ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Looking back over the many twists and turns of my life, I often feel that I have made remarkably few important decisions myself. Most of them seem to have been taken for me by circumstances, by chance encounters, or by people who somehow knew what was best for me long before I did. The earlier chapters of this memoir recounted how I drifted almost accidentally from the sciences into history and how, once there, destiny blessed me with teachers whose names were already becoming legends in the profession. This instalment of the story is about what happened next. It is about the period when a student slowly ceased to be merely a student and began the long apprenticeship of becoming a historian.

As my MA examinations drew to a close in the summer of 1982, I found myself standing at a familiar crossroads. I knew I wanted to continue studying history, but I lacked the courage to approach Professor Irfan Habib and ask whether he would accept me as his research scholar. To us students he was already an institution rather than merely a teacher. His books were discussed across universities, his lectures attracted packed classrooms, and his reputation travelled much farther than the walls of Aligarh Muslim University. Walking into his room simply to ask, “Sir, will you supervise my research?” seemed almost as intimidating as requesting a private audience with one of the Mughal emperors whom he himself had spent a lifetime studying. So, as was my habit in those days, I postponed the difficult conversation.

Fortunately for me, destiny had other plans. Like most students, after finishing our last MA examination, a few of us walked straight to our teachers’ rooms, partly to boast about how well we believed we had written our papers and partly to enquire how best to prepare for the Grand Viva scheduled a few days later. Among us were my classmate and friend Reena Arya and myself. Irfan Sahib listened patiently to our confident assessments of our own brilliance, smiled in the indulgent manner only experienced teachers can manage, and then, just as we were preparing to leave, quietly said, “You two come and meet me after the Viva.” There was nothing unusual in his tone. Neither of us imagined that the course of our lives had already changed.

The Grand Viva was followed, as tradition demanded, by the annual function of the Sultania Historical Society. By the time the proceedings ended it was already around half past eight in the evening. Reena and I walked to Professor Habib’s chamber where he was waiting for us. As we entered, he pointed towards two formidable heaps of books placed on chairs in one corner of the room. They were not books in the ordinary sense. They looked more like bricks that had somehow acquired covers. “These,” he said, “are for you.” We looked at one another with the apprehension of condemned prisoners. Turning towards me, he continued with complete matter of factness. “Nadeem miyan, you will write a paper on Muqarrab Khan, the surgeon. These volumes of Letters Received contain useful material. Here is a list of Persian and English sources that you should also consult.” He then looked towards Reena. “Reena bibi, you will write on Trimetalism under the Mughals.” Before either of us had fully absorbed what had just happened, he produced two membership forms of the Indian History Congress and pushed them across the table. “Fill these up.” Neither of us protested. Neither of us even thought of protesting. By the time we left his room that evening, we had unknowingly become members of the Indian History Congress and participants in its forthcoming annual session at Kurukshetra.

Only later did it dawn upon me that I had never actually asked Professor Habib whether he would supervise my research. Some days afterwards, gathering whatever courage I could muster, I timidly made the request. He looked at me almost with surprise. In truth, the decision had already been taken. Looking back today, I realise that I never formally became Professor Habib’s student. I simply found myself working under him one evening without either of us ever announcing it. Such was his way. There were no formal interviews, no solemn declarations and certainly no speeches about academic careers. A topic was assigned, a membership form signed, a pile of impossible books handed over, and one quietly found oneself inducted into a lifetime of research.

For the next six months my life changed completely. University examinations had taught us how to remember facts. Research taught us how little we actually knew. From June until December I lived among books. European travel accounts, English factory records, Persian chronicles, collections of letters and official documents gradually replaced the prescribed reading lists to which I had become accustomed. Most of these works had fortunately been published. Unfortunately, many remained untranslated. One had first to decipher the Persian before one could even begin asking historical questions. That, however, was only the beginning.

One day, shortly after my research had formally commenced, I entered Professor Habib’s room carrying a notebook filled with carefully prepared questions. Before I could ask a single one, he pointed towards another pile of enormous Persian manuscripts lying on a side table. “Take those.” I obediently carried them away. Only afterwards did I discover what I had undertaken. They were rotograph copies of Persian manuscripts. Black pages carried white lettering interrupted by worm holes, stains and innumerable dots. Many were written in khat-e-shikasta, literally the “broken script”, whose hurried abbreviations often appeared to have been invented specifically to discourage future historians. Each page resembled an elaborate puzzle. Each sentence demanded patience. Each word had first to be deciphered before it could be understood.

Months passed in this fashion. Finally, after what I considered a heroic struggle, I returned to Professor Habib. “Sir,” I announced rather proudly, “there is nothing here on my topic.” He looked up calmly. “Keep them there.” Then he pointed towards another equally intimidating pile. “Take those.” History, I was beginning to discover, had an unusual sense of humour. For several months this curious ritual continued. I would struggle through one set of manuscripts, decipher every difficult line, prepare careful notes and then report back, only to discover that there was scarcely a sentence relevant to my assigned topic. Professor Habib would quietly listen. “Very good.” Then another mountain of manuscripts would appear. My friends had begun discussing chapter outlines and bibliographies. Some had already drafted their first chapters. I, on the other hand, seemed to have become a full time reader of manuscripts that had absolutely nothing to do with my research.

Naturally, doubts crept in. Had I chosen the wrong supervisor? Surely supervisors were expected to direct their students towards useful material. Mine appeared to be leading me with remarkable determination in precisely the opposite direction. After nearly a year and a half of this exercise, I finally entered his room almost in despair. “Sir,” I confessed, “I have gone through all these sources. There is practically nothing on my topic.” Professor Habib smiled. It was one of those smiles which every one of his students eventually came to recognise. “I knew that from the beginning,” he replied. For a few seconds I was speechless. Then, seeing the bewilderment on my face, he explained. “But now you know how to read Persian manuscripts.”

It was one of the most important lessons I have ever received. Research is not the art of collecting information. Research is the discipline of learning how to search for information, how to eliminate false trails, how to recognise silence in the sources and, above all, how to distinguish evidence from assumption. Those months, which I had regarded as wasted, turned out to be the foundation upon which everything I have written since has rested. Every manuscript I have subsequently handled, every Persian document I have translated and every historical argument I have advanced owes something to those seemingly fruitless days. At that time, however, I was convinced that all I had acquired was a permanent weakness in my eyesight.

While this apprenticeship was unfolding, another annual ritual had begun to dominate our lives. The Indian History Congress. For us it was not merely an academic conference. It was almost a pilgrimage. Preparations began months in advance but reached fever pitch during the final week before departure. The Department of History underwent a transformation that would be difficult for younger historians, brought up in the age of laptops and printers, to imagine. Every large room seemed occupied. Manual typewriters clattered away from morning until well past midnight. Typists sat surrounded by piles of handwritten drafts covered with corrections in several inks and several handwritings. Teachers moved from table to table suggesting improvements. Research scholars waited impatiently for their turn. Fresh sheets of paper appeared mysteriously while discarded drafts accumulated in alarming quantities. There was no concept of office hours. The Department simply remained awake. Tea arrived with astonishing regularity. Somebody was always making another correction. Every time Professor Habib remarked, “Only one small change,” everyone within hearing distance knew that another hour had quietly disappeared.

There was, of course, no computer. No email. No photocopiers worth the name. Certainly no Ctrl+Z. If a typist made a mistake on page twenty eight, page twenty eight had to be typed again. The machine had neither sympathy nor memory. Yet no one complained. Indeed, those hectic days remain among my happiest memories of university life. What transformed the labour into a celebration were the people. Every now and then Professor Irfan Habib or Professor Shireen Moosvi would walk in carrying a large paper bag overflowing with roasted peanuts. On another evening M. Athar Ali Sahib would appear with another equally generous supply. Iqtidar Alam Khan Sahib was no different. Tea flowed continuously. Then, late at night, someone would announce that dinner had arrived. Huge containers of steaming qorma, stacks of naan and sometimes kebabs would appear from nowhere. We all ate together. Professors, lecturers, typists, research scholars and students. Nobody maintained any distance. Nobody stood on ceremony. Looking back now, I realise that the Department resembled less an academic institution than an extraordinarily large family trying collectively to meet an impossible deadline.

Once the typing had been completed, another stage began. The typed sheets had first to be converted into stencils and then cyclostyled on manually operated duplicating machines. Khursheed Bhai would be labouring at the cyclostyling machine while Idris Bhai and Noor Ahmad would be making sets out of that material. Those unfamiliar with that ancient technology cannot imagine the labour involved. Someone had to keep turning the crank while fresh sheets emerged one by one, still damp with ink and carrying that unmistakable smell which anyone of my generation instantly associates with scholarly publications. Then came collating. Hundreds of pages had to be assembled in precisely the correct order. Finally they were stitched and bound into volumes. It was usually only a few hours before departure that the last copies emerged. Sleep, if it existed at all, became a luxury.

Among the many traditions associated with those Congresses, one was particularly distinctive. Every year the Centre of Advanced Study in History produced its own independent collection of papers. It was affectionately known as the “rebel volume”. The title was never official. It never needed to be. The volume was cyclostyled, modestly produced and manually assembled. Yet it possessed a reputation that far exceeded its appearance. Delegates at the Indian History Congress would actively seek it out. Copies disappeared almost as soon as they reached the registration desks. One sometimes had the impression that people came looking for the volume before they came looking for the sessions. The contrast with the official departmental publication was rather amusing. That handsome printed volume, produced under the authority of the Head of the Department, often travelled home unopened, becoming an additional burden in already overfilled suitcases. Our modest cyclostyled collection, by contrast, was eagerly carried away. Perhaps the greatest attraction of the “rebel volume” lay elsewhere. It was thoroughly democratic. Every contributor’s name appeared proudly on the cover itself. Distinguished professors and first year research scholars stood side by side in alphabetical equality. For a young student to discover his own name sharing the cover with historians whom he revered was an encouragement beyond measure. And it was edited by Professor Irfan Habib.

When the final bundles had been tied and labelled, the entire group involved collectively exhaled. The next stage of the adventure was about to begin. The journey itself. When everything was finally packed, all members seemed to acquire a new burst of energy. The papers were ready. The bundles had been tied. The cyclostyle ink had finally dried. Now came the journey. For us young research scholars, the Indian History Congress began not at the venue but the moment we boarded the train. One of the remarkable traditions established by Professor Irfan Habib was that there was never one set of arrangements for the teachers and another for the students. We all travelled together. Professor Irfan Habib, Professor M. Athar Ali, Professor Shireen Moosvi, Professor Iqtidar Alam Khan, the younger lecturers, research scholars and students all occupied the same reserved third class compartment. Looking back, I realise how extraordinary this was. Elsewhere it was common for senior professors to travel separately, often in greater comfort. That distinction simply did not exist in our little travelling republic.

