadel, ed., Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.

19 Morrison, Alexander, “‘Applied Orientalism’ in British India and Tsarist Turkestan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 3 (July 2009): 619–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier 1845–1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002); Knysh, Alexander, “Sufism as an Explanatory Paradigm: The Issue of the Motivations of Sufi Resistance Movements in Western and Russian Scholarship,” Die Welt des Islams 42, 2 (2002): 139–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994).

20 Jean-Louis Triaud, La Légende Noire de la Sanûssiya: Une Confrérie Musulmane sous le regard Français (1840–1930), 2 vols. (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1995).

21 See Hawkins, Michael C., “Managing a Massacre: Savagery, Civility, and Gender in Moro Province in the Wake of Bud Dajo,” Philippine Studies 59, 1 (2011): 83–105Google Scholar; and Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

22 Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Committee of the Whole House, and the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, House of Commons Papers: Reports of Committees; 1812–13 (122) VII.1, p. 311. See also Copy of a Letter from the Governor-General to the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors, 2 Nov. 1807, House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1812–13 (142) VIII.275, pp. 41–45.

23 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27, 33,

24 William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 121.

25 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 139–42.; idem, The Aftermath of the Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 298; C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 320; Peter Robb, “The Impact of British Rule on Religious Community: Reflections on the Trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah of Patna in 1865,” in Peter Robb, ed., Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 142–76; and Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), ch. 3.

26 For the Russians this was known as miuridizm, and for the French it was the “peril” of confrèrisme: see, respectively, Morrison, “Applied Orientalism,” 633; Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, 89; Knysh, “Sufism as an Explanatory Paradigm,” 144; and Triaud, La Légende Noire, 9–14.

27 Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London: Anthem Press, 2007), 177; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

28 Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State (New Delhi: Sage, 2005); David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).

29 See George Otto Trevelyan, Cawnpore, 3d ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1866), 89–93; and Morrison, “Applied Orientalism.”

30 Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden, Fragments of the Frontier (London: Hurst & Company, 2011), 82. For an excellent recent treatment of the post-1857 British obsession with Indian conspiracies, including Muslim ones, see Wagner, Kim, “‘Treating upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India,” Past & Present 218 (Feb. 2013), 159–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 W. W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen? (London: Trübner and Co., 1871), 151.

32 The main difference was that after 1857 British colonial authorities began to conceive of Muslim “fanatics” as belonging to a universal, pan-Indian insurrectionary fraternity: Alex Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46, 49, 62.

33 Ibid., 57.

34 See, generally, Anand Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); Freitag, Sandria B., “Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India,” Modern Asian Studies 25, 2 (1991): 227–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Major, Andrew, “State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of the ‘Dangerous Classes,’” Modern Asian Studies 33, 3 (1999): 657–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

35 Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments of the Frontier, ch. 3; and Benjamin D. Hopkins, “Islam and Resistance in the British Empire,” in David Motadel, ed., Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 157–58.

36 K. N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Arnold, David, “Islam, the Mappilas and Peasant Revolt in Malabar,” Journal of Peasant Studies 9, 4 (1982), 255–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Minute by the Honorable President, 6 Feb. 1852, in Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar, for the Years 1849–53 (Madras: United Scottish Press, 1863), IOR, V/27/262/20, p. 263.

38 Report from T. L. Strange to T. Pycroft, 25 Sept. 1852, Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar, for the Years 1849–53 (Madras: United Scottish Press, 1863), IOR, V/27/262/20, p. 440.

39 Ibid., 443–44.

40 As one editorial in The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce from 1855 put it, the Mappilas were “turbulent, refractory, blood-thirsty, and revengeful fanatics,” who possessed a “deep-rooted prejudice and hatred against those opposed to their creed.” Their “vengeance is wreaked in blood,” it continued, “and should the forfeiture of life be entailed on any one of them, in their sanguinary conflicts, Paradise is held out as the reward, the sure and certain recompense for this ‘martyrdom!’” (3 Oct. 1855: 546).

41 Section 3 of the Act contained the proviso regarding burning: “Act No. XXIII of 1854, An Act for the Suppression of Outrages in the District of Malabar,” in William Plumbridge Williams, ed., The Acts of the Legislative Council of India Relating to the Madras Presidency from 1848 to 1855 (Madras: Church of Scotland Mission Press, 1856), IOR, V/4589, p. 294.

42 “The Malabar Coercion Bill,” Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 21 Nov. 1854: 4757.

43 According to the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (ibid.), “Its provisions were strict almost beyond the precedents of Ireland, and the crime also was beyond all European precedent. The Magistrate was rendered despotic, and nothing but responsible despotism can keep a race at once fanatic, Mussulman, and oriental to the observance of their social duties toward idolators.”

