Chapter 3 considers the pilgrimages and polemics of religious scholars: the ʿulama. Highlighting their intellectual exchanges with counterparts in the Hijaz, it contends that Mughal decline encouraged the interventions of scholars of Islam in debates over moral-political suasion, even though they had hitherto stood at the wings of state affairs. In particular, the chapter illustrates how the rise of Sunni “revivalism” or tajdīd – which saw the ʿulama attempt to reverse perceived social-political degradations by arguing for a “return” to the original precepts and principles of Islam – was intensely indebted to intellectual interactions on hajj. Beginning with a social history of knowledge formation among the ʿulama, the chapter first reconstructs the thoughts, travels, and far-flung networks of a towering Indian theologian, Shah Waliullah of Delhi (1703–1762). Situating his ascendance in clerical circles within India against the backdrop of scholarly connections with the Hijaz, the chapter then diminishes the focus. Through microhistorical methods, it reconstructs the career of a little-known judge or qāzī entangled in these same webs of reform and renewal. It thereby shows how the qāzi’s revivalism, developed as a pilgrim-student in Arabia, informed his later career as a judicial authority at a fledgling post-Mughal state seeking legitimacy through Islam.

British power at India’s northwest and northeast frontiers was only occasionally predicated on categorising and codifying, emanating more often from indeterminacy and upheaval. These were spaces of productive difficulties for colonial administrators, who prized as well as feared the supposed unruliness of uplands and deserts at the state’s fringes. This chapter provides a theoretical outline of how India’s frontiers became spaces of scientific and governmental exception, situating the book’s core arguments in relation to scholarship on power, knowledge, territory, and borderlands. It proposes that although internally fragmented by social structures, terrain, and colonial categories, colonial India’s frontiers took shape through ideational and material connections and comparisons. Following increasingly intense interventions from the later 1860s, by the turn of the twentieth century frontiers were established as crucial spaces of imperial power, science, and self-fashioning.