ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

I write this as calls to revive the almost defunct AMUSU pick up on the campus. And a student is sitting since a number of days on a hunger strike for it’s revival. It is extremely sad that for almost a decade or more the Student’s Union has not been allowed to function.

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The history of the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union cannot be written simply as a succession of Presidents, Vice-Presidents and Honorary Secretaries. It belongs, in many ways, to the history of Aligarh itself, reflecting the changing political culture of the institution, its intellectual ambitions, its internal conflicts, its relationship with national politics and its continuing attempt to reconcile authority with dissent. The Union has had its high points and its low points. At its best, it trained generations of students in public speaking, democratic participation and political argument, and it provided an institutional means through which grievances could be articulated and authority questioned. Union Hall became one of the most remarkable arenas of public debate in an Indian university. At its worst, student politics could descend into factionalism, regionalism, intimidation and violence, while student leaders sometimes confused representation with power and legitimate intervention with interference. Both sides belong to its history. One thing which distinguished the Student Union at Aligarh was that no political outfits were involved: it were just individuals with their respective agendas.

What makes the present moment particularly significant is that, after more than a century of evolution, the elected Union has in recent years effectively been rendered dysfunctional. This represents more than the disappearance of an annual election. It has weakened one of the important institutional channels through which students participated in University life and through which administrative authority could be publicly questioned.

The Siddons Union and the Making of a Debating Culture

The story begins in 1884, long before the establishment of Aligarh Muslim University. On 26 August that year the Siddons Union Club was inaugurated at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. Theodore Beck presided, Khwaja Sajjad Husain became its Vice-President and Syed Mohammed Ali its Secretary. The student debating tradition at Aligarh is therefore almost as old as the College itself. The organisation was named after Henry George Impey Siddons, the first Principal of the MAO College, while its intellectual model owed much to the debating culture of British universities, particularly Cambridge. Its purpose was educational rather than recreational. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan understood that modern education required more than books and examinations. Students had to learn how to formulate an argument, defend it before an audience, listen to disagreement and respond intelligently.

The early debates demonstrate this ambition. Students discussed female education, purdah, marriage practices, university education and questions concerning Indian society and the condition of Muslims. These were not inconsequential exercises. They were subjects upon which nineteenth-century Indian society itself was divided. The Union therefore embodied an important element of Sir Syed’s educational philosophy. Education did not end at the classroom door. A student was expected to read, converse, question and speak. From this developed one of Aligarh’s most distinctive traditions, the culture of taqrīr. Public speaking was encouraged through competitions and prizes. The Herald Caucus Cambridge Speaking Prize appeared during the nineteenth century, while later generations knew the Sir Shah Sulaiman Gold Medal and other prizes associated with English and Urdu oratory. Debates, discussions, symposiums and declamation contests eventually became formally incorporated into the activities of the Students’ Union.

Union Hall became the principal theatre of this culture. To speak there was different from delivering a ceremonial lecture. Its audience possessed a personality of its own. It could applaud generously but could also be merciless. Reputation outside Aligarh did not guarantee an easy reception inside the Hall. A pompous assertion might provoke laughter, and an evasive answer an immediate intervention from the floor. Over the decades national leaders, intellectuals, writers and public personalities appeared before Aligarh students. Mahatma Gandhi, Muhammad Iqbal, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru were among those associated with the tradition of honorary life membership. Their portraits in Union Hall eventually became a visual archive of the institution’s encounters with figures belonging to widely different political traditions. They recorded institutional history rather than contemporary political allegiance, a distinction sometimes forgotten during later controversies over the portraits.

From Debate to Representation

The transformation of the MAO College into Aligarh Muslim University in 1920 inevitably changed the character of student organisation. The debating tradition survived, but the Union increasingly acquired a representative and political role. These were also years of intense political ferment. The Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements swept through Aligarh. Gandhiji visited in October 1920, while a group of teachers and students left in circumstances associated with the foundation of Jamia Millia Islamia. During subsequent decades the campus contained competing political tendencies. Congress nationalism, Muslim nationalism, socialist and communist ideas, religious reform movements and other strands of anti-colonial politics all found adherents. It would therefore be misleading to read Aligarh’s student history backwards from Partition. The University did not move in a straight line towards Muslim League politics. By the late 1930s and especially during the 1940s, however, League influence among Aligarh students became increasingly powerful, and students participated actively in its political mobilisation.

Partition produced a profound rupture. Students and alumni migrated to Pakistan, old political certainties collapsed and the University had to redefine its place in independent India. The reconstruction of representative student politics after 1947 was therefore part of the larger reconstruction of Aligarh itself. A decisive moment came in January 1952 when a new constitution of the Students’ Union came into operation. It defined the Union in terms of student welfare, corporate and social life, social service, public discussion and relations with students elsewhere. Every student was a member, while the General Body was envisaged as the supreme governing body. The Union thus combined the older educational ideal of debate with a clearly democratic representative function. Its elections soon acquired enormous importance. Campaigns spread through residential halls, dining rooms, faculties and departments. Candidates went from room to room seeking support. Pamphlets circulated, alliances were negotiated and hall and regional loyalties frequently mattered. Yet personality, reputation and speaking ability remained crucial.

The Presidential Debate and the Rooftop Speech

For generations of Aligarians, the Presidential Debate was one of the defining spectacles of student life. A candidate might possess an impressive organisation and hundreds of campaigners, but eventually he had to stand before the students and submit himself to the judgement of an audience which could be extraordinarily demanding. Could he think while being interrupted? Could he answer an uncomfortable question? Could he retain his composure when the audience laughed at him? Could he respond to an opponent without descending into abuse? Above all, could he speak? A brilliant performance could transform an election. A poor one could expose a candidate whom an efficient organisation had made appear formidable. In this sense, the Presidential Debate was democratic education in unusually direct form.

But there was another electoral tradition which older generations of Aligarians remember with particular affection. There was a time when many students would postpone their final decision until they had heard the candidates’ concluding speeches. The respective candidates would address the students from the roof of Union Hall, while the electorate gathered below and listened. For some, the vote remained undecided until those final speeches had been delivered. Those speeches were something to be heard and learnt from. A good candidate had to demonstrate more than knowledge of hostel grievances or promises concerning student facilities. He had to show command over language, awareness of the University and understanding of the larger political world. Wit mattered, as did timing. Urdu poetry might be deployed to devastating effect. English and Urdu could move naturally through the same speech. A clever response to an interruption could bring an audience which had been hostile only moments earlier suddenly to the speaker’s side.

For younger students, merely listening could itself be an education. One learnt how an argument was constructed, how an audience was addressed and how disagreement could be expressed. Students listened not simply because an election was approaching but because some of these men were genuinely worth listening to. A memorable speech could alter an election. There was something wonderfully appropriate about this. Almost a century after the Siddons Union had been established to teach students the art of public speaking, Aligarh students could still wait outside Union Hall before deciding how to vote because they first wanted to hear what the candidates had to say. The election had changed. The University had changed. India had changed. But beneath the noise of electoral politics, something of the original purpose of the Siddons Union survived. The candidate was expected to speak, and the student was expected to listen before deciding.

The Orators of Aligarh

This culture produced a succession of memorable speakers. Some subsequently entered national politics, while others remained celebrated primarily within Aligarh. Mushirul Hasan, before becoming one of India’s leading historians and eventually Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, belonged to this world of debate and articulation. Javed Habib possessed an exceptional ability to formulate an argument and answer an opponent. Azam Khan represented another, more combative and theatrical tradition of public speaking. Ali Amir and Peerzada Lovey were similarly remembered for the fluency and force with which they could address students. Arif Mohammad Khan also emerged from this environment before entering legislative and national politics. Mohammad Adeeb belonged to the same wider tradition of Aligarh student oratory. There were many others.

Indeed, some of the finest speakers never subsequently became nationally known. A candidate might lose an election and nevertheless be remembered for decades because of a speech, while someone who won comfortably might leave little imprint upon the collective memory of the campus. This is why the history of AMUSU cannot be reconstructed entirely from official records. Files can tell us who won an election. They cannot recover a devastating reply during a debate, the moment when a speaker changed the mood of an angry audience, or the question from the floor which unsettled an eminent visitor. These survive in the memories of generations of Aligarians and constitute an oral archive which deserves systematic collection before much of it disappears.

Among the articulate Presidents of the Union, Javed Habib deserves particular mention. He became President during the politically charged atmosphere of the late 1970s, when questions surrounding the AMU Act, the character of the University and its relationship with the central government had again become major political issues. Habib was remembered not merely for the firmness of his politics but for the quality of his articulation. One particularly memorable encounter was with Vice-Chancellor Ali Muhammad Khusro. Khusro was himself an economist, intellectual and accomplished public speaker who possessed both the authority of office and considerable intellectual confidence. Yet Habib, speaking as the elected representative of the students, could counter the Vice-Chancellor’s arguments point by point. What made the exchange remarkable was the absence of personal rancour. Habib could disagree firmly without descending into abuse, while the Vice-Chancellor could be challenged without the disagreement becoming personal. Respect for office did not require intellectual submission to it, while opposition did not require vilification. It represented something valuable in the older culture of AMUSU. The Vice-Chancellor possessed administrative authority; the President possessed electoral legitimacy. Union Hall provided a space in which the two could meet through argument.

AMUSU at its Best

At its finest, the Union simultaneously functioned as a debating society, representative institution, welfare organisation and political training ground. Its everyday role was often less spectacular than its major agitations but no less important. Problems concerning hostels, dining halls, libraries, fees, examinations, scholarships, admissions and student welfare could be taken to elected representatives, who could in turn approach the Vice-Chancellor, Proctor, Registrar or Dean Students’ Welfare. A representative institution thus converted individual grievances into negotiable demands. This was particularly important at a residential university. Students did not simply attend classes at Aligarh; they lived within the institution. Food, accommodation, electricity, water, discipline, libraries and personal security constantly brought student life into contact with administrative authority. The Union provided a bridge between the two.

It also gave students an apprenticeship in public life. They learnt canvassing, organisation, negotiation and public speaking. They experienced elections, victories and defeats. They discovered that leadership required persuading people who did not necessarily agree with them. The Union could also become the collective voice of students when larger questions concerning the University arose. The controversies surrounding amendments to the AMU Act and the University’s minority character during the 1960s and 1970s brought students into debates about the institutional future of Aligarh. Whatever one’s position on those constitutional controversies, student participation demonstrated that they regarded themselves as stakeholders rather than merely recipients of University administration.

Its Failures and Excesses

Yet the enormous prestige attached to AMUSU sometimes became its weakness. The presidency could become an object of political ambition rather than public service. Elections encouraged factions, regional groupings and personal networks. Over time money and organisational muscle became increasingly visible. Student mobilisation could turn into intimidation, while leaders occasionally attempted to intervene in matters extending beyond legitimate student concerns. The communal disturbances following the Union election of October 1961 constituted one early and particularly tragic warning. An election which had acquired communal overtones was followed by the old student practice of taking out a mock janāza of defeated candidates. Rumours spread in the city that a Hindu student had actually been killed inside the University, helping to transform a campus confrontation into serious communal violence. The episode deserves separate treatment in its own right. For the history of AMUSU, its importance lies in demonstrating how easily student politics could escape the boundaries of the campus and acquire consequences never intended by those who initiated it.

The problems of later decades were different. Student politics increasingly acquired its own professional class of leaders. Electoral competition could involve money, regional blocs and displays of muscle. Access to senior administrators sometimes became a source of personal influence, while the distinction between representing students and acting as an intermediary or fixer could become blurred. By the decades immediately preceding the present prolonged absence of elections, rumours and allegations of corruption, money power and goondaism had increasingly begun to surround student politics. These allegations cannot all be accepted uncritically. Administrations sometimes had their own reasons for portraying troublesome student leaders as undesirable elements. Yet the criticism also arose from within the student community. Complaints about money and muscle power became part of campus discussion, while the involvement of outsiders, expelled students and individuals with reputations for violence was repeatedly alleged during election periods. Something had clearly changed.

Perhaps one of the saddest symbols of this transformation was the changing perception of the sherwani. The sherwani had long been among the most recognisable emblems of Aligarh. It was official University dress and was associated with generations of students and teachers and with a particular conception of Aligarh tahzīb. During Students’ Union elections, sherwani-poshi itself became a ceremonial moment. A candidate being dressed in the sherwani symbolically assumed the dignity and responsibility of the office he was seeking. But symbolism depends upon those who inhabit it. As the visible student politician came increasingly to be associated, fairly or unfairly, with entourages, motorcycles, displays of muscle and the swagger of the campus strongman, the sherwani worn conspicuously by aspiring student leaders could itself acquire an unfortunate association. In sections of campus perception, a dress which once immediately signified the Aligarian could now invite the cynical identification of its wearer as a student neta, a fixer or even a goonda. The sherwani had not changed. The political culture surrounding it had. This should not be exaggerated into a description of every candidate or every Union. Many serious and principled students continued to contest elections. But when an institution created to represent students begins to be perceived by ordinary students as the preserve of professional student leaders, moneyed candidates or musclemen, it loses some of the moral authority upon which democratic representation depends. This was undoubtedly one of the low points of AMUSU.

Representation as a Check upon Authority

The failures of student politics, however, should not obscure another important function of the Union. It acted as one of the institutional checks upon administrative authority. Universities cannot operate without administration. Vice-Chancellors must possess authority, Proctors must maintain discipline and academic decisions cannot be settled by popular vote. But academic institutions also require consultation and mechanisms through which those affected by decisions can question them. AMU’s statutory framework recognised this principle. The Students’ Union belonged to an institutional ecology which also included representative organisations of teachers and employees and elected representation upon statutory bodies. The AMU Act itself provides that there shall be a Students’ Union for the University. Student representation was therefore not merely an indulgence occasionally granted by a sympathetic administration. It formed part of the institutional conception of the University.

A functioning Union consequently compelled the administration to explain itself. Decisions concerning fees, hostels, discipline or student welfare could be questioned by elected representatives. Students might be wrong, and frequently were, but administrative authority could not simply assume silence. The Javed Habib and Khusro encounter provides an elegant illustration. The Union President could not administer the University and possessed no authority over the Vice-Chancellor. But he could stand before him and publicly argue that the administration was wrong. That was institutional accountability.

From Degeneration to Dysfunction

Here lies one of the great ironies of the recent history of AMUSU. The degeneration of aspects of student politics provided successive administrations with increasingly persuasive arguments for controlling or postponing elections. Yet the prolonged absence of elections has created another and potentially more serious problem. AMUSU elections had been interrupted before. What distinguishes the recent period is the length and increasing normalisation of the interruption. The last completed central Students’ Union election took place in 2018. Since then successive generations have passed through Aligarh without experiencing what earlier generations regarded as an ordinary part of University life. An exceptional suspension has gradually become an institutional condition.