The moment everyone boarded, Irfan Sahib assumed complete charge of the compartment. With a reservation chart in one hand and the authority of a veteran railway official, he began allotting berths. “You go there.” “You exchange with him.” “No, she should have the lower berth.” Within minutes every student had found a place. One incident from those journeys still makes me smile. A passenger from the general compartment wandered in looking rather anxious. Watching Irfan Sahib confidently assigning berths and settling passengers, he naturally concluded that this gentleman could only be the Travelling Ticket Examiner. Looking around cautiously, he quietly approached him, folded a few currency notes inside his ticket and, in a conspiratorial whisper, requested, “Sahib, if you could somehow arrange a berth…” For a brief second Irfan Sahib looked completely bewildered. Then the entire compartment burst into laughter. The poor passenger stood frozen, wondering what offence he had committed, until someone finally explained that the gentleman he had mistaken for a railway official happened to be one of the country’s foremost historians. Even years later, whenever the story resurfaced, it never failed to provoke another round of laughter.

The journey itself was unlike anything I have experienced since. Food appeared from every direction. One family had sent parathas. Another had packed pickles. Someone produced kebabs. Another opened a box of sweets. Nothing remained private for very long. Before the train had crossed the first few stations, every tiffin carrier belonged to everybody else. There were no separate groups. Teachers and students sat together, ate together and argued together. Discussions moved effortlessly from Mughal revenue administration to cricket, from Persian manuscripts to politics, from university gossip to the latest historical debates. Someone would invariably begin narrating an amusing anecdote about an earlier session of the Congress. Another would recall some unforgettable question put to a famous historian. Laughter travelled up and down the compartment as frequently as the tea vendors. By the time we reached our destination, we were no longer fellow passengers. We had become a family.

That spirit continued even after the journey ended. On reaching the Congress venue, Professor Habib would ensure that we all stayed together. He never looked for separate accommodation for himself. He shared the same hostel buildings allotted to the rest of us, lived under exactly the same conditions and remained available throughout the Congress. To us, this appeared perfectly natural then. Only much later, after attending conferences elsewhere, did I appreciate how unusual it really was. Eminent scholars generally occupied guest houses or hotels. Irfan Sahib preferred to remain amidst his students.

The Congress itself was a revelation. Until then, the great names of Indian historiography had existed for me only on the covers of books and journal articles. Suddenly they were all there. One passed them in the corridors. One listened to them over breakfast. One watched them argue in the sessions. One occasionally found oneself standing beside them while waiting for tea. For a young student who had only recently completed his MA, it was an overwhelming experience. I still remember the nervousness with which I prepared for my first presentation. No matter how often one rehearsed the paper, one remained convinced that disaster lay only a few minutes away. The real ordeal, however, began after the paper had been read. The discussion. One looked up from the lectern to find oneself facing scholars whose books had shaped the discipline itself. There sat Nurul Hasan. Nearby was J. S. Grewal. One could spot Aniruddha Ray, A. R. Kulkarni and many others whose names had until then belonged almost to another world. To receive a question from one of them was at once terrifying and exhilarating. Today, after presenting papers at the Congress for over four decades, I still experience a measure of nervousness before every presentation. But nothing has ever equalled those first few minutes in Kurukshetra. With experience comes confidence. With youth comes fear. And perhaps fear is not always a bad companion. It reminds us to remain humble before our evidence.

Looking back now, I realise that Professor Irfan Habib was doing something far greater than supervising a group of research scholars. He was creating a scholarly community. He believed that history was not learnt in isolation. It was learnt collectively. It grew through debate, disagreement, criticism and companionship. The train journeys, the shared hostel rooms, the endless conversations over tea, the sleepless nights preparing papers, even the roasted peanuts distributed with such generosity, all formed part of an education no university syllabus could ever prescribe.

Many things have changed over the last four decades. Today papers are written on computers, circulated by email and uploaded with the click of a button. Conferences are organised with remarkable efficiency. Hotels are comfortable. Trains are faster. One can revise an entire paper while travelling on a mobile phone. Yet I sometimes wonder whether, in making everything easier, we have unknowingly lost something precious. We have gained technology. We may have lost fellowship. When I think of those early years, I do not first remember my own paper. I remember the smell of fresh cyclostyle ink. I remember the clatter of manual typewriters through the night. I remember the mountains of roasted peanuts that somehow disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived. I remember the laughter in a crowded railway compartment after an unsuspecting passenger tried to bribe Professor Irfan Habib for a berth. Above all, I remember a teacher who never behaved like one of India’s greatest historians. He travelled with us, stayed with us, ate with us, argued with us and quietly taught us, by example rather than instruction, what it meant to belong to a community of scholars. Fate may have brought me to history. Professor Irfan Habib taught me how to live it.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

History stands among the most misunderstood of all academic disciplines. Because everyone possesses a past, many assume that anyone who reads widely, collects anecdotes and narrates events can legitimately claim the title of historian. Few assumptions are more misleading. History is not the mere narration of what happened; it is the disciplined investigation of what can be known about the past through the critical examination of evidence. Like archaeology, law or medicine, it possesses its own methods, conventions and ethical obligations. It requires mastery over sources, familiarity with languages where necessary, sensitivity to context, engagement with historiography, and above all an unwavering commitment to intellectual honesty.

A historian is trained not simply to accumulate facts but to interrogate them. Documents are not accepted at face value. They are questioned for authorship, purpose, audience, silences, bias and context. Contradictory evidence is weighed rather than ignored. Earlier scholarship is critically evaluated, not dismissed because of ideological disagreement. Every interpretation is expected to be supported by verifiable evidence, while every intellectual debt must be acknowledged through proper citation. These are not optional refinements; they are the very foundations of the discipline.

Curiously, history is perhaps the only academic field where society often overlooks the importance of disciplinary training. Nobody would willingly undergo surgery performed by someone who had merely read extensively about anatomy. Nor would a bridge designed by an enthusiastic amateur inspire confidence simply because he had studied engineering manuals. In medicine, law, architecture or engineering, rigorous professional training is regarded as indispensable. History, however, is frequently treated as an exception, as though reading widely about the past were itself sufficient qualification to pronounce upon it with authority.

This is not an argument that only university professors can write history. Some of the finest contributions to historical scholarship have been made by independent researchers. Institutional affiliation alone is no guarantee of excellence. The real distinction lies elsewhere. Serious historical scholarship is defined by method rather than employment, by critical engagement rather than conviction, and by evidence rather than assertion. It is therefore entirely legitimate to ask whether any historical work, irrespective of its author’s background, meets these standards.

The public career of Vikram Sampath illustrates why this distinction matters.

Over the past decade Sampath has emerged as one of the most visible writers on modern Indian history. His biographies of Gauhar Jaan, S. G. Kittappa and especially the two-volume biography of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar have earned him considerable public attention. His writings have been enthusiastically received by organisations and commentators associated with the broader Hindutva movement, which has sought to reshape public narratives about India’s past. His works are widely cited in support of the argument that established academic historiography has marginalised nationalist figures while privileging interpretations associated with what is loosely described as the “Left.”

Sampath’s educational and professional background differs from that of many historians working within universities. He holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology, not history, and his formal historical training is minimal. That fact alone neither disqualifies nor diminishes his work. Independent scholars have enriched historical knowledge throughout the world. The relevant question is whether a writer’s published work exhibits the methodological rigour expected of historical scholarship.

It is on this point that Sampath has attracted sustained criticism.

His biographies of Savarkar seek to recover their subject from what he regards as decades of ideological neglect. There is nothing objectionable in revisiting established historical interpretations. Every generation of historians re-examines accepted narratives in the light of new evidence and new questions. Yet revision demands more, not less, engagement with the existing scholarship. Critics have argued that Sampath’s treatment of Savarkar frequently adopts an apologetic tone, foregrounding his revolutionary activities while giving comparatively less weight to aspects of his later political career that have long occupied historians, including his theory of Hindutva, his views on nationhood, his clemency petitions, his relationship with the Hindu Mahasabha and the wider communal politics of the late colonial period. Whether one agrees with every criticism or not, the debate concerns the balance of evidence and the selective emphasis placed upon it.

The same pattern is visible in Sampath’s interventions on Tipu Sultan and the kingdom of Mysore. Over the last several years he has become a prominent public voice in debates over Tipu’s legacy. His interpretation broadly corresponds with the dominant themes of contemporary Hindutva historiography, presenting Tipu primarily through the lens of religious persecution and intolerance. Few historians would deny that episodes of coercion, forced migration and violence occurred during Tipu’s reign. These subjects have long been discussed in the scholarly literature. The question is not whether they should be studied but how they should be interpreted.

Professional historians have generally sought to place these events within the broader political and military context of the late eighteenth century, drawing upon Persian chronicles, Kannada records, Marathi correspondence, French archives, British documentation and temple records. They have also drawn attention to evidence of Tipu’s patronage of several Hindu institutions, his correspondence with the Sringeri monastery after its desecration by Maratha forces, the religious diversity of his administration and the complexity of state formation in southern India. These elements do not absolve Tipu of criticism, but they complicate any attempt to reduce his reign to a single ideological narrative. Sampath’s writings, his critics argue, tend to privilege evidence that supports a predetermined conclusion while engaging less fully with this wider body of scholarship.

Perhaps the most serious controversy surrounding Sampath, however, concerns not interpretation but scholarly ethics.

In 2022 a group of historians submitted a formal complaint to the President of the Royal Historical Society alleging repeated plagiarism in Sampath’s published work. The complaint was signed by distinguished scholars including Professor Emerita Barbara D. Metcalf, Professor Sunil Kumar, Dr Vinayak Chaturvedi, Professor Lynn Zastoupil, Professor Christopher Jaffrelot, Professor Gyanendra Pandey, Professor John Zavos, Professor Emeritus Mridula Mukherjee, Professor Emeritus Aditya Mukherjee, Professor J. Devika, Professor Indivar Kamtekar, Professor V. Rajagopal, Professor K. V. Ramakrishna Reddy, Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor Nandini Sundar, Dr S. S. Sharma, Professor Saibal Bandyopadhyay and others. The detailed complaint included extensive comparisons between passages from Sampath’s writings and earlier works by scholars such as Vinayak Chaturvedi and Janaki Bakhle, together with material drawn from an undergraduate dissertation. According to The Print (4 March 2022; also reported in the Frontline 18 March 2022), however reported that several prominent figures on that list, including Ramachandra Guha and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, publicly stated they had not signed it. Bakhle stated the essay contained “significant portions of my own article appear without credit”.

