Titumir

Syed Mir Nisar Ali (27 January 1782 – 19 November 1831), better known as Titumir, was a Bengali Muslim Revolutionary in British India who developed a strand of Islamic revivalism, sometimes also for Bengali nationalism coupled with agrarian and political consciousness. He is famed for having built a large bamboo fort to resist the British, which passed into Bengali Muslim folk legend.

Titumir was ranked number 11 in the BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of All Time.

Early life

Syed Mir Nisar Ali was born on 27 January 1782 (14 Magh 1182), in the village of Haidarpur or Chandpur per some sources to Syed Mir Hasan Ali and Abidah Ruqayyah Khatun. The family traced their lineage to Mir Sayyid Shahadat Ali who had migrated to Bengal from Persia to preach Islam, and his son, Mir Sayyid Abdullah, was appointed as the Chief Qadi of Jafarpur by the Emperor of Delhi.

Titumir was educated in a local madrasa, where he became a hafiz of the Quran by the age of twenty, besides being accomplished in Bengali, Arabic, and Persian. A good wrestler and gymnast, he served as the bodyguard of a local zamindar for some time. However, Titumir was jailed on account of a conflict with zamindars for high taxes from farmers and upon release, in 1822, left his job to embark upon Hajj.

Religious-political activism

Islamic resurgence

In Mecca, Titumir was influenced by the Islamist preacher Syed Ahmad Barelvi, an Indian Muslim revivalist, who advocated for jihad against the British East India Company rule and strict enforcement of sharia.

Upon return from Mecca, he began to mobilize the Bengali Muslim peasantry of his native place by preaching against aspects of Islam that were seen as deviations from the Quran and Sunnah by Islamists —veneraion of Sufi graves, performance of dhikr, folk syncretism, charging of interest on loans, etc.