The absence of elections does not abolish student politics. Students continue to experience problems concerning hostels, dining halls, fees, scholarships, examinations, discipline and administrative decisions. What disappears is the recognised representative mechanism through which such grievances can be articulated and negotiated. Informal leaders consequently emerge. Personal access to administrators acquires greater importance. Social media groups become centres of mobilisation. A grievance that might once have been discussed across a table can become a confrontation outside an office or at a gate. The administration then sees indiscipline; students see administrative high-handedness. Each becomes increasingly suspicious of the other. There is therefore a paradox. The degeneration of student politics can be used to justify suspending representative institutions, but prolonged suspension can produce an even less accountable form of politics. An elected President derives authority from students and can eventually be voted out. An informal intermediary may derive influence from personal connections, patronage or the ability to mobilise a crowd. The answer to bad representative politics cannot indefinitely be no representative politics at all.

What the University Loses

The consequences extend beyond students. Representative institutions provide checks and balances within any large organisation. Teachers’ bodies, staff associations, elected members of statutory bodies, faculty committees and student representatives historically created different levels at which executive decisions could be discussed and challenged. When such mechanisms weaken, authority becomes increasingly concentrated. This does not mean that every Vice-Chancellor will misuse power. Institutions should not depend upon the benevolence of individuals. Checks and balances exist precisely because procedures must survive both good and bad office-holders. The dysfunction of AMUSU therefore removes one important counterweight to administrative high-handedness. Students lose their collective voice, while the University loses another source of institutional scrutiny. In an environment where other representative bodies and statutory checks may themselves be weakened, the disappearance of elected student representation becomes still more consequential.

There is also an educational loss. Generations of Aligarh students experienced Presidential Debates, General Body meetings, Union debates, campaign speeches and the spectacle of elected representatives confronting administrators. These were not always edifying experiences, but they taught young people how public life worked. Social media cannot adequately replace that culture. An angry post requires little of the courage needed to stand before an audience capable of answering back. WhatsApp facilitates mobilisation but not necessarily deliberation. The old Union required students to defend their positions before people who disagreed with them. That too was part of an Aligarh education. One has only to remember those students waiting beneath the ramparts of Union Hall for the final speeches before deciding whom to vote for. They were exercising a democratic choice, but they were also participating in an intellectual tradition stretching back to the Siddons Union. They listened before they decided.

Reform, Not Extinction

A mature assessment of AMUSU therefore requires neither nostalgia nor condemnation. Its history contains factionalism, violence, regional loyalties, irresponsible agitation, allegations of corruption, money and muscle power and occasional attempts by student leaders to exercise influence beyond their legitimate sphere. These deserve criticism. Indeed, some of them contributed to the erosion of the Union’s own credibility. But the answer to defective democracy is better democracy, not its indefinite suspension. Election expenditure can be regulated. Academic eligibility can be enforced. Candidates who violate clearly defined rules can be disqualified through transparent procedures. Violence and intimidation should carry consequences. Union finances should be audited. Office-bearers should remain accountable to the General Body, while the administration must respect the legitimate sphere of elected student representation. Such a Union would neither govern the University nor function at the pleasure of the administration. It would perform the role for which representative institutions exist: to articulate interests, scrutinise authority, negotiate disagreements and provide peaceful means of resolving conflict.

The Right to Argue

There is an extraordinary continuity running through this history. When the Siddons Union was established in 1884, its fundamental premise was simple: students should learn to speak. From that principle followed something larger. Students who learnt to speak learnt to question, and those who learnt to question inevitably learnt to disagree. AMUSU inherited all the virtues and defects of that development. It produced fine speakers and demagogues, responsible representatives and irresponsible agitators, principled movements and factional struggles. It occasionally embarrassed the University and at other moments defended it. Sometimes it checked arbitrary authority; sometimes its own leaders behaved arbitrarily. Perhaps the remembered encounter between Javed Habib and Ali Muhammad Khusro captures the institution at its best. A student President could confront a Vice-Chancellor without rancour. Respect did not mean submission, and disagreement did not require enmity. Their institutional positions were unequal, but their arguments could meet within the public space created by the Union. That was not disorder. It was an expression of university life.

AMUSU does not need to return as an uncritical reproduction of its past. The culture of money, muscle, intimidation and the professional student leader deserves no nostalgia. Nor should the sherwani, one of the most dignified symbols of Aligarh, ever again become associated in the popular imagination with the swagger of the campus strongman. What deserves restoration is the principle of representation. The history that began with the Siddons Union was founded upon the belief that students are participants in the intellectual life of a university, not merely subjects of its administration. When that participation became irresponsible, it required restraint; when violent, discipline; when corrupt, investigation; when factional, reform. But when it disappears altogether, something fundamental disappears with it. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union can therefore be expressed simply. For more than a century it taught generations of students that authority could be respected without being beyond question, that disagreement need not become hostility, and that sometimes the most effective answer to power was neither a slogan nor a display of muscle, but a well-constructed argument delivered from the floor, or once upon a time from the roof, of Union Hall. The candidate spoke. The students listened. And then they decided. That was perhaps the finest inheritance of the old Siddons Union, and it remains one of the most valuable traditions that Aligarh has allowed to fall silent.

It needs to be revived and resurrected in a new form.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The history of Aligarh Muslim University has rarely moved in a straight line. There have been periods of remarkable intellectual and institutional expansion, and there have been moments when the University appeared to be fighting for its very identity. Some Vice-Chancellors are remembered for buildings, others for academic expansion, and still others because the circumstances of their tenure brought into the open some of the deepest contradictions within Aligarh itself. The years of Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung belong emphatically to the last category. His tenure, from March 1965 to January 1968, was relatively brief, yet it witnessed one of the gravest crises in the post-Independence history of the University. Within barely two months of assuming office he was physically assaulted by students and compelled under extraordinary circumstances to write his resignation. Yet he returned to Aligarh, continued as its Vice-Chancellor, refused to allow personal humiliation to become an excuse for vengeance, and subsequently defended the distinctive character of the very institution in which he had suffered so grievously.

To understand the significance of those years, Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung has to be rescued from the narrow confines of the events of April 1965, for he was much more than the Vice-Chancellor who was attacked at Aligarh. Born in February 1906 into an old and distinguished Hyderabadi family of scholars, administrators and educationists, he was educated in History at Queen’s College, Oxford, and represented that remarkable generation of Indian Muslims whose intellectual formation combined the older culture of adab, refinement and public responsibility with the modern worlds of universities, administration, diplomacy and the nation-state. Before coming to Aligarh, he had already accumulated an unusually rich experience of public life. He served twice as Vice-Chancellor of Osmania University, first in 1945 to 1946 and again from 1948 to 1952, and in the intervening period held ministerial responsibilities in Hyderabad, including portfolios connected with constitutional affairs, Home, education, public health and local government. These were difficult years, spanning the last phase of the princely state and the turbulent transition which followed its integration into the Indian Union. From the university world he moved into diplomacy, serving India in Argentina, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Greece and France, and was repeatedly associated with India’s delegations to the United Nations. His diplomatic career placed him in some of the most important capitals of the emerging post-colonial world and Europe at a time when Jawaharlal Nehru’s India was attempting to define an independent foreign policy. Before Aligarh, therefore, Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung had already inhabited several worlds: Hyderabad’s aristocratic and administrative culture, the modern university, the Government of India and international diplomacy.

It was this man who took over as Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University on 1 March 1965, succeeding Badruddin Tyabji. The violent episode for which his tenure is principally remembered occurred on 25 April 1965, and he had therefore been Vice-Chancellor for less than two months when the University exploded around him. This elementary chronology itself cautions against explanations which attribute the underlying crisis simply to his administration. Indeed, when the matter was debated subsequently in Parliament, precisely this point was made: how could a man who had joined on 1 March reasonably be held responsible for creating, through prolonged mismanagement, conditions which culminated in violence on 25 April? The immediate controversy centred upon admissions. Under Badruddin Tyabji the ratio between internal and external candidates had been altered in favour of internal students, reportedly to 75:25, and Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung proposed restoring a 50:50 arrangement. On paper this could be presented as an administrative measure designed to open admission more widely and strengthen competition. To a large body of Aligarh students, however, it appeared very differently, for they had entered the Aligarh educational system with the expectation that their years within it would provide an advantage in gaining admission to the University’s highly sought-after professional courses. Medicine and Engineering were particularly important because admission to them represented not merely academic progression but the prospect of professional status, employment and social mobility. The alteration of a percentage therefore touched aspirations extending far beyond the dry language of admission regulations.

But the admission question by itself cannot explain what happened, for the University which Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung inherited contained deep factional divisions. There were disagreements among teachers and administrators, competing groups among students, and wider ideological disputes about the future direction of AMU. Personal rivalries intersected with questions concerning secularism, Muslim identity and the University’s relationship with the Government of India. Laurence Gautier’s reconstruction of this period shows that the conflict cannot satisfactorily be reduced to a simple confrontation between an enlightened Vice-Chancellor and a body of unruly students. Different factions attempted to use the agitation for their own purposes, while Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung himself became the symbolic focus of grievances and anxieties which had developed before his arrival. The atmosphere became still more poisonous when administrative disagreement was transformed into an ideological struggle. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung was portrayed by some opponents as a representative of an excessively modernising or secularising tendency which might undermine the Muslim character of Aligarh. Conversely, those opposing him could be portrayed by their adversaries as communal and reactionary forces seeking to capture the University. Once such language entered the controversy, compromise became increasingly difficult. The issue was no longer merely whether admissions should follow one ratio or another. Both sides could imagine that something much larger, indeed the very future and identity of Aligarh, was at stake.

The explosion came on 25 April 1965. A meeting of the University Court was being held when an already tense student agitation turned violent. A crowd of about 1,500 students, armed with brickbats, lathis and empty bottles, collected outside the building and demanded that the University Court immediately rescind the decision of the Academic Council. When their demands were not met, they began throwing stones and bottles through the windows and doors of the hall. Some officers and teachers came out and tried to persuade the students to disperse, and at first they left, but they soon returned with renewed ferocity. The University authorities decided to call for police assistance. The mob continued its violent behaviour, throwing brickbats even at the police, and as there was an imminent danger of the mob overpowering the police party, three rounds were fired in self-defence, resulting in injuries to two students. Thereafter the students dispersed for a while, but again collected and questioned the presence of the police and their authority to enter the University. Some of them then forcibly entered the hall where the Court meeting was being held and started beating up the members of the University Court and the staff there. The Vice-Chancellor was severely assaulted and received a number of injuries. It is worth mentioning that two students protected the Vice-Chancellor from further injuries at great personal risk to themselves, a small but significant detail that reminds us that the University was never a monolith of hostility.

What followed was one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Aligarh. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung, a man who had represented India abroad, dealt with governments and occupied positions of considerable dignity, was physically humiliated within the University whose Vice-Chancellor he had become only weeks earlier. A student swung an iron rod at his head, and instinctively Jung placed his hands on his head. His fingers broke as they bore the brunt of the blow. He also sustained as many as thirty wounds on his head. He was forced to flee for his life, and later, cornered in a room in Sir Syed Hall, he was confronted by a student armed with a knife who demanded his resignation. In a trembling voice, Jung asked, “Why do you want to take my life?” The boy wanted his resignation, and the Vice-Chancellor readily conceded. He asked for a pen and scribbled on a piece of paper, “I, Ali Yawar Jung, the Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, hereby resign”. The stone tablet outside that room silently proclaimed that it had been constructed by Jung’s maternal grandfather, a detail of almost unbearable poignancy. The resignation was handed to the convener of the Action Committee, and Jung was taken to his residence in an ambulance. He narrowly escaped from the jaws of death.

Whatever the grievances of the students, and whatever the role of factions within the University in creating the atmosphere in which those grievances flourished, there can be no justification for the physical assault upon a Vice-Chancellor. Protest had crossed the boundary separating dissent from violence. Contemporary and later accounts differ on questions of planning, provocation and responsibility, but the fact of the assault and its gravity are beyond dispute. Gautier’s recent study of the minority-status campaign identifies the late-April protest as having escalated into a violent attack upon the Vice-Chancellor. Gautier argues that although the incident might appear to be the culmination of internal post-Partition rivalries, the controversies did not remain confined to the university for long, and the government’s ordinance soon sparked an unprecedented wave of mobilisation that transformed into a large-scale campaign for recognition of AMU’s minority status. During later parliamentary discussion A. K. A. Abdul Samad (1926-99), a prominent Tamil politician and a key leader of the Indian Union Muslim League, who also served as a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from 1964 to 1976. He was a journalist, editor, author, and educationist, popularly known in Tamil Nadu and Kerala by the title “Siraj-ul-Millat” (Light of the Nation). In the context of the 1965 Aligarh crisis, he intervened in parliamentary discussion to challenge the suggestion that Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung’s supposed mismanagement had created the crisis, while other accounts disputed whether the attack itself had been planned in advance. The historian must therefore distinguish between what is certain and what remained contested even among contemporaries.

What is certain is that Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung suffered personally, and yet it is here that his story becomes much larger than the story of an administrative crisis. The Aligarh memory of the episode has preserved a powerful account of his subsequent behaviour: that he would not turn the humiliation he had suffered into a campaign of personal retribution and was reluctant to identify his tormentors merely so that they might be punished. Parliamentary discussion in September 1965 recorded that, while Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung was recovering in a nursing home after the attack, he was urged to return precisely because his suffering had given him a unique moral authority. One speaker declared that no other individual could so effectively restore normality to the University. And Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung did return, in August 1965, to continue for less than three years, operating mostly from his residence. That simple fact deserves more emphasis than it usually receives. He could easily have resigned. No one could reasonably have accused him of cowardice had he decided that a University in which its own Vice-Chancellor had been assaulted no longer deserved his service. His diplomatic career was sufficiently distinguished for him to walk away without personal loss of reputation. Instead, he returned to the campus and resumed charge. There was nobility in this conduct, but it was not the nobility conferred by the title Nawwab. It was nobility of temperament. Authority is easily exercised when it is accompanied by obedience. The more difficult test comes when authority has been challenged and its holder humiliated. A lesser administrator might have returned determined to demonstrate power through punishment. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung returned with the more difficult task of restoring an institution without allowing personal vengeance to become administrative policy.

Unfortunately, the Government of India responded to the events in a very different register. The Union Education Minister, M. C. Chagla, interpreted the agitation principally as evidence of a struggle between secular and communal forces. He spoke of eliminating the “communal and reactionary element” within Aligarh. The very next day after the attack, he announced the closure of the institution and the suspension of the University Act, and he then swiftly passed an ordinance to extend government control over AMU. The powers of the University Court were drastically curtailed and governmental authority over the institution was strengthened. Thus, an assault upon Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung became the occasion for a far-reaching alteration in the constitutional relationship between AMU and the Central Government. Here lay one of the great ironies of his Vice-Chancellorship. The man who had suffered most directly from the violence became, in the eyes of many Aligs, associated with measures which they regarded as an attack upon the autonomy of their University. Yet it would be historically misleading simply to identify the position of Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung with that of M. C. Chagla, for the surviving documentary record reveals significant differences. At a press conference in Bombay on 12 May 1966, Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung ably summed up the ethos of the AMU. He saw no contradiction in its being a national Muslim university. It was principally meant for Muslims in the sense that education was provided in their religion, philosophy and traditions, but that did not mean that it was to be run for Muslims exclusively. It must continue to be a national university. He said there was no distinction of religion in the recruitment of teachers, and about forty per cent of the students were non-Muslim. The relationship was therefore considerably more complicated than the image of a compliant Vice-Chancellor carrying out the wishes of New Delhi.