44 See Condos, “License to Kill.”

45 General Report upon the Administration of the Punjab Proper, for the Years 1849–50 & 1850–51 (Lahore: Chronicle Press, 1854), 89, 27

46 Henry Walter Bellew, Our Punjab Frontier: Being a Concise Account of the Various Tribes by which the North-West Frontier of British India Is Inhabited (Calcutta: Wyman Bros. Publishers, 1868), 12.

47 Hopkins, B. D., “Jihad on the Frontier: A History of Religious Revolt on the North-West Frontier, 1800–1947,” History Compass 7, 6 (2009): 1459–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the history of jihad in South Asia, see Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

48 Hopkins, “Jihad on the Frontier,” 1459–62. For an examination of the 1897 Uprising, see David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 175–219; and Surridge, Keith, “The Ambiguous Amir: Britain, Afghanistan and the 1897 North-West Frontier Uprising,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, 3 (Sept. 2008), 417–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Letter from John Nicholson to the Punjab Government, 21 Jan. 1856, NAI, Foreign/Frontier/June 1856/nos. 171–85.

50 Condos, “License to Kill.”

51 Legislative Council Proceedings, 15 Mar. 1867, IOR, V/9/10, pp. 196–97.

52 Jalal, Partisans of Allah, 23; Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 34, 96; Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (London: Routledge, 2009), 2.

53 Nicholson once described a group of “Ghazi fanatics” who attacked his garrison during the First Anglo-Afghan War as a pack of animals, “howling for the blood of the Farangi Kaffirs”: Lionel J. Trotter, The Life of John Nicholson: Soldier and Administrator (London: John Murray, 1897), 28.

54 Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, “Holy Warriors: Religion as Military Modus Operandi,” in Gavin Rand and Crispin Bates, eds., Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Volume 4: Military Aspects of the Indian Uprising (New Delhi: Sage, 2013), 47–49.

55 Ibid., 50–51.

56 Legislative Council Proceedings, 15 Mar. 1867, IOR, V/9/10, pp. 197–98.

57 Ibid., 22 Feb. 1867, IOR, V/9/10, p. 90.

58 Maine, in particular, preferred retaining the word “religious,” believing there necessarily had to be “some ingredient of religion in the frenzy of an assassin who was brought under this measure.” Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 No juries were allowed for these cases, and court officers were allowed to dismiss evidence or witnesses if they were believed to have been “offered for the purpose of vexation or delay”: “Murderous Outrages in the Punjab, Act No. XXIII of 1867,” in William Theobold, The Legislative Acts of the Governor General of India in Council, from 1834 to the End of 1867; with an Analytical Abstract Prefixed to each Act, 5 vols., vol. 5: 1866–67 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1868), IOR, V/8/119, p. 461.

61 Statement of Fanatical Outrages.

62 As with the 1854 Moplah Act, burning was designed to exploit what the British believed was a deep-seated “superstition” amongst Muslims that this would destroy the soul and thus prevent the “fanatic” from ascending to Heaven: K. W. note by John Lawrence, 11 Oct. 1866, NAI, Foreign/Judicial A/nos. 12–14. It remained, however, a highly controversial punishment and was temporarily banned by Governor-General Fitzpatrick in 1896, before being revived again by Lord Curzon in 1905: see Condos, “License to Kill.” “Fanatics” were also sometimes buried in quick lime, which was considered by some to be just as severe as burning: Letter from H. A. Deane to the GOI, 16 Mar. 1905, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/July 1905/nos. 178–82.

63 IOR, P/862, Table B.

64 Statement of Fanatical Outrages.

65 Ibid.

66 See, for example, telegram from the Punjab Government, to D. F. McLeod, 9 Jan. 1869; telegram from D. F. McLeod, to the Punjab Government, 11 Jan. 1869, both in IOR, L/PS/6/566, coll. 198.

67 Ibid. For further correspondence regarding the improper reporting of MOA cases, see NAI, Foreign/Frontier B/June 1896/no. 38.

68 Letter 490F from the GOI to the Punjab Government, 20 Feb. 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32.

69 See Robert Nichols, ed., The Frontier Crimes Regulation: A History in Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

70 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6, 31–32, 181.

71 See, for example, Copy of Letter 56 from F. R. Pollock to the Punjab Government, 14 Aug. 1866”; and “Copy of Memorandum by Colonel J. Becher, 11 Aug. 1866, both in IOR, P/438/15, no. 13, p. 11; and Condos “License to Kill.”