The allegations are particularly grave because they document a pervasive pattern rather than isolated incidents. The complainants demonstrated that Sampath’s essay “The Revolutionary Leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar,” published in the India Foundation Journal in 2017, contained numerous passages that bore a striking resemblance to Chaturvedi’s earlier work published in Postcolonial Studies in 2013. The parallels were not merely thematic but textual. The very opening line of Sampath’s essay, “As an intellectual fountainhead and founder of what is termed as ‘Hindu nationalism,’ Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has emerged as one of the most controversial Indian political thinkers of the 20th Century,” closely echoed Chaturvedi’s formulation: “As an intellectual founder of Hindu nationalism, V D Savarkar has emerged as one of the most controversial Indian political thinkers of the twentieth century.”

The pattern of unattributed borrowing extended well beyond single sentences. Sampath’s discussion of Savarkar’s argument that “writing histories was a necessary step in overthrowing colonial empires” reproduced Chaturvedi’s observation almost verbatim. His account of Savarkar’s arrest on 13 March 1910, including the specific charges of “procuring and distributing arms,” “sedition,” and “waging war against the King Emperor of India,” was lifted directly from Chaturvedi’s article with only the most minimal alteration. The complainants further noted that when they ran the essay through plagiarism detection software, it registered roughly 50 per cent plagiarised content, borrowed largely from Chaturvedi’s essay and that of Dr Janaki Bakhle.

Perhaps most troubling, the complaint documented that Sampath’s two-volume biography of Savarkar contained passages taken from an undergraduate thesis submitted to Wesleyan University in 2012. The thesis, written by Paul Schaffel under the supervision of Dr William Pinch, had discussed A. M. Shah’s characterisation of the Indian Sociologist as only “mild in its criticism of British Rule.” Sampath reproduced this passage with only superficial changes and without attribution. The complaint noted that while Sampath cited the thesis incorrectly in his bibliography, he made no acknowledgement of having drawn directly upon it.

Response from the Royal Historical Society

The Royal Historical Society responded to the complaint by stating that it had examined the allegations and found that, while the evidence did not establish a case of intentional plagiarism sufficient to warrant removal from fellowship, it did identify serious concerns about Sampath’s scholarly practices. The Society’s statement noted that the case raised important questions about citation standards and acknowledged that its fellowship election procedures might require review. This response, however cautious, represented an implicit recognition that the allegations were not without substance. For many observers, the Society’s failure to take more decisive action raised troubling questions about whether professional bodies are equipped to enforce ethical standards when the accused commands significant public influence. The episode also highlighted a deeper dilemma: learned societies, which depend upon the goodwill and participation of their members, are often reluctant to expel fellows, particularly when the charges are denied and the accused enjoys political backing.

Sampath’s Defence and the Pattern of Response

Sampath publicly denied intentional plagiarism, characterising the allegations as politically motivated attacks by historians opposed to his interpretation of Savarkar. He argued that any textual similarities were the result of shared sources or constituted acceptable paraphrasing. This defence strategy is itself revealing. By framing criticism as ideological rather than scholarly, Sampath sought to shift the conversation away from evidence and towards motives. Yet the documentation provided in the complaint, running to many pages of detailed comparisons, was not rebutted with counter-evidence. The question of whether Sampath’s borrowings crossed the line from legitimate scholarly engagement to appropriation was answered not through engagement with the specific examples but through dismissal of the complainants’ political orientation.

This pattern, responding to scholarly critique by impugning the motives of critics, has become a recurring feature of Sampath’s public engagements. It is a strategy that mirrors the broader rhetorical tactics of the political movement with which he is associated. By casting every challenge as an attack by a hostile ideological camp, substantive questions about method and evidence are rendered invisible. The effect is to immunise his work from the kind of critical scrutiny that is the lifeblood of historical scholarship.

The Broader Context: History and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary India

The Sampath phenomenon cannot be understood in isolation from the wider political context in which it has emerged. Over the past decade, India has witnessed an intensifying contest over the interpretation of its past. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its associated organisations have sought to revise the narratives that have dominated academic historiography since independence, replacing them with accounts that foreground Hindu civilisation and minimise or deny the contributions of other traditions. This project has been advanced through multiple instruments: the rewriting of school textbooks, the renaming of cities and institutions, the construction of new museums and memorials, and the promotion of historians and writers whose work aligns with the official vision.

Sampath occupies a privileged position within this ecosystem. His books receive substantial publicity from media outlets sympathetic to the government, his speaking engagements are sponsored by organisations with close ties to the ruling party, and his interpretations are cited in political discourse as authoritative correctives to a supposedly biased academic establishment. This elevation of a writer whose professional training lies outside the discipline, and whose work has been shown to engage inadequately with both sources and scholarly conventions, reflects a profound transformation in the sources of intellectual authority in contemporary India.

The implications extend far beyond the reputation of a single author. When public discourse increasingly privileges works that gratify political preferences over those that submit to scholarly standards, the very meaning of knowledge is transformed. History becomes not a mode of understanding but a weapon of politics. The past is no longer studied for its own sake but constructed to serve the needs of the present. In such a climate, the distinction between history and propaganda begins to dissolve.

The Responsibilities of the Scholar and the Citizen

These developments place historians and citizens alike in a position of difficult responsibility. For historians, the obligation is to maintain the standards of their discipline even when doing so incurs political costs. This means engaging with popular narratives not by dismissing them but by subjecting them to the same rigorous scrutiny that is applied to any historical claim. It means explaining to the public not only what historians have concluded but how they have reached those conclusions, the methods, the evidence, the debates. It means resisting the temptation to retreat into specialised discourse while the public sphere is occupied by works that flout scholarly norms.

For citizens, the challenge is to recognise that not all accounts of the past are equally reliable. Historical authority cannot be measured by a book’s sales figures or its endorsement by political figures. It must be assessed by the quality of the evidence and argument, by the transparency of the method, by the willingness to engage with contrary interpretations. This is not an easy task in a media environment that rewards simplicity and emotional resonance over complexity and qualification. But it is essential for the health of democratic society, which depends upon a citizenry capable of distinguishing between knowledge and assertion.

The Past as an Arena of Struggle

The debate surrounding Vikram Sampath therefore raises questions far larger than the reputation of one author. It asks what contemporary India expects from its historians. Are they to function as custodians of evidence, prepared to follow the sources wherever they lead, even when the conclusions prove uncomfortable? Or are they expected to provide usable pasts that legitimise present political projects? The answer to that question will shape not merely the future of Indian historiography but the very meaning of history as an academic discipline.

History ultimately demands intellectual humility. It requires the historian to recognise that the past is rarely simple, that evidence is often contradictory and that certainty is the enemy of understanding. Whenever the complexity of the past is reduced to a single ideological narrative, whether of the Left or the Right, history ceases to be an inquiry and becomes an instrument. The challenge before Indian historiography today is not merely to defend one interpretation against another but to defend the discipline itself against the erosion of the standards upon which its credibility rests.

The Sampath case is not an isolated aberration but a symptom of deeper structural changes in the production and consumption of historical knowledge. It reveals the vulnerability of scholarship when it is divorced from institutional support and public understanding. It demonstrates the ease with which ideological entrepreneurs can appropriate the language of history while rejecting its methods. And it reminds us that the past is not a settled territory but an arena of struggle, a struggle over meaning, over memory, over the very identity of a nation.

In the end, the integrity of historical scholarship depends not upon the vigilance of any single institution but upon the collective commitment of historians to the norms of their discipline. It depends upon every scholar’s willingness to acknowledge intellectual debts, to engage honestly with contrary evidence, and to place the pursuit of understanding above the vindication of prior convictions. These are not optional virtues but essential obligations. Without them, history cannot fulfil its promise as a mode of understanding that illuminates the human condition while holding power to account.

Moral? Take authors like Vikram Sampath with a pinch of salt: their works are attempts at dāstangoi rather than serious works of history

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

History retains what power seeks to erase. Across centuries, we have mourned the destruction of Nalanda and Vikramashila, not as architectural losses but as civilisation’s self-inflicted wounds. Their names have become synonymous with knowledge consumed by conquest, with learning reduced to rubble by those who feared what books might teach. We condemn those responsible because they attacked humanity’s shared intellectual inheritance. Yet this condemnation rings hollow if we fail to ask an uncomfortable question of ourselves. What shall we call the threat of destruction that hangs over functioning institutions of learning in our own age? Can we invoke the sanctity of universities destroyed centuries ago while remaining silent when universities are threatened today?

This question acquires urgent particularity in the context of the proposed demolition of thirty-eight of the forty buildings comprising Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar University in Rampur. Whatever legal disputes may surround the institution or its founder, the larger issue transcends personalities. A university is never identical with the individual who establishes it. Once created, it belongs to generations of students, teachers, researchers and to society at large. Its classrooms, libraries, laboratories and archives embody years of intellectual labour and public investment. To destroy such an institution is to damage a public good whose beneficiaries extend far beyond those who conceived it. The threat alone is an assault on public trust.

No one disputes that a democratic state has both the authority and the obligation to enforce the law. Illegal construction, violations of planning regulations and administrative irregularities should be investigated and remedied. No institution, however eminent, should stand above the law. But the very essence of the rule of law lies in proportionality. Law exists to secure justice, not to maximise destruction. When demolition becomes the preferred instrument of governance, the line separating justice from spectacle begins to disappear. The threat of demolition, wielded as a political weapon, serves a purpose quite distinct from the enforcement of legal norms.

Justice and vengeance are fundamentally different. Justice seeks accountability while preserving the public good. Vengeance seeks visible punishment, often regardless of collateral damage. When universities become casualties of political conflict, those who suffer most are neither politicians nor administrators but students whose education is interrupted, teachers whose work is disrupted, employees whose livelihoods vanish and society which loses a centre of learning. The question is not whether the law should be enforced but whether destruction serves justice or merely satisfies a political appetite for visible retribution. The spectacle of demolition is not about legality; it is about sending a message.

There is, however, an even deeper danger. Educational institutions do not exist in a political vacuum. They often become symbols in larger ideological contests. When the demolition of a university is presented, celebrated or perceived as the defeat of a community rather than the impartial enforcement of the law, the consequences extend far beyond the campus. The act ceases to be merely administrative and begins to acquire a powerful political and communal symbolism. The threat itself becomes a performance, enacted for an audience that is meant to understand who holds power and who does not.

