Taming the Terrorist: British Responses to the Hur Uprisings in Sindh, 1930–46

In March 1943, a Martial Law court convicted and hanged the Sufi saint Pir Pagaro. His crime: the treason of his devotees, the Hurs. Hiding in the marshy wilds of northern Sindh, they had been waging a guerilla war against the colonial state since the mid-1930s, with a longer history of insurrection stretching back to the 1890s. Theirs was an improper devotion, both in the eyes of the state and of their fellow Muslims, who accused them of putting love of pir before love of God (pir parast).  For both groups, they became an icon of Islam gone wrong. Colonial official and Sindh-enthusiast H. T. Lambrick amassed a rich archive of letters, court transcripts, and press clippings that documents state perceptions of the uprisings from the first trial of the pir in 1930 to the re-education of his sons after his execution.

This paper analyzes the British state’s response to the Hur uprisings, attending to how the construction of the Hurs as “terrorists” inflected the late colonial state’s effort to reform devotional Islam. First, I analyze Lambrick’s The Terrorist (1972), situating its narrative of Hur violence in relation to 1940s newspaper coverage of the Hurs, as well as to its generic antecedents from the anti-thugee campaigns of the 19^th century. I suggest that the legal category of “criminal tribes and castes,” devised to describe anti-colonial Hinduism, was redeployed in the Hur campaign to consolidate the category of the Muslim terrorist. Second, I trace the two main strategies whereby the state sought to reform the Hurs: by extending the coercive power of the police via martial law, and by co-opting the pir’s gaddi for the state. The late colonial state, rather than putting an end to “fanatic” devotion, cynically and even fascistically sought to harness it to bolster imperial authority.