166 Claudia Preckel
sidered to have been one of the first and fiercest representatives of the
Wahhabi movement in 19th century India. Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān was no
Nawwāb in his own right, but the husband of the third female Nawwāb
Bēgum. In accordance with the example of the British “Prince Consort”
Albert (d. 1861), Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān was officially called “Nawwāb Con-
sort”. Muslim scholarly circles nevertheless always call him “Nawwāb
Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān” to this day.^14 Dōst Muḥammad Khān (d. 1728), who
was of Afghan/Pashtun origin, had already created the Princely State of
Bhopal in the 18th century. He was able to break loose from the Mughal
power in Delhi^15 and to establish a ruling class of Pashtuns as independent
rulers. From 1818 onwards, the Nawwābs co-operated with the British
administrative fields, nor for its close co-operation with the British authori-
ties. As Bhopal belonged to the “Central India Agency”, it also played a strate-
gic role for British troops. Bhopal belonged to the “First Class States”, which
meant that the ruler could enact his own legislation and that he dealt directly
with the Government of India and not the governor of any adjacent province.
Only in questions of death sentences, the marriage of the heir apparent or in
succession matters, did the British authorities have the right to intervene. In
1901, the number of inhabitants was 720,000 and the state reached an area of
ca. 7,000 square miles, which can be compared to Wales. Although the ruling
family was Muslim, the majority of the population was Hindu (73 percent). It
was only in the capital Bhopal (city) that the Muslim community constituted
more than 70 percent of the local population. See Preckel, Claudia: Bhopāl, in:
EI^3 , vol. 3 (2011), pp. 123–132. Bhopal was merged into the Indian Union in- In 1956 the territory was dissolved into the newly founded state Mad-
hya Pradesh, whose capital became the city of Bhopal. The city became known
to the world through the Bhopal disaster in 1984, when the Union Carbide
plant leaked 40 tons of toxic gas into the atmosphere. The death toll is estimated
between 3,000 and 20,000 people. This event is often mentioned as the world’s
worst industrial disaster.
14 For a biography, see Khān, Zafar ul-Islām: Nawwāb Sayyid Ṣiddīḳ Ḥasan Khān,
in: EI^2 , vol. 7 (1993), pp. 1048–1050, here p. 1049. Saeedullah published an Eng-
lish Ph. D. on Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān: The Life and Works of Muhammad Sid-
diq Hasan Khan, Nawab of Bhopal (1248–1307/1832–1890), Lahore 1973. Two
Arabic books on Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (by Indian Muslims), namely Luqmān,
Akhtar J.: al-Sayyid Ṣiddīq Ḥasan al-Qannawjī, Riyadh 1996; and Nadwī,
Muḥammad: al-Amīr Sayyid Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, Beirut 1999. In Urdu there
is Ḥāmid, Raḍiyya: Nawwāb Sayyid Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān, Delhi 1983. All these
works rely on the biography that Sayyid Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān’s son wrote on his
father, ʿAlī Ḥasan Khān: Maʾāthir-i Ṣiddīqī. Sīrat-i Walājāhī, Lucknow 1924.
15 For the Mughals in Delhi, see e. g. Alam, Muzaffar: The Crisis of Empire in
Mughal North India, Delhi 1986; Blake, Stephen: Shahjahanabad. The Sover-
eign City of Mughal India 1639–1739, Cambridge 1991. Gupta, Narayani: Del-
hi Between Two Empires. 1803–1931. Society, Government and Urban Growth,
Delhi 1981.
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