Indeed, this was one of the high points of the Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung years. Having himself suffered at Aligarh, he nevertheless refused to allow the University to be defined solely by its worst moment. He defended its distinctive identity, and for him there was no necessary contradiction between AMU possessing a Muslim historical and cultural character and simultaneously being a national university belonging to India. The preservation and study of Islamic civilisation, religion, philosophy, literature and culture did not require the exclusion of others, nor did loyalty to secular India require Aligarh to erase its historical personality. This distinction was fundamental. Aligarh did not have to choose between being Muslim and being Indian. Its Muslim character could describe its history, intellectual responsibilities and cultural inheritance without defining the religious identity of every student or teacher who entered its gates. In this sense Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung belonged to a broader Aligarh tradition represented in different ways by figures such as Zakir Husain, who likewise saw no contradiction between a secular Republic and universities possessing distinctive historical and cultural personalities.

There were nevertheless genuine low points in the Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung years, and one should not conceal them beneath admiration for his personal character. His handling of the admissions issue can legitimately be questioned. Even if the proposed alteration was academically defensible, its political and emotional implications were underestimated. The depth of resentment among students was not adequately anticipated, nor was the ability of organised factions to transform a limited administrative question into a much wider agitation. The subsequent concentration of authority after the Ordinance created its own bitterness, while the continued presence of police became a visible reminder that relations between the University community and authority had fundamentally changed. The parliamentary debate itself noted that teaching had returned to normal while expressing concern that police were still present on the campus. The greatest low point, however, was not an admissions formula. It was the collapse of adab. A university lives through disagreement. Students have every right to protest against their Vice-Chancellor. Teachers have every right to criticise an administration. A Vice-Chancellor can be mistaken and students can be justified in opposing him. But once argument gives way to physical violence, the university ceases momentarily to function as a university. The attack upon Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung was therefore not merely an assault upon an individual. It represented a breakdown of the culture through which an academic community ought to conduct its disagreements.

The second great tragedy was that this violence provided an opportunity for the Government to interpret the entire crisis through the language of communalism and reaction. Chagla’s response transformed an already complicated internal conflict into a confrontation concerning the very nature of Aligarh, and the resulting 1965 changes would have consequences extending far beyond the tenure of Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung. The 1965 amendment removed the mandatory representation of Muslims in the supreme governing body of AMU, also known as “the Court,” and paved the way for non-Muslims to participate in the administration of AMU. The legal dispute over AMU’s minority status dates back to this moment, when amendments to the Aligarh Muslim University Act, 1920, deprived the institute of its role as the university’s sole governing body. The body instead consisted of members appointed by the President, and legal experts point out that the problem began from here, when Muslims were not given administrative powers within the institution. An individual filed a petition in 1967, arguing that Muslims had established the University and therefore had the right to manage it, but in response the Supreme Court held in 1968 that the university was not a minority educational institution protected under the Indian Constitution, a judgement that sent ripples across the Muslim community. This has however, recently been over-ruled by a seven judge bench of the Supreme Court. Thus, what started in 1965 as an internal university dispute on student quotas soon transformed into a central Muslim issue, and the campaign for AMU’s minority status would continue for decades.

Here, then, is the point at which the long shadow of what happened to Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung becomes most visible. The attack upon him was not merely a personal tragedy. It became the catalyst for a constitutional transformation that would define AMU’s relationship with the Indian state for generations. The University which he had come to serve was, within weeks of his arrival, placed under a form of governmental control from which it would never fully emerge. The assault upon his person became the justification for an assault upon the University’s autonomy, and the man who had been the victim of the violence was, in the eyes of many Aligs, associated with the very measures that stripped their institution of its independence. This was a cruel irony, and it is one that Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung bore with a dignity that commands admiration. He did not allow the violence he suffered to become his definition of Aligarh, nor did he allow the bitterness of that experience to poison his relationship with the institution. His defence of AMU, and his insistence that there was no contradiction between its Muslim character and its national role, remain a vital part of the University’s intellectual inheritance. But the events of 1965 also left a wound that would not heal, and the debate over AMU’s minority status, which continues to this day, is a direct consequence of the constitutional changes that followed the attack upon him. In this sense, the effects of what happened to Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung were indeed long lasting, and they affected Aligarh profoundly.

Yet Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung did not permit the events of 25 April to consume the remainder of his Vice-Chancellorship. The University continued to function, teaching resumed and institutional life was restored. His contribution during these years cannot be measured in the same manner as that of Colonel B. H. Zaidi, whose tenure transformed the physical landscape of the campus. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung’s contribution was different. He presided over Aligarh during a constitutional and psychological crisis and helped bring the institution back from a moment when normal university government had almost collapsed. His defence of AMU is particularly significant because it came after his own suffering. It is easy to defend an institution which has honoured you. It requires a much greater largeness of character to defend an institution after some of its members have dishonoured you. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung could distinguish between Aligarh and those who had assaulted him. He would not allow the behaviour of a body of angry students to become his definition of the University as a whole. This capacity to distinguish individuals from institutions is perhaps one of the most important qualities of public life, and one increasingly difficult to find. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung did not confuse himself with the office he occupied. An attack upon him was reprehensible, but it did not make Aligarh his enemy, nor did opposition to his policies automatically make every opponent an enemy of the University. His conduct reminds us that the dignity of an office is demonstrated not by the ferocity with which its holder punishes criticism but by the restraint with which power is exercised after authority has been challenged.

Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung finally relinquished the Vice-Chancellorship in January 1968, but Aligarh did not mark the decline of his public career. Quite the contrary. He was immediately entrusted with one of the most important diplomatic postings available to an Indian diplomat and served as India’s Ambassador to the United States from 1968 to 1970. Thus, within a few years of being physically attacked on the Aligarh campus, Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung was representing India in Washington at the highest diplomatic level. Thereafter came the final great appointment of his life. He became Governor of Maharashtra in 1971 and remained in gubernatorial office until his death in December 1976. He had already received the Padma Bhushan in 1959 and was awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in 1977. Seen against this larger life, the Aligarh episode acquires its proper proportions. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung had been a minister in Hyderabad, twice Vice-Chancellor of Osmania University, a representative of India at the United Nations, and Ambassador in Argentina, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Greece and France before he came to AMU. After Aligarh he became Ambassador to the United States and finally Governor of Maharashtra. Aligarh was therefore neither the beginning nor the culmination of his public career, yet it was perhaps at Aligarh that his personal character was subjected to its severest test.

Diplomacy tests intelligence, patience and tact. University administration tests judgement and the ability to negotiate competing interests. High constitutional office tests one’s understanding of institutions. But humiliation tests something deeper. It tests character. That is why Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung should not be remembered at Aligarh merely as the Vice-Chancellor who was assaulted in April 1965, nor should his tenure be reduced to the Ordinance which followed, or to the constitutional controversy which subsequently developed around the University. He should be remembered as a man who came to Aligarh with an already distinguished career, experienced there perhaps the greatest personal humiliation of his public life, and yet refused to allow that humiliation to determine his attitude towards the institution. The title “Nawwab” in his case thus acquires an almost metaphorical significance. His nobility ultimately lay not in ancestry but in conduct. It lay in possessing the means to retaliate and exercising restraint; in suffering indignity without making the indignity of others the instrument through which his authority would be restored; and in continuing to defend Aligarh when it would have been entirely understandable for him to turn his back upon it.

Every Vice-Chancellor leaves behind a different legacy. Colonel B. H. Zaidi can be remembered through the physical Aligarh which expanded so dramatically under him. Zakir Husain can be remembered for stabilising the University after Partition and helping restore its intellectual and national standing. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung left another kind of inheritance. His was the example of a public man confronting an institutional crisis without permitting personal injury to extinguish his larger sense of responsibility. There is consequently something profoundly poignant about the Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung years. One of the lowest moments in the history of Aligarh Muslim University simultaneously revealed one of the nobler personalities to occupy its Vice-Chancellor’s chair. The violence of April 1965 exposed the capacity of an academic community to descend into factionalism and physical intimidation. The response of Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung demonstrated the opposite possibility: dignity without arrogance, authority without vindictiveness, and forgiveness without surrendering the dignity of office. The students who assaulted Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung gave Aligarh a moment which it has little reason to remember with pride. Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung’s response to them gave it something rather different to remember. Having been humiliated by Aligarh, he did not seek to humiliate Aligarh in return. And perhaps, after all the controversies, legislation and arguments surrounding his tenure have been recounted, that remains the finest epitaph for the Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung years.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Among the Vice-Chancellors who shaped Aligarh Muslim University during the difficult decades following independence, Badruddin Faiz Husain Badruddin Tyabji occupies an important but somewhat neglected position. He served for barely two and a half years, from November 1962 to February 1965, and his tenure consequently lacks the dramatic longevity associated with some of his predecessors. Yet the brevity of his vice-chancellorship should not obscure its significance. Tyabji came to Aligarh at a particular stage in the University’s post-independence history. The immediate danger that had confronted AMU after Partition had passed, and the great physical expansion undertaken under Colonel Bashir Husain Zaidi had transformed the campus. What the University now required was consolidation: administrative stability, academic confidence, discipline and a clearer relationship with the larger world outside Aligarh.

There is an interesting continuity in the succession of Vice-Chancellors during these years. Dr Zakir Husain had helped save AMU when, in the aftermath of Partition, its very future appeared uncertain. Colonel Bashir Husain Zaidi had subsequently presided over an extraordinary expansion of its physical and institutional infrastructure. Badruddin Tyabji inherited what these two men had secured and built. His task was to sustain it.

Tyabji was not a professional academic. He came to Aligarh from the upper reaches of the Indian administrative and diplomatic establishment. Born in 1907, he belonged to the distinguished Tyabji family of Bombay, whose contribution to Indian public life stretched back into the nineteenth century. The most famous earlier Badruddin Tyabji had been a pioneering lawyer, judge and, in 1887, the third President of the Indian National Congress. The family’s Muslim identity had therefore long existed alongside a deep commitment to Indian nationalism. The younger Badruddin Tyabji entered the Indian Civil Service in 1932. His administrative career subsequently gave way to diplomacy, and after independence he became closely involved in representing the new Republic abroad. He served in Brussels and held important positions in the Ministry of External Affairs before representing India diplomatically in Indonesia, Iran and West Germany. He was thus a man accustomed to government, negotiation and international diplomacy rather than the enclosed routines of university administration.

His family was connected with another powerful symbol of independent India. His wife, Surayya Tyabji, played an important part in the discussions surrounding the final form of the Indian national flag, particularly the version incorporating the Ashokan chakra. The Tyabjis therefore belonged unmistakably to that generation of Indian Muslims whose nationalism did not require them to choose between their cultural inheritance and their Indian citizenship. It was precisely this background that made Tyabji attractive when the vice-chancellorship of Aligarh fell vacant in 1962.

The surviving correspondence of Jawaharlal Nehru is particularly revealing. Education Minister K. L. Shrimali discussed the appointment with Nehru, the President and the Vice-President and concluded that Tyabji appeared to command unusually broad confidence. What is striking is the importance that the highest levels of the Government of India attached to the appointment. Aligarh was not regarded simply as another university requiring another administrator. Shrimali described it as one of the country’s important national institutions and insisted that it required the best possible leadership. Nehru himself was initially reluctant to lose Tyabji from the Ministry of External Affairs. Yet he considered the future of Aligarh sufficiently important to make the sacrifice. Writing to Tyabji on 7 July 1962, he urged him to accept the vice-chancellorship and emphasised the special place AMU occupied in the intellectual life of Indian Muslims and consequently in the future of India. Even more significantly, Nehru informed him that Dr Zakir Husain was among those who strongly favoured his appointment.

That detail is worth emphasising. Zakir Husain knew Aligarh intimately. He had guided it through its most dangerous post-Partition years. If he regarded Tyabji as suitable to succeed Zaidi, it suggests that he saw in him qualities particularly necessary for the next stage of AMU’s development.

There was nevertheless opposition to the appointment. Critics questioned whether a career civil servant without a conventional academic career should head a university. There were also fears that bringing a senior government official to Aligarh might compromise the University’s autonomy. Nehru rejected these objections. Whatever Tyabji’s professional origins, he regarded him as competent, efficient, able and independent. The episode tells us something about the conception of the vice-chancellorship at the time. The question was not simply who was available to occupy the chair. The Government was prepared to release one of its senior diplomats because Aligarh was considered important enough to require a person of national standing.

Tyabji assumed office in the autumn of 1962. From the beginning he made clear that one of his principal concerns was discipline. At his first Sir Syed Day address on 17 October 1962, he invoked the mission of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and called upon students to cultivate the determination, discipline and confidence required to confront the world around them. This emphasis has sometimes led to Tyabji being remembered primarily as a disciplinarian. There was certainly something of the ICS officer in his administrative manner. He expected rules to be observed and responsibilities to be discharged. But to reduce his approach merely to bureaucratic severity would miss the larger purpose behind it.

Tyabji believed that sections of Muslim youth continued to carry the psychological consequences of Partition. He detected what he described as a sense of despondency and defeatism among students. Too many, in his view, lacked the confidence to venture beyond familiar social and institutional surroundings. This was a perceptive diagnosis of one of the problems confronting Indian Muslims in the decades immediately following Partition. The question was no longer whether they belonged to India. The question was whether a generation shaped by the insecurities of Partition could participate confidently in the opportunities offered by the new Republic. Tyabji wanted Aligarh to prepare them for precisely that participation. In this respect his conception of AMU bore a striking resemblance to Sir Syed’s original educational project. Sir Syed had urged nineteenth-century Muslims to overcome fear of the modern world by acquiring the knowledge necessary to engage with it. Tyabji believed that the Muslims of post-Partition India confronted a comparable psychological challenge. Aligarh should not become a refuge from India; it should prepare its students to participate confidently in India.

One of his most interesting initiatives followed directly from this conception. Tyabji explored closer academic relations between Aligarh Muslim University and Banaras Hindu University. He envisaged faculty exchanges and greater interaction between the two institutions and even considered ways of encouraging more Hindu students to come to Aligarh and Muslim students to study at Banaras. The proposal was remarkably imaginative. AMU and BHU were institutions whose very names had acquired communal associations. Tyabji’s answer was not to abolish their distinctive historical identities but to make those identities less insular through intellectual contact. Muslim students at Aligarh and Hindu students at Banaras should encounter one another not as abstractions belonging to separate communities but as fellow students and scholars. The proposal encountered opposition and never developed on the scale he envisaged. Yet its significance lies as much in its conception as in its implementation. It demonstrated that Tyabji understood the problem of Aligarh after Partition not simply in administrative terms but in psychological and national ones.

