Talk by Rishad Choudhury (History, Oberlin College)

This talk surveys Islam’s emergence as an “imperial religion” in the Indian Ocean empire of the British Raj. Scholarship on colonial Islam has largely told a story of resistance: European empire as a provocation, and Pan-Islam as the insurgent reaction. By contrast, this talk shows how the Raj’s formal and informal empire in Asia and Africa, together with its material surrogate of free market capitalism, created skeins of connectivity and unity among transcolonial Muslims. Colonial Sharia, first codified in Bengal and then exported around the ocean’s rim, juridically bound and defined Muslim identity from South Asia to the Straits Settlements, the Swahili Coast, and Arabia. Meanwhile, the growth of colonial-era market relations drew far-flung coreligionists into shared, if unequal, circuits of exchange, triggering mass labor migrations in and among Muslim societies, propelling steamship journeys to Mecca, and weaving liens of debt and obligation throughout the Islamic world. The talk argues that the Raj’s oceanic empire crucially shaped modern Muslim projects of worldmaking until the First World War, whether by enabling connections of sociability among Cairine religious reformers and Bombay merchant-financiers, or by inciting discourses of economic self-sufficiency among Indian and Turkish Pan-Islamists. However, the racialized orders of colonial governance, coupled with the immanent inequities of capitalism, ultimately also foreclosed the constitutional and anticolonial possibilities that many Muslims across the Indian Ocean strove to imagine.

Rishad Choudhury is a historian of modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean, from ca. 1750 to decolonization. His work centers on how power is exercised in and on Muslim societies, and how political genealogies are shaped by regional and global histories of empire and colonialism. Choudhury’s first book, Hajj across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture after the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge, 2024), examined how South Asian Muslims navigated the revolutionary age between Mughal imperial decline and British colonial consolidation by forging transregional ties through pilgrimage to Arabia and the Ottoman world. For a preview of the book’s themes, you can read a short piece I wrote for the Cambridge University Press blog. Rishad was formerly an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. Rishad is now working on two new books. The first, Mughal Enlightenment: The Command of Subjects in Colonial Thought, reconsiders how Persian – a classical lingua franca of India and the Indian Ocean – transformed under colonial rule. It reveals how Mughal munshis (scribal workers) engaged with European sources and actors to coproduce novel vernacular epistemologies of science, art, narratology, medicine, ethnography, and political economy. The second is a history of the Nawabs of Dacca, a merchant clan turned landed dynasty that used a colonial peerage to reinvent themselves as neo-Mughal nobles loyal to the Victorian Raj. The book reconstructs the family’s pivotal role in broader currents of Muslim communal mobilization in modern South Asia.