ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Recently, at a seminar organised by Janki Devi Memorial College at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, I witnessed a demonstration of Dāstāngoi by Ms Poonam Girdhani and Ms Amina Sayed. With little more than their voices, expressions and occasional gestures, the two performers held the audience spellbound. There were no elaborate costumes, stage settings or theatrical devices. Yet characters came alive, situations unfolded and an entire imaginary world emerged before us. The experience recalled a once-flourishing tradition of oral storytelling that, after nearly disappearing from public life, has found a new audience in contemporary India.

Storytelling is perhaps as old as human civilisation itself. Long before people began recording their experiences in writing, stories served as repositories of memory, imagination and collective wisdom. They preserved accounts of heroes and rulers, celebrated love and courage, explained the inexplicable and entertained successive generations. Among the many traditions that developed across the world, Dāstāngoi acquired a distinctive character in the Persian-speaking lands and subsequently in India, where it became an important part of Indo-Persian and Urdu literary culture. To understand its development in the subcontinent, however, we must look beyond its Persian ancestry and recognise the rich indigenous traditions of narration with which it came into contact.

The term Dāstāngoi combines two Persian words: dāstān, meaning a tale, and gūʾī, meaning narration. But the dāstān, as it developed into a distinct performative tradition, was no ordinary story. Its most remarkable feature was its open-ended character. Unlike a conventional narrative proceeding towards a predetermined conclusion, a dāstān could be extended almost indefinitely. New characters might enter, fresh adventures could be invented, earlier episodes modified and unexpected twists introduced according to the imagination of the storyteller and the response of his listeners. One story could generate another, which in turn might lead to several more. There was no necessary finality to the narrative.

The dāstāngo was therefore much more than a narrator. He was also an improviser and, in a sense, a creator who continually reshaped inherited material. A battle might be prolonged, a romance elaborated, a magical encounter transformed or an entirely new episode inserted without disturbing the larger narrative. The audience also played its part, for its reactions could influence the pace, emphasis and direction of the performance. Dāstāngoi was thus a living art in which the tale was never entirely finished. Its appeal lay as much in the manner of telling as in what was being told.

The roots of this tradition can be traced to the heroic and romantic narratives of Iran and the wider Persian-speaking world. Professional storytellers entertained audiences in royal courts, marketplaces, caravanserais and public gatherings. Their repertoire included accounts of legendary kings, warriors, lovers and supernatural beings. These narratives travelled across regions, absorbing local beliefs, customs and imaginative traditions along the way. But it would be misleading to regard Dāstāngoi as an exclusively Persian cultural import that took root in an otherwise unfamiliar environment. India already possessed a remarkably rich tradition of oral storytelling, extending from the great epics and the Kathāsaritsāgara to regional kathās, heroic ballads and romantic narratives. Many shared with the Persian dāstān a fondness for elaborate adventures, supernatural encounters, stories within stories and the freedom to expand a narrative through digression and improvisation. The kathavāchak, much like the dāstāngo, depended upon memory, verbal skill and an intimate relationship with his listeners.

Particularly significant was the medieval premakhyān tradition, represented by Maulana Daud’s Chandāyan (1379), Qutban’s Mrigāvati (1503), Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmāvat (1540) and Manjhan’s Madhumālati (1545). These works brought together conventions of Persian romance, Sufi ideas of love and spiritual fulfilment, and the languages, imagery and narrative traditions of North India. Their stories of separation, journeys, adventure and extraordinary encounters belonged to a cultural world in which Indian and Persian literary influences were already deeply intertwined. Although the premākhyans were generally verse romances, often possessing allegorical meanings, while the later Urdu dastans developed into expansive prose narratives, both reflected a common delight in imaginative storytelling.

The development of Dāstāngoi in India should therefore be understood not simply as the transplantation of a Persian literary form but as part of a wider process of cultural interaction. Its inherited narrative conventions encountered indigenous traditions that had long celebrated the storyteller’s freedom to elaborate, embellish and reinterpret. The precise extent of direct borrowing is not always possible to establish, but the result was unmistakably Indian in its language, imagery, humour and social references. By the time Dāstāngoi reached its fullest expression in the Urdu-speaking world of Delhi and Lucknow, it had become a distinctive product of the subcontinent’s shared literary culture.

Among the most celebrated narrative cycles was the Dāstān-e Amir Hamza, centred upon the adventures of a legendary hero associated with Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. The resemblance, however, was largely nominal. The Amir Hamza of the dāstān inhabited a world far removed from historical reality, encountering sorcerers, demons, enchanted kingdoms and formidable adversaries. The narratives drew upon Iranian heroic legends, Islamic traditions and a wide range of popular stories. Their adaptability made them particularly suitable for an oral tradition in which each generation of storytellers could contribute something of its own.

With the spread of Persian literary culture under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, these narratives found a receptive environment in India. Persian was not merely the language of administration and courtly correspondence; it was also a medium through which ideas, literary conventions and cultural practices circulated. The Indian subcontinent, with its own rich traditions of oral narration, provided opportunities for the older Persian tales to acquire new forms and meanings. The Mughal emperor Akbar appears to have been particularly fascinated by the adventures of Amir Hamza. Under his patronage, the celebrated illustrated Hamza Nāma was produced during the second half of the sixteenth century. This monumental undertaking, originally comprising approximately 1,400 paintings, was among the most ambitious artistic projects of the Mughal atelier. Its surviving illustrations depict battles, royal assemblies, fabulous creatures and extraordinary adventures, often with remarkable dramatic energy.

One of the most remarkable features of Akbar’s Hamza Nāma was the unusually large size of its illustrations, measuring approximately 69 by 54 centimetres. These paintings were not merely intended for private viewing or as decorative accompaniments to a manuscript. The surviving folios contain Persian narrative passages written on their reverse, corresponding to the episodes depicted on the front.

The arrangement itself is significant. While the audience viewed the illustration, the qissago could consult the written narrative behind it. Indeed, the paintings were sufficiently large for the storyteller to remain at least partially concealed behind them. The written passages provided the narrative framework, but the performance depended upon the storyteller’s ability to elaborate upon it, introduce dialogue, embellish descriptions and develop the episode in his own particular style. Thus, the same narrative material could acquire different dimensions in the hands of different storytellers.

The Hamza Nāma therefore represents something more than an extraordinary achievement of Mughal painting. It provides tangible evidence of the close relationship between the written word, pictorial representation and oral narration at Akbar’s court. The Persian passages on the reverse of the paintings are surviving material evidence, not merely a conjectured feature of the performance. The precise manner in which individual storytellers handled and elaborated upon these passages cannot always be reconstructed, but the arrangement of the folios clearly demonstrates the relationship between image and narrative. The painter provided the visual setting, the written text supplied the substance of the episode, and the qissago transformed it into a living performance. In this sense, the Hamza Nāma also illustrates the open-ended character of the dāstān itself, in which an inherited narrative could continually be expanded and reshaped through the imagination and skill of the storyteller.

The Mughal Hamza Nāma, however, belonged to an earlier phase of the Hamza tradition and should not be confused with the elaborate Urdu Dāstāngoi that developed subsequently. It was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Dāstāngoi acquired its most distinctive Indian form. As Urdu emerged as a major language of literary expression, the older Persian narratives were increasingly recast in its idiom. Delhi became an important centre, but it was in Lucknow, particularly under the patronage of the rulers and aristocracy of Awadh, that the tradition reached an extraordinary level of refinement.

The decline of Mughal political authority did not mean the immediate disappearance of the cultural practices associated with the imperial court. Many found new patrons in the regional centres that emerged during the eighteenth century. Lucknow, with its cultivated urban society, elaborate etiquette and enthusiasm for poetry, music and conversation, offered particularly favourable conditions for Dāstāngoi. Here the storyteller’s command over language became as important as his narrative imagination.

The Lucknow dāstāngos developed a style rich in idiom, wit, poetic expression and elaborate description. They could evoke the splendour of a royal assembly, the confusion of a battlefield, the delicacy of a romantic encounter or the terrors of an enchanted palace with equal ease. Their narratives frequently moved between razm, the world of warfare and heroic combat, and bazm, the world of assemblies, festivities, romance and refined sociability. Equally important were tilism, the realm of magic and enchantment, and aiyyāri, the art of disguise, cunning and deception.

The aiyyār was among the most fascinating figures in these tales. Unlike the conventional hero who depended upon strength and martial prowess, the aiyyār relied upon intelligence, resourcefulness and the ability to assume different identities. He could outwit powerful enemies, penetrate guarded fortresses and overcome apparently impossible situations. Such characters introduced humour, suspense and unexpected reversals into the narrative. They also reflected an appreciation of wit and ingenuity within the cultural world of the dāstān.

Among the celebrated storytellers of nineteenth-century Lucknow was Mir Ahmad Ali, whose name became closely associated with the Hamza tradition. Muhammad Husain Jah and Sheikh Tasadduq Husain were among those who subsequently contributed to its literary elaboration. Their work coincided with the expansion of printing, which transformed the relationship between oral performance and the written text. The Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow played a particularly important role in preserving and disseminating these narratives. The enormous Dāstān-e Amir Hamza cycle eventually appeared in forty-six substantial volumes. Within this tradition, the Tilism-e Hoshruba achieved particular fame. Its enchanted world was inhabited by sorcerers, warriors, tricksters and extraordinary beings, all engaged in adventures that could continue almost without end.

The very size of these publications illustrates the essential character of the dāstān. Its expansion was not simply the result of excessive literary ornamentation. It arose from a narrative structure that permitted almost unlimited elaboration. Episodes could be inserted, characters multiplied and adventures prolonged without necessarily bringing the larger story closer to a conclusion. What might appear repetitive to a modern reader could, in an oral performance, become an opportunity for displaying the narrator’s ingenuity and verbal skill.

Interestingly, the imaginative world of the old Persian and Urdu dāstāns did not disappear altogether with the decline of professional storytelling. It continued to find expression in popular literature, cinema and eventually television. Many would remember the adventures of Hatim Tai, which were adapted for Indian television, including Dāstān-e-Hātimtai on Doordarshan and the popular Hātim, broadcast on Star Plus in 2003–04. Although the adventures of Hatim Tai belonged to a different narrative cycle from Tilism-e Hoshruba, both drew upon a common tradition of fabulous journeys, magical kingdoms, sorcerers, supernatural encounters and heroic adventures. The popularity of such productions demonstrated that the fascination with the world of the dāstān had survived, even though its traditional mode of oral performance had largely disappeared. What had once been conjured up through the voice and imagination of the dastango was now recreated through moving images and television special effects.

These tales also provide interesting insights into the cultural imagination of their times. Although their settings were frequently fantastic, descriptions of dress, food, architecture, weapons, ceremonies and social behaviour often reflected the world familiar to their North Indian audiences. The royal assemblies of imaginary kingdoms could resemble the refined gatherings of Lucknow, while the conversations of heroes and tricksters echoed contemporary manners of speech. The historian must naturally distinguish between literary imagination and historical evidence, but the dastans remain valuable for understanding social aspirations, aesthetic preferences and the ideals of conduct prevalent among their listeners.

Dāstāngoi was, above all, an art of performance. The successful dāstāngo required an exceptional memory, command over language, familiarity with poetry and an ability to change his voice and expression according to the demands of the narrative. He might narrate an episode with great solemnity, introduce humour through a sudden change of tone or prolong suspense by withholding the expected conclusion. The pleasure of the audience lay not merely in discovering what happened next, but in appreciating how the story unfolded.

In this respect, Dāstāngoi shared something with the mushaira, where verbal accomplishment and the response of the audience were central to the performance. Both belonged to a culture that valued eloquence, wit and the subtle possibilities of language. Dāstāngoi, however, was not confined to elite gatherings. Storytellers also performed in bazārs and other public spaces, enabling the tradition to reach audiences beyond the aristocracy. It was this interaction between courtly refinement and popular entertainment that gave the art much of its vitality.

By the late nineteenth century, however, the social and literary environment that had sustained Dāstāngoi was changing. The growth of print culture, the emergence of the modern Urdu novel and new expectations of realism gradually diminished the prestige of the older fantastic narratives. Literary reformers such as Muhammad Husain Azad and Altaf Husain Hali advocated different standards of expression, while changing forms of entertainment altered public tastes. The subsequent popularity of theatre, cinema and radio further reduced the space available to professional oral storytellers.

One of the last great representatives of the classical tradition was Mir Baqar Ali of Delhi, who died in 1928. With his passing, Dāstāngoi as a continuous professional tradition had effectively come to an end. Its enormous literary inheritance survived in printed volumes, but the art of performance, with its improvisation, dramatic timing and intimate relationship between narrator and audience, had largely disappeared.

Its revival in the early twenty-first century was therefore a significant cultural development. Much of the intellectual groundwork was laid by the distinguished Urdu scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, whose pioneering studies of the Dāstān-e Amir Hamza and Tilism-e Hoshruba restored scholarly attention to a literary tradition that had long been neglected. Faruqi demonstrated that these narratives possessed their own aesthetic principles and should not be judged merely by the standards of the modern novel. His meticulous scholarship, including his work on the poetics of the dāstān, established the intellectual foundations upon which the performance tradition could be rebuilt. By treating these tales as worthy of serious literary analysis, he helped restore the cultural prestige of a form that had been dismissed as mere popular entertainment.

Building upon this scholarship, the modern performance tradition of Dāstāngoi was revived in 2005 by Mahmood Farooqui, in collaboration with Danish Husain, drawing upon the pioneering literary research of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. The modern presentation frequently involves two narrators seated together, dressed simply, who alternate between narration, dialogue and dramatic expression. Although this form cannot be regarded as an exact reproduction of the older tradition, it retains its essential reliance upon the spoken word and the imaginative participation of the audience.

