Colonial fiction inverted loyalty by making the pious zealot the savior.

Evidence

In the more open imaginary space of a fictional narrative, in his novel The Afghan Knife, published in 1879, Robert Armitage Sterndale explored the events of 1857 through a cast of interconnected Anglo- Indian and Muslim characters. In the novel, Sterndale set up an opposition between two Muslim characters, one a Westernized deputy magistrate and the other a pious Wahhabi who fought with Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi. Inverting the politics of loyalty, at the end of the novel the Wahhabi saves a young Englishwoman from her rebel captives, while the deputy magistrate proves a duplicitous villain concerned only with himself. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 195

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A great device: the assimilated official is the traitor and the religious radical is the heroic rescuer — flip the expected allegiance to expose imperial anxiety about ‘loyal natives.’
• SEED: Article angle: how Victorian adventure novels about 1857 reassigned villainy, and what those inversions reveal about imperial self-doubt.
• CANDY: An 1879 novel where the Wahhabi saves the Englishwoman and the Westernized magistrate is the scoundrel — a surprising, easily shared tidbit.