Alternative Kingdoms: Shrines and Sovereignty in Jaora

In early modern and colonial-era India, struggles for sovereignty took place at the intersection of charismatic, religious, and political authority, with the rulers of India's princely states leveraging different forms of power to meet the various challenges presented by British colonial dominance. This struggle took a particular shape in the former Sunni Muslim princely state of Jaora. Now a town in contemporary Madhya Pradesh, Jaora has a population of 75,000 and is home to a collection of Islamic shrines known as Husain Tekri (literally, Husain Hill). Unlike most subcontinental Muslim memorial structures, the shrines are unaffiliated with Sufi lineages, and since their inception in 1886, they have attracted Sunni and Shia patronage, both of which continue to influence their ritual life and everyday culture.

In the more typical subcontinental arrangement, a constantly negotiated and shifting balance of power existed between the royal patron and the Sufi lineage in control of the shrine. At Husain Tekri, however, the shrines' hybridity has facilitated their reception as—depending on context—religious, secular, colonial, royal, Sunni, or Shia, and Jaora's nawabs have exploited the shrines' multivalence to bolster their sovereignty, wearing multiple hats in an effort to assert their rule to whichever political, secular, or sacred authority came calling. Unencumbered by accountability to Sufi lineages or charisma and patronized by a range of Sunni and Shia communities, Husain Tekri has functioned—and continues to function—as an ideal site for Jaora's nawabs to legitimate their rule and assert sovereignty. The hybrid nature of Husain Tekri has thus perpetuated links between political and social domains in ways that Nicholas Dirks has argued were dismantled in the colonial era.¹

Specifically, in the decades leading up to Indian independence, the hybrid nature of Husain Tekri facilitated the development of a mutually beneficial exchange between members of Bombay's Khoja community and Jaora's nawabs and a mutually defensive exchange between Jaora's nawabs and the British colonial authorities. For the Khojas, patronizing monuments of Shia piety consolidated wealth and their position in the larger Shia and Khoja community. For the nawabs, Khoja patronage provided connections to the larger commercial economy of Bombay and the emerging Muslim League. At the same time, the title of nawab conferred on its holder the position of Husain Tekri's mutawalli (manager), in charge of Husain Tekri's shrines and waqf properties. It was in this capacity that the nawab could assert his sovereignty in the face of the British colonial government.

While the novel hybrid nature of Husain Tekri is essential to the types of sovereignty I will discuss, the Jaora nawabs' sovereignty over what I term their "alternative kingdom" also participates in a far more widespread discourse of sovereignty associated with what historian Manan Ahmed Asif, in his study of the thirteenth-century mirror for princes Chachnama, has described as Indo-Persian political theory predicated on "accommodation for the purpose of retaining power" and reliant on "the recognition and incorporation of difference to create political order."² It was, I suggest, an act of subtle yet effective and powerful defiance for the nawabs of Jaora to mobilize this Indo-Persian model of sovereignty at the very moment that British colonizers were popularizing a version of Indian history that depicted Muslim rulers of the subcontinent as ideologically rigid despots and Hindus as oppressed subjects whose only hope was enlightened British rule.³

Because Husain Tekri remains a Sunni-Shia hybrid unaffiliated with Sufi lineages, in the contemporary period its multivalence endures, and with it the continued sovereignty of Jaora's current nawab Sarwar 'Ali Khan. Husain Tekri is outside the direct control of the Indian state because it is a waqf property, and as such it is under the jurisdiction of the Madhya Pradesh Sunni waqf board. The Madhya Pradesh Sunni waqf board's ability to control the shrines directly is, however, limited because the founding documents of Husain Tekri require the waqf board to recognize that the nawab must be mutawalli. Therefore, the board cannot directly access Husain Tekri's resources. The nawab, in other words, remains sovereign in the alternative...