72 Connolly served in Malabar from 1848 until 1855, when he himself was assassinated by a Mappila.

73 Quoted in “Editorial,” Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 13 (1849): 711.

74 Letter from C. Collett to T. Clarke, 7 Jan. 1856, Correspondence on Moplah Outrages, vol. 2, IOR, V/27/262/21, p. 239.

75 Voltaire, Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, 137; Toscano, Fanaticism, xix, 12, 17–22.

76 Roland Littlewood, Pathologies of the West: An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America (London: Continuum, 2002), 27; James H. Mills, Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The “Native-Only” Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 2. See also Nile Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

77 Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and “the African Mind” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 64–76.

78 Ibid., 70–73.

79 See, for example, Fred McNair, Perak and the Malays (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1878); Isabella L. Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1883); and Frank Swettenham, Malay Sketches (New York: John Lane, 1900).

80 Littlewood, Pathologies of the West, 6–7.

81 Ibid., 6–7, 9, 26.

82 Ibid., 26. See also Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 122.

83 Mahone, Sloan, “The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa,” Journal of African History 47 (2006): 243, 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Littlewood, Pathologies of the West, 26. For an example of this, see McNair, Perak and the Malays, 213.

85 McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry, 54–55.

86 Herbert Edwardes, A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848–49, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), vol. 1, 24.

87 Gazette of India, 1867: Jan.–Dec. 1867 Supplement and Gazette Extraordinary, IOR V/11/8, p. 233.

88 Note by J. G. Lorimer, 7 May 1900, NAI: Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72. However, unlike amok, which was seen as a completely indiscriminate killing frenzy, colonial officials did recognize how fanatical outrages were typically calculated and targeted attacks: G.F.W. Ewens, Insanity in India: Its Symptoms and Diagnosis with Reference to the Relation of Crime and Insanity (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1908), 334.

89 Letter 2842 (confidential) from James Browne to the GOI, 8 Apr. 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. Though Browne was referring to both Pashtun and Baluchis in this passage, there were those who believed that Baluchis were generally far less fanatical than their Pashtun counterparts: “Note on the Frontier Tribes of Sind—Belochees,” in J. Forbes and John William Kaye, eds., The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan (London: W. H. Allen and Co. 1872), vol. 6, 308; and K. W. note by T. H., 30 Aug. 1881, NAI, Foreign/Political A/October 1881/nos. 353–55; K. W. note by H. S. Barnes, 29 Apr. 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. The great paradox, however, was that, from 1881 onward, the vast majority of cases of fanatical outrage actually occurred in Baluchistan, and not in Punjab: Statement of Fanatical Outrages.

90 Letter 2842 from James Browne to the GOI, 8 Apr. 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32.

91 Ibid. The reference to “seeing blood” is also curiously similar to the notion that amoks were sometimes described as being literally “blinded” with rage: McNair, Perak and the Malays, 213–14.

92 While the overwhelming majority of the cases involved men, there was at least one documented case of a “woman Ghazi”: Demi-official letter from H. Wylie to the GOI, 13 July 1898, NAI, Foreign/External A/September 1898/nos. 90–104.

93 Letter 2842 from James Browne to the GOI, 8 Apr. 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32; letter from F. MacDonald to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 3 Apr. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 49.

94 Saha, Jonathan, “Madness and the Making of a Colonial Order in Burma,” Modern Asian Studies 47, 2 (Mar. 2013): 406–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 424, 435.

95 Letter 1492 from M. A. Tighe to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 5–6 Nov. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, pp. 43–44.

96 Letter 2435 from C. E. Yate to the GOI, 5 Mar. 1901, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72. Yate also reiterated this same point several years later: Extract from Colonel C. E. Yate's Review; of the Administration of Baluchistan during the Years 1901–1904, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/January 1905/nos. 7–9, no. 7. See also Letter 16-C from E. G. Colvin to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 4 Jan. 1901, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, pp. 40–41.

97 Note by J. G. Lorimer, 7 May 1900, NAI: Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72.

98 Letter 972 from W.R.H. Merk to the Punjab Government, 17 Dec. 1900, NAI: Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72.

99 According to R. I. Bruce, one of the most outspoken critics of this practice, it was unworthy “of a great Christian civilizing Government to resort to such a doubtful means of preventing crime as the taking advantage of a religious belief that the burning of the body bars the entrance of the soul to Heaven or Paradise’: The Forward Policy and Its Results; or Thirty-Five Years” Work amongst the Tribes on Our North-Western Frontier of India (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1900), 245.

100 Note on the burning of the bodies of Muhammadan Fanatics after execution by Captain C. Archer, Aug. 1897, NAI: Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72.

