5 - The Company Raj and the Hajjis

Summary

Chapter 5 reflects on the contradictory and conflict-ridden character of the hajj under early Company rule. As patron–client bonds rapidly changed hands from native polities to the colonial state, the chapter notes that the British initially betrayed an intense unwillingness to act as benefactors and patrons of Indian hajj pilgrims. Paradoxically, however, it was the Company’s own military-fiscal demands and aggressions that led to its first involvements with the “Mecca festival,” and thus birthed its first tentative actions as alien patrons of an indigenous pious exercise. Highlighting the conflicts and instabilities that British expansion produced in both intimate household politics and broader imperial domains around India and the Indian Ocean, the chapter is especially interested in understanding how royal Indian woman from subjugated kingdoms compelled the Company state to chart a set of unwritten policies regarding the hajj. The chapter therefore draws on an archive of petitions from the Company’s Persian chancellery, sent by would-be patrician female pilgrims from both northern and peninsular India, who used the “pretext” of leaving for Mecca and the Hijaz to leverage greater claims over dwindling resources of patrimonial, prebendal, and political power in regional settings.