A review of the book 'Political letters of Shāh Walīullāh Dehlavī: ‘Most Systematic Theory of Jihād’' translated by Rohit Sahasrabudhe.
In the 1750s, as Mughal power crumbled and Maratha armies pushed deeper into Hindustan, a Delhi theologian named Shāh Walīullāh sat down to write letters — not to fight the coming storm, but to direct it. In this episode, we open a newly translated collection of his political correspondence, Political Letters of Shāh Walīullāh Dehlavī: "Most Systematic Theory of Jihād," translated by Rohit Sahasrabudhe, and ask what forty-two letters written to nobles, regional rulers, and the Afghan invader Ahmad Shāh Abdālī can tell us about the ideological currents beneath the collapse of Mughal India — and why historians still trace a line from these letters to Islamic revivalist and jihādī movements two and a half centuries later. We compare Walīullāh's instrument, the pen and the fatwā, to Aurangzeb's, the army and the treasury, and ask whether two very different eighteenth-century Muslim figures were, in fact, working toward the same end. And we look at why a figure invoked by everyone from Deobandi seminarians to modernist reformers like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad remains, for most readers, almost entirely unknown.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'Political letters of Shāh Walīullāh Dehlavī: ‘Most Systematic Theory of Jihād’' translated by Rohit Sahasrabudhe.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
Rohit Sahasrabudhe is an author, translator, and history researcher specializing in Indian historical literature, particularly focusing on the Maratha Empire, Mughal-era chronicle analysis, and translations of historical primary sources.
Apart from this book, some of his other works in Marathi and English are: मुघल प्रशासन, शाह वलिउल्लाह देहलवी यांची राजकीय पत्रे, जाँ बातीस्त तावर्निये याचे भारतातील प्रवास and the Marathi edition of the Maasir-e-Alamgiri (मआसिर-ए-आलमगीरी).
Sahasrabudhe also contributes historical commentary and essays to online media publications such as Swarajya. His writings explore critical events and figures in Indian history, including historical analysis of the Battle of Panipat, political dynamics of the 18th century, and primary-source rebuttals regarding Mughal-era records.
Let me read a brief description of the book:
QUOTE
This book brings to light the thoughts of a lesser known but important personality in Indian history - Shāh Walīullāh Dehlavī [1703-1762] - through his own letters.
His writings made a significant impact on the political events in the Indian sub-continent, especially after the 18th century, inspiring and strongly influencing jihādī activities from the 19th century till date. So much so, that the surgical strike by the Indian armed forces on Balakot in 2019, is also indirectly linked to the 'Waliullahi ideology'.
Persian text and the English translation of forty-two letters written by Shāh Walīullāh around the time of the Panipat war, including the famous letter to Ahmad Shah Abdali, is given in this book. These letters present an unambiguous thought process of an Islamic preacher, whose advice was sought by Mughal emperors and their nobles on many socio-political and religious affairs. These letters clearly spell out the religious motives of the ʻulamā and the Islamic ruling class of his time.
While writing to Abdali he says, "... the religious obligation to conquer Hindustan by overthrowing the supremacy of the infidel Marathas and liberating helpless Muslims from the clutches of these infidels, O great Emperor, is incumbent upon you. Allāh forbid, but if the domination of these infidels continues in this manner, then Muslims will forget Islām".
These letters also show that his writings are almost as important as Aurangzeb's reign. Their methods were quite different but their objective was the same – propagating Islamic rule in the Indian subcontinent and thereby propagating Islam. Walīullāh’s writings have influenced almost all politically important Muslim figures, from Syed Ahmad Khan to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. The latter was praised as the 'last expert in Waliullahi ideology' and is said to have been elated after the discovery of these letters.
Yet, the common non-Muslim reader is largely unaware of the Islamic supremacist ideology propounded by Walīullāh and followed by millions even today. This translation hopes to bridge that gap, albeit to a small extent.
UNQUOTE
Some historical texts illuminate a moment in the past. Others force a reconsideration of how the past may still be shaping the present. Rohit Sahasrabudhe's translation of forty-two political letters by the eighteenth-century Delhi theologian Shāh Walīullāh (1703–1762) belongs to the second category.
The 160-page volume, drawn from a manuscript held at the Rampur Raza Library and cross-checked against Khaliq Ahmad Nizami's earlier Urdu edition, presents the Persian originals and English translations side by side, along with biographical notes on the recipients, a glossary, and a bibliography. The subtitle borrows historian Ayesha Jalal's description of Walīullāh's political writings as South Asia's "most systematic theory of jihād" — a framing the letters themselves largely bear out. These are not battle narratives. They are advice, exhortation, and religious instruction addressed to Mughal nobles, the Rohilla chiefs, the Nizam, and the Afghan invader Ahmad Shāh Abdālī, written as Mughal authority collapsed and Maratha power rose around Delhi.
