Breaking the begging bowl: morals, drugs, and madness in the fate of the Muslim faqīr.

This article follows a set of developments that transformed the meaning and value of begging as a religious pursuit in colonial India. Focusing on the Muslimfaqīrs, the article argues that missionaries, colonial officials, and physicians joined together in a moral and then medical critique of thefaqīrsas venerated idlers and sanctified drug users. The moral dimensions of the critique were then taken up by Muslim and Hindu reformists. Positioned at the centre of an immoral nexus, for their British critics thefaqīrswere key to the spread of drug abuse and in turn insanity among their followers. For Indian reformists and then nationalists, this nexus also connected thefaqīrsto the moral, economic, and physical weakening of the nation. In both of these critical visions, the begging mendicant was seen as an actively harmful figure whose misdeeds ranged from promoting the inversed morality of an anti-work ethic to peddling the evils of drug addiction and rousing the riotous masses on holy days. By drawing on a range of missionary, medical and Muslim reformist texts, the article shows how from around 1870 the discourses of Islamic reform and Indian nationalism gradually joined forces with the medical and moral discipline of empire such that by the 1920s thefaqīrshad gained an assembly of powerful enemies. In this way, the colonial period is seen as a crucial period of transition in the meanings of begging and drug use that would leave the venerated mendicants of former times disempowered in post-colonial South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]