Shadows of sacred and sword
In late 18th-century Bengal, officials of the East India Company confronted armed groups they struggled to classify.
They were religious ascetics, but they carried swords and matchlocks. They travelled as pilgrims, but also as traders. Some lent money and accumulated land. Others moved in formations large enough to fight professional armies. And when British troops pursued them through the riverine districts of northern and eastern Bengal, villagers sometimes hid them, supplied them and warned them of approaching soldiers.
The Company settled on a rather simpler description. They were, one colonial account said, “a set of lawless banditti” who travelled Bengal under the pretence of pilgrimage while begging, stealing and plundering.
The reality was less convenient.
The Sannyasis and Fakirs who challenged Company authority were neither simply criminals nor straightforward religious rebels. They belonged to networks that had developed over centuries, combining faith, commerce, credit, landholding and military service. Their confrontation with the British became particularly violent after the East India Company acquired the right to collect Bengal’s revenues in 1765.
The thing that followed is commonly called the ‘Sannyasi-Fakir Rebellion.’ But the term can obscure as much as it explains. There was no single rebel army, command structure or political programme. Instead, Bengal became a theatre in which armed ascetics, peasants, landlords, displaced political interests and an expanding colonial administration collided.
Understanding why requires going back to how religious orders became military organisations in the first place.
How ascetics became soldiers
The military tradition among Hindu ascetic orders long predated British rule.
The Dasnami orders traced their institutional origins to Sankaracharyya, traditionally dated to the eighth century, and the establishment of four principal maths, or monasteries. Some monastic establishments subsequently acquired land on conditions that included military obligations. At Ukhi Math in Garhwal, for instance, monastic lands were associated with military service to local rulers.
By the 16th century, the relationship between asceticism and armed force had become more systematic.
Muslim Fakirs were already participating in regional warfare. Hindu ascetics, some bound by traditions of ahimsa, or non-violence, were vulnerable to attacks from armed rivals.
According to later historical accounts, Madhusudan Saraswati, a prominent scholar associated with the Saraswati order in Benares, appealed to the Mughal court for protection. Raja Birbal is said to have proposed admitting larger numbers of non-Brahmans into the Sannyasi orders and allowing them to bear arms. Emperor Akbar approved the arrangement.
Whatever the precise sequence, by the following centuries armed ascetic orders had become an established part of the political economy of northern India.
Naga Sannyasis and Gossains served rulers as mercenaries. Contemporary observers regarded them as disciplined soldiers. The Raja of Jaipur employed thousands of Nagas, while figures such as Himmat Bahadur Gossain accumulated military and political influence in Bundelkhand.
Religion did not prevent participation in war. It could help organise it.
The orders possessed internal discipline, networks stretching across political borders and a religious status that could offer a degree of protection from interference. They also had commercial interests and access to credit.
By the time Bengal's political order began to fracture after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, such organisations were readily available to rulers who needed fighting men.
Mir Kasim, the former Nawab of Bengal, employed armed ascetics during his struggle against the Company in the 1760s. These were not poorly organised bands carrying little more than religious symbols. Some could deploy matchlock-men, cavalry and light artillery.
Their presence therefore preceded the East India Company's consolidation of Bengal. What changed under Company rule was the political and economic environment in which they operated.
The Company acquired the Diwani, or revenue-collection rights, of Bengal in 1765. Its administrators increasingly sought to impose a centralised fiscal system on a countryside previously governed through overlapping relationships among rulers, landlords, religious establishments, merchants and local communities.
That brought the Company into conflict with customs it did not recognise as legitimate.
For generations, Sannyasis and Fakirs travelling through Bengal had received alms and patronage. Contributions that may once have been voluntary had, in places, become customary payments.
To Company officials, these collections looked like extortion but to many villagers, they were familiar obligations. That difference became politically important.
Why Bengal's villagers helped them
The most revealing aspect of the conflict was not that armed Sannyasis and Fakirs fought the British. It was that sections of rural Bengal repeatedly helped them.
Company officials complained that talukdars, villagers and other local inhabitants withheld intelligence, concealed armed ascetics and sometimes deliberately misled British troops.
There were practical reasons for doing so. But there was also a larger question of legitimacy.
The Company's revenue regime arrived during a period of profound economic disruption. The Bengal famine of 1770 killed a vast number of people — contemporary estimates and later scholarship differ over the precise toll — and devastated rural communities.
Revenue demands nevertheless remained severe. Warren Hastings, who became governor of Bengal in 1772 and later governor-general, opposed granting deductions to revenue farmers on the grounds that they had supported religious groups the Company regarded as predatory.
This put the colonial government and local society on opposite sides of a long-standing system of patronage.
