Colonial trial records shape later scholarship on colonized religious movements

Evidence

The evidence gathered from such interrogations formed the backbone of the government’s case against the Wahhabis. Officials intimately involved with the investigations also used material from the trials and police investigations to write a series of articles on the origins, development, and beliefs of the Indian Wahhabi. Subsequent scholarly accounts of the Indian Wahhabis have relied heavily on these trial documents and colonial histories to chart the movement’s anticolonial activities. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 66

Categorization

• QUESTION: How much of the historiography of Indian Wahhabism is downstream of evidence extracted under coercion?
• XREF: Echoes debates about archival silences and the imperial construction of knowledge — connects to A Midwife’s Tale (Ulrich) on reading court testimony as historical evidence.