The events surrounding Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar University cannot be viewed entirely in isolation. They invite comparison with a wider pattern of political rhetoric and state action directed at certain educational and religious institutions. Many of those who today appear determined to see thirty-eight of the forty buildings of Jauhar University demolished are also among the most persistent critics of Aligarh Muslim University, Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University. The same public discourse has frequently extended to madrasas, many of which have faced closure or heightened regulatory intervention, while waqf properties have increasingly become subjects of intense political contestation. Each of these matters has its own legal history and must ultimately be judged on its own facts. Yet it is equally impossible to ignore the cumulative impression that such episodes create. When institutions associated with one section of society repeatedly become sites of political confrontation, demolition, legislative intervention or sustained public hostility, many citizens inevitably begin to perceive a pattern rather than a series of unrelated events. Whether or not governments accept such an interpretation, the perception itself carries profound consequences. It weakens confidence in the neutrality of public institutions and encourages the belief that educational and cultural establishments associated with minorities are especially vulnerable to the coercive power of the state.

This is how societies become communalised. Rarely does it happen through a single dramatic declaration. It occurs gradually through repeated public spectacles that encourage citizens to view universities, schools, neighbourhoods, places of worship and charitable institutions not as common national assets but as markers of competing religious identities. The language of equal citizenship slowly gives way to the language of majoritarian entitlement. Instead of asking whether an institution serves education, society begins to ask whom it symbolically represents. Once that transformation occurs, the demolition of a university can be applauded not because it advances justice but because it appears to satisfy the sentiments of a political majority. The spectacle of demolition is complete when the audience applauds the performance.

That is a dangerous path for any democracy. Governments undoubtedly possess the authority to enforce the law, but they also bear the responsibility of ensuring that their actions cannot reasonably be perceived as selective or discriminatory. The rule of law derives its legitimacy not merely from legality but from public confidence that it is applied consistently, impartially and without regard to religion, ideology or political convenience. When that confidence erodes, the law becomes merely another instrument of power rather than a shield against it. The spectacle of demolition does not strengthen the rule of law; it parodies it.

The gravest casualty of this process is the very idea of citizenship. A university named after Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar should first and foremost be regarded as an Indian university serving Indian students. The same principle applies equally to Aligarh Muslim University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University and every other institution of higher learning, irrespective of their history or nomenclature. Their classrooms belong to the Republic; their libraries belong to humanity; their future belongs to generations yet unborn. Once educational institutions begin to be judged primarily through communal or ideological lenses, the Republic itself begins to fragment into competing identities rather than remaining a shared constitutional community. The university becomes a battlefield; education becomes collateral damage.

There is another historical irony that deserves reflection. We often describe those who destroyed centres of learning in earlier centuries as barbarians. Whatever the complexities of those historical episodes, those rulers neither professed democratic ideals nor claimed to be governed by constitutional principles. They ruled as conquerors or monarchs in an age when concepts such as equal citizenship, fundamental rights, judicial review and constitutional accountability did not exist. They were products of their time; we claim to have transcended it.

The twenty-first century claims to be different. Modern governments derive legitimacy not from conquest but from elections. They govern under constitutions. Every public authority swears allegiance to the rule of law. Citizens are promised equality before the law, due process and protection from arbitrary power. If these ideals are to mean anything, then governments today must be judged by standards far higher than those applicable to medieval kingdoms. The democracy that threatens to demolish a university commits a sin that no medieval conqueror could have conceived, because it betrays not merely knowledge but the very principles that legitimate its existence.

For that very reason, the threatened destruction of an educational institution by a constitutional democracy carries an even heavier moral burden than comparable acts committed in pre-modern times. Medieval rulers may have possessed power without constitutional restraint. Democracies claim legitimacy precisely because power is restrained by law, reason and accountability. When elected governments choose demolition over preservation without convincingly demonstrating that no less destructive remedy exists, they invite comparisons that should trouble every democrat. The barbarians of the past had no constitutions to betray. We do.

Universities are unlike ordinary buildings. They preserve memory, encourage critical thought, produce knowledge and cultivate citizenship. They train doctors, scientists, historians, lawyers, engineers, teachers and artists. They are repositories of archives and manuscripts, laboratories of ideas and homes of intellectual dissent. Their value cannot be measured in square feet of construction or in market valuations of land. A university is not real estate; it is a republic of minds. Its demolition is not urban renewal; it is intellectual impoverishment. Even the threat of such destruction diminishes the public culture in which knowledge thrives.

History repeatedly teaches that societies become stronger by building universities, not by demolishing them. Every classroom destroyed diminishes educational opportunity. Every library lost narrows the horizon of future generations. Every campus reduced to rubble weakens the intellectual foundations upon which a nation ultimately rests. Nations that demolish their universities are not asserting sovereignty; they are committing a slow form of national suicide. The ruins they create will not be remembered as monuments to justice but as tombstones of their own short-sightedness. Even the threat, if left unchallenged, becomes a precedent for future destruction.

None of this implies that universities should enjoy immunity from legal scrutiny. Financial misconduct, corruption or violations of law should be investigated thoroughly. Those responsible should be held personally accountable after fair and transparent proceedings. But democratic justice distinguishes between punishing individuals and destroying institutions. The law should aim to preserve what serves the public while punishing those found guilty of wrongdoing. To demolish a university because some of its administrators may have erred is to punish students for the sins of their elders, a logic that no civilised legal system should countenance. The spectacle of demolition confuses the punishment of individuals with the obliteration of institutions.

Civilisations are remembered as much for what they preserve as for what they create. Nalanda survives today less as an archaeological monument than as a moral lesson. It reminds us that when knowledge is destroyed, everyone becomes poorer. That lesson loses all meaning if we commemorate the tragedies of the past while repeating similar mistakes in the present. If Nalanda continues to evoke our sorrow, it is because we recognise something in its destruction that transcends time, the tragic waste of human potential, the violence of ignorance against knowledge. To honour Nalanda while enabling its contemporary equivalent is not memory; it is hypocrisy.

If we continue to condemn those who destroyed centres of learning centuries ago, intellectual honesty demands that we apply the same moral standard to ourselves. Otherwise, history ceases to be a guide to ethical conduct and becomes merely a convenient weapon against the past. We cannot claim the moral authority to judge the barbarians of yesteryear while becoming the barbarians of today, armed not with swords but with bulldozers, not with conquest but with legal technicalities that serve as fig leaves for political vengeance.

The true measure of a democracy is not the ease with which it can demolish buildings. It is the restraint with which it exercises power. It is its willingness to distinguish between justice and retribution, between legality and spectacle, between accountability and collective punishment. A confident nation does not seek political triumph in the ruins of its universities. It builds them, protects them and reforms them where necessary, recognising that every institution of learning, irrespective of its name or origins, ultimately belongs to the nation. A democracy that understands itself does not need to demolish its universities to prove its strength; it preserves them precisely because strength lies in knowledge, not in rubble.

If the destruction of Nalanda and Vikramashila continues to evoke our sorrow a thousand years later, then we must ensure that future generations never have reason to look back upon our own age and ask why a democratic Republic, armed with a Constitution and governed in the name of the people, chose to destroy its own centres of learning. Should that happen, history’s verdict upon us may prove harsher than the verdict we have long reserved for those whom we call the barbarians of the past. They destroyed without the pretence of justice. We would destroy in its name, and that is the greater betrayal.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The historical Gorakhpanthi tradition presents a striking contrast to the political ideology now associated with its most prominent institutional representative, Yogi Adityanath. The contrast does not lie simply between religion and politics, for the Nath Yogis were never entirely removed from worldly power. They advised kings, received land grants, intervened in disputes and sometimes conferred legitimacy upon ruling dynasties. What separates the older tradition from its contemporary political appropriation is the manner in which power was conceived and exercised. Historically, Nath authority rested upon renunciation, inward discipline, freedom from social distinctions and an ability to communicate across religious boundaries. The political world represented by Adityanath, by contrast, has been shaped by the language of Hindu consolidation, suspicion of Muslims and the conversion of a flexible ascetic inheritance into a more rigid majoritarian identity.

Simon Digby’s Wonder-Tales of South Asia, especially “The Tale of Gorakh Nath” and the accompanying section on medieval Sufi tales of Jogis, offers an unusually rich entry into this earlier world.¹ The narratives collected and translated by Digby are neither doctrinal manuals nor dependable biographies. They belong to the domain of hagiography and popular memory. Yet precisely for that reason they reveal what successive generations believed Gorakhnath to represent. He appears not as the guardian of a territorialised Hindu community but as a wandering master of yoga, austerity, compassion and spiritual power. His authority comes from siddhi, discipleship and control over the self, not from the mobilisation of one religious community against another.

The first word through which the reader encounters this world is Alakh. Digby explains it as meaning, approximately, “beyond all perception”, the name of the divine used by Yogis as a greeting. Gorakhnath’s world therefore begins with a God who cannot be confined within image, institution or sectarian definition. The cry of Alakh accompanies the Yogi who moves from door to door seeking alms, without asking whether the householder belongs to a preferred community. It directs attention away from external identity towards the invisible and ungraspable divine.²

This orientation towards the formless was one of the reasons why Nath teachings could converse so readily with Sufi and later nirguna devotional traditions. The religious language of the Yogis did not depend upon a fixed opposition between Hindu and Muslim. It could employ Saiva, yogic, Islamic and vernacular vocabularies without treating their coexistence as a theological embarrassment. Religious identity was real, but it was not necessarily exclusive.

Digby’s narratives repeatedly define the true Yogi through renunciation. Gorakhnath rebukes his own guru, Matsyendra Nath, when the latter succumbs to luxury and sexual pleasure in the Land of Women. He reminds him that as a “semen-retaining and perfected Yogi” he has compromised the honour of the Nath path by becoming inflamed with passion.³ The point of the story is not merely sexual restraint. It establishes a larger distinction between yogic sovereignty and worldly captivity. The true master is the person who rules himself. A king surrounded by wealth, armies and flatterers may remain enslaved to desire, while an ascetic without possessions may exercise genuine power.

The cycle of Gorakhnath, Bharthari and Gopi Chand repeatedly dramatises rulers abandoning royal splendour for the life of a Yogi. Political sovereignty is thereby relativised. The king is not the highest form of human authority. He must eventually recognise the superiority of the renouncer who has conquered hunger, pride, attachment and fear.⁴ The historical Nath tradition could certainly become involved in politics, but its legends preserved a warning against mistaking possession of a kingdom for mastery of the self.