There was also continuity here with Zakir Husain. Zakir Husain had described the work at AMU as part of the larger task of constructing integrated nationhood in a secular democratic state. Tyabji was attempting, through different means, to carry that project forward.

His administrative reforms were less dramatic but equally characteristic. Tyabji was disturbed by personal patronage, favouritism and what he regarded as nepotistic tendencies within university administration. His years in the civil service had given him a strong belief in procedure and institutional accountability, and he attempted to apply these principles at Aligarh. This inevitably produced friction. Universities are not government departments, and distinguished academics do not always respond sympathetically to the administrative habits of civil servants. Some contemporaries found Tyabji brusque and believed that he did not sufficiently appreciate the distinctive culture of academic life. Such criticism should not be ignored. His vice-chancellorship was not a period of universal consensus, nor were all his reforms successful. Yet even those who found his manner difficult acknowledged the order that characterised his administration. Tyabji’s insistence upon discipline was directed not only at students but towards the functioning of the institution itself. He wanted appointments, administration and university procedures to operate according to institutional considerations rather than personal relationships.

Beyond questions of discipline and administration, Tyabji’s tenure witnessed several concrete academic developments that reflected his concern with professional training and institutional expansion. A new post of Dean of Students’ Welfare was sanctioned by the University Grants Commission, and a Post-Graduate Diploma Course in Public Administration was instituted from the academic session 1963–64, marking a modest but significant extension of the University’s professional offerings. The UGC also sanctioned a substantial non-recurring grant of Rs 1,53,00,000 during 1963–64 for the establishment of the Medical College, a commitment that underpinned the expansion of medical education in this period. Ten new departments in the Medical College became operational from 1 August 1964, encompassing Pathology, Microbiology, Pharmacology, Medicine, Surgery, Paediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Social and Preventive Medicine, Radiology and Electro-Therapeutics, and Forensic Medicine. On the admissions side, Tyabji altered the ratio between internal and external students in favour of Aligarh’s own candidates, raising the internal share for the Engineering College from fifty to seventy-five per cent, a decision that proved popular with students but would later become a point of contention under his successor. These measures, taken together, illustrate that his vice-chancellorship was not confined to disciplinary firmness but also sought to broaden the University’s academic and professional footprint at a formative moment in its post-independence development.

His tenure also coincided with an important phase in the development of medical education at Aligarh. Here again historical precision is necessary. The creation of the Medical College was not Tyabji’s achievement alone. Much of the groundwork had been undertaken during the vice-chancellorship of Colonel Bashir Husain Zaidi. But the institution expanded significantly during Tyabji’s tenure. In 1964, a number of clinical and para-clinical departments became operational, including Medicine, Surgery, Pathology, Microbiology, Pharmacology, Paediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Radiology, Forensic Medicine and Social and Preventive Medicine. Tyabji thus helped consolidate one of the most important institutional developments initiated under Zaidi. This distinction between creation and consolidation is important in assessing his entire vice-chancellorship. Tyabji was not primarily a builder in the manner of Zaidi. His contribution was less visible because it lay substantially in sustaining, organising and stabilising what had already been created.

His international experience also gave him a conception of Aligarh extending beyond its immediate environment. He had represented India in foreign capitals and had seen universities and institutions operating within different national settings. He wanted Aligarh students to escape intellectual and psychological provincialism. The world beyond the campus was not something to be feared; it was something for which the University should prepare them. There was consequently a consistent logic connecting apparently different aspects of his administration: discipline, academic standards, administrative reform, cooperation with BHU, professional education and his concern about the lack of confidence among Muslim students. All were parts of an attempt to make Aligarh more outward-looking.

The circumstances surrounding his appointment also reveal the continued importance attached to AMU by the leadership of independent India. Nehru’s correspondence makes clear that he considered Aligarh’s future a matter of national significance. The University was understood to possess a special relationship with Indian Muslims, but that relationship was not conceived as a justification for communal isolation. On the contrary, AMU was expected to help Indian Muslims participate more fully in the life of the Republic. Tyabji understood this delicate balance. He did not believe that Aligarh had to abandon its historical personality in order to become more Indian. Nor did he believe that preserving its Muslim cultural inheritance required withdrawal into a protected enclosure. AMU could remain Aligarh precisely while becoming more confidently part of India.

Tyabji’s tenure was brief. He relinquished office in February 1965 and returned to India’s diplomatic service, subsequently serving as Ambassador to Japan. Only weeks after his departure, the University entered one of the gravest crises of its post-independence history. In April 1965, disturbances culminated in the violent attack upon his successor, Nawab Ali Yavar Jung, and brought AMU once again into national controversy. The proximity of these events inevitably invites comparison with Tyabji’s administration. Contemporary parliamentary discussion after the disturbances recalled that shortly before leaving office Tyabji had publicly expressed satisfaction with the tradition of discipline among AMU students. It would be simplistic to conclude that order prevailed merely because Tyabji was Vice-Chancellor or that the subsequent crisis resulted simply from his departure. The causes of the 1965 disturbances were considerably more complex. Nevertheless, the contrast helps explain why his tenure came to be remembered for administrative firmness.

Tyabji’s larger projects remained unfinished. His proposals for closer AMU-BHU interaction did not develop as he hoped. His attempts to change established administrative habits encountered resistance. His conception of discipline could sometimes appear excessively bureaucratic. And two and a half years were in any case too short a period in which to transform the culture of a large residential university. Yet his importance lies precisely in recognising what Aligarh required at that particular historical moment. There is, in fact, a remarkable progression in the history of AMU under the three Vice-Chancellors who preceded Ali Yavar Jung. Zakir Husain had taken charge when Aligarh needed to be saved. Bashir Husain Zaidi had taken the institution that survived and physically transformed it. Badruddin Tyabji inherited the expanded University and attempted to give it discipline, administrative stability and confidence. Each man’s contribution was different because the needs of the University were different.

Tyabji’s contribution was perhaps the least spectacular of the three. There were no dramatic circumstances comparable to those confronting Zakir Husain in 1948, nor was there the extraordinary building activity that earned Zaidi the affectionate description of the ‘Shahjahan of Aligarh’. Tyabji’s work was quieter. He attempted to make institutions function, to improve discipline, to strengthen professional education, to widen intellectual horizons and, above all, to persuade Aligarh’s students that they had no reason to approach independent India with either fear or a sense of defeat.

There is another aspect of his tenure worth remembering. The man occupying the Vice-Chancellor’s chair had already held important positions in the Government of India and represented his country abroad. After Aligarh he returned to representing India internationally. The vice-chancellorship was not, for him, the culmination of a search for office. It was an interlude of public service undertaken because the University was considered sufficiently important to justify taking one of India’s senior diplomats away from the Ministry of External Affairs. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the stature that the office of Vice-Chancellor of AMU once commanded. Nehru was reluctant to lose Tyabji from his government. Yet he urged him to go to Aligarh because he believed the University needed him. Zakir Husain, who knew better than most what the institution required, supported the choice. Tyabji came, served for a relatively short period, and returned to the diplomatic world from which he had been drawn. His vice-chancellorship therefore deserves to be remembered not for a single monument or spectacular achievement but for something less visible and perhaps equally important: he helped sustain the institution during the transition between its great post-Partition reconstruction and the turbulent years that followed. Zakir Husain had demonstrated that Aligarh could survive in independent India. Zaidi had demonstrated that it could expand. Tyabji wanted it to demonstrate that it could be disciplined, confident, outward-looking and fully at home in the Republic. That, ultimately, was his contribution to Aligarh.

An episode from the period of Col Bashir Husain Zaidi as VC, AMU

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The communal disturbances that began in Aligarh in October 1961 occupy a curious place in the history of Aligarh Muslim University. They are remembered within the University, but usually in fragments. One recollection concerns a Students’ Union election; another, the old Aligarh custom of taking out the janāza, or mock funeral, of defeated candidates; another remembers the rumour that a Hindu student had been killed inside the University; and yet another recalls the attack from the city, the burning of shops around Shamshad Market and the fear that spread through the campus. Once the contemporary evidence is brought together, however, these fragments form a remarkably coherent and rather disturbing story.

The election and its communalisation

The events began with the elections to the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union (AMUSU) held on 1 October 1961. They need to be placed within the political atmosphere of Aligarh at the time. The University had 4,530 students, of whom the official administrative account listed 3,001 as Muslims, including overseas students. About 3,000 votes were cast. Hindu students had regularly participated in Union politics and non-Muslim candidates had been elected in previous years. Indeed, Bruce Graham notes that non-Muslims had secured representation in every Students’ Union election since 1951. What distinguished 1961 was the extent to which electoral alignments hardened along religious lines.

Initially eighteen Hindu candidates filed nominations for thirteen positions. Five subsequently withdrew, leaving what amounted to a Hindu slate, with one candidate for each position. The official account interpreted this as an attempt to consolidate Hindu votes, and this in turn provoked a counter-mobilisation among Muslim students. Badur-ul-Islam, a student of Ziauddin Hostel of Muhsinul Mulk Hall, was reported to have argued that Hindu voters were being organised communally and that divided Muslim votes could consequently allow Hindu candidates to capture the principal Union offices. Meetings were held in Ziauddin and Saifi hostels, Morrison Court and S.S. Hall to consolidate Muslim votes.

Communal appeals were therefore being made on both sides, and the official account records allegations that supporters of the Hindu candidates were soliciting Hindu votes on religious grounds. On the Muslim side, supporters associated with the Muslim right and Jamaat-e-Islami circulated equally inflammatory claims that, if Hindu candidates captured the Union, a temple might be constructed opposite the University mosque, Hindi would replace Urdu in Union proceedings and functions might begin with recitations from the Ramayana rather than the Qur’an. A campaign rickshaw was heard urging students to vote for supporters of Urdu lest the janāza of Urdu itself be taken out.

The precise slogan remembered in later accounts as “Hindus are in danger at AMU” requires some caution, because the exact wording has not so far been located in the contemporary official papers. There is, however, independent evidence that Hindu students were being asked to vote communally on the argument that Hindu students were being suppressed or disadvantaged within AMU. A later account explicitly describes the campaign in these terms. The underlying communal appeal is therefore documented, even if the exact phrase should not yet be placed within quotation marks without locating the original election leaflet or contemporary newspaper report.

The result was extraordinary. All thirteen positions went to Muslim candidates. According to the official reconstruction, approximately 2,700 of the 3,000 voters may have voted predominantly along communal lines, with only about 300 cross-community votes. Whatever the precision of that estimate, the outcome was striking because it was reportedly the first Union election in roughly a decade in which no Hindu candidate had succeeded. The results were declared at about 1.20 a.m. on 2 October, and it was at this point that an old Aligarh student custom acquired an entirely new significance.

The janāza and the clash

For years students had celebrated electoral victories by taking out mock janāzas or effigies of defeated candidates. Former AMU student leader Joginder Singh Bindra later recalled the practice quite matter-of-factly: supporters of the victorious group would carry the symbolic funeral of those who had lost, while defeated candidates sometimes absented themselves from campus to escape the humiliation. It was student rough humour, objectionable perhaps, but not inherently communal; by 1961, however, the context had changed. Vice-Chancellor Colonel Syed Bashir Husain Zaidi maintained that the practice had actually been prohibited two or three years earlier. The practice however continued, howsoever illegally, until at least 1980’s.

Nevertheless, at about 2.30 a.m., effigies representing defeated candidates were taken from V.M. Hall towards S.S. Hall, passing through Shamshad Market. Among those represented was a Hindu woman candidate, recorded in the administrative papers as Renuka “Bahjaj”, almost certainly Bajaj. There was also an attempt to include Iqbal Singh, who protested that he had withdrawn and had merely supported B. K. Sinha, the Hindu presidential candidate. Insulting slogans were reportedly raised against some defeated candidates.

Here the janāza ceased to be merely a piece of student theatre. Iqbal Singh and his associates confronted Badur-ul-Islam, and a scuffle followed. Several students sustained minor injuries. Thereafter matters became more serious inside Ziauddin Hostel. According to the district administration’s investigation, some Muslim students assaulted Hindu students, including several who had been sleeping and who had apparently played no part in the original confrontation. Windows were smashed and the bedding of one student was reportedly burnt. Five Hindu and three Muslim students were admitted to the University hospital, while others received treatment for lesser injuries. The official medical examination subsequently recorded numerous abrasions and contusions, although no student had been killed. This last fact is crucial: no Hindu student had been killed in AMU.

The rumour and the campus counter-rumour

Yet during 2 October the story spreading through Aligarh was increasingly that Hindu students had been murdered inside the Muslim University. The district authorities were already aware of the danger. Hindu students approached the District Magistrate displaying their injuries, and some left their hostels because they were frightened. At one point thirty or forty Hindu AMU students gathered at the District Magistrate’s residence and expressed fear that they would be attacked if they returned. Police and magistrates inspected the hostels and found Hindu students still residing there. At least two anxious Hindu students were actually taken by police to the University hospital so that they could see with their own eyes that the supposedly dead students were alive and could then convey this information to others.

At the same time, another account circulated within the campus. Even as reports of the period recorded that Hindu boys in Ziauddin Hostel had been beaten, it was rumoured among students and AMU fraternity, that Ziauddin, Saifi and other hostels had been attacked by students from D.S. College and Jana Sangh volunteers. According to this version, the attackers were sheltered in the house of a certain Dr Bhatnagar located near the Ziauddin Hostel, and emerged suddenly in an attempt to assault the hostels. They were said to have been repelled by residents of Muhsinul Mulk Hall, commonly referred to as M.M. Hall. This is what we heard when Bhatnagar’s house was allotted to my father a few years later. This account should be treated as a campus rumour or oral recollection unless corroborating contemporary evidence is found. It is nevertheless important because it shows that the University was not receiving the crisis in only one narrative. Outside the campus, the dominant rumour concerned the alleged “killing” of Hindu students inside AMU; within the campus, students also believed that organised Hindu groups from the city had attempted to attack Muslim hostels. The authorities also contacted local journalists Babu Lal Agrawal and Madan Lal Hiteshi, and explained that the incident had been a student clash and asked them not to exaggerate its communal dimensions, which they were doing quite liberally. Yet the rumour outran the official correction.

The Vice-Chancellor and the University’s response

At the centre of the University’s response to the crisis stood its Vice-Chancellor, Colonel Syed Bashir Husain Zaidi, who had headed Aligarh Muslim University since October 1956. Zaidi’s role during the disturbances is particularly significant because the contemporary administrative record shows him attempting to prevent the original student clash from becoming a Hindu-Muslim confrontation. When a group of frightened Hindu students gathered at the District Magistrate’s residence, expressing apprehension about returning to their hostels, Zaidi went there personally, assured them of their safety and even offered to take them to his residence and provide them food. University and district officials subsequently inspected the hostels, while arrangements were made to protect students who wished to remain or leave.