A different instrument, the same objective as Aurangzeb
The translator's preface makes a comparison worth sitting with: that Walīullāh's writings carry a historical weight nearly equal to Aurangzeb's reign. The comparison is not about the scale of the empire but about the durability of consequence. Aurangzeb had armies, a revenue bureaucracy, and the machinery of imperial policy. Walīullāh had none of that — his instrument was the pen, the fatwā, and access to powerful patrons. Yet the letters make a serious case that both were working toward the same end: the entrenchment and expansion of Islamic political authority over the subcontinent. Walīullāh urges Abdālī that conquering Hindustan by "overthrowing the supremacy of the infidel Marathas" is a religious obligation incumbent on him; he warns that if Hindu power goes unchecked, "even the name of Islām will be wiped out"; he frames "foresight and tolerance" as misplaced virtues in a moment that instead calls for the sword. Different tools, the book argues, but a shared destination.
From the 1750s to nineteenth- and twentieth-century jihād — a real but uneven lineage
The letters' afterlife is where the book's stakes become clearest. Walīullāh's son, Shāh Abdul Azīz, issued the fatwā declaring British India Dār al-Ḥarb, obligating jihād against colonial rule. His grandson Shāh Ismā'īl joined Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi in founding the Tariqah-i-Muḥammadiyah, the movement historians trace forward into the Ahl-i Hadith and Deobandi schools, and from there — at greater remove — into the intellectual world that shaped Hussain Ahmad Madani, Abul A'la Maududi, and eventually the Taliban. The publisher's own framing extends this thread as far as the 2019 Balakot strike, a connection that deserves to be read as interpretive argument rather than established historical fact — the site's name overlaps with Barelvi and Ismā'īl's 1831 death there, but that is a resonance, not a causal chain the letters can themselves establish.
It's also worth noting that at least one recent academic reassessment has questioned whether the famous Abdālī letter was really a call to conquest or a more circumstantial attempt to manage an Afghan army already on the move — a caveat that doesn't undercut the letters' content but is a reminder that a single collection of primary sources, however striking, doesn't settle every historical debate about intent and causation on its own.
Claimed by revivalists and modernists alike
One of the more genuinely interesting threads is how widely Walīullāh's legacy has been claimed, by figures who otherwise disagree about almost everything. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, whose early religious formation ran through the same Delhi scholarly milieu, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, whose conception of religion drew on Walīullāh's Hujjat Allāh al-Bāligha (Nizami reportedly dedicated his Urdu edition of these letters to Azad, who responded warmly), both invoked Walīullāh — largely for his emphasis on ijtihād, independent reasoning, and reform, rather than for the jihād letters translated here. That the Deobandi-militant lineage and the modernist-reformist lineage both anchor themselves in the same eighteenth-century figure says something about how central, and how selectively read, Walīullāh has become. Sahasrabudhe's translation is useful precisely because it isn't a secondhand gloss: it's the primary text, and the primary text is far more explicit a call to conquest than the "reasoning and renewal" framing sometimes attached to Walīullāh's broader memory. But influence is not the same as agreement — later thinkers inherited a vocabulary from Walīullāh without necessarily endorsing every political implication of his eighteenth-century letters, and the book's occasional suggestion of one continuous ideological line from Walīullāh to virtually every major modern Muslim political figure asks for more differentiation than forty-two letters alone can provide.
A gap in general awareness
This may be the book's most useful service. Most non-Muslim readers in India have at least a passing, contested familiarity with Aurangzeb; almost none have read a line of Walīullāh, despite his name recurring across two and a half centuries of South Asian religious-political thought. The preface's blunter claims — that an explicitly supremacist theological-political doctrine persists today with millions of adherents, largely unexamined by the wider public — are exactly the kind of claim a primary-source translation exists to let readers test for themselves, rather than take on faith from paraphrase in either direction.
Final Verdict:
'Political letters of Shāh Walīullāh Dehlavī' is a slim, well-sourced, and deliberately provocative primary-source collection that does what it sets out to do: put Walīullāh's own words, not summaries of them, in front of readers who have heard his name invoked by Deobandi seminarians, modernist reformers, and secular historians alike but have rarely encountered the letters themselves. The larger claims about a continuous line from these letters to contemporary jihādism deserve more scrutiny than the letters alone provide — but the letters themselves, read plainly, are reason enough to take this book seriously. Anyone trying to understand the religious-political undercurrents of eighteenth-century Mughal decline, and their long afterlife in South Asian Islamic thought, will find this a valuable and overdue addition to the shelf.
I give this book 4.25/5.
The book is currently available in Paperback and Kindle formats and is yet to be made available in Audible format. Also, the book is available only in Kindle format on Amazon USA at the time of recording this podcast episode. I have given the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check them out for the latest prices.
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