The revival has also demonstrated the adaptability of Dāstāngoi. Contemporary performers have moved beyond the adventures of Amir Hamza to explore historical events, literary works and present-day social concerns. In doing so, they have remained faithful to one of the fundamental characteristics of the tradition: its capacity to absorb new material and reshape itself according to changing circumstances. What was once a vehicle for narrating fantastic adventures can now also become a means of reflecting upon contemporary society.

The history of Dāstāngoi is particularly revealing when viewed against the wider background of India’s cultural development. Originating in Persian narrative traditions, drawing upon Islamic legends and Iranian heroic literature, flourishing under Mughal patronage and subsequently finding expression in Urdu, it exemplifies the continuous interaction of cultures that shaped the Indian subcontinent. Its language, imagery and social references were neither exclusively Persian nor simply Indian in origin. They emerged through a long process of borrowing, adaptation and creative transformation.

Such traditions remind us of the limitations of dividing India’s cultural past into rigid religious compartments. The world of Dāstāngoi was shaped by Persian, Arabic and Indian literary influences, while its audiences belonged to the shared urban culture of North India. Its history cannot be adequately understood through categories that treat Hindu and Muslim cultural experiences as separate and self-contained.

For the historian, Dāstāngoi also raises an important methodological question. Much of what we know about the past comes from written records, inscriptions, buildings and other surviving material remains. Yet oral traditions and performances were equally important in shaping how people understood their world. They preserved memories, communicated values and offered imaginative interpretations of social experience. The fact that many such traditions have disappeared makes their reconstruction difficult, but it does not diminish their historical significance.

The performance by Poonam Girdhani and Amina Sayed at the India Habitat Centre brought these reflections into focus. The world that had sustained the classical dastangos has largely vanished, and the modern auditorium is very different from the courtly assemblies and public gatherings of earlier centuries. Yet the essential attraction of the art survives. Two performers, with no elaborate theatrical apparatus, could still transport their listeners into another world through the power of narration.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Dāstāngoi is that it resists finality. The dāstān does not necessarily end when the narrator falls silent. Another episode may be imagined, another character introduced and another adventure begun. In this sense, the recent revival is itself a continuation of the old tradition, a new chapter in a story that has travelled across languages, regions and centuries. Dāstāngoi survives because its possibilities, like those of the human imagination, are never entirely exhausted.

Note: This essay is inspired by the talk delivered by Ms Poonam Girdhani which she delivered at the Janki Devi seminar held at India Habitat Centre.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Every year in October we remember Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, and at Aligarh the occasion inevitably brings before us the founder of the institution which eventually became Aligarh Muslim University. We remember the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, the Scientific Society, Tahzīb-ul Akhlāq, his advocacy of modern education and his struggle to persuade a community shaken by the catastrophe of 1857 that its future could not be secured by turning away from the new sciences and intellectual currents of the age. All this is deserved, yet there is another Sir Syed whom we have gradually allowed to recede from view.

Long before he became the great educationist of Aligarh, Sir Syed was a historian, an editor of historical texts, an epigraphist, a collector of antiquities and, I would argue, one of the earliest Indian practitioners of what we would today call ‘historical archaeology’. His concern with education and his fascination with the material remains of the past were not two unrelated phases of his life. They emerged from the same intellectual disposition. He wanted people to look at evidence, interrogate inherited assumptions and acquire the intellectual equipment necessary to understand both their past and their changing present.

That is the Sir Syed whom I wish particularly to remember. It is also necessary to recover him because Sir Syed has increasingly become the subject of two contrary but equally unhistorical tendencies. One converts him into an icon before whom ritual homage must be offered but whose writings need not necessarily be read. The other selects a few statements from a long and evolving intellectual life and attempts to make him responsible for political developments which occurred decades after his death. Between adulation and denunciation, the historical Sir Syed disappears. A historian’s tribute must be different. Sir Syed deserves neither a halo nor a charge-sheet prepared retrospectively from the politics of our own times. He deserves to be placed in his nineteenth-century world and read seriously.

A Man Born into One World and Forced to Enter Another

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was born in Delhi on 17 October 1817. The Delhi of his childhood still possessed a Mughal emperor, a courtly culture, an extraordinary world of Persian and Urdu learning, and families whose identities remained connected with the political and cultural structures of the old empire. Yet British power was already determining the material realities of northern India.

Sir Syed consequently belonged to a generation which witnessed not simply political change but the collapse of an intellectual universe. Persian lost its position in the colonial administration. New systems of law and education appeared. Print began transforming the circulation of knowledge. European scholarship introduced new methods of chronology, philology, numismatics and antiquarian investigation. Then came 1857, destroying much of the Delhi into which Sir Syed had been born. His intellectual life has to be understood against this background. He was not simply a Muslim intellectual confronting the West. He was an Indian scholar standing between two systems of knowledge, attempting, sometimes successfully and sometimes awkwardly, to understand what could be retained from one and what had to be learnt from the other. The important point is that he chose engagement rather than retreat. His later insistence upon modern education grew from this encounter, but so too did his historical scholarship.

Sir Syed as a Scholar of the Past

Before the Aligarh Movement acquired its institutional form, Sir Syed was already deeply involved with history. He engaged with some of the most important Persian historical texts of medieval India and helped bring historical material into print at precisely the moment when the older manuscript culture was becoming increasingly vulnerable. Apart from his celebrated edition of Abu’l Fazl’s Ā’īn-i Akbarī (1855), Sir Syed Ahmad Khan also edited two other important Persian historical texts: Ziyauddin Barani’s Tārīkh-i Fīrūzshāhī (1862) and Emperor Jahangir’s memoirs, the Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī (1864). These editorial undertakings testify to his significant, though often overlooked, contribution to the preservation and critical study of Indo-Persian historical sources.

Whatever reservations a modern textual editor may have about nineteenth-century editorial practices, the significance of making such works available in print should not be underestimated. A manuscript might exist in a few libraries or private collections and remain inaccessible to all but a handful of scholars. A printed edition could circulate throughout India and beyond.

His engagement with the Indo-Persian historical tradition was therefore not antiquarian nostalgia. It belonged to a much larger process through which the sources of medieval Indian history were being collected, compared, edited and transferred from manuscript to print. Sir Syed was associated with the publication or study of important Indo-Persian historical materials, including the Āʾīn-i Akbarī and texts connected with the Mughal historical tradition. His own Silsilat-ul-Mulūk represented another attempt to arrange India’s rulers within a chronological framework. There is an interesting symbolism here. Sir Syed was simultaneously attempting to preserve the documentary remains of an older intellectual world and preparing his contemporaries for a new one. But it was with Āsār-us-Sanādīd that his historical imagination took its most remarkable form.

Āsār-us-Sanādīd and the Monument as Historical Evidence

The first edition of Āsār-us-Sanādīd appeared in 1847, and a substantially revised edition followed in 1854. C. M. Naim has demonstrated how substantially the second differed from the first, to the extent that the two versions reveal the transformation of Sir Syed’s own intellectual method. To describe Āsār-us-Sanādīd merely as a history of Delhi would be inadequate. It was an attempt to create an archive of the historic city through its buildings, inscriptions, topography, personalities and memories. Modern scholarship has increasingly recognised the originality of this achievement. Mrinalini Rajagopalan has drawn attention to the extraordinary scale of Sir Syed’s documentation of Delhi and to the visual, chronological and comparative character of the project. This is important because it challenges the assumption that the supposedly scientific documentation of India’s architectural heritage was exclusively a product of European colonial scholarship.

Sir Syed served for a period at Fathpur Sikri during his early judicial career. His appointment there offered him an opportunity to encounter the architectural remains of Akbar’s former imperial capital at close quarters. His interventions at Anūptalāo and the structure beneath the Khwābgāh at Fathpur Sikri deserve particular attention. The case of Anūptalāo is especially interesting. The Archaeological Survey of India’s World Heritage Series: Fatehpur Sikri records that the tank was given a new floor in the 1840s, substantially reducing its original depth. This is precisely the period of Sir Syed’s association with Fathpur Sikri. During this period his office is said to have been in the chamber below Khwābgāh.

As mentioned below in this essay, Sir Syed’s remarkable effort to copy the inscriptions on the Qutb Minar, while suspended in a basket secured by ropes, demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which he was prepared to go in obtaining first-hand epigraphic evidence. It also reflects his commitment to examining historical monuments directly rather than relying solely on received accounts.

He went to the monuments, examined them, measured them, copied their inscriptions and attempted to establish their chronology. He compared what survived on the ground with what written sources and traditions claimed about it. This is the point at which antiquarianism begins to move towards historical archaeology. The distinction is important. An antiquarian may admire an ancient building because it is old or beautiful. A historical archaeologist asks what the physical fabric of that building can tell us about the society which produced it. Once measurements, building materials, inscriptions, architectural sequences and artefacts are treated as independent historical evidence, the monument ceases merely to illustrate history. It becomes a source for writing history. Sir Syed was moving precisely in that direction.

Was Sir Syed a Plagiarist?

It is within this context that we should consider a recent discussion concerning an early manuscript collection of the inscriptions of Delhi associated with Hafizuddin and copied by Mirza Sangin Beg. Dr Ather Farouqui deserves our thanks for drawing wider attention to this important material. Whenever a manuscript or source of information hitherto neglected comes to light, historians have reason to be excited. New sources complicate what we thought we knew. They may confirm an established interpretation, modify it, or overturn it altogether.

We have repeatedly witnessed this in medieval Indian history. The study of the Waqāʾiʿ-i Ajmer helped M. Athar Ali reconsider the political circumstances surrounding Aurangzeb’s conflict with the Rathors and move the discussion beyond explanations which reduced imperial policy to religious animosity. Similarly, the recovery and publication of Abdus Sattar Lahori’s Majālis-i Jahāngīrī provided historians with a remarkable record of discussions at Jahangir’s court and opened new questions concerning imperial culture, religion and intellectual exchange. The sources were not, of course, literally new. They had existed all along. What was new was their entry into active historical scholarship. The Hafizuddin material deserves to be approached in the same spirit.

The manuscript takes us further back into the history of antiquarian activity in early nineteenth-century Delhi. Mirza Sangin Beg, who copied it, subsequently wrote Sair-ul-Manāzil. Later we encounter other attempts to collect Delhi’s inscriptions. Sultan Singh copied inscriptions for Munshi Muhammad Hasan, and a manuscript associated with that project survives in the Royal Asiatic Society and has been studied by Professor Chander Shekhar. Hafizuddin’s collection, therefore, was not unique. There were several collections and transcripts of inscriptions from Delhi’s monuments. This immediately suggests another question. Why were so many people copying inscriptions?

The answer is actually quite simple. Before photography became available as a routine instrument of archaeological documentation, copying was itself a means of recording. If an inscription on a mosque, tomb, gateway, pillar or minaret was to be preserved and communicated to somebody elsewhere, somebody had to copy it. It might be transcribed by hand, traced, drawn or reproduced by a calligrapher. The epigraphist’s notebook performed part of the function which photography would subsequently perform with far greater accuracy. This makes the allegation of plagiarism considerably more complicated.

An inscription is fundamentally different from an original passage of historical prose. The Persian inscription above a gateway does not become the intellectual property of the first antiquarian who copies it. If Hafizuddin copied an inscription, Sangin Beg copied it afterwards, Sultan Singh recorded it subsequently and Sir Syed copied it yet again, the similarity of their texts proves very little. They were all attempting to reproduce the same physical object. The real test must therefore be different.

We need to place the surviving collections side by side. If Sir Syed’s inscriptions reproduce Hafizuddin’s collection in precisely the same sequence, contain precisely the same omissions, repeat precisely the same errors and reproduce peculiar misreadings which could only have been inherited from the earlier copy, then we would possess serious evidence of textual dependence. If, moreover, Sir Syed included nothing which his supposed source had omitted and there were no independent evidence of his own fieldwork, one could reasonably suggest that he had simply reproduced an earlier collection. But what if the readings differ? What if Sir Syed corrects an earlier reading? What if he records an inscription which Hafizuddin missed? What if the earlier collection contains something which Sir Syed does not? What if his transcript reveals an attempt to reread the physical inscription rather than mechanically reproduce a manuscript? Most importantly, what if independent evidence demonstrates that Sir Syed himself went to the monuments and attempted to record what was actually there? Then we are dealing with something altogether different.

These are questions capable of being tested. What is now required is a proper comparative concordance of the epigraphic collections. Hafizuddin, Sangin Beg, Sultan Singh and Sir Syed should be placed alongside one another, inscription by inscription, and wherever possible compared with later Archaeological Survey readings and the surviving monuments themselves. Variants, omissions, additions and shared errors should be identified. Only then can relationships of dependence be established with confidence. That is how historians should settle the matter. Not by accusation and certainly not by reverence for Sir Syed, but by collation and evidence.

Sahbai, Sir Syed and the Collective Production of Knowledge

There is another problem with applying the modern accusation of plagiarism too casually to the scholarly world of early nineteenth-century Delhi. Knowledge was often produced collaboratively. Scholars, munshis, scribes, calligraphers, draughtsmen, assistants and local informants participated in collecting and transmitting information. Sir Syed himself does not conceal the assistance he received from Imam Bakhsh Sahbai. Hali’s Hayāt-i Jāved preserves the memory of Sahbai accompanying him during visits to the monuments. Sahbai assisted him in examining inscriptions and in the laborious work involved in surveying the remains scattered around Delhi. This was not a modern academic sitting alone at his desk and claiming another person’s research as his own. It was a scholarly workshop operating according to the conventions of its own age.

