This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
40
JOHN RUSSELL COLVIN

three years later would issue a host of armed men to challenge Christian supremacy. More lives would be lost, fiercer conflict would he engaged, another enquiry would be needed, before the Wahábí movement and the Wahábí fanatics, whose outbreak in Bárásat took Mr. Colvin there in November, 1831, could be regarded as having been disposed of. The fruits of the teaching of Sayyid Ahmad, the apostle in India of the Wahábí tenets of the creed of Islam, were similar in kind in Bárásat, if not of equal abundance, to the later harvest in Sitána.

'The preaching of Sayyid Ahmad in 1820-22,' writes Sir William Hunter in The Indian Musulmans, 'passed unheeded by the British authorities. He traversed one Province with a retinue of devoted disciples, converted the populace by thousands to his doctrine, and established a regular system of ecclesiastical taxation, civil government, and apostolical succession. Meanwhile, our officers collected the revenue, administered justice, and paraded our troops, altogether unsuspicious of the great religious movement which was surging around them. From this unconsciousness they were in 1831 rudely awakened.' Among the disciples of the new Apostle in Calcutta was one known to his fellows as Títú Mian, to the authorities as Mir Nisár Ali. This man had begun life as a small cultivator. It was whispered that he had been leader of a robber gang. He drifted in course of time to Calcutta, where he became a wrestler. Thence he passed into the service of one of the large