Zaidi also maintained that the old practice of taking out mock janāzas of defeated Students’ Union candidates had already been prohibited some years earlier, an important detail because it suggests that the procession which helped precipitate the crisis was neither an officially tolerated University ceremony nor something encouraged by his administration. Nehru’s later assessment is worth recalling in this context. Writing in August 1962, towards the end of Zaidi’s tenure, he observed that “Colonel Zaidi has done good work at Aligarh”, while also noting the difficulties created for him by ‘inadequate cooperation within the University’s own governing structure’. The evidence surrounding October 1961 thus presents Zaidi not as a passive spectator to the crisis, but as a Vice-Chancellor attempting, under exceptionally difficult circumstances, to contain a campus dispute before rumour and organised mobilisation carried it far beyond the boundaries of the University.

From campus fear to city mobilisation

By the evening of 2 October approximately 500 students had gathered near Gandhi Eye Hospital, some carrying sticks and announcing their intention of marching upon the University. They were persuaded to disperse, and police patrols were organised during the night while Section 144 was prepared for enforcement. The administration knew that the situation could explode the following morning. The connection with organised politics also becomes visible in the official papers. The district report stated that Atma Deo Sharma, a municipal commissioner described there as a well-known RSS and Bharatiya Jana Sangh worker and student activist, together with Jyoti Prasad Rastogi, secretary of the city Jana Sangh, had taken an interest in organising strikes in the city colleges. On the morning of 3 October strikes were organised in H.B. Barah Saini College, D.A.V. College and D.S. College.

Bruce Graham’s later reconstruction, drawing upon Jana Sangh history, gives the scale of the mobilisation. Dramatised accounts of what had occurred inside AMU were carried into the city’s colleges, and on 3 October a procession estimated at 7,000 to 8,000 people, predominantly students, attempted to march upon the University. Police stopped the main body near the Kathpula railway bridge. Jawaharlal Nehru’s own reconstruction, written privately to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister C. B. Gupta on 10 October after interviewing a number of people, is particularly revealing. Nehru believed communal tendencies had developed among sections of both communities. He specifically mentioned Jamaat-e-Islami influence among some Muslim students and RSS, Jana Sangh and Vidyarthi Sangh influence among Hindu students, including students of the city colleges. But regarding the immediate mobilisation against AMU, he was unequivocal: the crowd came towards the University because of the false story that one or two Hindu students had been killed there. Nehru was astonished that the rumour had not been effectively contradicted before it produced its consequences.

Some members of the crowd managed to cross the railway line and enter the Civil Lines and University area. The district report places their number at roughly 150 to 200. They first set fire to Muslim stalls near Tasveer Mahal cinema, then damaged the University cricket pavilion and proceeded towards Shamshad Market, where Muslim-owned shops were burnt and damaged. AMU students now came out in large numbers. Some were armed with lathis. A Hindu cyclist was assaulted before magistrates intervened. Muslim students and some Muslim shopkeepers retaliated in Shamshad Market, setting fire to two Hindu shops and ransacking several others. What had begun as an assault moving towards the University had therefore turned into reciprocal street violence around its perimeter.

Chronology and responsibility

It is important to retain this chronology, because to say merely that “Hindu and Muslim students rioted” obscures how the violence developed. There had indeed been an intra-University confrontation on 2 October in which Hindu students were assaulted. That incident was real and should not be minimised. But campus recollections also preserve a counter-narrative of attempted attacks on Muslim hostels by students from D.S. College and Jana Sangh volunteers, allegedly sheltered by Dr Bhatnagar and repelled by M.M. Hall residents. Whether or not that account can be independently verified, its circulation demonstrates how rapidly competing stories of attack and self-defence were forming on both sides. Nobody was killed in the University.

The transformation occurred when the real assault was converted through rumour into a story of Hindu students having been murdered, while the campus itself circulated a parallel story of organised Hindu attacks on Muslim hostels. These narratives were carried into a pre-existing network of mobilisation in the city colleges. A large crowd then attempted to march upon AMU. Only after parts of that mobilisation penetrated the Civil Lines, attacked Muslims and burnt Muslim shops did large groups from the University emerge and retaliate.

Nor did the killings occur within the University. Violence spread through Aligarh city, with stabbings and shootings and the notorious violence at Manik Chowk. The official tally by 11 October stood at thirteen dead, twelve Muslims and one Hindu, although even the Hindu death was that of a Delhi mechanic whose connection with the communal disturbances was uncertain. Fifty of the sixty-one officially recorded injured were Muslims. Later scholarly accounts give slightly different totals, and Paul Brass has questioned the completeness of official casualty figures. The imbalance in the officially recorded victims is nevertheless unmistakable.

This is one reason why the description of the episode simply as an “AMU communal riot” is historically misleading. The initial campus clash certainly involved communal mobilisation on both sides, and Muslim students committed serious assaults in Ziauddin Hostel. At the same time, campus memory preserves allegations of an attempted attack by city-based Hindu students and Jana Sangh volunteers on Muslim hostels. But the larger violence in Aligarh city quickly became disproportionately directed against Muslims.

Nehru himself made precisely this distinction. He considered what happened inside the University regrettable but comparatively limited. What happened subsequently outside AMU, and particularly in other towns of Uttar Pradesh, alarmed him much more. In his private letter to C. B. Gupta, he wrote that Muslims in these other places appeared principally as victims. He considered two possible mechanisms: Hindu students leaving Aligarh may have carried exaggerated stories to their home towns, or organisations such as the RSS and Jana Sangh may have exploited the situation through existing networks, or both processes may have operated simultaneously. He believed that a hard core of communal activists had taken the lead.

The wider violence in Uttar Pradesh

The disturbances indeed travelled remarkably quickly. Meerut was one of the most serious centres. Paul Brass’s detailed study of the Meerut violence traces its immediate connection back to the Aligarh episode. Iqbal Singh, one of the principal participants in the Ziauddin Hostel confrontation, had connections with Meerut, and intelligence reaching Nehru suggested that his father was a police officer there. Nehru cautioned that he had not independently verified this information, which is an important qualification. Brass’s subsequent research similarly found accounts connecting Iqbal Singh with the mobilisation in Meerut.

Violence also broke out in Chandausi, Hapur and elsewhere. Speaking on 13 October, Nehru himself listed Aligarh, Meerut, Chandausi, Hapur and other places and remarked that one reassuring feature was that the wider masses had generally not become involved. Contemporary reporting cited in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru recorded seven deaths in Chandausi and Meerut in the immediate aftermath of the Aligarh disturbances. A Reuters report published by Le Monde on 10 October put the combined toll in Aligarh, Chandausi and Meerut at at least twenty-nine dead and about one hundred injured by that stage.

Chandausi provides another revealing example. Muslim merchants subsequently met Nehru and described extensive looting of their businesses. They told him that shops had been specially stocked for Dussehra and that the destruction had wiped out their working capital. One merchant reported losing three members of his family. They also alleged that students of the local D.A.V. College had repeatedly taken the lead during communal disturbances in Chandausi. Nehru transmitted their representation to C. B. Gupta.

The central government was sufficiently disturbed for Nehru to press for a formal inquiry. Writing to Home Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri on 18 October, he argued that although the disturbances in Meerut, Chandausi and Hapur might be investigated separately, the incidents in Aligarh city could not meaningfully be separated from those within AMU because the two were “intimately connected”. He suggested that the inquiry encompass both the University and the city, and there is another aspect of the story which deserves emphasis.

Contemporary sources do not support a simple picture of Hindu students inside AMU facing an undifferentiated hostile Muslim institution. About 150 Hindu students reportedly remained in the University throughout the crisis. University officials and the district administration inspected their hostels; escorts were subsequently provided to those wishing to leave. Nor had Hindu participation in AMUSU politics been exceptional before 1961. Former students remembered an earlier campus in which Sikh and Hindu candidates could and did win Union positions. The very abnormality of the 1961 result, when no Hindu candidate AM won, was one reason it attracted so much attention.

What October 1961 reveals

What October 1961 therefore reveals is not an ancient or inevitable Hindu-Muslim confrontation. It shows something historically more interesting and more disturbing: the manufacture of a communal riot out of a limited student conflict. There were genuine grievances. The election itself had been communalised. Hindu students had organised electorally along communal lines; Muslim students responded with their own communal consolidation. Some Muslim students assaulted Hindu students in Ziauddin Hostel, including students who apparently had nothing to do with the initial quarrel. None of this should be concealed.

But neither should the next stage be collapsed into the first. Nobody had been murdered in the University, yet Aligarh city was told that Hindu students had been killed. Within the campus, meanwhile, students circulated a different account: that D.S. College students and Jana Sangh volunteers, allegedly sheltered by a teacher, had attempted sudden attacks on Ziauddin, Saifi and other hostels and had been repelled by residents of M.M. Hall. Whether this account can be confirmed from contemporary records or not, but it belongs to the history of how the crisis was experienced and remembered inside AMU.

A traditional, if foolish, student ritual involving the symbolic janāza of defeated candidates became detached from its older campus meaning and could now be represented outside as evidence of something much more sinister. Injured students, frightened students, political activists, city colleges, rumours and existing organisational networks supplied the channels through which the story travelled. The result was that within little more than twenty-four hours thousands were marching towards the University.

Shamshad Market became one of the first physical meeting points between rumour and violence. Muslim stalls and shops were attacked and burnt, and retaliatory attacks followed. Violence moved into Aligarh city, and within days the reverberations were being felt in Meerut, Chandausi, Hapur and elsewhere.

Nehru appears to have understood the wider danger. His correspondence in the weeks following the disturbances repeatedly returned to the organisational infrastructure behind communal mobilisation. He did not absolve communal Muslim organisations within AMU. On the contrary, he criticised Jamaat-e-Islami influence sharply. But he was equally concerned by the role of the RSS, Jana Sangh and allied student networks outside the University. More significantly, after examining reports from the different towns, he distinguished the original campus conflict from the subsequent pattern of violence in which Muslims elsewhere were overwhelmingly the victims.

The episode therefore needs to be restored to the history of AMU with considerable care. It was neither simply an “attack on Hindus in AMU” nor simply an “RSS attack on AMU”. Both formulations flatten a complicated sequence of events. The documentary record permits a more precise reconstruction. A communally polarised Students’ Union election was followed by a provocative revival of the traditional janāza ritual. A confrontation followed, and Hindu students were assaulted in Ziauddin Hostel and an alleged attempt to attack Muslim hostels by D.S. College students and Jana Sangh volunteers took place.

The real assault in Ziauddin Hostel was then magnified into the false report that Hindu students had been murdered. Students and political activists in Aligarh city mobilised around the rumour. Thousands attempted to march upon the University. Muslim shops were attacked and burnt. University students retaliated. The conflict spread into the city, where the overwhelming majority of the recorded dead were Muslim, and subsequently into several other towns of western Uttar Pradesh. The distance between the original event and the stories that produced the larger violence is perhaps the most important historical lesson of October 1961. A quarrel had occurred. Students had been beaten. Competing rumours of attack and counter-attack then transformed the campus conflict into a city-wide communal crisis. But no Hindu student had been killed in Aligarh Muslim University. A rumour said otherwise, and a large part of western Uttar Pradesh briefly burned.

*

Note on Principal sources for further investigation

The most important primary body of material is the Home Ministry and Uttar Pradesh Government documentation reproduced or summarised in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, especially Volumes 71 and 72. Particularly valuable are Nehru’s letter to C. B. Gupta of 10 October 1961; the detailed administrative report, “Communal Conflict in Aligarh”, dated 17 October; Nehru’s correspondence with Lal Bahadur Shastri concerning an inquiry; the Central Intelligence material forwarded on 20 October; and his subsequent correspondence concerning Meerut and Chandausi. Nehru’s August 1962 assessment of Colonel Zaidi, including the observation that “Colonel Zaidi has done good work at Aligarh” and his remarks on the difficulties created by inadequate cooperation within the University’s governing structure, is also relevant. Contemporary parliamentary discussion should be read alongside Lok Sabha Starred Question No. 184, “Disturbances in Aligarh Muslim University”, answered on 23 November 1961. Contemporary newspaper coverage includes The Hindu, especially 7 and 8 October 1961, The Times of India reports for the first half of October, and Reuters reports reproduced internationally.

For later historical reconstruction, particularly important are Paul R. Brass’s early study Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh and his later work on communal violence in Aligarh and Meerut; Bruce Desmond Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh; Christophe Jaffrelot’s work on Hindu nationalism; and later studies of communal violence in Aligarh which use the 1961 disturbances as an important episode in the changing relationship between the University and the city.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Among the Vice-Chancellors who shaped Aligarh Muslim University after independence, Colonel Bashir Husain Zaidi occupies a distinctive and perhaps insufficiently remembered place. Dr Zakir Husain is rightly associated with the difficult years immediately following Partition, when the future of the University itself appeared uncertain, and Badruddin Tyabji, who followed Zaidi, brought to Aligarh the experience of a distinguished civil servant and diplomat, seeking to strengthen discipline and administrative confidence. Between them stood Bashir Husain Zaidi, Vice-Chancellor from 1956 to 1962, whose tenure witnessed perhaps the most remarkable physical expansion of the University in the post-independence period, a transformation so profound that he came to be known affectionately as the “Shahjahan of Aligarh.” The description was remarkably appropriate, for during his six years as Vice-Chancellor, buildings appeared across the campus on a scale that permanently altered its physical character, including the Maulana Azad Library, the General Education Centre and Kennedy Hall, the buildings of the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, engineering and technical facilities, and a considerable number of residential houses for teachers and employees. The University’s landed and immovable-property base was also enlarged through acquisition, transfer, and gifts, providing resources for an institution whose future requirements Zaidi understood would be much greater than its immediate needs. Yet there was something striking about this great builder of Aligarh; he did not cover his buildings with plaques bearing his own name, and this becomes particularly noticeable when his tenure is viewed from the perspective of the later history of the University, when under some subsequent Vice-Chancellors the name of the incumbent became a conspicuous presence on foundation stones and inauguration plaques. There is, of course, nothing inherently improper in recording who laid a foundation stone, as such inscriptions can themselves become useful historical records, but Zaidi represented a rather different culture of public office. The man under whom perhaps more of modern Aligarh was physically created than under almost any other Vice-Chancellor apparently felt little need to turn that achievement into a programme of personal commemoration, and the irony is worth emphasising: the Vice-Chancellor whose name was least insistently written upon buildings became the Vice-Chancellor most closely remembered for building them.