Compassion is equally central. In one of Digby’s stories, Gorakhnath’s disciple is maliciously directed towards an impoverished household to request milk. The woman of the house is so poor that she and her husband lack sufficient clothing. When the disciple explains her distress, Gorakhnath’s “heart melted with compassion”. The miracle that follows is generated not by hostility towards an enemy but by sympathy for the humiliated poor.⁵ Elsewhere, when Matsyendra Nath threatens a woman who has made a mistake, Gorakhnath intercedes: “the lady of the house has done nothing wrong. Please pardon her!” Matsyendra responds that Gorakhnath’s magnanimity proves his spiritual worth.⁶

These episodes are important because they locate spiritual greatness in mercy, restraint and protection of the vulnerable. The Yogi’s miraculous power becomes legitimate only when governed by compassion. Anger may possess enormous force, but force without moral control is not siddhi. It is spiritual failure.

The same principle governs the relationship between asceticism and political authority. In Digby’s account of Gorakhnath’s intervention in Nepal, the Yogi opposes a ruler who persecutes the followers of Matsyendra Nath. When the king temporarily promises to stop the oppression, Gorakhnath forgives him. Only when persecution resumes does he conclude that “such an unjust man has no right to remain on the throne” and that a ruler inclined towards oppression is a sinner.⁷

This is not an endorsement of theocracy. Gorakhnath does not seek the throne for himself. His political action is justified as resistance to oppression, while kingship remains morally conditional. The Yogi stands outside the state and judges it by justice. This differs fundamentally from a modern situation in which the head of a religious establishment becomes the head of government and the moral distance between ascetic authority and state coercion virtually disappears.

The inclusive dimension of the older Nath tradition is even clearer in the materials examined by Christine Marrewa-Karwoski in her two important essays for The Wire. Her 2018 article, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts of the Nath Sampraday”, draws attention to two early-modern texts, the Avali Siluk and the Kafir Bodh. These were known to P. D. Barthwal when he prepared his influential edition of the Gorakhbani, but they were not included in the published compilation. Marrewa-Karwoski shows that the two teachings appear in an early Hindavi manuscript dated 1614 and continued to circulate in later manuscript traditions. They were directed unmistakably towards Muslim audiences.⁸

Their importance is not that the Naths secretly became Muslims, or that they ceased to belong to a broad Saiva and yogic world. Rather, they demonstrate that Nath teachers could acknowledge Islamic belief and ritual while presenting yogic knowledge in a vocabulary intelligible to Muslims. The Avali Siluk employs Persianised religious terms and treats Islamic ethical categories with respect. One of its memorable formulations is rendered as: “Anger is haram, truth is halal.” It continues by equating uncontrolled desire with Satan and purity of heart with freedom from desire.⁹

The language is not decorative. It places yogic discipline inside an Islamic ethical idiom. The teaching does not demand that Muslim listeners first renounce their inherited religious identity. It tells them that self-control, humility, truth and purification are recognisable within their own vocabulary.

A further passage treats the mosque, prayer niche, ablution and profession of faith as meaningful symbols rather than objects of ridicule. Marrewa-Karwoski argues that such texts invited Muslim devotees into a sacred space where Islamic practices could coexist with yogic teaching without being stripped of their Islamic specificity. She quotes Barthwal’s conclusion that the Yogis made no distinction between Hindus and Muslims as servants of the same Lord.¹⁰

This was not modern secularism, nor should it be romanticised as complete equality. Medieval ascetic traditions competed for followers, patronage and prestige, and their inclusiveness could also serve strategic purposes. Yet the strategy itself remains revealing. The Naths sought authority by crossing boundaries, not by sharpening them. They increased their spiritual reach by incorporating, translating and accommodating. Their confidence did not require the vilification of another community.

Digby’s “Medieval Sufi Tales of Jogis” supplies parallel evidence from Muslim sources. The Chishti saint Gesudaraz could recount narratives concerning Matsyendra Nath and Gorakhnath by describing the elder Yogi as a pir and his disciple as a murid. Digby notes that Gesudaraz was aware of the special “Jogi language” employed by the Naths and could narrate their traditions within Sufi conceptual categories.¹¹ This was a world of debate, competition and occasional polemic, but also of translation. Yogis entered Sufi hagiography, while Sufi terms entered the narration of yogic lineages.

The historical Gorakhpanthi world also included Muslim Yogis as a social reality. Communities in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar preserved ballads of Gopi Chand and Raja Bharthari while wearing the dress associated with Nath renouncers and performing with the sarangi. Many belonged to occupational groups such as weavers and cotton carders who stood outside the centres of Brahmanical authority. Their gurus were often drawn from their own communities rather than from Brahman priesthood.¹² The legacy of Gorakhnath therefore survived not only in monasteries and Sanskrit texts but in mixed communities, itinerant singers and occupational groups whose lives complicated any simple Hindu-Muslim division.

Marrewa-Karwoski’s 2020 essay, “By Attacking the Mughals, Adityanath Is Erasing the History of His Own Nath Sampraday”, (The Wire) develops the argument further. It points out that Nath establishments received patronage from both Hindu rulers and Mughal emperors. The relationship was not uniformly peaceful, and individual Yogis sometimes opposed rulers. Yet the evidence does not support a timeless struggle between the Naths and Islam. Grants, gifts, requests for yogic or alchemical knowledge and relationships with individual ascetics continued under Mughal rule.¹³

Aurangzeb, so frequently converted into the archetypal Muslim enemy in contemporary political rhetoric, appears in Nath traditions in a far more ambiguous fashion. Scholarship on Nath lore shows him both as a threatening sovereign and as a ruler attracted to the powers of Yogis. A letter associated with the Jakhbar establishment reportedly requests treated mercury, valued in alchemical traditions for its connection with bodily perfection and longevity. Whether every detail of later monastic memory is accepted literally or not, the evidence reveals interaction where modern polemic prefers an unbroken history of persecution.¹⁴

The Gorakhpur monastery itself emerged through layered relationships that cannot be reduced to Hindu resistance against Muslim power. Historical accounts connect its expansion to Baba Roshan Ali, a Muslim faqir and devotee of Gorakhnath, and to support attributed to the Nawab of Awadh. The memory of Roshan Ali remains embedded in the sacred geography of Gorakhpur.¹⁵

The decisive transformation came much later. Marrewa-Karwoski locates the systematic Hinduisation and militant politicisation of the Gorakhpur establishment in the twentieth century, particularly under Mahant Digvijaynath.¹⁶ Nath Yogis had interacted with rulers for centuries, but Digvijaynath recast monastic power within the idiom of Hindu nationalism and mass electoral politics. A member of the Hindu Mahasabha, he was arrested for inflaming passions against Mahatma Gandhi and played a leading role in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in 1949, which culminated in the appearance of Rama idols inside the Babri Masjid.¹⁷ His successors, including Mahant Avaidyanath, inherited an institution increasingly aligned with the Hindu Mahasabha, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and eventually the BJP.¹⁸ This transformation marked a departure from the temple’s earlier syncretic character, turning it into a space associated with hard-line, right-wing politics.¹⁹

Yogi Adityanath’s politics therefore cannot simply be projected backwards and described as the timeless political expression of Gorakhnath’s teachings. It represents a selective modern reconstruction. The ochre robe, the title of Yogi and the authority of the math supply religious continuity. The ideological content, however, has been substantially reworked.

The historical Nath vocabulary sought to overcome duality. Contemporary Hindutva politics depends upon producing a durable duality between majority and minority, native and alien, patriot and suspect. The old tradition could speak of Allah, Muhammad, mosque and kalima in order to engage Muslim listeners. The contemporary political idiom often treats Muslim historical presence as a wound to be avenged or erased. The older Yogi sought freedom from pride and possession. The modern political ascetic commands the instruments of the state. Gorakhnath’s legendary authority rested upon disciplining anger. The current political culture repeatedly converts anger into electoral solidarity.

It would be too simple to say that the historical Naths were apolitical pacifists. They possessed land, cultivated royal patrons, claimed supernatural powers and occasionally intervened forcefully in dynastic affairs. Nor was the tradition entirely free of religious competition. But its historical plurality is undeniable. It included ascetics and householders, Hindus and Muslims, Sanskritic and vernacular strands, temples and itinerant performers, kings and marginal occupational communities. Its central religious imagination remained capacious enough to inhabit contradictions.

A more complete picture of this tradition requires attention to its social dynamics, particularly its relationship with caste. The Nath movement attracted considerable support from lower caste and marginalised communities, and its critique of Brahmanical orthodoxy had social as well as theological implications. Scholarly accounts note that the Nath sampradaya never believed in untouchability or birth-based discrimination. In Bengal, the householder Naths were degraded by Brahmanical society during the twelfth century and placed outside the mainstream, yet they resisted this marginalisation by asserting their identity.²⁰ The ascetic branch, in contrast, remained beyond the varna system because its practices did not conform to Puranic Hinduism. This dual nature of the tradition – egalitarian in its spiritual ideals yet accommodating of caste in its householder manifestations – complicates any straightforward narrative of its relationship to social hierarchy.²¹ The Bengal case shows that while the Nath cult was philosophically anti-caste, over time and in certain regions it developed endogamous caste frameworks, with householders forming communities that became designated as Other Backward Classes.²²

The politics of Yogi Adityanath is deeply entangled with these caste dynamics. His government has at times been praised for rising above caste arithmetic and focusing on development that benefits all sections of society. His identity as a renunciate is presented as enabling a form of governance that transcends narrow caste loyalties. Yet critics point to persistent upper caste dominance in his administration and political appointments. The irony is familiar: a tradition that questioned caste distinctions is now deployed in a politics that must continually negotiate the very caste identities it claims to transcend.

The narrative of the Nath tradition also has a gendered dimension that deserves consideration. Ann Grodzins Gold’s ethnographic work, particularly Listen to the Heron’s Words, demonstrates how women in North India use expressive traditions – songs, stories, and oral narratives – to reimagine kinship, conjugality, and their own agency within patriarchal structures.²³ While her work is not primarily about Nath tradition per se, it illuminates how religious and folk traditions in the same region as Gorakhpur contain counter-hegemonic possibilities. The Nath tradition’s ambivalent treatment of female figures and sexuality, as seen in the story of Matsyendra Nath’s temptation, exists alongside a broader landscape where women’s expressive cultures have long offered subtle critiques of social hierarchy. A fuller engagement with this material might reveal unexpected continuities: both the Nath tradition and women’s songs share a capacity to subvert dominant social orders through spiritual or poetic means.

