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Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire
Contributor(s): Green, Nile (Author)
ISBN: 0521898455     ISBN-13: 9780521898454
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
OUR PRICE:   $65.54  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: May 2009
Qty:
Annotation: A study of the cultural world of the Muslim soldiers of colonial India in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | Europe - Renaissance
Dewey: 954.008
Series: Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society (Hardcover)
Physical Information: 0.9" H x 5.8" W x 9" (1.15 lbs) 236 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Indian
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Set in Hyderabad in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book, a study of the cultural world of the Muslim soldiers of colonial India, focuses on the soldiers' relationships with the faqir holy men who protected them and the British officers they served. Drawing on Urdu as well as European sources, the book uses the biographies of Muslim holy men and their military followers to recreate the extraordinary encounter between a barracks culture of miracle stories, carnivals, drug-use and madness with a colonial culture of mutiny memoirs, Evangelicalism, magistrates and the asylum. It explores the ways in which the colonial army helped promote this sepoy religion while at the same time attempting to control and suppress certain aspects of it. The book brings to light the existence of a distinct 'barracks Islam' and shows its importance to the cultural no less than the military history of colonial India.