Bashir Husain Zaidi was born in 1898 and belonged to that important generation of Indian Muslims whose public careers bridged the colonial and post-colonial periods. Educated at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and subsequently at Cambridge, he studied law and was called to the Bar, and his connection with Aligarh was not created by his appointment as Vice-Chancellor, for he had taught at AMU during the 1920s before entering the service of the princely state of Rampur. It was in Rampur that Zaidi acquired much of the administrative experience that would later prove valuable at Aligarh, serving first as a minister and eventually becoming Chief Minister of the state, and after independence he participated in the political institutions of the new republic, serving in the Constituent Assembly, the Provisional Parliament and the Lok Sabha, and later also sitting in the Rajya Sabha. His career thus brought together education, administration and politics in an unusual manner, and this background is essential for understanding his vice-chancellorship, for Zaidi was not primarily a professional academic. What he brought to Aligarh was the experience of government: the ability to negotiate with ministries, obtain financial assistance, deal with bureaucracies, acquire property, plan institutions and, above all, get things done, and he possessed access to the highest levels of the political establishment. His years as Vice-Chancellor coincided with the period when Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad were attempting to create the institutional foundations of modern India, a time when universities, scientific laboratories, engineering institutions, dams, factories and cultural academies were all part of a larger developmental imagination, and Zaidi’s transformation of Aligarh belonged precisely to this historical moment.

The significance of Zaidi’s vice-chancellorship becomes clearer when placed against the background of Partition, for Aligarh had emerged from 1947 badly shaken, its association with Muslim League politics having created suspicion about its position within independent India, while teachers and students migrated to Pakistan and the political and psychological uncertainty was profound. Under Dr Zakir Husain, the University had begun the difficult process of redefining itself within the secular Indian republic, and by the time Zaidi assumed office in 1956, the immediate existential crisis had receded; the question was no longer simply whether Aligarh would survive but what kind of university it would become. Zaidi’s answer was expressed partly through bricks and mortar, for the old MAO College campus had developed around buildings such as Strachey Hall, the Jama Masjid, Victoria Gate, the old library and the residential halls, representing the world created by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and his successors, but the needs of a rapidly expanding twentieth-century university were entirely different. New departments required laboratories, lecture rooms, libraries and offices; engineering and technical education required workshops; cultural activities required auditoria and specialised spaces; a growing teaching establishment required houses; and expanding student numbers required a correspondingly enlarged physical infrastructure. Zaidi understood that a university could not expand intellectually unless it expanded physically, and the most conspicuous monument of his tenure remains the Maulana Azad Library, for the University library had existed since the MAO College period, but the great multi-storeyed building that came up during his vice-chancellorship gave AMU a central library commensurate with its ambitions as a major national university, inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1960 and named after the scholar, nationalist and first Education Minister of independent India. The choice of name is itself revealing; Zaidi could easily have associated his own name with a building that was to become one of the most recognisable structures of Aligarh, but he did not, and the building commemorated Azad rather than himself.

The General Education Centre and Kennedy Hall constituted another major intervention in the architectural and cultural life of the University, conceived during Zaidi’s vice-chancellorship and constructed between 1959 and 1962, representing an unusually broad understanding of university education that encompassed not merely classroom instruction but theatre, debate, music, literature and cultural activity as part of the intellectual formation of students. Its modern architectural vocabulary was equally significant, for Aligarh did not attempt simply to reproduce the Indo-Saracenic language of the nineteenth-century College buildings but was prepared to express itself architecturally in the language of post-independence modernism, and the association of Joseph Allen Stein with the project placed it within a much wider history of modern architecture in India. But the Library and Kennedy Hall should not be allowed to overshadow the scale of what was happening elsewhere, for the buildings of the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Social Sciences also came up during this great phase of expansion, allowing departments that constituted the intellectual core of the University to be organised within purpose-built academic spaces rather than accommodated incrementally within the older College infrastructure. Engineering and technical education similarly expanded, with buildings, laboratories and workshops associated with the Engineering College and Polytechnic, while plans for medical education were pursued with equal determination, and Zaidi personally approached the Government of India concerning the development of the Medical College, with Nehru’s correspondence recording his efforts to secure assistance for it. Thus Zaidi was not constructing ornamental buildings but the infrastructure of a modern comprehensive university, and there was another aspect of his building programme that is less spectacular but perhaps equally important: residential construction. A considerable number of houses for University teachers and other employees were built during his tenure, and residential areas expanded as the academic establishment itself expanded, and while these houses rarely enter accounts of university history because they possess none of the monumentality of the Maulana Azad Library or Kennedy Hall, they were essential to Aligarh’s character as a residential university. Zaidi appears to have understood something that is sometimes forgotten in discussions of institutional development: a university consists not merely of classrooms and offices but is a community, and teachers brought to Aligarh needed places in which to live and raise their families, while students and teachers needed to inhabit a common intellectual environment. The residential expansion of the Zaidi years consequently formed part of the same vision as the Library, the faculty buildings and the engineering facilities; he was not merely putting up structures but building a university town.

Zaidi’s institution-building extended even beyond construction, for one of the least discussed aspects of his tenure was the enlargement of the University’s landed and immovable-property base, with lands and properties added to AMU during these years through acquisition, transfer and gift, some required for immediate expansion and others representing an investment in the future. This was a particularly farsighted policy because the Aligarh of the late 1950s was very different from the densely built city that surrounds the University today, and land that might then have appeared peripheral would eventually become extraordinarily valuable to the institution. Some properties whose possession or title has subsequently become disputed or contested trace their association with the University to gifts, transfers or acquisitions belonging to this broader period of institutional expansion, and while individual cases naturally need to be examined through their title deeds, gift documents, revenue records and University files, the larger historical contrast remains striking: Zaidi’s administration was adding property to the University, whereas today considerable institutional energy has to be spent defending University property from encroachment, litigation and competing claims. That difference is not merely administrative but reflects two very different moments in the history of the institution; Zaidi was thinking prospectively, acquiring land not merely because a building had immediately to be constructed upon it but because a residential university required room to grow, and the administrator was therefore acting as a custodian for people he would never meet: teachers who would be appointed decades later, departments that had not yet been imagined and generations of students who had not yet been born. There was little glamour in such work, for acquiring a piece of land or securing the transfer of a property did not provide the public visibility of inaugurating a monumental building, and there might be no impressive ceremony and certainly no marble plaque, yet fifty or sixty years later, that apparently mundane administrative act might prove more valuable to the University than an imposing structure. It was the cumulative scale of these changes that earned Zaidi his famous sobriquet, and Aligarh tradition even produced an amusing historical comparison: Zaidi, because of his extraordinary building activity, was likened to Shahjahan, while Badruddin Tyabji, whose tenure witnessed considerable attention to roads and communications, could consequently be compared with Sher Shah Suri, and the joke was effective precisely because the transformation of the campus was visible to everyone. But the comparison with Shahjahan should not be understood too literally, for Zaidi’s buildings were not imperial monuments; their importance lay overwhelmingly in their utility as libraries, classrooms, auditoria, laboratories, workshops, offices and houses. What Zaidi created was therefore better described as the architecture of institutional confidence, for a university uncertain about its future does not normally acquire land for distant requirements, construct large residential colonies, create new faculty complexes or build a monumental central library; such actions presuppose confidence that the institution will still be there many decades later. The physical expansion of the Zaidi years consequently represented something larger than construction; it announced that the crisis produced by Partition had been overcome and that Aligarh was no longer merely struggling to survive but was preparing for the future.

The physical expansion of the Zaidi years was accompanied by an equally significant, if less visible, broadening of the University’s academic provision. The establishment of the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in October 1962, with an initial intake of forty MBBS students, represented the realisation of an ambition that had been discussed at Aligarh for decades and stood as perhaps the most consequential academic initiative of his tenure. The new faculty buildings for Arts and Social Sciences allowed departments that had previously been accommodated incrementally within the older College infrastructure to organise themselves within purpose-built spaces, and the Faculty of Arts acquired a physical form that reflected its centrality to the University’s intellectual life. New departments and courses were introduced in this period, including in the sciences and social sciences, and the General Education Centre, conceived under Zaidi with funding from the Ford Foundation, embodied a broader understanding of university education in which cultural and co-curricular activity formed part of the intellectual formation of students. The University’s engineering and technical provision also expanded, with laboratories and workshops accompanying the new buildings, while the residential expansion of the teaching establishment meant that the academic community could grow in step with the facilities designed to serve it. The expansion of the University’s academic programmes thus proceeded alongside, and in many respects because of, the construction programme for which Zaidi is chiefly remembered, and the two together gave Aligarh the institutional shape it would carry for decades afterwards. Professor Mohd. Shafi, a geographer who completed his PhD at London University in 1956, was appointed Reader in the Department of Geography at AMU in the same year and subsequently became Professor and Chairman of the Department in 1962, the year Zaidi left office. Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, the historian, was already on the faculty by this period; he had joined the Department of History in 1947 and became a Reader in 1953, and while his promotion to Professor came in 1963, under Badruddin Tyabji, he was a prominent member of the academic establishment during Zaidi’s vice-chancellorship. The broader picture is that Zaidi inherited a university whose senior academic appointments had largely been settled during the Zakir Husain years, and his own contribution lay less in individual recruitment than in creating the conditions, through new buildings, laboratories and residential accommodation, in which the existing faculty could expand their work and in which new appointments could eventually be made. The establishment of the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in October 1962 was the most consequential academic initiative of his tenure, though it required the recruitment of an entirely new medical faculty whose names have not been widely recorded. The General Education Centre, conceived in 1958 with Ford Foundation funding and designed by Joseph Allen Stein, also represented an institutional appointment of sorts, in that it brought a distinguished modern architect into the University’s orbit and created a permanent facility for cultural and co-curricular activity. Beyond these, the evidence suggests that Zaidi’s approach to academic appointments was consistent with his broader administrative style: he was not a Vice-Chancellor who sought to remake the faculty in his own image, and the academic developments of his tenure were more about providing the physical and institutional foundations for expansion than about the arrival of a small number of celebrated individuals.

The transformations during his tenure also need to be placed within the larger political environment of the 1950s, for Zaidi’s Aligarh was consciously part of independent India, and his political background, his participation in the Constituent Assembly and Parliament, and his close dealings with the Government of India positioned him within the secular nationalist establishment of the period. His relationship with Nehru is particularly revealing, for Nehru’s correspondence shows that Zaidi approached him directly on matters affecting the University’s development, including the Medical College, and more significantly, towards the end of Zaidi’s tenure Nehru himself recorded a favourable assessment of his vice-chancellorship, observing in a letter to K. A. Hamied in August 1962 that Colonel Zaidi had “done good work at Aligarh” while regretting that he had not always received the cooperation he deserved from elements within the University’s Executive Council. That judgement is important, for Zaidi’s reputation was not created retrospectively simply because several impressive buildings survived; his contemporaries recognised the energy with which he pursued the development of the University.

The confidence and expansion that marked the Zaidi years were not achieved without a severe test of the Vice-Chancellor’s authority. In October 1961, communal tensions erupted at Aligarh following the Students’ Union elections, when electoral rivalry between Muslim and Hindu candidates, conducted on increasingly communal lines, spilled over into violence on the campus. The immediate trigger was the tradition of taking out a symbolic funeral procession, or janaza, of the defeated candidates, which had been revived that year and which quickly became the occasion for clashes between students of the two communities. Rumours of killings and stabbings spread rapidly from the campus into the city and then to other towns of western Uttar Pradesh, and within days the disturbances had extended to Meerut, Moradabad, Hapur and elsewhere, leaving a trail of deaths, injuries, arson and looting in their wake. The crisis placed Zaidi at the centre of an extraordinarily difficult situation, for he had to contend not only with a breakdown of order within the University but with a wider communal conflagration that threatened to engulf the institution entirely. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing to C. B. Gupta in the days that followed, noted the growth of communal feeling on both sides of the campus divide and the role of organisations such as the Jamaat Islami, the RSS and the Jan Sangh in fostering it, while the PSP’s own inquiry into the disturbances concluded that the troubles had their origin in the Union election clashes and that had the elections been properly handled the catastrophe might have been averted. Zaidi’s task was to restore the authority of the University, calm the fears of students and staff, and prevent the campus from becoming a permanent battleground. That he succeeded in restoring law and order on the campus, and in steering the University through a crisis that could easily have destroyed the institutional confidence he had spent five years building, is among the least discussed but most consequential achievements of his vice-chancellorship. The events of October 1961 and their aftermath, including the inquiry that followed and the wider political repercussions across western Uttar Pradesh, are matters that deserve fuller treatment than can be given here, and a separate blog will be devoted to them. For the present purpose, it is enough to note that the same Vice-Chancellor who built libraries, faculties and residential colonies also had to defend the University in a moment of acute danger, and that he did so with a steadiness that allowed the institution to continue along the path of expansion he had set for it.

There is nevertheless a small feature of Zaidi’s legacy that deserves reflection because it tells us something about changing conceptions of public office: walk through Aligarh today one repeatedly encounters foundation stones and inauguration plaques recording the names of administrators under whom particular works were undertaken, and during some later vice-chancellorships the name of the serving Vice-Chancellor became a conspicuous feature of such plaques. Again, there is nothing inherently objectionable about a foundation stone recording historical information, as universities need institutional memory and inscriptions can provide valuable evidence for future historians, but the question is one of proportion and culture. Zaidi could have placed his name upon an extraordinary number of buildings; if ever an AMU Vice-Chancellor possessed an excuse for leaving his name scattered across the campus, it was the man under whom the Library, major faculty buildings, cultural institutions, engineering facilities and large numbers of residential structures were constructed, yet Zaidi did not make his own name part of the architecture of Aligarh. The buildings belonged to the University, the money came from public resources, grants and institutional funds, the land belonged to the institution, and the Vice-Chancellor was its temporary custodian. That conception of office is worth recovering, for a Vice-Chancellor does not personally give a university a building constructed from University or public funds, nor does a university begin anew whenever a new Vice-Chancellor assumes office; each administrator inherits the accumulated labour, resources, land and institutions created by generations before him and has a responsibility to leave something more substantial to those who follow. Zaidi appears to have understood this instinctively, and there is consequently an extraordinary paradox in his reputation: the man who built most needed least to proclaim that he had built, and his contemporaries supplied the memorial themselves by calling him the Shahjahan of Aligarh.