The material conditions that enabled the transformation of the Gorakhpur math into a political powerhouse also deserve closer attention. The math was not always the dominant political force it is today; its rise is a modern phenomenon, rooted in the early twentieth-century consolidation of Hindu majoritarian politics. Digvijaynath, who became Mahant in the 1930s, allied the institution with the Hindu Mahasabha and the Gita Press management, and he played a role in the early Ram Janmabhoomi movement.²⁴ His successor, Avaidyanath, expanded the math’s reach, and Yogi Adityanath inherited and enlarged this political machinery.²⁵ The math’s influence is primarily felt in Gorakhpur and adjoining districts, sustained by organisational efforts, claims to developmental leadership, and the projection of its abbots as vikaspurush (figures of development). Its trajectory shows how a monastic establishment could evolve into an alternative power centre capable of displacing gangster politics and offering protection to the local population, thereby creating the conditions for its eventual electoral dominance.²⁶

Finally, comparisons with similar transformations in other religious traditions help situate the Nath case within broader patterns of modern religious politics. Nadeem Farooq Paracha’s work on Sufism in Pakistan shows how the state and political actors have repeatedly attempted to model Sufism in their own image – as a pacifist, inward-looking tradition under Ayub Khan; as a Sharia-abiding orthodox force under Zia-ul-Haq; and as a symbol of “enlightened moderation” under Musharraf.²⁷ Each attempt failed to capture the complexity of Sufi traditions, reducing them to instruments of state policy. The Nath tradition’s contemporary appropriation by Yogi Adityanath follows a recognisably similar pattern: a complex, syncretic, and socially diverse tradition is simplified and redeployed for majoritarian politics. The parallel suggests that the selective use of ascetic traditions for political ends is not unique to India but reflects a recurring tension between the fluidity of mystical or ascetic religions and the rigidity of modern political ideologies.

The deepest irony of Adityanath’s position is therefore not that a Yogi has entered politics. Naths entered politics long before the modern age. The irony is that a custodian of Gorakhnath’s legacy now represents a politics that narrows the very tradition from which his authority derives. The older Gorakhpanth accumulated prestige by travelling across boundaries. Its modern political expression consolidates power by policing them.

Simon Digby’s stories and Marrewa-Karwoski’s research return us to a Gorakhnath who cannot easily be recruited into a simple history of Hindu assertion. He belongs to a shared religious world in which a Yogi could be understood through the vocabulary of the Sufi pir, Muslim performers could sing his legends, Mughal rulers could patronise his followers, and teachings associated with his lineage could declare truth halal and anger haram. That inheritance does not fit comfortably within the politics of exclusion. It is precisely for this reason that recovering it is historically and politically important.

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Notes

¹ Simon Digby, Wonder-Tales of South Asia, translated from Hindi and Urdu by Leonard Harrow (New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 2006), 3–24.

² Digby, Wonder-Tales, 5.

³ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 8.

⁴ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 17–20.

⁵ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 11.

⁶ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 13.

⁷ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 22.

⁸ Christine Marrewa-Karwoski, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts of the Nath Sampraday,” The Wire, 21 December 2018.

⁹ Marrewa-Karwoski, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts.”

¹⁰ Marrewa-Karwoski, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts,” quoting P. D. Barthwal.

¹¹ Digby, Wonder-Tales, “Medieval Sufi Tales of Jogis,” 89–94.

¹² For the role of marginal communities in preserving Nath-related performance traditions, see Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 234–36.

¹³ Christine Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals, Adityanath Is Erasing the History of His Own Nath Sampraday,” The Wire, 13 December 2020.

¹⁴ Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”

¹⁵ William Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 89–94; see also Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals,” for discussions of Nath-Muslim interactions and the Roshan Ali tradition.

¹⁶ Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”

¹⁷ For Digvijaynath’s role in the Hindu Mahasabha and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, see Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (London: Hurst, 1996), 89–92; also Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”

¹⁸ See Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, 95–98, for the involvement of Nath maths in the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign; see also Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”

¹⁹ Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”

²⁰ For the Nath tradition’s relationship with caste in Bengal, see Hiteshranjan Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1981), 123–35.

²¹ Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal, 128–32; see also “Nath” in the Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 2003), which documents the householder Nath community’s caste status.

²² Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal, 130–35; Government of India, Report of the Backward Classes Commission (New Delhi: Government of India, 1955), vol. 2, 147–49, for the classification of Nath communities as OBCs.

²³ Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3–15.

²⁴ Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, 89–92; Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”

²⁵ For the expansion of the Gorakhpur math under Avaidyanath, see Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, 95–98; also Jaffrelot, “The Modi Model of Governance: Development as a Political Tool,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 21 (2019).

²⁶ See Jaffrelot, “The Modi Model of Governance,” for the math’s role in providing protection and development in Gorakhpur; also R. S. Mishra, “The Politics of Yogi Adityanath,” Economic and Political Weekly 52, no. 43 (2017): 13–15.

²⁷ Nadeem Farooq Paracha, The Pakistan Anti-Hero: History, Politics and the Pop-Culture Icon (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 145–78.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The reconstruction of medieval Indian society has long rested upon chronicles, inscriptions, administrative documents, travellers’ accounts and archaeological evidence. Together, these sources have enabled historians to craft sophisticated narratives of political institutions, dynastic change, economic structures and religious movements. Yet they remain largely the products of courts, bureaucracies and learned elites. They illuminate the actions of kings and nobles far more readily than they reveal the assumptions, aspirations and moral universe of ordinary men and women. Questions concerning how society imagined kingship, understood justice, negotiated religious diversity or viewed the supernatural often find only partial answers in official sources. It is here that popular narratives assume particular significance.

Folktales, romances and wonder tales cannot be approached as literal historical records. Their chronology is fluid, their characters often larger than life, and the supernatural is accepted as an integral part of reality. Yet, as modern social historians increasingly recognise, such narratives preserve something that formal chronicles rarely capture: collective memory, social values and the mental world of the communities that produced and transmitted them. They tell us less about what happened than about what people believed ought to happen—what they admired, what they feared and what they considered just.

Simon Digby’s Wonder-Tales of South Asia represents one of the most important contributions towards understanding this neglected dimension of medieval Indian history. Bringing together translations from Hindi, Urdu, Persian and Nepali traditions, Digby does far more than present an anthology of entertaining stories. Through his learned introduction and, more importantly, his detailed historical commentary in “The Background of the Tales,” he demonstrates how these narratives may be read alongside chronicles and inscriptions as valuable historical evidence. The tales preserve memories of courts, villages, shrines, forests, pilgrimage centres and social relationships that illuminate the cultural landscape of medieval India from an entirely different perspective.

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One of the dominant themes emerging from Digby’s collection is the medieval conception of kingship. Unlike modern political narratives that emphasise military conquest, the tales consistently portray the ruler primarily as the guardian of justice. The opening description of Raja Niladhwaj in Madhumalati and Madhukar immediately establishes this ideal:

“He was adept in distinguishing between justice and injustice, like Brihaspati in wisdom… He was stalwart, brave, warlike and glorious, and also merciful towards the poor and the unfortunate… So he was replete with all good qualities… but he had a single great fault; and that was whenever he found time to get away from his royal task he always used to go off to hunt in the jungle.”1

The passage is striking for what it chooses to celebrate. The king’s legitimacy rests neither upon conquest nor wealth but upon justice, wisdom and compassion. Yet the narrator immediately introduces the weakness that eventually destroys both ruler and kingdom. Niladhwaj’s fondness for hunting – a pastime enjoyed by medieval rulers across South Asia – becomes the narrative device through which he abandons the discipline expected of a sovereign and falls prey to deception. The moral is unmistakable: political authority is inseparable from ethical responsibility. A kingdom declines not merely because of external enemies but because its ruler allows personal passions to override sound judgement. In this respect the tale stands comfortably alongside the political ethics of Barani, the Persian Akhlaq tradition and even the Sanskrit Arthashastra, all of which regarded self-control as one of the essential virtues of rulership.

Closely connected with this conception of kingship is the equally important role assigned to the minister. Medieval political literature throughout South Asia repeatedly emphasised that kings required wise counsellors capable of speaking uncomfortable truths. Digby’s translation preserves this ideal with remarkable clarity. Shar Sen is described as a minister accomplished in finance, diplomacy, war, secrecy and administration. More importantly, he possesses the courage to oppose injustice. When Niladhwaj orders the execution of his innocent queens and sons, the minister responds:

“Maharaja! This will be a great injustice. It is not right to bring down such a thunderbolt on those who are blameless.”2

The king refuses to listen, but the minister quietly substitutes the hearts of deer for those of the princes and secretly saves their lives. The episode demonstrates a sophisticated conception of political morality. Loyalty is directed not merely towards the person of the sovereign but towards justice itself. Such an understanding closely resembles the ideals articulated in Persian advice literature, where the wazīr functions as the conscience of the monarchy. The story suggests that popular political imagination valued ethical government no less than official political theory.

The narratives also contain revealing observations concerning education and the formation of the ruling elite. Niladhwaj does not merely prepare his sons for warfare. Instead, he “sent for learned men from many countries and appointed them to instruct his sons in the six branches of knowledge.”3 This apparently incidental remark reflects several assumptions about medieval education. Learning is presented as cosmopolitan, depending upon scholars who travel across regions, while the education of princes extends beyond martial accomplishment to embrace intellectual cultivation. Such details correspond closely with evidence from the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal courts, where princes were instructed by distinguished scholars in literature, ethics, languages, theology and statecraft.

Equally informative are the stories’ representations of family life and gender. The seven queens are described as “faithful to their husband,” accomplished in household management and “skilled in the secrets of love.”4

Such descriptions undoubtedly idealise queenship, but therein lies their historical significance. They reveal the qualities medieval society associated with female virtue: loyalty, domestic competence, beauty and maternal responsibility. Against these ideals stands the witch queen, whose beauty conceals deception and whose ambition destroys the moral order of the court. She persuades the king to exile his own family and finally demands the execution of his children. Rather than reading these figures literally, historians should recognise them as symbolic expressions of social anxieties concerning kingship, succession, sexuality and the stability of the household.

