ABSTRACT
The administration of justice occurred in an impatient and suspicious mood in the north Indian town of Allahabad during the late 1880s and early 1890s. The anxious atmosphere in the High Court centred on conflict between the British judges and Justice Syed Mahmud. Second son of the north Indian Muslim leader Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Mahmud was appointed as a permanent member of the Allahabad bench in 1886, after acting up when British judges went on leave since 1879. Two successive chief justices, Comer Petheram and John Edge, did not want an Indian on the bench. But at a time of political unease, when British administrators had lost the confidence which followed their re-conquest of north India in 1857-58 and Muslim loyalty in particular was questioned, senior imperial officers imagined that appointing an Indian judge would consolidate the loyalty of elite groups well disposed to British rule. The former Law Member of the Governor General’s Council, Sir Arthur Hobhouse, argued that Mahmud’s appointment would cement his father’s loyalty to the imperial regime. Similarly, the governor of the North-West Provinces felt ‘it was most desirable that at least one of the judges of the Court be a Native’ (Hobhouse 1883).1