Perhaps the fairest way of assessing a university administrator is to ask a very simple question: what did he inherit, and what did he leave behind? When Bashir Husain Zaidi assumed office in 1956, he inherited an institution whose post-Partition survival had been secured but whose physical infrastructure remained inadequate for the expansion already underway, and when he relinquished office in 1962, he left behind a substantially enlarged university with new academic buildings, a monumental central library, cultural facilities, expanding infrastructure for engineering and technical education, and the pursuit of medical education; the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences had acquired substantial physical form, teachers and employees had new residential accommodation, roads and services extended into newly developing parts of the campus, and crucially, the University’s stock of land and property had grown, creating possibilities for expansion far beyond Zaidi’s own lifetime. This is what makes the description “Shahjahan of Aligarh” more than an affectionate piece of Aligarh folklore; Zaidi built because he believed the University had a future, he acquired land because he understood that those who came after him would require it, he constructed houses because a university was a community and not simply a collection of departments, and he built a library because books and scholarship remained at the centre of that community, and he did all this without feeling compelled to carve his own name repeatedly into the physical fabric he was creating. More than six decades after he left office, much of what he built continues to serve purposes for which it was created; other properties secured in that period have become enormously more valuable than anyone could then have imagined, and some have unfortunately become contested and therefore remind us how much easier it is to inherit an institutional asset than to create one. Therein perhaps lies the most important lesson of Bashir Husain Zaidi’s vice-chancellorship: institution-building is not measured by the number of plaques an administrator leaves behind but by the resources, opportunities and institutions he leaves to the next generation. Some administrators leave their names on buildings; Bashir Husain Zaidi left buildings, houses, land and a larger University. That was monument enough.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

There are articles with which one disagrees, articles which irritate but nevertheless compel one to think, and then there are articles whose propositions are so enormous and whose evidence is so slender that one is left wondering how exactly the author managed to travel from one to the other. The recent piece published in ThePrint, “From Shah Bano to Waqf: How Muslim politics has produced just intermediaries, not intellectuals”, belongs, unfortunately, to the last category. Its author writes under the imposing name “Ibn Khaldun Bharati”, and the choice itself has a certain charm. The original Ibn Khaldun was one of the most formidable historical minds of the medieval world, a thinker who attempted to understand societies through power, institutions, economic circumstances, social solidarities and historical change. His Indian namesake appears to have devised a considerably simpler method: take approximately twenty crore Indian Muslims, remove their differences of class, caste, language, region, politics, gender, education and intellectual formation, stir thoroughly, and what finally emerges is what the author himself calls an “undifferentiated lump of thoughtlessness”. It is sociology made wonderfully economical, since one no longer requires fieldwork, archives, statistics or even troublesome human diversity.

The article begins with the claim that “most Indian Muslims” like to brandish their backwardness and use it to indict India. The Sachar Committee Report naturally enters the argument because its findings documented serious socio-economic disadvantages affecting sections of the Muslim population, but our author performs an interesting manoeuvre. Having invoked the question of Muslim backwardness, he announces that he does not intend to decide whether it is “real or mythical”. Surely, however, that is precisely the question which has to be answered before proceeding further. The Sachar Committee Report of 2006 was not a work of fiction. It was a government-appointed committee under Justice Rajinder Sachar, and its findings were unambiguous: the Muslim community was lagging behind other religious groups of India in most development indicators, relatively poor, more illiterate, and facing deep deficiencies and deprivation. By and large, Muslims ranked somewhat above Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes but below Hindu Other Backward Classes, other minorities and Hindu general castes in all indicators considered. The Committee stressed the need for formulation of appropriate programmes to address the educational and economic backwardness of the community. One may dispute the Sachar Committee’s methodology, categories, statistics or conclusions, and there is nothing sacred about a government committee report, but intellectual criticism requires identifying what is wrong with the evidence and demonstrating why. The Government itself described the Sachar exercise as an attempt to establish the social, economic and educational status of India’s Muslim community, and subsequent official reporting recorded decisions on the overwhelming majority of its recommendations. Instead, the Sachar Report is rhetorically converted into something resembling the official version of a Muslim catalogue of grievances. Evidence has not been refuted; it has merely been renamed.

Having avoided the empirical question of backwardness, “Ibn Khaldun Bharati” arrives at his real discovery. The actual problem of Indian Muslims, he tells us, is “intellectual backwardness”, since India has millions of Muslims but somehow they have failed to produce an intellectual class. He is aware, of course, that Muslim historians, economists, scientists, lawyers, journalists, writers, academics and public figures exist in rather inconvenient numbers, so another ingenious device becomes necessary. Possessing intellect, he tells us, does not necessarily make somebody an intellectual, and Gramsci and Edward Said are summoned to lend theoretical dignity to the exercise. Very well, let us accept the test. What, then, are we to do with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad? What do we do with Zakir Husain, Mohammad Mujeeb, K. M. Ashraf, Mohammad Habib, Nurul Hasan, Irfan Habib, Mushirul Hasan and Asghar Ali Engineer? These are only a few obvious names, and they did not constitute an ideological regiment. Some were Marxists, others liberals; some were devout believers, others secular in intellectual orientation; some engaged deeply with Islamic thought, others with nationalism, class, history, communalism, education, gender or constitutionalism. They disagreed with each other, sometimes fundamentally, which is precisely what intellectuals normally do. Asghar Ali Engineer alone creates considerable difficulties for the thesis, since he criticised communalism, patriarchal interpretations of religion and authoritarian structures within his own community, supported reform on questions of Muslim personal law and repeatedly confronted religious conservatism. His intellectual and activist career, which earned him the Right Livelihood Award in 2004, therefore fits rather awkwardly into the picture of a Muslim society incapable of producing internal criticism. Indeed, the broader history of Muslim enlightened thought in South Asia, as scholars such as Ayesha Jalal have documented, includes figures from Mirza Ghalib and Sayyid Ahmad Khan to Muhammad Iqbal and Fazlur Rahman, alongside lesser-known intellectuals such as Nazir Ahmad and Sadequain, all of whom engaged seriously with questions of faith, selfhood, history and time. One may dislike their conclusions, but one cannot make their existence disappear.

There is a simple way around this difficulty, however, and our author seems to have discovered it. Define an intellectual in such a manner that anyone whose conclusions differ from one’s own ceases to qualify, then having emptied the room, announce triumphantly that nobody is inside. Syed Shahabuddin receives especially rough treatment, as the former diplomat, parliamentarian and editor of Muslim India is transformed into almost the archetypal Muslim intermediary. His politics surrounding Shah Bano, the Babri Masjid dispute and other questions certainly deserves critical examination, and I would myself disagree with several positions taken by Shahabuddin, but disagreement cannot substitute for historical representation. Here was a man who left the Indian Foreign Service, entered parliamentary politics, edited a journal for years and wrote extensively on minority rights, constitutional questions, foreign affairs and Indian Muslim politics. He was, by many accounts, a practitioner of left-of-centre politics who proudly called himself a socialist, even as his stance on Shah Bano and Babri Masjid led some to compare him to Muhammad Ali Jinnah. One may reject his conclusions, but it requires a remarkably elastic definition of “intellectual” to make intellectual engagement itself disappear merely because one dislikes the politics that accompanied it.

The treatment of Shah Bano is equally revealing. There was unquestionably a deeply conservative mobilisation against the Supreme Court judgement of 1985, and it deserves criticism, while Muslim intellectuals and women’s voices themselves criticised it, but Shah Bano was not a simple morality play in which a single Muslim leadership confronted an enlightened state. The controversy involved competing interpretations of personal law, Muslim organisations, reformist voices, women’s groups, Congress electoral calculations and the changing politics of communal mobilisation. The Supreme Court judgement itself concerned the applicability of Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to a divorced Muslim woman unable to maintain herself. The case involved a civil court ordering M. A. Khan to pay his divorced wife Shah Bano monthly support, a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court but which evoked extensive conservative Muslim protest and led to legislation meant to limit alimony among Muslims. History requires recovering those complications, while polemic has the easier task of removing them.

Then come Gramsci and Said. Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” arose from a sophisticated discussion of class, hegemony and the organisation of consent, not a certificate to be awarded by an examiner to those whose politics met with his approval. Edward Said is an even stranger recruit to this enterprise, since Said’s conception of the intellectual emphasised independence from power, received orthodoxies and collective simplifications. Yet he is invoked in an article whose principal achievement is precisely the reduction of an extraordinarily heterogeneous population into a collective personality. Indian Muslims, we are told, do not possess the normal ideological spectrum of Left, Right and centre, and their divisions are apparently merely sectarian: Sunni, Shia, Deobandi, Barelvi, Wahhabi, Tablighi and so forth. Eventually Muslim society is compared with a “unicellular organism”. One hardly knows whether the appropriate response should come from a historian or a biologist.

Where are Muslim communists to be placed in this organism? Where are Muslim socialists, Congressmen, liberals, conservatives, feminists, Islamic modernists, secular academics, traditional ulema, reformist ulema, supporters of the BJP and its Muslim opponents? What happens to Pasmanda politics, a movement that has contested the hegemonic Muslim-minority discourse since the 1990s and comprises Dalit, Backward and Adivasi Muslims who constitute about 85 per cent of Indian Muslims? What happens to the enormous regional differences separating Kerala, Bengal, Kashmir, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and the Deccan? Does a Malayalam-speaking Muslim businessman in Kozhikode inhabit precisely the same political consciousness as an Urdu-speaking artisan in Uttar Pradesh, a Bohra trader in Gujarat and a Muslim communist in Kerala? Apparently they do, since twenty crore people become intellectually unicellular because allowing them to remain humanly complicated would ruin a perfectly good theory.

The historical method becomes still more adventurous when contemporary Muslim political behaviour is connected with the “tribal origins and military expansion” of Islam. At this point fourteen centuries of history disappear with enviable efficiency. The Umayyads and Abbasids pass silently away, Persia and Central Asia vanish, the Ottomans and Safavids are excused attendance, and Sufism, jurisprudence, philosophy, regional cultures, colonialism, capitalism, print, nationalism and modern education are no longer required. In India itself, more than a millennium of political change, social mobility, regional differentiation, caste formation, linguistic transformation and cultural interaction can apparently be bypassed. We begin in seventh-century Arabia and arrive directly in twenty-first-century India, a journey even Air India cannot manage non-stop. This is not longue durée history but historical essentialism. The historian normally asks how societies change, while the essentialist assumes that somewhere beneath all inconvenient historical change lies an eternal cultural substance waiting to explain everything.

The category of Ashrāf is treated in much the same manner. It is a historically meaningful social category and certainly deserves serious investigation, but in the article it becomes almost a hereditary political instinct travelling effortlessly across centuries. The old Muslim ruling class supposedly reinvents itself repeatedly, turning its class interests into the interests of the entire Muslim community. A genuine class analysis would ask who constituted this class at different historical moments, what its economic basis was, how colonialism altered it, how regional variations operated, how new professional classes emerged and how its relationship with other Muslim social groups changed. Here, however, Ashrāf becomes something of a magic word: say it three times and the whole of modern Muslim politics appears. The same fascination is visible in the author’s earlier writings on Aligarh Muslim University, where he has described AMU as “Allah Miyan’s University”, presented it as a “Succession State of the Mughal empire” and elsewhere called it the “last citadel of the Muslim political power”. These are remarkable descriptions of a modern central university, but they become even more interesting once one knows something about the gentleman writing under the name “Ibn Khaldun Bharati”. For the man behind this pseudonym is himself a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, so the road to this devastating diagnosis of Aligarh passed through Aligarh itself. After graduating from AMU, he proceeded to Jawaharlal Nehru University, that famous “den of Leftists” of contemporary political folklore, and from JNU he entered government service and became an officer of the Indian Police Service. AMU, JNU and the IPS: it is, one must admit, quite a journey.

There is nothing objectionable in any part of it, since AMU and JNU are distinguished universities, whatever criticisms one may make of either, and service in the IPS is an honourable career. The relevance of the biography lies elsewhere. Someone who repeatedly interprets the intellectual failures of institutions and communities cannot reasonably expect his own intellectual formation to be treated as occurring in a vacuum. If AMU is really the intellectual wasteland suggested by these writings, what did it do to him? Who were his teachers, what did he read there, which debates did he encounter and which habits of thought did he acquire? The Aligarh Movement, after all, was founded by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan as a radical model for Muslim education in nineteenth-century India, embracing Western secular learning and the English language despite severe criticism, and its object was to make Muslims progressive. Did the University contribute nothing to the formation of the graduate who subsequently went to JNU and eventually emerged as “Ibn Khaldun Bharati”? JNU makes the story still more delightful. Here is a Muslim graduate of AMU who moves to one of India’s most intensely argumentative universities, enters an elite government service, and later announces that Indian Muslims somehow lack ideological diversity and an intellectual class. His own biography rather inconveniently demonstrates movement between precisely the intellectual worlds whose complexity his argument tries to erase, yet the biography disappears behind the magnificent curtain of “Ibn Khaldun Bharati”.

The use of a pseudonym is publicly acknowledged by the publications which have carried his work. An earlier publication explained that employer rules prevented him from publishing under his real name, while ThePrint has stated that its editors know the writer’s identity and allow the pseudonym, noting that they only permit pseudonyms when they know the writer well. There may therefore have been perfectly understandable professional reasons for the original concealment, but that does not make the resulting asymmetry any less interesting. Syed Shahabuddin has a name. Rajiv Gandhi has a name. Muslim organisations have names. AMU has a name. The ulema have names. The alleged intermediaries have names. Everybody standing in the dock has a name, while only the judge is wearing a mask. This brings us to perhaps the funniest contradiction in an article about “intermediaries”. The author reserves particular disdain for former bureaucrats who seek to become spokesmen or intellectual leaders of Muslims, yet the person writing this diagnosis is himself a government servant, an IPS officer, writing for a major national platform and explaining Indian Muslims to a wider readership. He tells readers what Muslims think, why they behave as they do, which grievances are genuine and which are manufactured, which leaders are legitimate and which are intermediaries, what AMU really represents, what Muslim Personal Law signifies, what Waqf politics means and even what psychological residue of early Islam supposedly remains buried in contemporary Muslim consciousness. What exactly is an intermediary supposed to do that is missing here? One is tempted to ask a rather simple question: who is mediating whom to whom?

The discussion of maslahat provides another example of the article’s method. A complex concept with a substantial history in Islamic jurisprudence is acknowledged as capable of meaning something like strategic prudence or consideration of welfare, only then to be rendered in “unadorned language” as makkāri, deceit. A complicated legal and ethical category thus undergoes an astonishing linguistic transformation, as centuries of jurisprudence enter the machine at one end and makkāri comes out at the other. This is not philology but a conjuring trick. The argument concerning AMU’s minority character suffers from the same tendency. One may support or oppose particular interpretations of AMU’s minority status, but it is not an imaginary controversy manufactured by an Ashrāf cabal. It involves Article 30 of the Constitution, parliamentary legislation, amendments to the AMU Act and a substantial history of constitutional litigation. The Supreme Court has grappled with the question of whether Article 30(1) applies to an institution established before the commencement of the Constitution, and a seven-judge Constitution Bench has deliberated on whether AMU fulfils the parameters of a minority institution under Article 30. To disagree with one interpretation is perfectly legitimate, while to treat the very existence of the dispute as proof of elite manipulation is another matter altogether.

