Meat Together: South Asian Muslim Visions of Sovereignty in the Age of Minority

Historians of South Asia have long treated practices related to the consumption of meat—especially cow slaughter—as a flashpoint in late-nineteenth-century Hindu–Muslim conflict. Such clashes carried profound social and political consequences and exposed a shifting nexus between sovereignty and everyday life in post-Mughal North India. Against this backdrop, the present article argues that halal meat—and food more broadly—functioned as a medium of inter-communal rapprochement, challenging the colonial state’s claim to arbitrate Hindu–Muslim daily interactions. As Mughal rule ebbed and British power consolidated in the former Mughal territories of North India, South Asian Muslim elites (ashraf or shurafaʾ; sg. sharif)—long accustomed to imperial primacy—found themselves in a polity in which demographic weight reshaped inter-communal relations. Under these new conditions, colonial technologies of governance recast Muslims as a political “minority,” compelling members of the ashraf to seek British protection against the dangers of an increasingly Hindu majoritarian arena—even as the Raj styled itself the sole “impartial” guardian of communal peace. These constraints, however, also catalyzed alternative conceptions of sovereignty aimed at navigating the sociopolitical terrain of colonial South Asia. Focusing on the Urdu writings of the renowned Muslim educator and thinker Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), the article shows that his advocacy of shared civic and dietary practices, alongside the preservation of Muslim ritual distinctness, sought to reconfigure Muslim–Hindu–British relations by rejecting the colonial claim to “impartial” sovereignty over everyday life. Grounded in Islamic jurisprudence and Mughal notions of impartiality, Sayyid Ahmad recast sovereignty as a shared dietary practice—realized in animal slaughter, cooking, eating, and cooperation—rather than a capacity vested in the state alone. Although he later retreated from some positions amid escalating cow-protection mobilization and the political challenge posed by the Indian National Congress (est. 1885), his writings show that halal food politics—with meat at its center—offered a radical vision of sovereignty as quotidian practice, one that unsettled British claims to impartiality and to governance over everyday life. In so doing, the article not only offers a new reading of one of South Asia’s most significant nineteenth-century Muslim writers but also recovers an underexplored history of sovereignty: the everyday as a site where coexistence rests on mutual, non-state-mediated ethical commitments—avoiding harm and respecting one another’s ritual domains—rather than on the domination of any single community.