The Silk Letters Movement

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2016

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

In 1916 the authorities in India uncovered what they believed was a plot to overthrow British rule in the subcontinent. It involved an Islamic teacher from the city of Deoband in northern India. Messages written on sheets of silk had been intercepted by the British. Owen Bennett Jones presents reports from the colonial archives.

(Photo: The Darul Uloom Deoband, the seminary at the heart of the Silk Letter Movement)

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Owen Bennett Jones.
0:06.2	And today we're going back a hundred years to 1916 in colonial India, the most cherished of Britain's imperial possessions. In 1916 a whole generation of British youth was being killed in the First World War in Europe,
0:32.0	but on the subcontinent the British were still dominant.
0:35.0	There was still dominant.
0:37.0	There was opposition to British rule. In 1857 the British had suppressed the Indian
0:47.2	mutiny. In the aftermath of that uprising some Muslims set up seminaries to preserve traditional text-based Islamic values, and
0:57.5	the most successful was established in Deoband, an obscure provincial town 150 kilometers north of Delhi.
1:06.5	The first lessons were taught under the shade of a pomegranate tree.
1:10.5	Today, a sprawling complex of buildings is the headquarters of a worldwide movement with tens of millions of followers.
1:18.0	Farida Zaman is from the University of Chicago.
1:22.0	Dearbun was founded in 1867 to teach scholars the foundational text of Islam
1:29.0	so that they could in turn teach other Muslims to lead good Islamic lives.
1:33.6	What was it about Dieoband that made it so phenomenally successful?
1:37.6	One could say that Dieuband was offering a solution to the problem of living as a Muslim within the British Empire.
1:46.0	There were other parallel reform movements which offered a form of reconciliation with the British Empire, whereas the deal bond in its emphasis on returning
1:56.1	to the true tenets of Islam seemed to offer something very attractive to many Muslims in India. A way of holding onto their identity that didn't lead to any form of compromise with British power.
2:09.5	The British were suspicious and sent spies to infiltrate the seminary at Deirband.
2:15.6	At first the reports that came back suggested it was what it said it was, an institution
2:20.6	devoted to Muslim scholarship. But in 1915, evidence came to light of a change
2:26.2	in attitude going right to the top of the institution, to the principle of Dioband,
2:31.6	Mahmoud Hassan.
2:33.0	There were a series of very secretive meetings that took place in Delhi.
	...

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