The empire that prays together stays together

Religion provided much of the colour, pageant and spectacle of the British Empire as well as its sounds and smells, through its church, mosque and temple bells and gongs, chants, dances, festivals, incense, music, pilgrimages, processions and rites of passage. Many in the Empire in the century after 1857 might have been indifferent to religion. However, few among its multi-million inhabitants from the Queen-Empress and Defender of the Faith at its apex to the frosty little Eskimo in the higher Arctic or the heated wizened Pundit in the lower Bengal could avoid contact with it. Yet, religion was always a subordinate issue in imperial defence. Nonetheless, the undertone of religion echoed right to the economic, military, political and cultural chambers of imperial defence’s heart. Usually, it lay subcutaneously dormant beneath the surface of colonial society until bitten into, as happened in the Indian Mutiny that burst out in 1857. Moreover, religion was often been used as a convenient scapegoat for imperial difficulties, by providing a simplistic shorthand explanation to obfuscate very complex issues at the core of the confrontations between the ruler and the ruled, for religion was usually intertwined with other potentially explosive imperial issues of which race, culture and language are three of the more obvious

Ancient history · Empire · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Historical and Architectural Studies · History · South Asian Studies and Conflicts