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One of the greatest strengths of Digby’s anthology lies in its portrayal of the religious landscape of medieval India. The stories move effortlessly between Hindu, Islamic and yogic traditions without suggesting rigid cultural boundaries. Krishna, Gorakh Nath, Muslim saints, Persian heroes and Sufi masters inhabit the same imaginative universe. Digby’s discussion of the tales concerning Gorakh Nath and the medieval Sufis demonstrates that interaction between yogic and Sufi traditions formed an accepted part of popular memory. The traditions surrounding Kamal Jogi and Sayyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani, for example, reveal a world characterised by dialogue, adaptation and shared spiritual vocabulary rather than simple confrontation.

This cultural fluidity reaches its clearest expression in Digby’s discussion of The Flower of Bakawali. Although surviving in Urdu versions heavily influenced by Persian literary conventions, the story preserves older Indian traditions while continuing to evolve through successive retellings. Digby perceptively observes that the tale illustrates “…the cultural complexities of late Mughal and pre-modern India” which “defy simplistic politico-religious classification.”5

This observation extends beyond literary criticism to become an important historiographical statement. The medieval literary world was characterised not by isolated religious traditions but by continuous borrowing, adaptation and translation. Stories crossed linguistic boundaries with ease, acquiring new meanings while retaining older cultural associations. The collection therefore provides compelling evidence for the composite literary culture that flourished across much of South Asia.

The stories also illuminate aspects of everyday social organisation that rarely appear in court chronicles. Digby’s discussion of the tale of Ganga Ram the Headman and Bulakhi Ram the Barber demonstrates how popular narratives preserve memories of the traditional north Indian village before the transformations brought about by colonial rule.6

The relationship between the headman and the barber reflects neither complete equality nor simple domination. Rather, it reveals a society organised through reciprocal obligations in which occupational groups depended upon one another for the functioning of village life. Humour softens hierarchy, while mutual dependence tempers authority. Such narratives remind historians that medieval society cannot be understood solely through the perspectives of kings and nobles.

Hospitality likewise emerges as a recurring social virtue. When Raja Niladhwaj arrives at the mysterious palace deep within the forest, he pleads with its occupant:

“Do not leave the guest who has arrived in the middle of the night without hope! It will be a great merit if you light the fire and make arrangements for our eating and sleeping.”7

The appeal assumes that receiving travellers constituted a recognised moral obligation, even under extraordinary circumstances. Such moments reveal ethical expectations embedded within everyday life that official documents seldom record. Hospitality appears not merely as social etiquette but as a religious and moral duty recognised across cultural traditions.

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Finally, historians should resist the temptation to dismiss the supernatural elements of these narratives as irrelevant fantasy. Demons, enchanted flowers, miraculous journeys, shape-shifting beings and saintly miracles were not peripheral embellishments but formed part of the medieval understanding of reality. For historians, their importance lies not in determining whether such events actually occurred but in recognising what they reveal about contemporary mentalities. These stories illuminate the boundaries of the imaginable, demonstrating how the visible and invisible worlds coexisted within the medieval imagination. They preserve beliefs, fears and hopes that no administrative record could ever capture.

In the Preface to the volume, Digby modestly remarks that “the translator claims no moral rights over the tales that he has translated, and he will be glad if they are retold and give pleasure.”8

Yet their value extends well beyond literary pleasure. Through centuries of retelling, these narratives accumulated the experiences, ideals and collective memories of the societies that preserved them. They constitute a different kind of historical archive, one shaped not by state institutions but by popular transmission.

Wonder-Tales of South Asia therefore demonstrates that historians need not confine themselves to chronicles, inscriptions and official documents. Popular narratives, read critically and comparatively, recover dimensions of medieval Indian society that formal historical writing often leaves in shadow. They reveal ideals of kingship founded upon justice rather than conquest, ministers who embodied ethical governance, villages sustained by reciprocal obligations, educational values rooted in cosmopolitan learning and a religious world characterised by interaction rather than isolation. Above all, they remind us that history survives not only in monuments and manuscripts but also in stories. When approached with historical sensitivity, these tales cease to be merely tales of wonder. They become indispensable reflections on the social, moral and cultural world of medieval India.

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Notes

1. Simon Digby and Leonard Harrow, trans., Wonder-Tales of South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 2006), 14.
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., 14.
4. Ibid., 14.
5. Ibid., xxxiii.
6. Ibid., xxix.
7. Ibid., 18.
8. Ibid., viii.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

After having so far dealt with how I chose the subject, what type of teachers I was privileged with and how I evolved in life, I will here deal with another type of training and education altogether. It is about the education that no curriculum prescribed, no examination tested and no degree formally recognised. Yet, in retrospect, it was perhaps the most important education I ever received. The University did not merely teach me history. It taught me how to live with history.

Beyond the classrooms lay another world: the MA Seminar Room where afternoons effortlessly merged into evenings; the endless shelves of the Maulana Azad Library where one entered searching for a single reference and emerged having discovered an entirely different subject; hostel debates that continued well past midnight; endless cups of tea consumed while quarrelling over historiography; friendships forged in moments of intellectual excitement as well as financial hardship; and the exhilarating discovery that history was not merely a subject to be studied but a way of thinking and living. My life at the University bore little resemblance to the life I had known at school.

Academically, school had never been particularly kind to me. History and literature came naturally enough, but arithmetic and physics seemed determined never to reveal their secrets. Numbers stubbornly refused to obey me, and scientific formulae appeared to inhabit a universe to which I was never fully admitted. Yet outside the classroom my life had been remarkably comfortable. I was the only son of a highly respected scholar, surrounded by the affection of two doting sisters and protected by a family that ensured I seldom worried about the practical difficulties of life. Looking back, I sometimes think I lived like a young prince without ever realising it. That comfortable world disappeared almost overnight.

Within the first few months of my entering the University, my father passed away. The emotional loss was devastating enough, but it was accompanied by a crisis that only later did I fully comprehend. Suddenly there was no earning member in the family. The security that had always seemed permanent vanished in an instant. For the first time I understood the uncertainties that accompany financial hardship. Curiously, while my personal life entered one of its darkest periods, my academic life entered one of its brightest. Every morning I walked into classrooms where some of the finest historians in the country unfolded before us worlds that fascinated me. Unlike my school years, I understood what was being taught. More importantly, I enjoyed understanding it. History was no longer a subject that required memorisation. It became an intellectual adventure.

There was another reason why I found the Department so welcoming. Many of my teachers had known my father personally. Some had been his close friends. Others had been frequent visitors to our home. They were towering names in Indian historiography, yet I never found them intimidating. They had watched me grow up long before they became my professors. That familiarity gave me a confidence that many of my classmates understandably lacked. Something else also happened almost imperceptibly. The diffidence that had characterised my school days began slowly to disappear. At school I had remained reserved, almost painfully shy. At the University I gradually found myself becoming increasingly outgoing. Perhaps it was the stimulating intellectual atmosphere, perhaps the encouragement of inspiring teachers, or perhaps the simple joy of finally discovering a subject that genuinely excited me. Whatever the reason, I found myself making friends with remarkable ease.

Some sought my friendship because of the elaborate notes I prepared after every lecture. I had acquired the habit of recording almost everything my teachers said, supplementing their lectures with additional reading and arranging the material systematically. Before long, my notebooks acquired a circulation of their own. Others appreciated that, having studied in a convent school, I was reasonably comfortable expressing myself in English, a skill that many students educated in Urdu or Hindi medium institutions wished to cultivate. Amongst my earliest friends was Amjad Afridi from Jammu. Like me, he had received a convent education and possessed an easy command over English. He was also closely related to Professor Haqqi, the distinguished Head of the Department of Political Science. We shared similar backgrounds and quickly became close companions.

Quite different was my friendship with Jawaid Akhtar from Purnea. Jawaid came from an Urdu medium background and had set his heart upon joining the Civil Services. During our earliest encounters he regarded Amjad and me with considerable suspicion. Whenever we approached him, he would greet us with a barrage of sarcastic remarks, accusing us of belonging to an unduly privileged class of students. According to him, we had every conceivable advantage. Perhaps he was not entirely wrong. Friendship, however, has a remarkable ability to dissolve such distinctions. Gradually the sarcasm disappeared, conversations became longer, and before very long we had become inseparable companions. When Amjad later left for Jawaharlal Nehru University to pursue his postgraduate studies, Jawaid naturally filled the void. For several years we were almost constantly together.

There was one difficulty that both of us shared. Neither of us possessed much money. Necessity, however, often stimulates ingenuity. Those were the days when even BA (Hons) students remained in the Department until late in the evening. Hunger therefore became an almost daily companion. Unfortunately, our pockets rarely cooperated. So Jawaid and I devised what we considered a brilliant strategy. We would quietly occupy a table at one of the dhābas outside the campus and patiently wait until some senior student, or preferably someone known to possess a reasonably healthy wallet, appeared. The moment our unsuspecting benefactor arrived, we would begin a loud and entirely fabricated argument. Within moments voices would rise, accusations would fly, and both of us would display dramatic talents that neither of us had exhibited elsewhere. As expected, the kindly senior would intervene. “Arrey bhai, why are you fighting? Sit down, both of you.” Then, in accordance with the finest traditions of Aligarh hospitality, he would immediately order tea, pakoras and generous helpings of fried dālmoth in the hope of restoring peace. The miracle invariably occurred. Our quarrel would instantly subside. We would consume the refreshments with appropriate seriousness, thank our peacemaker for his wisdom and generosity, and leave in perfect harmony. Looking back now, I cannot decide whether we deserved Oscars or disciplinary action. Perhaps both.

The episode that taught me perhaps the greatest lesson of my student life came quite unexpectedly. One afternoon a few friends informed me that Aftab Hall was organising its annual debate competition. One of them requested that I write a speech for him opposing the motion. I readily agreed. Writing had never frightened me. I spent the next few hours preparing what I thought was a reasonably convincing speech. Just before the competition was about to begin, an idea suddenly struck me. If I could write a speech for someone else, why could I not deliver one myself? With all the confidence that only youth can possess, I walked to the organisers’ table and entered my own name as a speaker. Since my friend was speaking against the motion, I decided to speak for it.

There was only one small problem. I had completely forgotten who I was. Throughout my school life I had remained painfully shy. Public speaking was something I had carefully avoided. Standing before an audience had never been one of my strengths. Yet, buoyed by the confidence that the University had slowly instilled in me, I convinced myself that speaking would be no more difficult than writing. Confidence, however, is not always accompanied by experience. When my name was announced, I walked confidently towards the podium. The confidence lasted exactly as long as it took me to look at the audience. My mind went completely blank. Not a single sentence remained. Not a single argument survived. Everything that I had thought I knew vanished in an instant. I stood there staring at the audience while the audience stared back at me. Then came the inevitable hooting. The louder the hooting became, the more paralysed I felt. It was as though someone had suddenly switched off my brain. I do not know how long I stood there. It could not have been more than a minute or two, but to me it felt like an eternity. Eventually, defeated and utterly embarrassed, I lowered my head and quietly stepped down from the podium.