More importantly, the evidence for Sir Syed’s direct engagement with monuments cannot simply be dismissed. Perhaps the most revealing evidence is provided by those inscriptions which he could not even read. Among these were the ancient inscriptions on the Ashokan pillar. Sir Syed encountered characters outside his own linguistic and palaeographical competence, yet he attempted to reproduce them. His inability to decipher the script did not persuade him that the inscription could simply be ignored. There is something profoundly important in this. Sir Syed was effectively saying: I may not understand this evidence, but that does not make the evidence unimportant. Someone else may understand what I cannot. My responsibility is to record what survives. That is an archaeological instinct of a very high order.

It also complicates the plagiarism argument rather decisively. A man who physically records scripts he himself cannot decipher is plainly engaged in collecting primary evidence from monuments. That does not prove that he never consulted earlier collections. He almost certainly did, just as every serious historian consults predecessors. But consultation, comparison, collaboration and plagiarism are not interchangeable categories. The discovery of the Hafizuddin manuscript should therefore lead us towards a much more interesting historical question. Instead of searching for a culprit, we should reconstruct an epigraphic and archaeological community in pre-1857 Delhi. Hafizuddin, Sangin Beg, Sahbai, Sultan Singh, Syed Ahmad and their European associates belonged to overlapping networks concerned with Delhi’s antiquities. Information moved between manuscripts, inscriptions, personal observation, oral traditions, copies and institutional organisations. What we are seeing is not necessarily a succession of people stealing from one another. We may instead be witnessing the gradual creation of an archive of Delhi before photography and before the Archaeological Survey of India had been established. Within this larger process, Sir Syed’s achievement remains distinctive. He attempted to bring architecture, chronology, epigraphy, textual evidence, measurements, drawings and field observation together into a coherent historical description of the city. That is why Āsār-us-Sanādīd matters.

When a Brick Became a Historical Document

There is another aspect of Sir Syed’s archaeological work which deserves far greater attention because it demonstrates that his interests went considerably beyond impressive monuments and elegant inscriptions. He became actively associated with the Archaeological Society of Delhi and wrote a remarkable paper in Urdu on the dimensions of bricks belonging to different historical periods. A brick hardly possesses the grandeur of the Qutb Minar. Precisely for that reason, Sir Syed’s interest in it is revealing.

He observed that the dimensions and proportions of bricks varied through time. He attempted to distinguish bricks associated with what he understood as Hindu, Pathan, Akbar, Shah Jahan, Muhammad Shah and other periods.

His argument was that brick dimensions varied across historical periods, including what he identified as the Hindu, Pathan, Akbar, Shah Jahan and Muhammad Shah periods. Consequently, the dimensions of bricks could provide evidence for dating archaeological remains.

This was a remarkably early attempt to employ brick typology as a method of archaeological chronology, well before the institutionalisation of systematic archaeological investigation in India.

His suggestion that variations in brick dimensions might assist in determining the approximate age of the buildings in which those bricks occurred was unique for his age. Whatever corrections modern archaeology would make to his chronology or classifications, the methodological principle was remarkably perceptive. A manufactured object possesses chronological characteristics. Those characteristics can be measured. Measurable differences in material culture may provide evidence for dating. This is archaeological reasoning.

Sir Syed went further. At Hastinapur he had digging undertaken to recover bricks from below the surface and recorded their dimensions. He was not content with saying vaguely that ancient bricks appeared larger. He measured them. And he was doing this in the 1840s. This deserves particular emphasis because the systematic use of brick dimensions subsequently became familiar within Indian archaeological investigation. Sir John Marshall, whose archaeological career in India belonged to the twentieth century, also recorded brick dimensions and proportions in his archaeological work. Marshall’s archaeology naturally operated within a far more developed professional discipline, and one should not manufacture a direct intellectual descent where documentary evidence does not demonstrate one. But the chronology remains striking. Sir Syed was writing about bricks as chronological archaeological evidence decades before Sir John Marshall was doing so.

We need not claim that Sir Syed invented archaeological method. Nor should we project the fully developed stratigraphic archaeology of the twentieth century backwards upon him. But it would be equally misleading to ignore what the evidence plainly demonstrates. Before Cunningham’s Archaeological Survey had acquired institutional shape, and long before Marshall’s great archaeological projects, an Indian scholar writing in Urdu was asking whether monuments could be dated through their material fabric, whether inscriptions should be copied even when the investigator could not decipher them, and whether the dimensions of bricks could reveal chronological change. This is why I would describe Sir Syed not merely as an antiquarian or a connoisseur of India’s architectural heritage, but as one of the pioneers of historical archaeology in India.

From Delhi’s Ruins to the Collections at Aligarh

The archaeological impulse did not disappear when Sir Syed’s centre of activity shifted to Aligarh. He continued to take an interest in antiquities from Aligarh and neighbouring areas. Sculptures, architectural fragments, door jambs and other objects came into collections associated with the institution he founded. Significantly, these were not restricted to Islamic remains. Buddhist, Jain and Hindu antiquities were also preserved. The surviving account reproduced with this essay is particularly revealing. It refers to material from Hathras, Mathura and Balai Qila and records the subsequent attempt to gather scattered pieces into the University’s museum collection. Professor R. C. Gaur later catalogued this material, preserving an important record of what came to be known as the Sir Syed Collection.

There is something particularly appropriate about this connection. The institution established to prepare Indians for the intellectual challenges of the future simultaneously became a repository for fragments of their ancient and medieval past. Much later, the Department of History at Aligarh developed an archaeological tradition of its own. Excavations and explorations at Atranjikhera, Jakhera, Lal Qila and Fathpur Sikri, together with investigations of Mughal highways, settlements and monuments, helped establish a distinctive Aligarh tradition in which historians were encouraged to work with material evidence as well as texts. Sir Syed could not have anticipated the precise form this scholarship would take. But its basic principle would have been immediately intelligible to him. The historian must sometimes leave the library and confront the material remains of history upon the ground.

1857 and a Historian Confronting His Own Present

Then came 1857. The significance of the uprising in Sir Syed’s intellectual development can hardly be exaggerated. The old Delhi world was devastated. Mughal sovereignty disappeared. Families with which he had grown up were destroyed or dispersed. British reprisals were brutal, and Muslims in northern India came under particular suspicion. Sir Syed might simply have mourned the catastrophe. Instead, he asked a historian’s question: Why had this happened?

The result was Asbāb-i Baghāwat-i Hind. What makes this work remarkable is that Sir Syed himself served the colonial administration. Yet he refused to accept the comfortable explanation that the uprising could simply be attributed to Indian treachery, religious fanaticism or conspiracy. He examined failures of governance, the exclusion of Indians from consultation, British ignorance of Indian opinion, anxieties concerning religious interference and the accumulation of grievances which had produced the explosion. This complicates the easy caricature of Sir Syed as merely a British loyalist.

He undoubtedly became convinced that direct confrontation with British power would be disastrous, particularly for the Muslims of northern India who had suffered enormously after 1857. He sought accommodation with colonial rule and regarded education as more urgent than political confrontation. We may analyse and debate that judgement. But loyalty did not mean intellectual silence. The colonial employee told the colonial rulers that their own policies had helped create the conditions for rebellion. His Tārīkh-i Sarkashī-i Bijnor similarly attempted to document events he had himself witnessed. Once again we encounter the same intellectual instinct that animated his archaeological investigations: observe carefully, record evidence, compare accounts and seek causes. The monument and the mutiny appear to be completely different subjects. Yet the mind examining them was recognisably the same.

From Historical Enquiry to Educational Reform

After 1857 Sir Syed became increasingly convinced that the central problem confronting Indian Muslims was not simply their loss of political power. Something still more dangerous was taking place. They were in danger of becoming intellectually marginal to the new world emerging around them. The answer, for Sir Syed, was education.

Schools were established at Moradabad and Ghazipur. The Scientific Society became one of the most imaginative components of his educational programme. Its purpose was not simply to teach Indians English. It sought to make European works on science and other fields accessible through Indian languages. This is important because Sir Syed is sometimes too casually described as an advocate of Westernisation. His project was subtler. He did not initially demand that Indians abandon their languages in order to acquire modern knowledge. He wanted modern knowledge to enter those languages. Translation therefore became an instrument of intellectual democratisation.

It is precisely this inclusive educational vision that certain vested interests today seek to distort by reading the politics of the present into the nineteenth century. A familiar allegation now circulating in Pasmanda Muslim discourse is that Sir Syed was concerned only with the education of the Ashrāf, that he had no place in his scheme for the ajlāf, let alone the razīl. The claim is that the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College was designed as an exclusive preserve of the upper-caste Muslims and that the founder actively discouraged the education of the so-called low-born. This is a serious charge, but it is also a fundamentally unhistorical one.

The allegation rests upon a selective reading of a handful of statements from a long and evolving public life, divorced from their context and from the institutional record. Sir Syed certainly belonged to a nineteenth-century social world in which distinctions of birth and status were deeply embedded, and it would be dishonest to pretend that he was entirely free of the prejudices of his time. But the claim that his educational project was designed to exclude the ajlāf and the razīl collapses the moment we examine what he actually built. The Madrasatul Uloom, founded in 1875, was open to all, irrespective of religion, caste or creed. The first graduate of the MAO College was a Hindu, Ishwari Prasad, and the first postgraduate was also a non-Muslim, Amba Prasad. The college admitted students from all communities and had a sizeable number of Hindu students from its earliest years. Sanskrit was taught from the beginning, and the institution’s secular character was widely acknowledged by contemporaries, including Sir William Hunter, President of the Education Commission of 1882.

Nor does the documentary record support the suggestion that Sir Syed sought to confine modern education to the Ashrāf alone. When he founded a madrasa at Moradabad in 1859, the school report of January 1860 showed a student population of 175, of whom 103 were Muslims and 72 Hindus. In his report for the year 1877, he wrote explicitly that it was never the intention of the founders of the college that other races should be shut out from reaping the benefits of the high and liberal education which the college professed to impart, adding that it could not be entertained for a moment that public-spirited and patriotic persons should be possessed of such narrow minds and hard hearts as not to appreciate the value of human sympathy. These are not the words of a man constructing a caste-exclusive institution.

It is true that Sir Syed’s primary concern in the aftermath of 1857 was with the Muslim gentry and middle classes, who had suffered most severely from the collapse of the old order and who possessed the social capital to engage with the new colonial administration. But this was a judgement about the most urgent practical priority of the moment, not a principled exclusion of the ajlāf and the razīl from the benefits of education. The Pasmanda critique, whatever its legitimacy as a contemporary political intervention, commits a fundamental historical error when it projects the identity politics of the twenty-first century backwards onto a nineteenth-century reformer whose intellectual world was shaped by entirely different categories and constraints. To hold Sir Syed responsible for the later structural exclusion of Pasmanda Muslims from Aligarh is to make him answerable for developments he did not control and could not have foreseen. The institution he founded was, by the standards of its time, remarkably open. That its subsequent history became more socially narrow is a matter for historians of the twentieth century, not for retrospective indictment of the founder.

The Aligarh Institute Gazette carried the project further, while Tahzīb-ul Akhlāq, launched in 1870, extended it into the realm of social criticism. Sir Syed increasingly confronted customs, habits and intellectual assumptions within his own community which he regarded as obstacles to advancement. Naturally, he was attacked.

The Naturī and the Defence of Reason

His opponents mocked him as a Naturī. He was accused of subordinating revelation to nature, denying miracles and compromising Islam in his eagerness to reconcile religion with modern science. Sir Syed was certainly no conventional theologian. His religious thought placed unusual emphasis upon ʿaql, reason. He was deeply suspicious of an intellectual culture in which inherited authority and taqlīd could close the door upon enquiry. His interpretation of scripture attempted to reconcile revelation with what he regarded as the established laws of nature.

Yet here again the caricature fails. The same Sir Syed who was accused of capitulating before Christianity challenged William Muir’s representation of Islam and the Prophet. At the same time he was capable of engaging sympathetically with the Bible. Intellectual engagement did not, for him, necessarily mean intellectual surrender. Barbara Metcalf has made an important point in this regard. Sir Syed’s modernist interventions preceded some of the Egypt-based Muslim modernists who are often treated as the originators of this tendency. She has also cautioned against drawing too rigid a line between Aligarh and Deoband. Both emerged from the intellectual upheavals of nineteenth-century north India. Their responses differed profoundly, but they shared an anxiety about the future of Indian Muslim intellectual and institutional life. Sir Syed’s answer was distinctive. Faith could not be protected by forbidding questions.

The Aligarh Movement and the Gospel of Free Enquiry

The culmination of these experiments was the institution which became the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. The Madrasatul Uloom was established at Aligarh in 1875. On 8 January 1877 Lord Lytton laid the foundation stone of the MAO College. Sir Syed had visited England and observed Oxford and Cambridge, and his ambition was to create an institution which could combine aspects of modern Western education with the cultural and ethical formation of Indian Muslims. But perhaps no administrative account conveys his vision as beautifully as his own words on that occasion.

He hoped that the seed being planted might grow into a mighty tree, like the banyan, whose branches would themselves strike roots into the earth and produce new saplings. He hoped that the College would eventually become a University whose sons would go throughout the length and breadth of the land preaching the gospel of free enquiry, large-hearted toleration and pure morality. These words deserve to be remembered every Sir Syed Day. Free enquiry. Large-hearted toleration. Pure morality. The College was not conceived simply as a machine for producing degrees or government servants. It was intended to produce a particular kind of mind.