101 Letter 2842 from James Browne to the GOI, 8 Apr. 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32.

102 Note by W. J. Cunningham, 8 May 1900, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72. Supporters of this argument included Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab Mackworth Young (1897–1902), and C. E. Yate. As Yate put it, “The immediate execution of the murderer, which has hitherto been in vogue, destroys all chance of ever getting at the real cause of the murder”: Letter 2435 from C. E. Yate to the GOI, 5 Mar. 1901, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72. See also Letter 1284 from the Punjab Government to the GOI, 10 Sept. 1900, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72.

103 Letter from F. MacDonald to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 3 Apr. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 50.

104 Letter 87 from C. Archer to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 13 Nov. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 45.

105 Ibid., 46. This was advocated by several of Archer's colleagues as well: Letter 16-C from E. G. Colvin to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 4 Jan. 1901, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 40; Letter 719 from C. E. Yate to the GOI, 22 Jan. 1901, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 38.

106 Letter 6856 from J. Ramsay to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 31 Oct. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 43.

107 See letter from F. MacDonald to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 3 Apr. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 51; and Letter 16-C from E. G. Colvin to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 4 Jan. 1901, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 40.

108 Merk did, however, concede that “fanaticism” was not entirely restricted to Muslims, and noted how the Akali (Nihang) Sikhs of Punjab were particularly “fanatical”: Letter 972 from W.R.H. Merk to the Punjab Government, 17 Dec. 1900, NAI: Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72.

109 Letter 12-C-42 from W.R.H. Merk to the Commander and Superintendent, Peshawar Division, 30 May 1899, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, pp. 5–6.

110 Note by J. G. Lorimer, 7 May 1900, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72. Lorimer even suggested that the British authorities might also do more to treat fanatics as bona fide “lunatics” in order to “destroy the mock-heroic element of the situation and make the would-be martyr an object of derision”: Ibid.

111 Extract from pp. 9 and 10 of Colonel C. E. Yate's Review of the Administration of Baluchistan during the years 1901–1904, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/January 1905/nos. 7–9.

112 Letter 3665 from C. E. Yate to the GOI, 3 Apr. 1901, NAI, Foreign/External A/September 1901/nos. 9–21.

113 Mahone has made a similar observation about the legal status of prophets and others identified as “fanatics” in British East Africa: “The Psychology of Rebellion,” 253.

114 Even in colonial Burma, where efforts to provide proper resources and facilities for diagnosing and treating the criminally insane were lackluster, the colonial state at least made some attempt to provide for these individuals (Saha, “Madness”).

115 Because of the highly unusual nature of cases tried under the MOA, which were often disposed of with the utmost speed, it is sometimes difficult to find detailed accounts of them. Some of these reports consist of little more than roughly scrawled notes or vague allusions to them in officers’ political diaries: see, for example, NAI, Foreign/Frontier B/June 1896, no. 38.

116 See Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7; Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); and “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–88.

117 My thinking here is largely influenced by Kim Wagner's work on Thuggees and Ann Laura Stoler's work on violence in colonial Sumatra: Wagner, Thuggee; and “‘In Unrestrained Conversation’: Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in Nineteenth-Century India,” in Ricardo Roque and Kim A. Wagner, eds., Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 135–62.

118 Stoler, Ann Laura, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations 37, special issue: “Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories” (Winter 1992): 151–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 172.

119 As Alexander Spencer has suggested, it is extremely difficult and often unhelpful to try and separate political from religious motivations when it comes to understanding certain forms of extreme or “terrorist” action: “Questioning the Concept of ‘New Terrorism,’” Peace, Conflict & Development 8 (Jan. 2006): 15, 24.

120 Crown versus Shereen, IOR, P/442/53.

121 Letter 2672 from Robert Sandeman to the GOI, 5 June 1890, NAI, Foreign/External B/June 1890/nos. 196–97; Copy of Translation of the Statement of Accused, Payo, 17 Sept. 1890, NAI, Foreign/External B/January 1891/nos. 84–89; and Letter from E. G. Colvin to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 19 Mar. 1898, NAI, Foreign/External A/September 1898/nos. 90–104; and Demi-Official Letter from H. Wylie to the GOI, 13 July 1898, NAI, Foreign/External A/September 1898/nos. 90–104.

122 See Extract from Colonel C. E. Yate's Review of the Administration of Baluchistan during the years 1901–1904, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/January 1905/nos. 7–9, no. 7; Letter 88-–661 from D. C. MacNabb to the Punjab Government, 7 Apr. 1871, IOR/P/147.

