Taking Sovereignty to Court: An Inquiry into the Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar

Muhammad Bahadur Shah Zafar – the last Mughal emperor – was tried for treason and sentenced to exile within a British court of law at the conclusion of the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857. The trial decisively brought the Mughal Empire to an end while fundamentally transforming the nature of colonial authority in India, from Company Rule to Crown Rule. Many scholars have argued that the trial was conducted as an "afterthought" to the violent repression of the Mutiny by the British forces – a formality in the inevitable establishment of the British Empire in India. This view offers a limited understanding of the trial and the role of the law in shaping sovereign authority in India in the nineteenth century. This paper argues that the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar played a crucial role in restructuring the colonial episteme after it had been violently challenged by the Sepoy Mutiny. This colonial episteme, which emerges through the trial, allowed for the simultaneous construction of Mughal treason and justification of British claims of sovereign authority in the Indian subcontinent. The restructuring of the colonial episteme did not entail a dismantling of pre-existing imperial networks and structures in the Indian subcontinent. Rather, by enfolding these networks into the colonial episteme, the trial played an important role in transforming these networks to justify British claims of sovereign authority in India. To elucidate this argument, this paper aims to critically analyze three types of evidence that were presented during the trial, namely: documentary evidence, testimonies, and newspaper reports. Finally, this paper argues that, by invoking the discourse of the law, the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar restructured the colonial episteme, which, in turn, shifted the locus of sovereign authority within the Indian subcontinent from the Mughal sovereign to the British Crown.