Sir Syed and the Politics of His Age

A tribute, however, should not become hagiography. Sir Syed’s political thinking changed during his lifetime and contained tensions which historians must acknowledge. He eventually became a determined opponent of the Indian National Congress. He feared that representative institutions based simply upon numerical majority could place Muslims, particularly the educationally disadvantaged Muslims of northern India, at a permanent disadvantage. His attitude towards Bengali political leadership could sometimes be sharp and prejudiced. These aspects of his thought should neither be concealed nor explained away. Great historical figures do not require us to pretend that all their opinions were great. But they do require us to respect chronology and context.

The Congress of the 1880s was not the mass nationalist organisation of Gandhi’s time. Questions of representation, employment, language, education and community were being negotiated within a colonial political system in which Indians themselves possessed extremely limited power. Nor was Sir Syed’s political vocabulary static. In earlier speeches he could speak of Hindus and Muslims as members of a common Indian qaum. He famously employed the metaphor of Hindus and Muslims as the two eyes of the beautiful bride that was Hindustan. Later statements placed greater emphasis upon political differences between communities. The tension is real. It should be studied, not concealed. But the nineteenth-century word qaum did not possess one immutable twentieth-century meaning. It could refer to a religious community, a social collectivity, a people or the inhabitants of a territory. To translate every nineteenth-century occurrence mechanically into the modern concept of a sovereign nation-state is to erase precisely the historical vocabulary we are supposed to be explaining.

Was Sir Syed the Father of Pakistan?

This brings us to one of the more striking attempts in our own times to retrospectively malign Sir Syed: the claim that he was somehow the intellectual architect of Pakistan. There are serious historical debates about the longer genealogy of Muslim political identity in India. Some historians have located elements of later Muslim political separatism in Sir Syed’s later speeches. Such arguments deserve to be examined on their evidence. What cannot responsibly be done is to collapse concern for Muslim representation, the recognition of Muslims as a political community, the theory of two nations and the demand for a sovereign territorial Pakistan into a single timeless idea.

Chronology matters. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan died on 27 March 1898. The All-India Muslim League was founded at Dacca only in 1906, eight years after his death. He therefore did not found it, could not have joined it and obviously played no role in its subsequent political development. The explicit programme associated with the name Pakistan belongs to a still later period. Choudhry Rahmat Ali’s Now or Never appeared in 1933, thirty-five years after Sir Syed’s death, and explicitly proposed a separate political arrangement under the name Pakistan. V. D. Savarkar, addressing the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937, spoke explicitly of Hindus and Muslims as two nations, although his proposed political solution differed fundamentally from the territorial partition later pursued by the Muslim League. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Lahore address of 1940 then articulated the League’s claim that Hindus and Muslims constituted distinct social and political collectivities within the context of the Lahore Resolution.

Whatever genealogies historians may trace backwards from these later developments, the territorial Pakistan of the twentieth century cannot simply be attributed to a man who died in 1898. One may criticise Sir Syed’s opposition to the Congress. One may analyse his changing conception of qaum. One may question his political judgements. One may examine the tension between his earlier language of common nationhood and his later concern with separate Muslim political interests. That is history. To make him an advocate of the Partition of 1947 is retrospective politics.

Neither Saint nor Sinner

Perhaps we honour Sir Syed best when we stop requiring him to be either flawless or wicked. He had prejudices. He made political judgements which subsequent generations may question. His confidence in British rule after 1857 appears uncomfortable when viewed from the history of the later national movement. His attitude towards Bengali political leadership deserves criticism. His religious interpretations were contested in his lifetime and remain contested today. None of this diminishes the magnitude of what he achieved.

He belonged to a defeated social world and refused to accept intellectual defeat. He saw Delhi devastated and began recording what remained of its past. He saw a community suspicious of modern science and created institutions to transmit it. He encountered religious orthodoxy and insisted upon the legitimacy of reason. He served the colonial state and nevertheless told that state that its policies had contributed to the catastrophe of 1857. He belonged to the culture of Persian manuscripts yet recognised the revolutionary possibilities of print. He admired the past without believing that society could continue living in it. That combination is what makes him extraordinary.

From a Brick to a University

There is, for me, something deeply moving in connecting the young Syed Ahmad wandering among the monuments of Delhi with the older Sir Syed standing at Aligarh and imagining the university which might one day arise there. At first sight, a brick measured at Hastinapur and the foundation stone of the MAO College appear to belong to completely different stories. Perhaps they do not.

The man examining the brick was already learning that received opinion was insufficient. Measure it, compare it, ask where it came from and establish its relationship with other evidence. Do not simply repeat what tradition tells you. The man recording an inscription which he could not decipher was making another intellectual commitment. Evidence does not cease to matter merely because I cannot understand it. The man writing Asbāb-i Baghāwat-i Hind carried the principle into contemporary politics. Do not explain a catastrophe simply by blaming those who rebelled. Ask what conditions produced it. The man establishing the Scientific Society extended the principle into education. If knowledge exists elsewhere, translate it, discuss it and make it available. The religious reformer carried it into theology. Do not silence ʿaql before taqlīd. And finally the founder embodied it in an institution.

The line connecting these apparently different activities is remarkably clear. It is enquiry. That is why the phrase Sir Syed used in 1877, free enquiry, matters so much. It was not merely an ornamental expression appropriate to a ceremonial speech. In a very real sense, he had spent his adult life practising it.

Sir Syed in 2026: A Legacy That Still Lives

On 17 October 2026, as we celebrate the 209th anniversary of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s birth, we are therefore not merely commemorating a nineteenth-century reformer. Nor are we simply remembering the founder of an institution which subsequently grew into Aligarh Muslim University. We are remembering a way of thinking which, nearly a century and three decades after his death, continues to challenge, provoke and influence us.

The world in which Sir Syed lived has disappeared. The Mughal Delhi of his childhood vanished before his own eyes. The East India Company disappeared. The colonial empire against which, and within which, he negotiated his intellectual position is gone. The political questions of his age have assumed forms he could never have anticipated. Yet many of the questions with which he struggled remain strangely familiar. What should be the relationship between faith and reason? How should a society respond when new knowledge challenges inherited assumptions? How can education rescue communities from intellectual and economic marginalisation? Can tradition survive without becoming taqlīd? Can modernity be embraced without producing cultural amnesia? How should we preserve the material remains of our past? What responsibilities does a historian have towards evidence which contradicts received wisdom? And, above all, can a university remain worthy of the name if it becomes afraid of questions? These were Sir Syed’s questions. In different forms, they remain ours.

That is also why reducing him to the political controversies of the late nineteenth century, or retrospectively making him responsible for political programmes which developed decades after his death, impoverishes our understanding of him. The Sir Syed who continues to matter is larger than these retrospective quarrels. He is the man who could examine an old brick and ask whether its dimensions might reveal its date; copy an inscription whose script he himself could not decipher because he understood that evidence mattered independently of his ability to interpret it; edit the texts through which India’s medieval past could be recovered; tell the colonial rulers after 1857 that their own policies had contributed to rebellion; translate modern knowledge into Indian languages; confront religious orthodoxy with ʿaql; and finally build an educational institution around the hope that future generations would possess the courage to enquire.

From the inscriptions of Delhi to the bricks of Hastinapur, from the pages of Abul Fazl to Asbāb-i Baghāwat-i Hind, from the Scientific Society to Tahzīb-ul Akhlāq, and from the modest beginnings of the Madrasatul Uloom to the University that ultimately emerged from it, there runs one persistent thread. It is the conviction that knowledge must be sought rather than inherited unquestioningly, that evidence must be examined rather than made subordinate to prejudice, and that education should liberate the human mind rather than discipline it into conformity.

The banyan whose seed Sir Syed spoke of in 1877 did indeed grow. But the real measure of his achievement is not simply the size of the institution which grew from that seed. It lies in the intellectual inheritance he left behind. His hope that its students would carry the principles of free enquiry, large-hearted toleration and pure morality throughout the land remains an unfinished responsibility.

Perhaps that is the most meaningful way of celebrating Sir Syed Day in 2026. We celebrate a man born in 1817 not because he belongs safely to the past, but because he has never entirely left our present. Sir Syed remains relevant because the questions he raised about reason, education, scientific temper, historical enquiry, tolerance and intellectual openness remain relevant. He continues to influence the questions we ask, the manner in which we approach our past, and the kind of university and society we wish to create.

More than a century after his death, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan therefore remains among us, not merely in portraits, buildings, ceremonies or institutional memory, but in an idea. It is the idea that no society can advance if it is afraid of knowledge, no intellectual tradition can remain alive if it is afraid of questioning, and no university can fulfil its purpose if it ceases to encourage free enquiry. That is why, as we celebrate Sir Syed in 2026, we do not merely remember him. He remains relevant to our present, continues to influence us, and still compels us to think, question, enquire and learn.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

There is something deeply disheartening about the limited public visibility of some of our most celebrated historians at a time when the very period upon which they have built their international reputations is being subjected to increasingly contentious political reinterpretations. I refer particularly to distinguished scholars of Indian origin occupying prestigious positions in universities abroad, whose writings on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries command enormous respect within the historical profession.

Their scholarly achievements are unquestionable. Their books have transformed our understanding of early modern India, and their intellectual authority extends far beyond the institutions in which they teach. Yet one cannot help asking whether this authority has been brought to bear sufficiently and consistently upon contemporary attempts to marginalise or distort the history they have spent their lives reconstructing.

The Turkish Sultans and the Mughal Emperors are frequently portrayed in sections of India’s political discourse as foreign conquerors, religious fanatics and oppressive rulers. The medieval centuries are sometimes reduced to a narrative of Hindu suffering under Muslim domination. School textbooks have undergone revisions, including the removal or reduction of material on the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal history, raising legitimate concerns about the historical understanding that future generations will inherit.

Some internationally renowned historians have criticised communal interpretations of India’s past, whether through scholarly writings, interviews, public lectures or occasional statements. These interventions are valuable and should not be overlooked. Nor would it be fair to assume that every contribution has received widespread publicity. Nevertheless, the relative absence of a sustained and readily visible collective response invites reflection. Has the international scholarly community engaged with these developments as fully and effectively as its intellectual resources and public standing might permit?

The issue is not whether the Sultans and the Mughals should be shielded from criticism. They were rulers, not saints. They conquered territories, suppressed rebellions and exercised coercive authority. Their achievements and failures demand rigorous scrutiny. But historical criticism is fundamentally different from interpreting the past selectively through the religious antagonisms of the present.

To portray the Turkish Sultans and the Mughal rulers merely as alien oppressors is to disregard decades of scholarship demonstrating the complexity of their political institutions, agrarian relations, commercial networks and cultural interactions. Their rule was integral to the processes through which the subcontinent’s institutions, economic structures and artistic traditions evolved. To minimise this history, or to present it predominantly as an age of religious oppression, is to diminish our understanding of India itself.

There is an uncomfortable irony here. The Sultanate and Mughal worlds have provided generations of historians with subjects of research, rich archival material and opportunities for distinguished academic careers. Their scholarship has illuminated precisely those historical complexities that are now often obscured in popular representations. One might therefore have expected a more conspicuous effort to bring the findings of this scholarship into public discussions of the period.

The contrast with the responses of many historians working within India deserves particular attention. It is they who confront the immediate consequences of changes in the country’s intellectual and institutional climate. Academic independence can come under pressure, while public disagreement with dominant historical narratives may expose scholars to criticism, professional difficulties or organised hostility. Despite these challenges, a number of historians in India have continued to question textbook revisions, challenge communal interpretations and defend the importance of historical evidence through articles, public statements and debates. Their willingness to intervene is especially significant because the consequences of public disagreement can be more immediate for those working within the institutions directly affected by these developments.

By comparison, internationally established scholars often possess access to influential publications, professional associations and academic platforms that could amplify such interventions. Their institutional circumstances differ, and it would be simplistic to assume that appointments abroad guarantee complete freedom from pressure or controversy. Nevertheless, their international standing offers opportunities to support colleagues in India and broaden the discussion beyond the country’s immediate political divisions. The paradox is that some of those confronting the greatest institutional pressures have remained publicly engaged, while the interventions of certain internationally prominent scholars have been less visible or less sustained.

This observation should not be mistaken for a blanket accusation of silence. Scholars contribute in different ways, and sustained research can itself provide a powerful challenge to ideological interpretations. Some have publicly questioned communal historiography, while others have addressed these issues through teaching, writing and scholarly collaboration. The concern is less about the absence of individual contributions than about whether their collective intellectual weight has been sufficiently evident in debates over historical education and public memory.

Nor does one expect every historian to become a political activist. Academic scholarship is itself a valuable public contribution, and intellectual independence includes the freedom to choose the manner of one’s engagement. But there is a difference between routine political controversy and a sustained struggle over how an entire historical period is represented to the public. When history is invoked to reinforce contemporary communal divisions, and when educational narratives risk privileging ideological certainties over historical complexity, the responsibilities of the historical profession extend beyond specialist scholarship.

This raises a question about the relationship between academic distinction and public intellectual responsibility. Scholars who engage confidently in sophisticated historiographical controversies possess the knowledge to illuminate the limitations of simplistic public narratives. Could more of that expertise be communicated beyond academic conferences, specialist journals and university classrooms?

The concern extends beyond the Sultanate and the Mughals. Once Indian history is divided into rigid religious or civilisational compartments, centuries of cultural interaction become difficult to accommodate. Shared traditions of language, literature, music, architecture and religious thought risk being marginalised, while the complex processes that shaped Indian society are reduced to an exaggerated narrative of perpetual antagonism.

What is required is neither the romanticisation of this period, nor the defence of individual rulers. It is a sustained assertion of the principles upon which responsible historical scholarship rests: fidelity to evidence, sensitivity to context, recognition of contradictions and resistance to the imposition of contemporary political prejudices upon the past.

