Hākam Button Sahib: indigenous recasting of the police officer John Paul Warburton (1840–1919) in late nineteenth-century Punjab

Abstract

This article examines indigenous laudatory verse in print surrounding the police officer John Paul Warburton (1840–1919) in late nineteenth-century Punjab in genres such as qissa, bārāmāsā , and qaṣīda . Rooted in the oral and performative literary culture of Punjab, these texts reimagined Warburton not as a colonial police official but as a hākam (ruler/judge) shaped by Indo-Persian ethical idioms of rulership and justice. While colonial policing in India has largely been studied through official archival records, this article shifts attention to indigenous literary sources to explore popular notions of justice and the just ruler. It argues that these works—dismissed in colonial writings as sycophantic ‘verbal garlands’—imagined Warburton outside the institutional framework of colonial policing and relocated moral authority within indigenous conceptions of ethical rule. Rather than confronting or celebrating colonial policing, the texts largely disengaged from it, foregrounding instead the figure of hākam Warburton as a benevolent and just ruler. By juxtaposing literary representations with archival evidence, the article highlights the dissonance between imagined justice and the realities of colonial policing, demonstrating how Indo-Persian ethical idioms continued to shape popular understandings of justice and authority in colonial Punjab.