Emotions, Adab, and the Muslim Service Elite: Regimes of Affect under Company Rule

Abstract

Faẓl-i Ḥaqq Khairābādī was a prominent logician, theologian, and literati who is known for his contributions to early nineteenth-century Muslim theology and, later, for his role in the 1857 Uprising. Like several of his scholarly counterparts, Khairābādī was also a salaried East India Company employee who grew discontent with colonial rule, not just due to missionary activity, but also the emotional, sensory, and hygienic practices of British administrators. While his career as a bureaucrat has been largely overshadowed by his intellectual production and political activities, his epistolary and poetic corpus provides rich insights into how early Company rule tested longstanding regimes of affect among the Muslim service elite. Adab, an Islamicate concept referring to etiquette and comportment, was imbibed as a practice and regime of emotion among Muslim scholarly and service classes alike. Reading adab texts and Khairābādī’s Arabic letters and poetry alongside Company administrative manuals on manners and social behavior yields insights into the clashing of emotional regimes in early colonial politics and government in India. This paper concludes that despite the Company’s outward assimilation to Indo-Persian norms of statecraft and governance through the upholding of Mughal sovereignty, participation in local political rituals, and supervision of an Islamic legal regime, their failure to recognize elite Muslim standards of emotion and etiquette marked the colonial state as irreconcilably different. Significantly, this indexing of emotional difference can be contrasted to other non-Muslim political actors in the Delhi Territory and Rajasthan such as the Marathas or regional Hindu rajas to whom Khairābādī served in between his two stints as a Company judicial employee. Khairābādī’s letters therefore reveal how Muslim-Hindu proximity operated at the level of emotional styles in politics and patronage and the frictions of feeling generated through the pre-1857 colonial experience.