Internationally recognised historians could contribute through collective scholarly interventions, accessible public lectures, engagement with educational debates and closer collaboration with colleagues in India. Such efforts need not be partisan. Their purpose would be to make the findings of serious historical research more accessible and to strengthen public understanding of periods too often reduced to political slogans.

For those of us who have devoted our lives to studying, teaching and writing the history of medieval and early modern India, the present situation is profoundly distressing. We have witnessed painstaking historical research displaced in public discussions by sweeping generalisations, complex historical personalities reduced to communal stereotypes, and centuries of interaction recast as an almost uninterrupted confrontation between religious communities.

The responses of historians working within India demonstrate that scholarly engagement with these developments remains possible, even under difficult circumstances. Their example also invites reflection among colleagues whose international standing could lend additional visibility and authority to the defence of historical complexity.

A historian’s responsibility does not necessarily end with the publication of a celebrated book, the delivery of a prestigious lecture or the acquisition of an endowed chair in a foreign university. There are moments when scholarship has an especially important role to play beyond the academy.

The question is not whether internationally distinguished historians have contributed to our understanding of medieval and early modern India. They unquestionably have. Nor is it whether they have all remained silent. They have not. The more pertinent question is whether their interventions, individually and collectively, have matched the seriousness of the challenges confronting the public understanding of India’s past. And perhaps the most compelling consideration is this: when historians working within India continue to defend historical inquiry despite institutional pressures and public hostility, should their internationally established colleagues not seek more visible and sustained ways of supporting that effort?

The disappointment expressed here arises not from personal animosity or a dismissal of existing scholarly contributions, but from the conviction that intellectual eminence offers opportunities for public engagement that should not be lightly set aside.

The Turkish Sultans and the Mughal kings do not need historians to defend their honour. History needs historians to defend its integrity. At a time when that integrity is being contested, the historical profession would be strengthened by a more sustained, collective and publicly accessible engagement from those whose scholarship has done so much to illuminate India’s medieval and early modern past.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Much has been written on Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. His life, the Aligarh Movement, his educational programme, his response to the events of 1857, his attitude towards British rule, his political ideas and his role in the intellectual awakening of Indian Muslims have all received considerable scholarly attention. Indeed, few figures of nineteenth-century India have generated such an extensive and often contentious literature. Yet within this enormous body of writing two aspects of Sir Syed’s intellectual personality have generally received less attention than they deserve: Sir Syed as a historian and Sir Syed as a religious thinker.

I have attempted to deal with the former elsewhere, particularly his understanding of history, his antiquarian interests, his use of inscriptions and monuments, and the historical method reflected in works such as the Āsār al-Ṣanādīd. Here my concern is with the second and, in many ways, considerably more difficult Sir Syed. The purpose of this essay is to grapple with his religious ideas and perspectives: his understanding of God and nature, his conception of revelation, his attitude towards the Qurʾan and hadith, his rejection of taqlīd, and above all his striking attempts to reinterpret miracles, angels, jinn, the miʿrāj and other elements of the supernatural world traditionally associated with Islam.

This dimension of Sir Syed is particularly important because his educational programme cannot really be separated from his religious thought. The founder of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College could encourage Muslims to embrace modern science because the religious thinker had first convinced himself that genuine scientific knowledge could never contradict genuine revelation. His educational modernism, in other words, rested upon a theological foundation.

The Intellectual World of the Young Sir Syed

Sir Syed was born in Delhi in 1817 into a distinguished Sayyid family connected with the declining Mughal court. He grew up within the complex religious and intellectual culture of late Mughal Delhi, a world in which Persian literary culture, Islamic scholarship, Sufism, philosophy and the rational sciences continued to interact. The religious atmosphere surrounding him was recognisably Sunni, and Sir Syed himself remained a Sunni Muslim, although the Indo-Muslim intellectual culture in which he was formed was much less hermetically divided along sectarian lines than later accounts sometimes suggest.

This point deserves some emphasis because intellectual influence does not necessarily imply sectarian affiliation. Sunni and Shiʿi scholars in Delhi and northern India disputed questions of doctrine, authority and history, sometimes with considerable bitterness, but they also participated in overlapping traditions of Persian learning, philosophical speculation and theological argument. Rationalist tendencies in kalām, discussions concerning divine justice and human responsibility, and the use of ʿaql as an instrument of religious reasoning were not confined to a single sectarian tradition.

Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi’s discussion of Sir Syed in the second volume of his A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isnā ʿAsharī Shīʿīs in India is useful in precisely this limited but important sense. It reminds us of the wider intellectual environment within which Sir Syed developed. It would, however, be misleading to infer from Rizvi’s placement of him that Sir Syed was himself a Shiʿi. He was not. Indeed, the young Sir Syed’s engagement with Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Dihlawi’s Tuhfa Ithna ʿAshariyya, a major Sunni polemical work directed against Ithna ʿAshari Shiʿism, points in quite another direction. What Rizvi helps us appreciate is not a hidden sectarian identity but the permeability of the intellectual world from which Sir Syed emerged.

This wider background is worth keeping in mind, but it should not be made to carry more explanatory weight than the evidence allows. Sir Syed’s mature rationalism cannot simply be derived from Shiʿi theology, any more than it can be explained entirely through Muʿtazilism, the intellectual legacy of Shah Waliullah, British empiricism or Victorian science. Elements from several intellectual traditions eventually converged in his thought, and his originality lay in the particular synthesis he fashioned from them.

The young Sir Syed was, in any case, very different from the controversial religious rationalist of his later years. His early writings reveal a man thoroughly embedded in the Indo-Muslim scholarly world of his time. His Āsār al-Ṣanādīd, first published in 1847, demonstrates his extraordinary interest in the buildings, inscriptions, personalities and historical traditions of Delhi. There is already something significant here, for Sir Syed was interested in things that could be observed, recorded, compared and verified. The antiquarian instinct of the young scholar was eventually to become part of the critical disposition of the mature religious thinker.

1857 and the Search for Causes

During the great rupture was 1857, Sir Syed witnessed the destruction of the political and cultural world to which his family had belonged. The Mughal dynasty disappeared, Delhi was devastated and many members of the old Muslim elite were killed, dispossessed or impoverished. Yet his reaction to this catastrophe was characteristic. Instead of explaining the uprising simply through providence, conspiracy or moral decline, he attempted to investigate its causes. In Asbāb-i Baghāwat-i Hind he examined administrative failures, political grievances and the absence of adequate communication between rulers and ruled.

The importance of this approach goes beyond Sir Syed’s political thought, for it reveals an intellectual habit that became increasingly pronounced in his later life. Events had causes, those causes could be investigated, and received explanations were not necessarily true merely because they had been repeated for generations. The same intellectual disposition would eventually be applied to religion.

The aftermath of 1857 confronted Sir Syed with another problem. The Muslims of northern India, or at least those sections with which he was most closely associated, had suffered a profound political and psychological shock. British power appeared overwhelming, and that power seemed closely associated with new forms of knowledge, scientific enquiry and educational organisation. Could Muslims acquire that knowledge without compromising their religion? Sir Syed increasingly came to believe that they could, but before he could persuade others, he had to establish this proposition intellectually for himself.

Christianity and the Problem of Revelation

His engagement with Christianity formed an important stage in this development. Nineteenth-century India witnessed increasingly vigorous encounters between Christian missionaries and Muslim scholars. Missionaries criticised the Qurʾan, the Prophet and Islamic doctrines, while Muslim scholars responded with attacks upon Christian theology and the textual history of the Bible. Sir Syed gradually moved beyond straightforward polemics. His Tabyīn al-Kalām, his commentary upon the Bible, represented an attempt to identify common ground between the Abrahamic revelations. Christianity might have undergone historical development and textual difficulties, but revelation itself could not fundamentally contradict revelation.

This principle would eventually be extended much further. If one genuine revelation could not contradict another genuine revelation, could revelation contradict nature? Sir Syed’s mature answer was no.

The Word of God and the Work of God

At the heart of Sir Syed’s religious thought lay a deceptively simple proposition. God was the author both of revelation and of nature. The Qurʾan represented the Word of God, while the universe represented the Work of God. Since both proceeded from the same divine source, genuine contradiction between them was impossible. This became the foundation of his mature theology.

If scientific investigation conclusively demonstrated that nature operated according to particular laws, genuine revelation could not contradict those laws. If an apparent contradiction emerged, either the scientific conclusion was mistaken or the human interpretation of scripture required reconsideration. Once a fact concerning nature had been securely established, Sir Syed was prepared to reconsider the interpretation.

This was the intellectual origin of the naturalism for which his opponents called him a necharī. The term was intended as an accusation, suggesting that he had elevated nature above God and revelation, but Sir Syed understood the matter quite differently. Nature itself was God’s creation, its laws were manifestations of the divine will, and to discover a law of nature was therefore not to discover something outside God but to understand something of the order established by God.

Here Sir Syed’s thought possessed affinities with older rationalist currents within Islamic theology, including aspects of Muʿtazili thought and, at points, rational traditions cultivated within Shiʿi kalām. Rizvi’s account is useful in reminding us that the intellectual history of Indian Islam contained such currents before the nineteenth-century encounter with Europe. But Sir Syed cannot simply be turned into a latter-day Muʿtazili, still less into a representative of Shiʿi rational theology. His central problem was distinctly nineteenth-century. Geology, astronomy, modern medicine, historical criticism and the growing authority of natural science had created intellectual problems very different from those confronted by medieval theologians, and his theology was therefore a new response to a new intellectual situation.

Miracles and the Laws of Nature

Sir Syed’s difficulty with miracles followed directly from his conception of natural law. If God had established a coherent system through which the universe operated, would He violate His own laws in order to demonstrate prophetic authority? Sir Syed increasingly answered in the negative.

He did not necessarily deny the Qurʾanic narratives themselves. What he denied was the assumption that they had to represent violations of natural law. Events traditionally regarded as miracles therefore had to be explained as natural occurrences whose causes had been misunderstood, as figurative expressions, or as visionary experiences. This distinction was fundamental to his method.

The parting of the sea associated with Moses, for example, could be understood through natural phenomena rather than as the temporary suspension of physical laws. Similarly, extraordinary events associated with Jesus had to be interpreted in ways compatible with the established order of nature. To his traditionalist critics, this emptied the Qurʾanic miracle of its meaning. To Sir Syed it did something very different, for it protected revelation from being placed in opposition to demonstrable truth.

His argument was ultimately theological. The laws of nature represented the order established by God, and a miracle understood as an actual violation of natural law would therefore require God to suspend the very order which He Himself had established. This was one of the most radical consequences of Sir Syed’s theology.

What, Then, Were Angels?

His treatment of angels followed from the same reasoning. Traditional Islamic belief understood angels as a distinct category of unseen beings created by God, but Sir Syed found the conventional conception of independently existing supernatural beings moving between heaven and earth difficult to reconcile with his understanding of the universe. He therefore reinterpreted the Qurʾanic language concerning angels. Rather than treating every reference to an angel as describing a separate supernatural being in the conventional sense, he could understand angelic language as referring to divine powers, agencies or capacities through which God’s order operated within creation.

This created an obvious difficulty in relation to Gabriel. The traditional account of revelation envisaged Gabriel communicating God’s revelation to Muhammad, and once the conventional conception of angels had been questioned, the mechanics of revelation itself required reconsideration. Sir Syed did not deny revelation; he reinterpreted the manner in which revelation occurred. This is an important distinction, for his critics often represented his position as simple disbelief. Sir Syed regarded himself as doing something quite different. The Qurʾan remained true, and what could be mistaken was the literal manner in which generations of human beings had interpreted its descriptions of realities beyond ordinary perception. The consequences were nevertheless enormous, for one of the principal components of the traditional Islamic understanding of the ghayb, the unseen world, had effectively been transformed.

Jinn and the Supernatural World

Sir Syed approached the jinn in much the same way. He was unwilling to accept the popular understanding of an invisible species of supernatural beings capable of appearing to humans, possessing them or intervening in everyday life. He therefore attempted to interpret Qurʾanic references to jinn through natural, historical or linguistic categories. In certain contexts the word could refer to remote, unfamiliar or uncivilised groups of human beings, while elsewhere the terminology could be understood without requiring the existence of supernatural creatures operating outside the normal order of nature.

The significance of this position went far beyond theology. Belief in jinn, spirits, possession, magical intervention and supernatural causation formed part of everyday religious culture. Sir Syed’s rationalism was therefore challenging not only scholastic propositions but also the manner in which ordinary people explained illness, misfortune and extraordinary events. His universe was becoming progressively less populated by supernatural agencies, and causes were to be sought within nature.

The Miʿrāj: A Spiritual Rather Than Bodily Journey

Perhaps the most delicate issue was the Prophet’s miʿrāj. The bodily ascension of the Prophet had become firmly established in mainstream Islamic belief. According to the conventional understanding, Muhammad was miraculously transported and ascended through the heavens, an event intimately connected with the isrāʾ from Mecca to Jerusalem. Sir Syed could not accept the physical ascent in this supernatural sense. He understood the experience as visionary or spiritual rather than as a bodily journey through the physical heavens. The Prophet had undergone an extraordinary religious experience, but Sir Syed did not believe that his physical body had travelled through the celestial universe in violation of the ordinary laws of nature.

Again, his reasoning was consistent. The religious significance of the miʿrāj could remain even when its conventional physical explanation was abandoned. This provides perhaps the clearest illustration of his entire hermeneutical method. Sir Syed sought to distinguish the religious truth contained within a narrative from the supernatural interpretation traditionally attached to it.