123 Jadoons,” in J. Forbes and John William Kaye, eds., The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan (London: W. H. Allen and Co. 1872), vol. 5, no. 247.

124 Copy of Translation of the Statement of Accused, Payo, 17 Sept. 1890, NAI, Foreign/External B/January 1891/nos. 84–89; and NAI, Foreign/External B/June 1890/nos. 196–97.

125 Letter 1767 from Robert Sandeman to the GOI, 22 June 1883, NAI, Foreign/A. Pol. E./July 1883/nos. 81–83, no. 82; see also Bruce, Forward Policy, 85.

126 See Letter 173 from the Commissioner of the Peshawar Division to the Punjab Government, 9 Apr. 1899, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/June 1899/nos. 107–14; and Memorandum by George Hamilton to the GG, 28 Jan. 1898, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/April 1898/nos. 214–15; Letter 52-C from R. E. Younghusband to the Commissioner of the Peshawar Division, 20 June 1899, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 7.

127 See Crown vs. Shereen, IOR, P/442/53; and Letter 88-–661 from D. C. MacNabb to the Punjab Government, 7 Apr. 1871, IOR/P/147; NAI, Foreign/External B/October 1894/nos. 53–56.

128 Copy of a Confidential News-letter, 26 Feb. 1881, NAI, Foreign/Political A/April 1881/nos. 135–36, no. 136.

129 Letter 6856 from J. Ramsay to the Agent to the GG and Chief Commissioner of Baluchistan, 31 Oct. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 43.

130 Letter from Mufti Fida Muhammad to the District Commissioner of Peshawar, 30 Mar. 1899, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/June 1899/nos. 107–14.

131 Letter from Muhammad Barkat Ali Khan Bahadur to the Punjab Government, 30 June 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 21.

132 Demi-official from H. Wylie to the GOI, 6 Apr. 1898, NAI, Foreign/External A/September 1898/nos. 90–104.

133 Letter from E. G. Colvin to P. T. Spence, 19 Mar. 1898, NAI, Foreign/External A/September 1898/nos. 90–104.

134 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

135 Note by F. D. Cunningham on the suggestion for checking murders of which the motive is religious fanaticism, 3 Apr. 1900, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 17.

136 Some scholars have even argued that such acts of violent resistance and suicidal martyrdom were a means for marginalized individuals to fashion a sense of subjecthood on their own terms: Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 36–40; Ronit Lentin, “Introduction: Thinking Palestine,” in R. Lentin, ed., Thinking Palestine (London: Zed Books, 2008), 13. See also Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall, eds., Agamben and Colonialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

137 Letter 2435 from C. E. Yate, to the GOI, 5 Mar. 1901, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72.

138 Hunter, Indian Musalmans, 149. The “frontier rebels” Hunter refers to were the “Hindustani fanatics” at Sitana.

139 For other examples of scholarship that has challenged the ready applicability of Foucauldian frameworks to the colonial world, see Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); John L. Comaroff, “Governmentality, Materiality, Legality, Modernity: On the Colonial State in Africa,” in Jan-Gorg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt, eds., African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 107–34; and Peter Redfield, “Foucault in the Tropics: Displacing the Panopticon,” in Jonathan Xavier Inda, ed., Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 50–79.

140 Laura Payton, “Bill C-51 Bars CSIS from Committing ‘Bodily Harm,’ Sexual Violation,” CBC News, 4 Feb. 2015: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c-51-bars-csis-from-committing-bodily-harm-sexual-violation-1.2938380 (accessed 30 Mar. 2015). The 2001 American Patriot Act is, of course, the other signal example of this: “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001,” U.S Government and Printing Office: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-107hr3162enr/pdf/BILLS-107hr3162enr.pdf (accessed 4 Dec. 2014).

141 “6 Things We Learned about Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Parliament Hill Shooting,” CBC News, 6 Mar. 2015: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/6-things-we-learned-about-michael-zehaf-bibeau-and-parliament-hill-shooting-1.2984759 (accessed 7 Mar. 2015); Marian Scott, “Radicalization: Why Do Western Youth Join Extremist Groups?” Montreal Gazette, 23 Oct. 2014: http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/radicalization-why-do-western-youth-join-extremist-groups (accessed 18 Jan. 2015).

142 Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, ix.

143 “Full text of President Obama's 2014 Address to the United Nations General Assembly,” Washington Post, 24 Sept 2014: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-text-of-president-obamas-2014-address-to-the-united-nations-general-assembly/2014/09/24/88889e46-43f4-11e4-b437-1a7368204804_story.html (accessed 13 Nov. 2014).