The most disturbing passages come when Muslim society is described as possessing something resembling an army mentality in which departure from collective opinion becomes treason and religious dissent becomes apostasy, potentially exposing the dissenter to death. Again the question that a historian instinctively asks is embarrassingly simple: which Muslims, which country, which region, which class, which organisation, which school of thought, which historical period and which evidence? Once twenty crore people have already been converted into a “unicellular organism”, such tiresome questions cease to matter, and “The Muslim” has replaced Muslims. The tragedy is that underneath all this rhetoric lies a subject that genuinely deserves serious discussion. Muslim political leadership certainly deserves criticism, Muslim institutions require criticism, Waqf administration requires transparency and scrutiny, and here the author could have found genuine common ground with Muslim reformers. The lack of transparency in Waqf management, leading to corruption and misuse of funds, has been a longstanding problem that Muslim reformers themselves have acknowledged, and recent reform proposals have introduced digital portals to record Waqf properties, mandatory financial audits and stricter penalties for irregularities. Muslim Personal Law should be debated, patriarchal interpretations deserve challenge, the disproportionate public prominence sometimes accorded to clerics requires examination, self-appointed spokesmen claiming to represent millions of people should be questioned, and educational and economic problems require far more attention than symbolic controversies. There is nothing anti-Muslim in saying any of this, and Muslims themselves have been saying it for generations.

Indeed, that is precisely why the thesis of intellectual barrenness collapses. Modern South Asian Muslim history is saturated with arguments among Muslims about modernity, theology, nationalism, education, women, law, socialism, capitalism, Pakistan, secularism, communalism and democracy. Deoband argued with Aligarh, Aligarh argued within itself, Shibli differed from Sir Syed, Azad confronted the Muslim League, Muslim communists attacked Muslim communalism, Muslim feminists challenged patriarchy, Asghar Ali Engineer challenged both communalism and religious authoritarianism, and Muslim historians have disagreed with one another about almost every significant question in Indian history. Muslim women have themselves deployed everyday ideas of ethics and bodily practices to challenge inequality in Muslim family law, constructing a just community based upon the ethical ideals of the Quran and rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. One may dislike their conclusions, but one cannot make their existence disappear. There is also something wonderfully circular about the author’s complaint that Left-liberal Hindus have functioned as “attorneys” for Indian Muslims and prevented Muslims from speaking for themselves. This could have led to a serious discussion about representation and access to public platforms. Instead, having complained that others speak for Muslims, “Ibn Khaldun Bharati” spends the remainder of his article telling us what Indian Muslims really think. Apparently they cultivate victimhood, lack ideological diversity, have failed to secularise, lack civil society, remain intellectually shaped by tribal origins, behave collectively like soldiers and are manipulated by Ashrāf intermediaries. At last the Muslim has been allowed to speak, and, remarkably, all twenty crore of them speak through Ibn Khaldun Bharati.

There is a personal dimension to my amusement at all this. This is not my first encounter with the gentleman behind the pseudonym. On an earlier occasion he had written something of a similar order and I responded, raising particular historical questions and challenging his assumptions and evidence. His memorable response was not to answer the questions; he discovered that I had used AI, and that apparently settled the matter. How could I have responded so quickly and in such detail to what he had written? What he forgot was that as some are expert in baton wielding and witch-hunting, I have a decades old experience of wielding a pen! Whether I had used a fountain pen, a typewriter, Microsoft Word, Google, a research assistant or artificial intelligence somehow became more important than whether the arguments I had made were correct. It was a magnificent intellectual manoeuvre: when unable or unwilling to answer the petition, investigate the stationery on which it was written. Months have passed, and I am still waiting for the answers. Perhaps he has been busy, perhaps the original Ibn Khaldun had to be consulted, and perhaps somewhere in an undiscovered manuscript of the Muqaddimah there survives a chapter entitled “On the Proper Response to an Opponent Suspected of Using Artificial Intelligence”. Scholarship requires patience, and I am therefore prepared to wait a little longer.

But the same problem now arises again. Did the Sachar Committee document socio-economic disadvantages or did it not? If its conclusions are wrong, which conclusions are wrong and why? Where do Azad, Mohammad Habib, K. M. Ashraf, Zakir Husain, Nurul Hasan, Irfan Habib, Mushirul Hasan and Asghar Ali Engineer fit into the alleged absence of Muslim intellectuals? How does one describe a population containing communists, liberals, conservatives, feminists, secularists, Islamists and supporters of virtually every major Indian political formation as a “unicellular organism”? What historical mechanism takes us from the tribal society of seventh-century Arabia to an Indian Muslim citizen in 2026 while fourteen centuries conveniently disappear? How exactly does maslahat become makkāri? And if AMU is really a Mughal “Succession State”, what are we to make of the fact that the gentleman making this discovery graduated from it? These are questions of evidence and argument, and “He used AI” is not an answer to any of them. If AI has produced a false quotation, identify it. If a historical fact is wrong, correct it. If Sachar has been misread, demonstrate where. If Shah Bano has been misunderstood, produce the judgement. If my understanding of Ashrāf, maslahat or Aligarh is historically defective, show me the evidence. I would be perfectly happy to be corrected, since that, after all, is what scholarly disagreement means.

But there is another fascinating sociological phenomenon surrounding “Ibn Khaldun Bharati”, and it deserves recording for the benefit of future historians. He has friends. They are a remarkable fraternity, possessing what appears to be a highly developed capacity for seasonal hibernation. For weeks, sometimes months, one hears nothing from them. Universities may decline, historical claims may be distorted, scholarship may suffer and public discourse may descend into absurdity without noticeably interrupting their repose. Then somebody criticises Ibn Khaldun Bharati, and suddenly the forest awakens. One remembers Facebook, another discovers the share button, a third arrives to question the critic’s motives, a fourth becomes deeply concerned about tone, and a fifth, previously indifferent to the historical issue, develops an urgent interest in artificial intelligence. The original questions remain unanswered, but an impressive amount of activity takes place around them, and one almost expects a bugle. Then the danger passes and tranquillity returns, as the defenders withdraw gently into their caves, burrows and other suitable places of intellectual hibernation. Their public presence once again acquires the peaceful stillness of an archaeological mound, until the next article appears, or, more accurately, until somebody questions it. Then spring returns.

This is particularly entertaining in the context of an article lamenting the absence of an intellectual class among Indian Muslims. Apparently such a class exists after all, and its principal intellectual activity merely consists of sharing Ibn Khaldun Bharati and rushing to his defence whenever awkward questions arise. Here, at last, the pseudonym becomes genuinely useful. The original Ibn Khaldun possessed an excellent concept for precisely this sort of group solidarity: ʿasabiyyah. Groups cohere, protect their members, rally around authority and mobilise when challenged. Perhaps our modern Ibn Khaldun has finally provided us with an authentically Khaldunian phenomenon worthy of investigation, not the supposed tribal mentality of twenty crore Indian Muslims but his own little circle of ʿasabiyyah. So when this response circulates, I have one modest request for Ibn Khaldun Bharati and his periodically awakening friends. Please do not begin by asking whether I used AI. Let us save everybody some time and assume that I did. Assume, if it makes the discussion more enjoyable, that ChatGPT sat beside me, fetched the books, supplied the tea, checked the references and occasionally whispered Gramsci into my ear. Now answer the questions.

The real Ibn Khaldun taught his readers to examine societies through structures, interests, solidarities, power and historical change, and he was interested in explanation rather than denunciation. His modern Indian namesake instead gives us tribal origins, an eternal Ashrāf, maslahat transformed into makkāri, a “unicellular” Muslim society and twenty crore people somehow incapable of producing intellectuals. There is something almost autobiographical about the resulting paradox. A man graduates from AMU, proceeds to JNU, enters the IPS and eventually writes behind the name of one of history’s greatest social thinkers to explain that Indian Muslim politics produces former bureaucrats who become intermediaries instead of intellectuals. Sometimes a polemic possesses such perfect internal symmetry that a critic should hesitate before disturbing it. Perhaps the intellectuals whom Ibn Khaldun Bharati seeks were there all along, arguing, disagreeing, teaching, writing, reforming, criticising orthodoxy and criticising one another. Perhaps the difficulty lies not in their absence but in the peculiar spectacles through which he has chosen to search for them. As for me, I remain where I was several months ago, waiting for an answer to the earlier questions, and these new questions can now join the queue. When the hibernating friends next awaken, they too are welcome to answer them. Whether the questions were typed by a human finger, dictated into a telephone, written with a fountain pen or polished with AI will not alter the evidence one little bit, since the answer to an argument remains an argument. Perhaps “Ibn Khaldun Bharati”, having diagnosed the desperate need of Indian Muslims for genuine intellectuals rather than intermediaries, might set an example. He could begin by answering one.

Appendix: A Partial Inventory of the Barren

The question of who constitutes a living intellectual from Aligarh Muslim University is one that “Ibn Khaldun Bharati” might find inconvenient, since the answer rather undermines his thesis of a community-wide intellectual barrenness. The university has produced and sustained a remarkable range of scholars, writers, critics and public thinkers whose work continues to shape debates far beyond Aligarh, and this is nowhere more true than in history, the sciences, medicine and engineering, where the charge of intellectual vacancy becomes not merely unkind but demonstrably false.

Alongside Irfan Habib, who turned ninety-five in August 2026 and remains Professor Emeritus of History, still visiting his chamber at the department two or three times a week to meet colleagues and research students, the university sustains historians whose contributions are foundational. Professor Ishtiyaq Ahmad Zilli taught history at Aligarh Muslim University from 1978 to 2004, specialising in historiography, Muslim religious thought and medieval Indian history, particularly the Delhi Sultanate, before becoming director and secretary of the Darul Musannefin Shibli Academy in Azamgarh, a premier research institute for oriental studies in South Asia; he is the author of The Mughal State and Culture 1556-1598: Selected Letters and Documents from Munshaat-I-Namakin and remains a founding president of the Institute of Qur’anic Studies in Aligarh. Shireen Moosvi had been teaching at the Centre of Advanced Study in History since 1970 and today is a leading member of what is now known as the Aligarh school of historians, combining critical rigour with evolving visions of history; her statistical study of the Mughal empire’s economy in 1595, based on the Ain-i Akbari, remains a landmark of empirical research, and she has published widely on Mughal India and the economic history of colonial times, including People, Taxation, and Trade in Mughal India. Professor Iqtidar Alam Khan retired as Professor of History from Aligarh Muslim University in 1994 and served as President of the Indian History Congress in 1997; his political biographies of early Mughal nobles such as Mirza Kamran and Mun‘im Khan have served as founding pillars for Mughal prosopography, and his later works on India’s polity in the age of Akbar and on gunpowder and firearms in medieval India remain indispensable to the field. He is credited to have streamlined a new field of study, the field of Medieval Archaeology. He was one of the first to use modern scientific methods like satellite imagery in History. Professor Farhat Hasan is an alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University who went on to Cambridge, returned to teach at the Centre of Advanced Study in History at AMU, and now serves as Professor of Medieval and Early Modern South Asian History at the University of Delhi, where he has written on state and locality in Mughal India and was asked to write on Mughal history for NCERT textbooks in 2008. Najaf Haider graduated from Aligarh Muslim University and obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford, subsequently teaching medieval Asian history at the University of Delhi before moving to Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is now Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies working on the history of money, banking and credit in Mughal India. And Professor Muzaffar Alam, who was trained at Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, obtained his doctorate in history in 1977 and went on to become the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, with landmark works on the crisis of empire in Mughal north India and the making of Indo-Persian culture.

In the sciences, medicine and engineering, the charge of intellectual vacancy becomes not merely unkind but demonstrably false. Mohammad Akram, Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, is a distinguished oncologist and researcher whose work focuses on the interface between the human microbiome and cancer, and who is a core member of the Cancer Nanomedicine Consortium at AMU. Professor Syed Moied Ahmed, former Chairman of the Department of Anaesthesiology and In-Charge of the ICU at JNMCH for two decades, is a Commonwealth Fellow who has authored over a hundred and fourteen papers, established the PDCC programme in Critical Care Medicine at AMU, and developed a resuscitation course that has been incorporated into CBSE school textbooks. Lalit Mohan Bariar, who served as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Plastic Surgery at JNMCH, dedicated his career to burns management, maxillofacial trauma and reconstructive microsurgery, mentored generations of surgeons, and published extensively on immunological responses in burn injuries and innovative reconstructive techniques. In the basic sciences, Professor Qudsia Tahseen is Professor of Zoology, a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a recognised authority on nematology whose work has been supported by the Indian National Science Academy. M. Masroor A. Khan, Professor of Botany, has published widely on plant physiology and essential oil-bearing plants, while Professor Shamsul Hayat is known internationally for his research on brassinosteroids, salicylic acid and plant stress responses. In physics, M. Sajjad Athar is a Professor whose work on neutrino physics and nuclear reactions has been presented at international workshops, and Shri Krishna Singh is a Full Professor working on neutrino physics, quark models and electroweak interactions. There are non-Muslims too, but I will name only one or two: B. P. Singh, Professor and Chairperson of the Physics Department, and R. Prasad, Emeritus Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Science, represent the departmental leadership that “Ibn Khaldun Bharati” would presumably classify as evidence of intellectual vacancy.

In chemistry, Farukh Arjmand is a Full Professor whose work on antitumour polymer therapeutics and clinical developments in polymer chemistry has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and Anees Ahmad is Professor of Industrial Chemistry, a product of AMU’s own academic pipeline who has been publishing and teaching in the department since 1987. Zeba N. Siddiqui, Professor of Organic Chemistry, works on green chemistry, heterogeneous catalysis and synthetic organic chemistry, while Dr Inamuddin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Chemistry at Zakir Husain College of Engineering and Technology, has an extensive publication record in analytical and materials chemistry. In engineering, Mohd Hasan has been Professor in the Department of Electronics Engineering since 2005, holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and has published a hundred and seventy-eight refereed papers on low-power architectures and multicarrier systems. Salman Hameed is Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, a Gold Medallist and recipient of the QIP Research Fellowship from IIT Roorkee, whose research spans power systems, artificial intelligence applications, fuzzy logic controllers and nanotechnology in solar PV cells. Dr Md. Rehan Sadique, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, has published over sixty Scopus-indexed papers on finite element analysis, multi-hazard protection of structures and underground construction, and has led sponsored research projects funded by the UGC and the DST-RSF scheme. Dr Tabish Alam, a Senior Scientist at CSIR-Central Building Research Institute who earned his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from AMU, was listed among the top two per cent of scientists globally by Stanford University in 2024 and serves on the editorial board of Scientific Reports. Faisal Talib is Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, with over eighty publications in industrial engineering and total quality management, and Dr Sidra Khanam is an Assistant Professor in the same faculty whose work has been indexed in Scopus and Google Scholar.

The point is not that every one of these figures is beyond criticism, or that their politics are uniformly agreeable, or that the university has no problems worth discussing. The point is that they exist, they research and teach and publish and mentor, and they do so from within the very institution that “Ibn Khaldun Bharati” has described as a Mughal succession state and a citadel of intermediaries. The pattern is difficult to ignore, since Aligarh trained them, Delhi University and JNU housed them, and the wider scholarly world read them. If AMU is really the intellectual wasteland that “Ibn Khaldun Bharati” describes, one wonders why its alumni keep turning up in the history departments of the country’s most competitive universities, publishing books that the rest of the field is obliged to cite, and why its scientists continue to win grants, publish in international journals and appear on lists of the world’s most cited researchers. A thesis of intellectual barrenness requires, at the very least, an explanation of how so many of the barren are still publishing in journals that the rest of the world happens to read.