Revelation Without a Supernatural Cosmology

By this stage it becomes clear that Sir Syed was attempting something considerably more ambitious than reconciling a few difficult Qurʾanic passages with nineteenth-century science. He was reconstructing the relationship between God and the universe.

Traditional Islamic cosmology, like the cosmologies of Christianity and Judaism, contained an extensive unseen world populated by angels, jinn and other realities. Miracles occurred, prayers could bring divine intervention, and God could interrupt the ordinary course of nature. Sir Syed sought to preserve belief in God, prophecy and revelation while drastically reducing the role of supernatural intervention in the physical universe.

This immediately raised another problem. How could revelation itself occur? If Gabriel was not necessarily to be understood as a supernatural being physically conveying words between heaven and earth, what was revelation? Sir Syed’s answer once again involved naturalisation. The capacity for prophetic revelation could itself form part of the order God had implanted within creation and within exceptional human beings. Prophethood did not therefore require God repeatedly to suspend natural laws. This was perhaps the most daring aspect of his religious thought, for he was no longer merely interpreting a few miracles differently. He was reconsidering the very mechanism through which divine revelation reached humanity.

Prayer and Divine Intervention

The same difficulty appeared in relation to prayer. If the universe operated according to divinely established and consistent laws, could prayer persuade God to alter physical events? Sir Syed’s theology made such an understanding difficult. Prayer retained immense moral and spiritual importance, but it could not simply become a mechanism through which human beings persuaded God to suspend natural causation.

Theologically, Sir Syed could present this as an exalted conception of God. God did not need continually to intervene in order to repair His creation, and the perfection of divine wisdom was demonstrated precisely by the consistency of the order He had established. Yet there was an emotional price to this conception. The God of Sir Syed’s rational universe could appear more distant than the God of popular devotion who answered prayers, performed miracles and intervened dramatically in individual lives. This tension was never entirely resolved.

The Qurʾan and Its Commentators

Sir Syed’s theology necessarily required a new approach to Qurʾanic interpretation. His unfinished Tafsīr al-Qurʾān, together with his writings concerning the principles of tafsīr, represents the fullest expression of that method. Its foundation was the distinction between revelation and interpretation. The Qurʾan was divine; tafsir was human. However eminent the classical commentators might have been, they remained human beings interpreting revelation according to the intellectual knowledge available in their own age. Their interpretations therefore could not possess the same authority as revelation itself.

This distinction liberated Sir Syed intellectually. A traditional interpretation could be rejected without rejecting the Qurʾan. Indeed, Sir Syed could argue that abandoning an interpretation demonstrably incompatible with truth was actually necessary to defend the Qurʾan. If a nineteenth-century Muslim student encountered a scientific fact apparently incompatible with a medieval commentary, Sir Syed did not want that student to believe that he had to choose between science and Islam. The commentary could be wrong; the Qurʾa remained.

Hadith and the Problem of Historical Transmission

The same critical approach affected his treatment of hadith. Sir Syed did not simply reject the Prophetic tradition, but neither was he prepared to place every transmitted report on the same epistemological level as the Qurʾan. Hadith had passed through human chains of transmission and had been collected, assessed and classified by human scholars. It therefore possessed a history, and what possessed a history could be historically examined.

Reports describing supernatural occurrences became particularly vulnerable to this method. If a tradition described an event which contradicted the Qurʾan, reason or the established order of nature, Sir Syed was prepared to question the report rather than abandon reason. Classical hadith criticism had developed sophisticated methods for evaluating transmitters and chains of transmission, and Sir Syed effectively introduced another test: compatibility with reason and nature. The implications were revolutionary, for a report could possess an apparently respectable chain of transmission and still be rejected if what it described could not, according to Sir Syed’s understanding of the universe, have happened.

Taqlīd, Ijtihād and the Authority of the Past

Behind all these positions stood Sir Syed’s hostility towards taqlīd, the unquestioning acceptance of inherited scholarly authority. The great scholars of Islam deserved respect, but they were not infallible. They had responded to the knowledge and problems of their own ages, and Muslims living in the nineteenth century could not simply repeat medieval answers to questions transformed by modern knowledge. The right of ijtihād therefore had to be recovered.

Sir Syed extended this principle beyond conventional juridical ijtihād. He was effectively asserting the right to reconsider large parts of the accumulated intellectual tradition of Islam. This again brought him into proximity with several older rationalist traditions of Islamic thought. One can recognise echoes of Muʿtazili arguments, certain tendencies within rationalist Shiʿi theology, and the wider Indo-Islamic tradition of maʿqūlāt, the rational sciences. Rizvi is useful here because his work demonstrates how alive some of these intellectual traditions remained in India. But it would be a mistake to search for a single genealogy for Sir Syed’s thought. His rationalism was eclectic, and its immediate challenge was modern.

England and the Intensification of Rationalism

Sir Syed’s visit to England in 1869–70 represented an important stage in this development. His admiration for British educational institutions, scientific organisation, libraries, publishing and associational life intensified, and Oxford and Cambridge provided institutional models which influenced his conception of the college eventually established at Aligarh. But he did not travel to England as an intellectually untouched traditionalist and return as a rationalist. The transformation had begun much earlier. His historical interests, his experience of 1857, his engagement with Christianity and his work on Tabyīn al-Kalām had already forced him to confront questions concerning evidence, revelation and reason. England accelerated the process; it did not create it.

This is why the description of Sir Syed as simply a product of Western influence is inadequate. He certainly borrowed from European thought, but borrowing is not surrender. Ideas were selected, modified and incorporated into an intellectual framework created in response to the problems of Indian Muslim society. The resulting synthesis was distinctly his own.

Tahzīb al-Akhlāq and the Reform of the Muslim Mind

His religious thought consequently flowed directly into his programme of social reform. When Sir Syed began publishing Tahzīb al-Akhlāq in 1870, his objective was not merely to encourage Muslims to learn English. He wanted to transform habits of thought. Superstition, intellectual lethargy, inherited custom and unquestioning submission to authority became objects of criticism. The reform of society required the reform of the mind, and education meant learning to ask why.

The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College therefore cannot be separated from Sir Syed’s theology. If modern science and Islam were fundamentally incompatible, his educational project would have contained a fatal contradiction. Muslim students exposed to modern science would ultimately have been compelled to choose between knowledge and faith. Sir Syed’s theology was intended to ensure that no such choice was necessary. The laws discovered by science were God’s laws, and studying nature therefore could not threaten religion. In this sense, Aligarh itself was an institutional expression of Sir Syed’s theology of nature.

The Price of Rationalisation

There was nevertheless a price to be paid. Once Sir Syed had reinterpreted angels, jinn, miracles, the miʿrāj, prayer and numerous extraordinary Qurʾanic narratives, his critics could reasonably ask whether the religion which emerged remained recognisable as the Islam understood by generations of believers. This criticism cannot simply be dismissed as obscurantism.

Sir Syed had created a hermeneutical principle with potentially unlimited consequences. Whenever revelation appeared to contradict reason or natural law, interpretation had to change. But who determined what constituted established reason? And what happened when science itself changed? Nineteenth-century science was not the final stage of human knowledge. There was therefore a danger that Sir Syed was defending the Qurʾan from nineteenth-century scientific criticism by making nineteenth-century scientific assumptions themselves the standard by which scripture was interpreted. His critics recognised this vulnerability, yet many of them failed to recognise the seriousness of the problem he was attempting to solve. Sir Syed had encountered educated Muslims for whom elements of the traditional cosmology no longer appeared intellectually credible. Simply commanding them to believe was unlikely to restore belief. He attempted something much more difficult: he tried to reconstruct belief itself.

The Paradox of Sir Syed

Here lies the central paradox of Sir Syed’s religious thought. The man accused of undermining Islam believed that he was defending it. He did not reinterpret miracles because he wished to destroy the Qurʾan; he reinterpreted them because he believed that the Qurʾa could contain nothing contrary to truth. He did not question conventional descriptions of angels because he wished to abolish revelation; he did so because he believed that revelation could be understood without requiring acceptance of a supernatural cosmology incompatible with reason. He did not deny a bodily miʿrāj because he lacked reverence for the Prophet; he regarded the experience as real but spiritual because a physical ascent through the heavens conflicted with his conception of the divinely established order of nature.

Whether one accepts these interpretations is quite another question. Historically, however, his purpose needs to be understood before his conclusions are judged. Sir Syed’s project was therefore not secularisation in the simple sense. It was the rationalisation of faith. Precisely because he remained a believer, the project became so intellectually audacious.

The Religious Thinker Behind the Founder

The Sir Syed who emerges from these writings is consequently much more complex than the familiar portrait of the founder of Aligarh. He was a Sunni formed within the intellectual culture of Delhi, but that culture itself contained multiple currents. The legacy of Shah Waliullah and his successors, Sufism, the rational sciences, older Islamic theological arguments, Shiʿi traditions of rational disputation, Christian missionary challenges and eventually European science all formed parts of the intellectual environment within which he worked. None alone explains him, and his modernism emerged from their interaction.

Most importantly, Sir Syed was prepared to follow his principle of natural law into areas where few Muslim reformers of his generation were willing to go. Angels, jinn, miracles, the bodily miʿrāj, supernatural intervention and the authority of transmitted traditions could all be reconsidered. Nothing except revelation itself was protected from enquiry, and even revelation had to be interpreted. That is why Sir Syed’s religious thought generated such intense hostility. The controversy was never simply between English education and conservatism. It concerned the much deeper question of where religious authority ultimately resided. Was Islam identical with the interpretations inherited from its classical scholars? Sir Syed’s answer was no.

At the centre of his thought was ultimately an extraordinary confidence in God. Truth could not contradict truth. The Word of God could not contradict the Work of God. If the two appeared to conflict, human beings had misunderstood one or the other. This principle explains his naturalistic interpretation of miracles, his treatment of angels and jinn, his rejection of a bodily miʿrāj, his critical approach towards hadith, his hostility to taqlīd, his advocacy of ijtihād, his engagement with Christianity, his enthusiasm for science and, ultimately, his educational project at Aligarh. They were not separate Sir Syeds. They were different expressions of the same intellectual project.

Sir Syed belonged to the old Indo-Muslim world even as he dismantled some of its assumptions. He inherited Sunni Islam while inhabiting a wider intellectual culture in which theological and philosophical arguments had long crossed sectarian boundaries. He encountered European science not as a blank slate but as someone already formed by the intellectual traditions of Delhi.

His particular solutions need not persuade us today. Some appear strained, and some of his attempts to naturalise Qurʾanic narratives raise as many questions as they answer. Yet the intellectual courage behind them is difficult to miss. Sir Syed recognised earlier than many of his contemporaries that the crisis created by modern knowledge could not be answered merely by condemning modern knowledge. Nor could Islam be defended indefinitely by demanding acceptance of interpretations which educated believers themselves had ceased to find intellectually convincing. He therefore attempted to separate revelation from the historical interpretations surrounding it.

In doing so he opened questions that have never really been closed. What is permanent in religion and what belongs to history? How much authority should inherited interpretation possess? Can the supernatural be reinterpreted without transforming the religion itself? What happens when scripture appears to conflict with established knowledge? And, above all, can reason operate freely within faith without eventually becoming the judge of faith? Sir Syed never completely resolved these tensions. Perhaps no one could. His importance lies partly in having confronted them so directly.

Behind the founder of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, behind the educational reformer, behind the controversial political thinker and behind the monumental figure subsequently created by Aligarh, there stood a far more restless personality: Sir Syed the religious thinker. It is this Sir Syed who questioned the conventional understanding and insisted that God’s revelation could never ultimately contradict God’s universe.

If Sir Syed the historian, whom I have discussed elsewhere, reveals his concern with evidence, monuments, texts and the recoverable past, Sir Syed the religious thinker reveals another side of the same questioning mind: his refusal to accept that faith could survive by insulating itself from reason. It is perhaps this Sir Syed, rather than the safely commemorated founder whose portraits adorn Aligarh, who remains intellectually provocative even today.

A Basic Reading List

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān wa Huwa al-Hudā wa al-Furqān. The principal primary source for Sir Syed’s mature religious thought and his interpretations of nature, miracles, angels, jinn and revelation.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Taḥrīr fī Uṣūl al-Tafsīr. Important for understanding the principles underlying his interpretation of the Qurʾan and his relationship with the inherited exegetical tradition.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Tabyīn al-Kalām fī Tafsīr al-Taurāt wa’l-Injīl ʿalā Millat al-Islām. His engagement with the Bible and Christianity and an important stage in the development of his understanding of revelation.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Tahzīb al-Akhlāq (multiple issues of his period). Indispensable for understanding the connection between his religious rationalism, ethical thought and programme of social reform.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Khutbāt-i Ahmadiyya [A Series of Essays on the Life of Muhammad and Subjects Subsidiary Thereto]. Important for his defence of the Prophet and his response to nineteenth-century European criticism of Islam.

Altafhusain Hali, Hayāt-i Jāved. An indispensable contemporary biography by a close associate, though naturally to be read critically.

Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isnā ʿAsharī Shīʿīs in India, Vol. II, Canberra: Ma’rifat Publishing House, 1986. Valuable particularly for understanding the broader Indo-Muslim theological and intellectual environment within which Sir Syed developed and the rationalist currents that crossed formal sectarian boundaries.

J. M. S. Baljon, The Reforms and Religious Ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. An important study concentrating specifically upon Sir Syed’s religious reform and theological ideas.

Bashir Ahmad Dar, Religious Thought of Sayyid Ahmad Khan. A sustained examination of his rationalism, theology and understanding of revelation.

