On 1 January 1862, the British enacted the Indian Penal Code, and within two decades most of India's law was codified. Ironically, England still awaits a criminal code, and the vast majority of English law remains uncodified, in the form of statute or common law. Hindu and Muslim law was rarely included in these Indian law codes, so the entire codification process represented the transplantation of English law to India, complete with lawyers and judges. A modest historiography has investigated the effect codification had on Indian society; or as Marc Galanter theorized, what happened to India's indigenous law as a result of the formation of a modern Indian legal system. However, Galanter's question implicitly assumed that England's legal system was modern. That assumption has resulted in a misleading interpretation of the Indian Penal Code.

Contemporary historians imagine reformist activity relating to women in colonial India as a series of public debates scattered across the nineteenth century. Whether such historians discuss sati, widow remarriage, the Rakhmabai case or the Age of Consent controversy, they privilege highly specific vocabularies of contestation, forms of argument and forums of expression. Judicial reformist activity, occurring incrementally within the technical vocabularies of law, tends largely to be disregarded. This disregard is hardly new. Anglo-Indian judges themselves recognized that their reformist activity was shielded from scrutiny when they boasted that ‘judicial decisions have silently promoted the cause of female emancipation and progress.’

When A‘la Hazrat [Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan] was born, his . . . paternal grandfather put him in his lap and said, ‘This [grand]son of mine will be a great ‘ alim’ ...

And one day someone knocked on the door. A‘la Hazrat, who was then ten years old, opened it and saw an elderly holy man (faqir) standing outside. . . . the man put his hand on A‘la Hazrat's head and said, ‘You are a great scholar.’

Six months after [Maulana Mustafa Riza's] birth, Nuri Miyan Sahib [Shah Abu'l Husain Ahmad Nuri] came to Bareilly. Putting his finger into [the child's] mouth, [Nuri Miyan] entered him into [his] chain of spiritual authority, and gave him permission (ijazat) [to have disciples of his own] and investiture as his successor (khilafat), and he predicted that this child would be a great ‘alim in his time as well as a perfect saint (wali).

When Mutfi-e A‘zam-e Hind [Mustafa Riza Khan] was nine years old, his father A‘la Hazrat invited all the famous men and ‘ulama to Bareilly and announced . . . this son of mine is a wali. Learn from him.

This is an essay about a father and a son, who were individually revered as ‘ ulama (scholars) and pirs (spiritual preceptors), whose lives together spanned more than a hundred-year period, between 1856 and 1981. Both were leaders of the reform movement known to its followers as the Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama‘at (lit., ‘people of the [prophetic] way and the [majority] community’) and to others as the Barelwi movement.

Frontier Wars are but the surf that marks the edge and the advance of the wave of civilization.

—Lord Salisbury, 1892

Like the jellyfish, the absence of a backbone to be broken was the greatest defense of the tribes against the waves of state power which beat upon them.

[Yapp 1983:186]

Introduction

An aphorism occasionally heard today purportedly summarizes the approach the British took to govern the parts of the empire that now constitute Pakistan. Their formula, it says, was ‘Rule the Punjabis, intimidate the Sindhis, buy the Pushtun, and honor the Baloch.’ While doing fieldwork in Quetta, the capital of Pakistani Balochistan and, in recent years the setting for several incidents of serious ethnic conflict, I found that current stereotypes about Baloch and Pushtun held by members of both groups about themselves and each other reflect essentially the same attitudes as those expressed in the aphorism.

This essay is an enquiry into the context, nature, and significance of militant sectarian conflict in Pakistan. The parties to the conflict are the Sunnis, who constitute the majority of Muslims in Pakistan, and the Shi‘a, a small but influential minority. Conflict between these two religious communities has deep roots in the history of Islam and of South Asia. In Pakistan, which aspires to be in some sense an ‘Islamic state’, sectarian conflict is part of, and interacts with, broader issues concerning the place of Islam in public life. This essay seeks to analyse some of factors which have contributed, especially in the past twenty-five years or so, to militant sectarian conflict in Pakistan and to assess the significance of this rather neglected form of Islamic radicalism.

In the decade preceding the consolidation of All India Radio (circa 1936), there was an alternative model for broadcasting in India. It rejected the premise that there was a national audience, a national culture, or a national politics, or that radio's key function was to create them. In these negations of broadcasting's nation-statist implications, this model for Indian radio departed from the standard of the 1930s for the mass medium in the Western democracies and authoritarian states alike. Decreeing that discrete local services were the natural correspondent to the subcontinent's fractured social landscape, the model affronted the legitimacy of Indian nationalism. In this it mirrored the conservative face of colonial rule.

A distinctive feature of the late Victorian capital market was the volume of investment in overseas countries, and this was clearly reflected in the dominant position occupied by overseas securities on the London Stock Exchange. By 1913 these amounted to approximately £5.5 billion, some 60% of the nominal value of all quoted securities. The attraction for home investors was the prospect of relatively high rates of return, along with the opportunity to diversify the range of assets held in private and institutional portfolios. In terms of geographical distribution new British investment in Asia ran at an annual average of £16.5 million in the 1890s, increasing to £19.25 million in the 1900s, and reaching a peak of £33 million in 1910.