In this episode of Guftagu, we've with us Dr Jessica Namakkal, author of the book, "Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India"ĭr Jessica Namakkal is an assistant professor of the practice in international comparative studies gender, sexuality, and feminist studies and history at Duke University. Tune into the episode with Dr Nile Green, exploring the extraordinary lives of Muslims sepoys and the ways in which the colonial army helped promote the sepoy religion while at the same time attempting to control and suppress certain aspects of it. This Orientalist stereotype of Islam as being anti-military discipline persists, as evidenced by the numerous newspaper articles and editorials covering any aspect of Muslim life. Islam and the Army in Colonial India contests the widely held belief that Islam was incompatible with the goals and operations of the colonial army, which was a dangerous and ultimately subversive force that sapped the morale and discipline of the Raj's armies. This book is a study of the cultural world of the Muslim soldiers of colonial India, set in Hyderabad in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and focuses on the soldiers' relationships with the faqir holy men who protected them and the British officers they served.
It is a study that cannot fail to impress its readers with its erudition and innovation, especially when reconciling seemingly incompatible official accounts preserved in the colonial archive with subaltern memories preserved in oral traditions. Nile Green's Islam and the Army in Colonial India is one of those rare works that inspires both admiration and envy.
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