Christian W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology. Particularly valuable for Sir Syed’s encounter with Christianity, modern science and the consequent reconstruction of Muslim theology.

David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India. Essential for understanding the social and intellectual world within which the Aligarh Movement developed.

Margrit Pernau, “Fluid Temporalities: Saiyid Ahmad Khan and the Concept of Modernity”, History and Theory, 58:4 (2019), pp. 107–131. Essential to understanding his religious ideas.

Dr Yasmin Saikia and M. Raisur Rahman, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan. A major recent collection covering different dimensions of Sir Syed’s life and thought, including particularly useful discussions of religion, science and the relationship between prophetic and natural revelation.

Note: In the accompanying image one can see two cartoons of Sir Syed. One made during his lifetime, and the other, much after his death. In the first, the Muslim orthodoxy depicts him as a “Natury Jogi”: ‘Natury’ as he stood for Science and (thus) Darwin, and ‘Jogi’, an allusion to his un-Islamic ways. His limbs are shown tangled with serpents on the head of each of which is written “chanda” (donation) which he used to seek for his college.

The second cartoon actually highlights him, and his companions, who like angels are trying to wake up the “sleeping beauty”, the Muslim community from a deep slumber (of ignorance).

It is unfortunate that the community is still in deep slumber, and many still hold Sir Syed as a devil!

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Today is 15 October 2026. According to the chronology followed by Abul Fazl, Akbar was born at Amarkot on 15 October 1542, at a moment when his father Humayun was a fugitive and virtually without a kingdom. Sixty-three years later, in October 1605, Akbar died at Agra, leaving behind an empire vastly different from the precarious inheritance that had come to him in 1556. October, therefore, provides an appropriate occasion not merely to remember Akbar, but to ask a question which has acquired a certain urgency in our own times: what relevance can a sixteenth-century emperor possibly have for the India of the twenty-first century?

The question matters because Akbar has never remained confined to the sixteenth century. Successive generations have interpreted him according to their own concerns. Colonial historians often represented him as the exceptional ‘tolerant’ Muslim monarch. Indian nationalist historians saw in him an important figure in the growth of political unity and composite culture. Gandhi, Nehru and others invoked him in discussions of India’s plural traditions. In Pakistan, by contrast, certain strands of nationalist historiography viewed him with suspicion precisely because his religious and political policies appeared to dilute an exclusively Islamic conception of sovereignty. While he continued to be invoked positively in India, he was frequently criticised in Pakistan for supposedly having harmed Islam.

More recently, however, Akbar has again become contested in India. Attempts have been made to reduce his significance, question the older image of ‘Akbar the Great’, and increasingly foreground the violence associated with his conquests. This tendency has moved from social media and popular polemics into school textbooks. Recent NCERT revisions describe his reign as a ‘blend of brutality and tolerance’, while the medieval section is prefaced by a discussion of what it calls the ‘darker periods’ of history. The new Class IX textbook, released at the end of September 2026, introduces the seven centuries between approximately 1000 and 1700 through the overarching framework of ‘Resistance and Resilience’, emphasising resistance to external threats while giving considerably less prominence to processes of cooperation and the formation of composite political and cultural traditions.

This makes it all the more necessary to return to the historical Akbar, neither to defend him as a modern secular hero nor to condemn him as an alien invader, but to understand what was distinctive about the political experiment over which he presided.

Akbar Was Not a Modern Secularist

We must begin with a caution. Akbar was neither a democrat nor a constitutional secularist. He was an emperor whose authority ultimately rested upon military power. His empire was hierarchical, its resources came overwhelmingly from the agrarian surplus, and its expansion involved warfare and conquest. To transform him into a modern liberal ruler would be as historically misleading as reducing him to a foreign Muslim conqueror.

His significance lies elsewhere.

Akbar confronted a problem which remains remarkably familiar to us: how does a state govern a population divided by religion, language, ethnicity, caste, region and cultural tradition without requiring all its inhabitants to become alike? His response evolved slowly. It was neither formulated at the beginning of his reign nor implemented according to some predetermined programme. What emerged over several decades was a conception of sovereignty in which the ruler increasingly attempted to place himself above competing sectarian identities.

The concept most closely associated with this development was sulh-i kul, or peace with all. It would be anachronistic simply to translate sulh-i kul as ‘secularism’. Its intellectual genealogy belonged to a very different world. Yet under Akbar and Abul Fazl it acquired an important political meaning. The ruler was not to discriminate among his subjects merely on account of their religious beliefs. Political loyalty and service to the state were increasingly separated from religious affiliation.

In an age when the religion of the ruler could profoundly determine the relationship of subjects to the state, Akbar increasingly sought to unite people across barriers of dogma and showed an unusual willingness to engage seriously with differing religious traditions.

It is here that Akbar begins to acquire significance for twenty-first-century India.

The Ibādat Khāna and the Habit of Enquiry

One of the most fascinating expressions of Akbar’s intellectual development was the Ibādat Khāna at Fathpur Sikri. What began as a space for discussions among Muslim religious scholars gradually expanded into something considerably more ambitious. Sunni and Shi’i scholars were joined by Brahmins, Jain monks, Christian Jesuits, Zoroastrians and representatives of other traditions. The diversity of those invited to participate in these discussions was itself remarkable.

The Ibādat Khāna should certainly not be romanticised. Its discussions could become acrimonious, and the emperor remained the arbiter of proceedings. Nevertheless, the principle underlying the experiment was extraordinary for its time. Difference was to be encountered through conversation rather than simply condemned from a distance.

Perhaps even more important was Akbar’s willingness to question received wisdom. He listened, questioned, doubted and sometimes changed his mind. His religious development cannot adequately be explained through the once-popular notion that he abandoned Islam and created a new religion called the Din-i Ilahi. What emerged was far more complex: an intellectual search in which Islamic, Sufi, Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian ideas were encountered and examined.

There is something particularly relevant here for our own age. We live at a time when technology has enormously increased our capacity to communicate while frequently diminishing our willingness to listen. Social media encourages certainty, instant judgement and outrage. Akbar’s experiment at Fathpur Sikri suggests another intellectual habit: before condemning another person’s beliefs, listen to what that person has to say about them.

The ability to question one’s own certainties is not a weakness of intellectual life. It is one of its greatest strengths.

Translation as an Instrument of Understanding

Akbar’s engagement with India’s diversity did not remain confined to theological discussion. One of the most remarkable intellectual enterprises of his reign was the translation movement associated with the Maktab Khāna. Sanskrit works were translated into Persian, the principal language of Mughal administration and high culture. The Mahabharata became the Razmnama. The Ramayana, Rajatarangini and the story of Nala and Damayanti were among the other works that entered the Persian intellectual world.

This was not merely literary patronage. Translation became an instrument through which one intellectual tradition could become accessible to another.

The significance of this project for India should not be underestimated. Indian civilisation was never produced within hermetically sealed cultural compartments. Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Prakrit and numerous regional languages continually encountered one another. Ideas travelled between religious traditions, literary forms borrowed from one another, and artistic vocabularies were repeatedly transformed through contact.

Akbar’s translation project institutionalised this curiosity. Instead of asking which tradition should defeat the other, it asked how one tradition might become intelligible to another.

That remains an important lesson for twenty-first-century India. Civilisations are not weakened when their constituent traditions converse with one another. They are enriched.

Diversity within the Structures of Power

Akbar’s pluralism was not confined to ideas. Its most consequential expression lay in the composition of the Mughal ruling class.

The nobility that developed under him incorporated Turanis, Iranis, Indian Muslims, Rajputs and others. Rajput chiefs were not merely provincial allies who were grudgingly tolerated by the Mughal state. Many entered its highest ranks. Raja Bhagwant Das and Raja Man Singh are obvious examples, while Raja Todar Mal occupied an important position within the administrative establishment.

The diversity was substantial. By around 1580 the mansabdars included Rajputs, Iranis, Indian Muslims and Turanis in significant numbers.

This was certainly not democracy or equality in the modern sense. The Mughal nobility remained an enormously privileged ruling class. Nor should we ignore political calculation. Incorporating different groups strengthened the emperor by preventing any single ethnic or sectarian faction from monopolising power.

Yet political calculation does not diminish the historical importance of the development. Akbar had recognised something fundamental, which should be a lesson to our modern day rulers: a durable state governing a diverse society can not indefinitely remain the possession of a narrow ethnic or religious group.

The question has not entirely disappeared. Does a state visibly belong to the entire diversity of the people whom it governs? Akbar’s answer was necessarily imperial. Modern India’s answer is constitutional. But the underlying political problem bears comparison.

Akbar and the Making of an Indian Empire

Akbar did not create the Indian nation, nor was he the originator of an ‘idea of India’. Such claims would be historically untenable. India possessed geographical, cultural and political conceptions of itself long before the Mughals, while the modern nation-state belongs to a much later historical development.

What happened under Akbar was nevertheless significant. A dynasty of Central Asian origin gradually created an empire whose political and cultural foundations became deeply rooted in the Indian subcontinent.

Akbar remained conscious of his Timurid ancestry throughout his life. Yet the empire over which he ruled became increasingly Indian in its personnel, resources and cultural expressions. Persian remained the principal language of administration, but Sanskrit texts entered Persian. Rajputs entered the imperial nobility. Persianate artistic traditions encountered Indian conventions and produced new forms. Architecture at Agra and Fathpur Sikri similarly brought together architectural traditions with different genealogies.

This is why describing the Mughals simply as ‘foreign invaders’ explains remarkably little about the history that followed their conquest. Babur certainly entered India as a conqueror from Central Asia. But what precisely does the category ‘foreign’ explain about his grandson Akbar, who was born at Amarkot in Sindh, ruled from Agra, Fathpur Sikri and Lahore, obtained his revenues from Indian agriculture, recruited Rajputs and Indian Muslims into his nobility, patronised translations of Sanskrit literature, and created institutions which continued to shape thea subcontinent long after his death?

Conquest may explain how an empire begins. It cannot by itself explain what that empire becomes.

Chittor Cannot Be Forgotten

None of this requires us to sanitise Akbar’s reign. There was violence, sometimes on a terrible scale. His empire expanded through warfare. Gujarat, Bengal, Rajasthan, Kashmir, Sind and parts of the Deccan were incorporated through a combination of military action, negotiation and alliance. Most importantly, the siege of Chittor in 1567–68 and the massacre following its capture cannot be wished away because they disturb the image of the tolerant emperor.

They should disturb it.

History is not improved by protecting admired figures from uncomfortable evidence. But neither is it improved by selecting one episode and making it the interpretative key to an entire reign.

The same Akbar who presided over the violence at Chittor subsequently developed sulh-i kul, abolished discriminatory taxation, widened recruitment into the nobility, participated in discussions with representatives of different religions and sponsored translations of Sanskrit texts. The contradiction is real. The historian’s task is to explain it, not to eliminate one side in order to preserve the other.

Historical personalities do not have to be converted into either saints or villains. Indeed, Akbar becomes considerably more interesting when we cease demanding that he be either.

Recasting Akbar in the New Textbooks

It is against this background that the treatment of Akbar in some recent NCERT textbooks deserves attention.

There is nothing objectionable in principle about revising textbooks. Historical knowledge changes. New research questions older interpretations, and every generation of historians revisits the past. Nor should school textbooks suppress imperial violence merely because earlier textbooks may not have adequately discussed it.

The issue is one of proportion, context and framing.

The new Class VIII Social Science textbook, Exploring Society: India and Beyond, describes Akbar’s reign as a ‘blend of brutality and tolerance’. It devotes attention to the massacre following the conquest of Chittor and discusses violence associated with the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal periods. The history section itself is preceded by a ‘Note on Some Darker Periods in History’. NCERT has stated that its intention is not to blame anyone living today for historical events and has defended the approach as evidence-based and intended to avoid sanitising history.

The textbook does not erase Akbar’s more accommodative policies. It refers to sulh-i kul, interfaith dialogue and the appointment of Hindu officials. It would therefore be inaccurate to suggest that Akbar has simply disappeared from the curriculum.

Something subtler has happened. The framework within which the child encounters him has changed.

This becomes even more apparent in the Class IX textbook released on 29 September 2026. Some seven centuries of medieval Indian history, from approximately 1000 to 1700, are presented through the theme of ‘Resistance and Resilience‘. The emphasis falls upon invasions and the resistance offered by Rajputs, Ahoms, Vijayanagara, Marathas, Sikhs, Jats and others. While the textbook mentions both conflict and cooperation, its treatment focuses upon resistance rather than upon cooperation and the development of composite culture, themes which had occupied an important place in Indian historiography for decades.

Here lies the larger historiographical problem. If seven centuries of Indian history are organised principally around the categories of ‘invaders’ and ‘resistance’, what happens to the immense processes of accommodation, alliance, migration, cultural exchange and institutional transformation that occurred during precisely the same centuries?

Maharana Pratap unquestionably belongs to the history of Akbar’s reign. But so does Raja Man Singh. Haldighati belongs to that history, but so does the incorporation of Rajputs into the Mughal nobility. Chittor belongs to it, but so does sulh-i kul. Military conquest belongs to it, but so do the Ibadat Khana and the Maktab Khana. The sword is part of the historical record, but so is the Razmnama.

To remember one while marginalising the other does not necessarily make history more truthful. It may merely replace one simplification with another.

Who Was the ‘Invader’?

The terminology also raises a larger question. At what point does an invader cease to be an invader?

This is not merely a semantic issue. It lies at the heart of how we understand medieval India. Turks, Afghans and Mughals undoubtedly entered the subcontinent through conquest at different moments. But historical societies do not remain frozen at the moment of conquest. People settle, marry, acquire local interests, establish institutions and become part of the societies they once entered.