For peasants already facing revenue pressure, the British official collecting taxes could appear more threatening than the ascetic collecting customary alms.
Majnu Shah, one of the best-known Fakir leaders, understood this distinction. In a 1772 petition to Maharani Bhawani of Natore, he presented the Fakirs not as insurgents but as religious men whose customary rights had been violently disrupted.
“We have for a long time begged and been entertained in Bengal,” he wrote, according to a surviving translation, adding that Fakirs had worshipped at shrines without oppressing local people. He complained that 150 Fakirs had been killed “without cause”.
The language was strategic. Majnu Shah was asserting an older legitimacy against a new political authority.
Villagers sometimes acted on the same calculation.
In December 1772, a British force commanded by Captain Thomas was defeated near Rangpur. Accounts reported that local villagers refused to assist wounded Company sepoys. Some instead helped the Sannyasis locate soldiers who had hidden themselves and took possession of their firearms.
Such episodes complicate any attempt to describe the conflict solely as bandit suppression.
The Sannyasis and Fakirs could certainly use violence and coercion. Their collections were not always voluntary. Yet the Company also encountered a basic problem familiar to governments fighting irregular forces: military superiority mattered less when local populations would not provide reliable information.
The ascetics knew the terrain. They had religious and commercial networks. They could obtain intelligence and supplies locally. When necessary, they could cross political frontiers beyond easy Company control.
They were difficult to eliminate because they were embedded in a society the Company was still learning to govern.
Raiders, bankers and landlords
There was another complication. Not all Sannyasis lived or operated in the same way.
One branch consisted of itinerant groups moving across large territories. Another became permanently established in Bengal. The distinction is important.
Nomadic bands could number from roughly 1,000 to several thousand men. Their movements often followed pilgrimage routes and religious calendars, including gatherings at Hardwar and Allahabad, festivals at Mahasthangarh and journeys towards Puri. They were mobile and armed.
Matchlocks, swords and lances were common, while some accounts also refer to rockets and small swivel guns. Their mobility allowed them to appear in one district, confront local authorities and then move quickly elsewhere. Under pressure, groups could withdraw towards frontier regions such as the Nepal Terai.
But their networks were economic as well as military.
George Bogle, the Scottish traveller and diplomat sent towards Tibet in the 1770s, observed the role of Sannyasis in long-distance commerce. Ascetic merchants carried goods including coral, pearls and spices into the interior and returned with products such as musk and gold dust.
Religion, commerce and mobility reinforced one another.
Resident Sannyasis occupied a different position. They acquired land and established maths in districts including Mymensingh, Bogura, Dinajpur and Rangpur. Some became substantial merchants and moneylenders.
The Kasi Barnana, written around 1800, described Dasnami establishments whose inhabitants outwardly practised asceticism while conducting commercial and lending businesses. Some wore gold ornaments beneath their ochre robes. They also carried weapons.
Their lending practices could be severe.
Colonial administrators reported annual interest rates ranging from 12% to levels exceeding 100%. Commissioner Eliot wrote in 1789 of debts passing from one generation to another.
Some monasteries were fortified. Their residents could resist tax collectors and use armed retainers in disputes over land.
This makes the conventional division between colonial state and religious rebel inadequate.
Some Sannyasis were themselves landlords and creditors. They could exploit peasants while also resisting Company authority. Resident monasteries could shelter itinerant bands, store weapons and provide information about potential targets.
The same network could therefore function as a religious institution, bank, trading house, landholder, intelligence system and military infrastructure.
That is what made the Sannyasi-Fakir challenge so difficult for the Company to suppress — and why the episode remains useful for understanding how states confront organised power outside their institutions.
The Company's mistake was initially to treat the phenomenon mainly as a problem of policing. Military campaigns could kill leaders, disperse bands and make particular routes dangerous. They could not easily dismantle the social and economic relationships that made those groups viable.
There is a broader lesson here, but it does not require forcing an 18th-century conflict into a modern analogy.
States tend to describe armed organisations in categories useful to administration: criminal, insurgent, religious, commercial. The Sannyasis and Fakirs crossed all of them.
They were capable of predation as well as resistance. Their religious standing gave them legitimacy, their commercial activity financed movement, their lending and landholding created local influence, and their military organisation allowed them to challenge government forces.
The Company eventually expanded its administrative reach and reduced their room for manoeuvre. But the conflict exposed an enduring limit of centralised power. That is a government can possess the larger army and still struggle to govern a territory in which its rules are regarded as less legitimate than the informal arrangements it is trying to replace.
—
Al Mamun Harun Ur Rashid is a journalist based in Dhaka