Saquib Salim

"This Wahabiism must be stamped out." Robert Henry Elliot wrote these words in 1872 in his book Concerning John's Indian Affairs, within months of Sher Ali Afridi assassinating Viceroy Lord Mayo at the penal settlement of Port Blair. The British described Sher Ali as a lone fanatic with no political affiliation. Elliot's own account of the affair, written by a man who wanted the culprits hanged and their families ruined, tells a rather different story.

A Slice Of History

It is often argued that the men the English branded Wahabis were nothing more than a fanatical religious sect, cut off from the political life of the country. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan disagreed. He pointed out that Wahabi was a misnomer invented by the English, one that swallowed up Muslims of every sect who dared to organise against the colonial government, and that the genuine Wahabis of theology had little to do with the conspiracies pinned on them. A reading of Elliot’s own narrative of Patna in 1857 shows exactly what this organisation actually was.

Patna sat on the Ganges, some four hundred miles from Calcutta, and had already earned, in Elliot’s words, a reputation as the headquarters of "the most troublesome and dangerous sect in India." The Commissioner of Patna, Mr Tayler, became convinced through intelligence from various quarters that this apparently peaceful community was holding meetings and preparing for revolt. The safest course for him was to seize its leaders before they could move. Under the pretext of discussing security issues, Tayler called a meeting of the principal inhabitants at his own house, and three wanted men walked straight into it: Mohammad Hussain, the spiritual leader of the group, Ahmadullah, his "notorious" chief disciple, and Moulvi Waizul Huq.

At the end, the three were told they were being detained. Ahmadullah, with what Elliot calls "wonderful readiness," folded his hands and thanked the Commissioner for his kindness, telling him that their enemies would now be unable to bring false charges against them. The three were marched off under a guard of troops. Patna, alone among the towns of Bengal, remained quiet through the first war of independence, save for one trifling revolt that collapsed the moment it began, undone by the very precautions Tayler had taken.

The reward for saving Patna was a strange one; Tayler was dismissed for "judgment of error." Maula Buksh, his deputy and right-hand man in the arrests, was "ignominiously removed" from the city. The new Commissioner, Mr Samuells, declared that there was "not the slightest proof" that the Wahabis had ever posed any danger to the government. Ahmadullah, the very man Tayler had arrested as a threat to the Empire, was received by Samuells "with open arms," handed a government appointment, and seated for years beside English officials on the Committee of Public Instruction at Patna. By 1863 he could be seen shaking hands with the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal at Belvedere, on his way to being formally introduced to the Governor General. Elliot, writing years later, was still hoping that Tayler would one day receive "some reparation for his unmerited disgrace."

Interestingly, this rehabilitation did not last. Captain Parsons arrived from Ambala in Punjab (now Haryana), marched straight to the Wahabi quarters, and carried off a batch of prisoners for trial in the Punjab courts. Ahmadullah was arrested, convicted on what Elliot calls "the clearest evidence," and sentenced to hang, a sentence that turned into banishment to the Andamans. He was still there, the acknowledged chief of the Wahabi convicts of Port Blair, years later.

In fact, the road to Lord Mayo’s murder ran through this very chain of events. Immediately after Ahmadullah’s conviction in 1865, an attempt was made on the life of Mr Ainslie, the judge who had convicted him, at Patna itself. Chief Justice Norman was next to "fall a victim to the assassin’s knife," struck down immediately after rejecting a set of Wahabi appeals, on the very eve of hearing the rest of them. When his assassin was hanged in turn, the government had the man’s body burned rather than buried, denying him even a grave, an act that Elliot admits "exasperated the Mahommedans to the highest degree."

Lord Mayo, Elliot records, had himself approved of these very indignities practised on a dead man’s remains, an approval that some, Elliot notes, believed had "no small effect in aiding to bring about" his own assassination soon after. At Port Blair, meanwhile, nearly all the Wahabi convicts sat under Ahmadullah and, thanks to "the laxity of discipline," kept up "frequent communication with their friends in India."

When one of their spiritual leaders had been arrested years earlier, three letters written by a Wahabi convict from the Andamans were found among his papers. The line from Patna to the penal colony, in other words, had never actually been broken.

The British were quick to insist that Sher Ali’s act had nothing to do with any of this, that he had killed Lord Mayo, the Governor General, out of a private grievance and nothing more. Elliot demolishes the theory with a single letter. Sher Ali had written to his cousin Arsala Khan shortly before the murder, and that letter proved, in Elliot’s words, that "so far from being miserable at the Andamans," Sher Ali "seemed to think himself rather well of than otherwise," and that he even expected a pardon from the government. A contented man who expects release does not commit murder out of personal despair. Elliot could only draw one conclusion, that Sher Ali "was urged on to the deed by the Wahabis."

There is no denying what this chain of events actually shows. Sher Ali did not walk up to the Viceroy of India as a madman nursing a private wound. He walked up as the last man standing in a struggle that Patna’s Muslims had carried on since 1857, a struggle the Empire had first tried to buy off with a government chair, then tried to hang out of existence, and finally chased all the way to a penal colony in the Bay of Bengal.

Years later, once the truth could no longer be denied, Maula Buksh was decorated with the Star of India, a quiet admission of who had been right about Patna all along. Elliot himself, even while admitting he could not prove the exact link, wanted every man convicted of this "treason" hanged, his whole family banished, and his property seized, a policy he called "a barbarous remedy truly" even as he pressed for it. That is the measure of how seriously the Empire took what it insisted on calling mere religious fanaticism. T

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he English called it Wahhabiism because that word let them dismiss a political struggle as a fit of madness. Sher Ali’s blow, which felled the Queen’s own Viceroy, said otherwise. It said that Patna’s Muslims had never stopped resisting the Empire, and that one of their own had finally reached the man who symbolised it. Call it Wahhabiism if the record insists on that word. It was Indian nationalism all the same.