If Akbar, born in the subcontinent and ruling an empire whose human and material resources were overwhelmingly Indian, is permanently understood through the origins of his grandfather, then we are employing a conception of belonging which history itself makes difficult to sustain.

More importantly, Akbar’s empire refuses to fit neatly into a binary opposition between ‘Hindu India’ and ‘Muslim invaders’. Rajputs fought Akbar, but Rajputs also commanded his armies. Some resisted Mughal authority while others helped extend it. Hindu zamindars could oppose the Mughal state, while other Hindu elites participated in its administration. Muslims too could rebel against the emperor. Political allegiance did not invariably follow religious identity.

The history of medieval India becomes unintelligible if every political conflict is retrospectively converted into a religious confrontation.

From ‘Akbar the Great’ to ‘Akbar the Brutal’?

There is certainly room to question the older nationalist image of Akbar. Earlier historiography sometimes transformed him into an almost prophetic precursor of modern Indian secularism. That too was an anachronism. Akbar was a man of the sixteenth century and must first be understood within that world.

But historical revision should make our understanding more complex, not simply reverse its moral signs.

Replacing ‘Akbar the Great‘ with ‘Akbar the brutal conqueror‘ does not necessarily bring us any closer to the historical Akbar. Both can become constructions fashioned according to the requirements of the present.

Indeed, there is an intriguing comparison with Pakistan. Some Pakistani textbooks have traditionally treated Akbar negatively for almost exactly the opposite reason. He has been accused there of compromising Islam through his religious experiments, his accommodation of non-Muslims and what is represented as the Din-i Ilahi. Some of these textbook claims go well beyond what the primary evidence can sustain.

The irony is difficult to miss. One kind of identity-based history can distrust Akbar because he supposedly compromised Muslim identity; another can distrust him because he remains associated with Muslim rule in India.

Perhaps that tells us something about why Akbar continues to matter.

He is inconvenient to historical narratives constructed around permanently separated religious communities because his reign demonstrates how frequently those boundaries were crossed. His empire was created through conquest, certainly, but also through negotiation, accommodation, intermarriage, collaboration and cultural exchange. It cannot adequately be understood by imagining Hindus and Muslims as two self-contained political blocs confronting one another across the centuries.

The Right to Be Different

Perhaps this is where Akbar speaks most clearly to twenty-first-century India.

The great challenge confronting any plural society is not merely to permit different communities to exist. It is to create a political culture in which difference does not diminish one’s relationship with the state.

Akbar could never have expressed this principle in the language of citizenship, fundamental rights or constitutional equality. Those concepts belong to another historical age. His political order rested upon imperial sovereignty; modern India rests upon popular sovereignty expressed through a democratic Constitution. The distinction is fundamental.

Yet there is an unmistakable historical resonance. Sulh-i kul can be compared with the modern constitutional promise of equality and freedom of religion. The two should not be equated, but they can certainly be placed in conversation.

Akbar’s solution was imperial; ours is constitutional.

His experiment ultimately depended upon the personality and authority of an emperor. Ours is supposed to depend upon rights, institutions and laws. Yet both confront an enduring reality of Indian history: India is irreducibly plural.

This is why Akbar’s relevance does not lie in providing twenty-first-century India with a political programme. The sixteenth century cannot provide ready-made answers to the problems of the twenty-first. His importance lies instead in the questions his reign continues to raise.

Can political unity exist without cultural uniformity? Can deeply held religious convictions coexist with respect for the convictions of others? Can a state govern people of different faiths without identifying itself exclusively with one of them? Can knowledge travel across religious and linguistic boundaries? Can difference be regarded as a resource rather than a threat? Can we possess strong convictions while retaining enough intellectual humility to listen to those who disagree with us?

Akbar confronted versions of these questions more than four centuries ago.

Why Akbar Still Matters

October, then, should be more than an occasion for remembering the dates of an emperor’s birth and death. Akbar’s military victories belong to the sixteenth century. His empire eventually disappeared. The mansabdars, jagirs, imperial camps and court ceremonials belong to a political world which cannot return.

But the problem that confronted Akbar has not disappeared. How are many peoples, many languages, many religions and many memories to inhabit the same political space?

His answer, gradually formulated and never perfectly realised, was sulh-i kul.

Modern India has given itself another answer through democracy, citizenship, fundamental rights and the Constitution. The two belong to entirely different historical worlds, but across more than four centuries there remains a fascinating conversation between them.

Perhaps this also explains why Akbar’s memory has once again become contested. Debates over Akbar are rarely only about a Mughal emperor who died in 1605. They are also debates about how we imagine India’s past and, through that past, how we understand India itself.

Was medieval India essentially a battlefield between indigenous peoples and foreign invaders? Or was it also a world in which conquest was followed by settlement, conflict by accommodation, and encounter by the creation of new political, linguistic, artistic and cultural forms?

A historian need not choose between these realities. Both existed. There was conquest and there was accommodation. There was Chittor and there was sulh-i kul. There was Haldighati and there was Man Singh. There was imperial violence and there was the Ibadat Khana. There were battles for territory, but there was also the translation of the Mahabharata into Persian.

The historian’s responsibility is to explain how all these could belong to the same historical world.

That is why attempts to diminish Akbar may, paradoxically, make him more relevant. The more our past is represented as a history of permanently antagonistic communities, the more important it becomes to recover those historical moments which refuse to fit that division. The more medieval history is reduced to a story of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the more inconvenient becomes the evidence of a political order in which those categories continually overlapped.

Akbar need not be made into a modern secularist to recognise the significance of what he attempted. Nor need the violence of his empire be concealed in order to appreciate the originality of sulh-i kul. His achievement becomes more meaningful when placed within all the contradictions of his age.

Akbar belongs neither to the Hindus nor to the Muslims of modern India. He cannot legitimately be appropriated exclusively by one or rejected as belonging exclusively to the other. He belongs to the complicated, frequently violent, remarkably creative and deeply intertwined history of India.

And that, perhaps, is why Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar remains so relevant even after 421 years after his death.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

My association with Professor Gautam Sengupta, whom we affectionately called Gautam da, goes back many years. I was introduced to him by Professor Aniruddha Ray. My first interaction with him came when he organised a seminar under the auspices of the Centre for Archaeological Studies and Training, Eastern India (CASTEI), Kolkata, an institution earlier inaugurated by Professor Irfan Habib. Gautam da invited us to Kolkata, and I was asked to present a paper on Fathpur Sikri. That was the beginning of an association which continued over the years, bringing us together on numerous academic and institutional occasions.

Subsequently, he invited me to CASTEI as a Visiting Fellow, where I was asked to deliver a series of ten lectures. What I remember most vividly is that Gautam da attended every single one of them. Despite his own academic commitments and administrative responsibilities, he would sit through the lectures, listening attentively and joining the discussions. This reflected something fundamental about his personality. He was not merely an organiser or administrator who brought scholars together. He was himself deeply interested in scholarship and remained an enthusiastic student of history and archaeology throughout his life.

Our interactions continued when he became Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi. On several occasions, I met him in the company of Professor Irfan Habib, who held him in considerable esteem. Gautam da belonged to that tradition of Indian archaeology which regarded the material remains of the past not simply as monuments to be preserved or objects to be classified, but as evidence through which the history of society, its economy, cultural interactions and everyday life could be reconstructed.

One of my most vivid memories of him relates to the 2023 session of the Indian History Congress at Patiala. When we were considering whom to invite as General President, I telephoned Gautam da, and he graciously accepted our invitation. By then his health was already a matter of concern, but he showed no hesitation in accepting the responsibility. What followed was a remarkable demonstration of his commitment to the institution. Despite his physical difficulties, he attended the proceedings on all three days. He would remain present even during the late evening sessions and would enthusiastically ask me where else his presence was required.

I particularly remember the late-night meeting of the Executive Committee. It was a cold Punjab winter, and the meeting followed an already long and exhausting day. Yet Gautam da not only presided over the proceedings but participated actively in the deliberations. Every now and then, he would lean towards me and whisper, asking what he was expected to say or how he should proceed with a particular matter. There was something deeply endearing about those exchanges. Here was a distinguished archaeologist, a former Director General of the ASI and the General President of the Indian History Congress, completely free from any sense of self-importance. He was willing to seek guidance, to listen and to work collectively. His concern was never with asserting his authority but with ensuring that the proceedings were conducted properly.

When I spoke to him in April this year and mentioned that the next session of the Indian History Congress might possibly be held in Bangalore, he was immediately enthusiastic. “Oh! I live there,” he exclaimed, “and I will surely attend.” He also promised to participate in the panels being organised by the Aligarh Society of History and Archaeology (ASHA) and the Aligarh Historians Society (AHS). Even when I informed him more recently that the venue had been shifted, his enthusiasm had not diminished. He assured me that he would still try to attend, health permitting. Unfortunately, that was not to be. Before we could meet again, Gautam da left us.

His contributions to archaeology were substantial, both as a scholar and as an institution-builder. His work was particularly important in expanding the scope of archaeological research in eastern and north-eastern India. He helped bring into focus regions, sites and categories of material evidence that had often remained peripheral to the larger narratives of Indian archaeology. His interests extended from early settlements, terracotta traditions and sculptural remains to the historical landscapes and urban centres of medieval Bengal.

His publications provide ample evidence of this breadth. Among the important works associated with him were Archaeology of Eastern India: New Perspectives (2002), edited with Sheena Panja; An Annotated Archaeological Atlas of West Bengal (2005), edited with B. D. Chattopadhyaya and Sambhu Chakrabarty; Past and Present: Ethnoarchaeology in India (2006), edited with Suchira Roychoudhury and Sujit Som; and Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (2008), edited with Sharmi Chakraborty. These volumes brought together scholars working on different periods and regions, encouraging approaches that connected archaeological discoveries with broader historical questions.

Equally significant was Archaeology in India: Individuals, Ideas and Institutions (2009), edited with Kaushik Gangopadhyay, which explored the development of archaeology as a discipline and the people and institutions that shaped it. His Eloquent Earth: Early Terracottas in the State Archaeological Museum, West Bengal (2007), prepared with Sima Roy Chowdhury and Sharmi Chakraborty, reflected his concern with documenting and interpreting material culture. Later, as Director General of the ASI, he co-edited Custodians of the Past: 150 Years of the Archaeological Survey of India (2012) with Abha Narain Lambah. His more recent Ganga-Brahmaputra & Beyond: Exploring Art and Iconography of Eastern and North-Eastern India (2023) demonstrated that his engagement with the archaeological heritage of the region continued well into his later years.

But perhaps what deserves particular emphasis today is the intellectual integrity with which Gautam da approached the discipline. The later decades of his professional career coincided with a period when the growing influence of Hindutva began casting its shadow over the study and interpretation of India’s past. Archaeology, like history, was increasingly becoming a contested field, with attempts to privilege certain periods and traditions while marginalising others. It was in this atmosphere that Gautam da’s contribution acquired a significance extending beyond his individual research.

As Professor Irfan Habib pointed out on several occasions, Gautam da ensured that the secular traditions of archaeology were not abandoned and that the medieval remains of Bengal, including those associated with its Islamic past, continued to receive scholarly attention. This was no small achievement in an atmosphere in which the medieval period was increasingly being subjected to selective interpretations. Under his stewardship, archaeological work in West Bengal continued to reflect an understanding of the region’s past as a product of multiple cultural, religious and social traditions.

One particularly telling example was the attention devoted to the medieval city of Gaur. The thematic volume Gaur: The Medieval City of Bengal, edited by Gautam Sengupta and Sheena Panja, brought together studies of a city whose architectural and archaeological remains testify to the richness of Bengal’s Sultanate heritage. Such work was important not simply because it documented monuments, but because it resisted the tendency to treat the Islamic centuries as an interruption in India’s historical development.

Gautam da understood that the archaeological record could not be divided into compartments of religious identity. The temples, mosques, monasteries, settlements, fortifications, sculptures, inscriptions and everyday objects of the past were all part of the same historical inheritance. To study one while deliberately neglecting another was to distort the past itself. His approach was grounded in the conviction that archaeology must remain an evidence-based discipline, free from the demands of contemporary political ideologies.

His association with CASTEI was equally important. The Centre became a meeting ground for archaeologists and historians, encouraging interdisciplinary conversations and providing opportunities for younger scholars. It was this spirit of intellectual exchange that I had personally experienced during my visits to Kolkata. Gautam da believed in institutions, in collective scholarship and in the necessity of bringing people together. His administrative positions never diminished his interest in academic discussion. Rather, he used the opportunities provided by those positions to promote research and strengthen the institutions with which he was associated.

It is difficult for me to separate the scholar from the man I knew. His warmth, simplicity, intellectual curiosity and complete absence of pretension made every encounter memorable. He could preside over an important academic gathering with dignity and, a moment later, turn to a colleague with the informality and affection of an old friend. Even when his health was failing, his enthusiasm for academic work and institutional responsibilities remained undiminished.

When I think of Gautam da today, I remember not merely the distinguished archaeologist or the former Director General of the ASI, but the man who sat through all ten of my lectures at CASTEI, who remained at the Executive Committee meeting in Patiala late into a freezing winter night, and who, despite his failing health, was still looking forward to attending another session of the Indian History Congress.

His passing is a loss to Indian archaeology, to the Indian History Congress and to all those who believe that the study of the past must remain committed to evidence, reason and the recognition of India’s composite historical inheritance. For me, it is also the loss of an affectionate friend and senior colleague whose kindness and encouragement I shall always remember.

Farewell, Gautam da. You will be missed, not only for what you contributed to our understanding of the past, but also for the warmth and humanity with which you enriched our lives.