For a young man who had only recently begun to discover confidence, it was a crushing humiliation. There remained, however, another problem. The debate was to be followed by dinner. Anyone who studied at Aligarh in those days will understand that one simply did not miss a hostel dinner after a hall function, especially when qorma and freshly baked rotis, kabābs and biryāni followed by a sweet dish, mostly shāhi tukda were on the menu. But how could I possibly return after making such a spectacular fool of myself? Providence, or perhaps desperation, suggested an ingenious solution. I walked straight to Shamshad Market and entered a barber’s shop. “Shave it off,” I said, pointing to my beard. The barber looked mildly surprised but asked no questions. Within minutes the beard that I had carefully nurtured had disappeared. I looked into the mirror. The young man staring back at me appeared sufficiently different to convince even me that he was someone else. Feeling reassured, I returned to the lawns of Aftab Hall where dinner was being served. I quietly joined the table, accepted my plate of qorma and rotis, found a comfortable corner and enjoyed my meal with complete satisfaction. As far as I could judge, nobody recognised that the clean-shaven fellow enjoying his dinner was the very same unfortunate individual who, less than an hour earlier, had stood speechless before the audience while they mercilessly hooted him down.

Even today, whenever I remember that evening, I cannot help smiling. What seemed at the time an unbearable humiliation became one of the most valuable lessons of my life. That evening taught me that possessing knowledge and communicating knowledge are two entirely different accomplishments. It is not enough to understand a subject. One must also learn to express one’s thoughts clearly, confidently and persuasively. Scholarship locked away within one’s own mind serves little purpose. Knowledge fulfils its true purpose only when it is communicated to others. Ironically, the greatest lesson I ever learnt about public speaking came not from delivering a memorable speech but from being completely unable to utter a single word. Far from discouraging me, that failure transformed me. I resolved that never again would I allow fear to silence me. From then onwards I deliberately sought every opportunity to speak before an audience, however small. Every discussion, every seminar, every informal gathering became an exercise in overcoming the paralysis that I had experienced that evening at Aftab Hall. Looking back today, I often tell my own students that failure is sometimes the finest teacher one can ever have. Success may give confidence, but failure gives determination.

Around the same time another transformation was quietly taking place. I came from a deeply religious Shi’i family. My father had been a distinguished theologian, and religion naturally formed an integral part of my upbringing. Yet almost as soon as I entered the University I found myself exposed to an intellectual atmosphere very different from the one in which I had grown up. Many of the brightest students in the Department were associated with the Students’ Federation of India, the student wing of the Left. Before long I too found myself attending their meetings. The experience introduced me to Marxist literature, political activism and ways of looking at society that were entirely new to me. I learnt much from those associations. At the same time, I remained deeply rooted in my own religious traditions. There were aspects of Left politics that appealed to me greatly, particularly its emphasis on social justice and equality. There were others with which I felt less comfortable.

Perhaps it was an unconscious attempt to reconcile these different worlds that led me to one of the more amusing episodes of my undergraduate years. If there could be an SFI representing the Students’ Federation of India, why could there not also be another SFI? And so, with all the idealism and confidence of youth, I floated an organisation bearing exactly the same initials. Mine stood for the Shia Federation of India. The similarity of names was entirely intentional. It never possessed the organisational machinery or political ambitions of the other SFI. Nor was it intended to. It simply reflected the world from which I had come and the identity that continued to shape me. Through this organisation I began arranging programmes entirely at my own expense. Looking back, I often wonder where the money came from, given the financial circumstances through which my family was then passing. Somehow, however, one always managed. I do remember one benefactor however: an Engineering teacher at ZH Engineering College, Dr Aliul Hasan of Banaras, who would keep on funding my programme materially and intellectually. During my undergraduate years we organised three substantial functions. One was held in the Arts Faculty Lounge, another at Bait-us-Salaat, the University’s principal centre of Shi’i religious and cultural activity, and a third in the Kennedy Auditorium. Those programmes gave me an education that no classroom ever could. They taught me how to organise an event from beginning to end, how to persuade people to participate, how to coordinate speakers, arrange logistics and assume responsibility for success as well as failure. Only much later did I realise that these experiences were preparing me for a lifetime spent organising seminars, conferences and academic gatherings. The training had begun long before I knew that I would spend my professional life in a university.

By the time I entered the MA programme, however, another transformation had quietly begun to take place. The rather exclusive outlook that had characterised my undergraduate years slowly gave way to something much broader. It was not that I had become any less attached to my own religious identity. My upbringing, my family and my father’s influence remained inseparable parts of who I was. Rather, I had begun to appreciate that history, by its very nature, refuses to remain confined within narrow boundaries. The more one reads, the more one realises that societies, cultures and religions are intertwined in ways that simple labels fail to explain. The historian’s first loyalty must ultimately be to evidence and understanding rather than to inherited assumptions. Without consciously deciding to do so, I found myself moving away from specifically Shi’i student activities towards a much more inclusive academic engagement. The change was so gradual that I scarcely noticed it myself. Instead of organising religious gatherings, I began organising student seminars on Medieval Indian History. They were modest affairs by the standards of later years, but for us they represented an entirely different kind of intellectual exercise. Students were encouraged to read original texts, prepare papers and defend their arguments before their peers. We learnt not merely to collect information but to formulate questions, construct arguments and, perhaps most importantly, accept criticism.

Not every initiative, however, received enthusiastic encouragement. There were occasions when the then Chairman of the Department (I won’t name him as I still respect him a lot) would take a rather dim view of our activities. Sometimes we were told that the Seminar Room could not be occupied indefinitely. On other occasions we were gently reminded that students were expected to attend classes rather than organise them. Being young and thoroughly convinced of the importance of what we were doing, we accepted these interruptions with remarkable good humour. If we were turned out of the Seminar Room, we simply shifted the seminar to the lawns. Someone would spread a newspaper on the grass, another would produce a notebook, and within minutes the discussion resumed exactly where it had been interrupted. Looking back today, I often feel that those informal baithaks beneath the trees were among the finest seminars I have ever attended. There were no microphones. No inaugural ceremonies. No chief guests. No interminable votes of thanks. Only students, and occasionally a visiting Professor, arguing passionately about history.

One afternoon the discussion might revolve around the nature of the iqta system under the Delhi Sultans. On another occasion we debated whether Akbar’s theory of sovereignty represented a genuine ideological departure or merely a political necessity. Sometimes the arguments became so animated that passers-by would stop and look at us with curiosity. They probably wondered why a group of young men seemed prepared to quarrel so passionately over emperors who had been dead for centuries. For us, however, those emperors were very much alive. They represented ideas. They represented problems. Above all, they represented different ways of understanding the past.

It was during those years that another important academic tradition began within the Department. Professor Irfan Habib initiated what were then known as the Thursday Seminars of the Aligarh Historians Group, an enterprise that would, in later years, evolve into the Aligarh Historians Society. Few of us realised at the time that we were witnessing the birth of an institution that would eventually become one of the most respected historical forums in the country. To us it was simply Thursday. Those seminars became an event around which our week revolved. There was much to be done before each meeting. Chairs had to be arranged, notices circulated, visiting scholars received, papers duplicated and countless small details attended to. A seminar that appears effortless to an audience invariably rests upon the unseen labour of volunteers. I was fortunate to be one of them. Along with a few fellow students, I became actively involved in organising these meetings. There was no financial reward, no certificate of appreciation and no expectation of recognition. We participated simply because we enjoyed being part of an intellectual community that was visibly growing before our eyes.

The rewards were immeasurable. For the first time I found myself listening not only to my own teachers but also to distinguished scholars from universities across the country. I watched eminent historians disagree with one another, sometimes quite vigorously, yet without any trace of personal bitterness. Arguments were supported by evidence, challenged by evidence and refined through evidence. That experience fundamentally altered my understanding of scholarship. Until then I had imagined that history consisted of established facts waiting to be learnt. The seminars taught me something very different. History is, in reality, an unending conversation. Every generation returns to the same evidence with new questions. Every historian contributes one interpretation amongst many others. Scholarship advances not because everyone agrees, but because informed disagreement compels us to think more carefully. It was a lesson that remained with me throughout my own academic career.

The MA Seminar Room itself gradually acquired an almost sacred significance. It was no longer merely a room where students sat between classes. It became the intellectual heart of our lives. Hours disappeared there unnoticed. One discussion naturally gave birth to another. Someone would introduce a newly published article. Another would disagree with its conclusions. A third would rush to the library to fetch a relevant book. Before long what had begun as a casual conversation had become a miniature research seminar. Equally important was the Maulana Azad Library. To visitors it was one of the University’s most magnificent buildings. To us it was home. I often think that no historian is ever truly educated until he has learnt to lose himself in a great library. One entered intending to consult a single volume and emerged several hours later carrying references to half a dozen books that one had never originally intended to read. A footnote led to another book; that book suggested another article; the article referred to an obscure Persian source; and before one realised it, the entire afternoon had disappeared. Long before electronic databases transformed research into a matter of computer searches, scholarship depended upon serendipity. One learnt to browse. One learnt to wander. Above all, one learnt patience.

The friendships forged during those years have remained amongst the greatest blessings of my life. Some began in classrooms, others in the Seminar Room, still others over countless cups of tea in the canteens and dhabas that surrounded the campus. We borrowed one another’s books, criticised each other’s papers with ruthless honesty, argued over historiography with youthful certainty and reconciled ourselves over yet another cup of tea. Looking back now, I realise that the University was educating us in ways that no curriculum could ever prescribe. The lectures gave us knowledge. The library taught us discipline. The seminars taught us to think. Friendships taught us generosity. Failure taught us resilience. Organisation taught us leadership. And life itself taught us humility.

When I first entered Aligarh, I imagined that education took place inside classrooms. By the time I completed my MA course, I knew better. The classrooms had given me teachers. Life beyond them had made me a historian. The story, however, was far from over. The years that followed would take me from the Seminar Room to research, from student life to teaching, and eventually to the very Department that had nurtured me. Looking back now, I often feel that everything that came later had its origins in those unforgettable years when the University quietly taught me lessons that no textbook could ever contain. That, however, is a story yet to be told.