ASHA: Blast From The Past

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.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

By the time the events narrated in the previous instalment of this series (uploaded a few weeks ago) had run their course, I had learnt something about my academic career. Whenever an opportunity arose to leave Aligarh, I would seriously consider it, seek advice, sometimes apply, occasionally prepare myself to go, and then somehow remain exactly where I was. Perhaps it was indecision. Perhaps attachment. Or perhaps, as I have preferred to call it throughout these reminiscences, it was a call I had not yet learned to recognise properly. I thought destiny was summoning me elsewhere, but all along it was telling me to stay.

The world around me was also changing. Slowly and gradually, most of the teachers before whom we had once sat as students retired. Some passed away. The giants who had dominated the corridors of the Department when I entered it as a young student were disappearing from everyday life. We, who had once been the youngsters, were becoming the seniors, although our official designations did not always keep pace with either our age or our grey hair. We waited for promotions. And we waited.

Aligarh had developed a peculiar philosophy regarding Selection Committees. Other universities appeared to regard them as a routine administrative necessity. At Aligarh they sometimes resembled astronomical events, discussed frequently, predicted confidently, but actually witnessed only after very long intervals.

While waiting for one such celestial occurrence, my telephone rang one evening. I was at home watching television when the caller introduced himself as speaking from Kolkata. He informed me that the Pro Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University wanted to speak to me. That was sufficient to make me sit upright. I was told that a certain Professor, whose name I shall deliberately not reveal, had recommended me for appointment as Professor. Could I come to Kolkata with my original documents by a specified date and join? Literally, I was swept off my feet. A Professorship had arrived over the telephone while I was watching television. After waiting endlessly for Aligarh to hold a Selection Committee, here was Calcutta University asking when I could arrive with my certificates.

I somehow composed myself and requested a day or two to think. The following morning I went, as I had done so many times before at crucial moments in my life, to Professor Irfan Habib. “Sir, what should I do?” He smiled. “Is there something to think? Go and join.” That appeared to settle the matter. Except that it did not. The following day I telephoned Kolkata and politely declined. The gentleman at the other end was astonished. “Do you even realise that this is an opportunity of a lifetime?” “Yes, Sir,” I replied. “I do.”

I then tried to explain why I was refusing an opportunity of a lifetime. There were two reasons. The first was Aligarh’s libraries. By then my research had become so dependent upon Persian sources, manuscripts, rotographs, microfilms, rare books and old journals that I had come to appreciate the extraordinary resources available around me. If I required a particular source, there was a very good chance that it was somewhere in Aligarh. I did not have to travel from city to city hunting for material. The second reason was even more difficult to reproduce elsewhere. At Aligarh there was a living encyclopaedia called Irfan Habib. One could sit with him over an ordinary cup of tea, mention a subject one was thinking about, and within minutes receive a list of sources, references, problems and possible approaches. Sometimes one emerged from such a conversation wondering whether the proposed paper had not already been written in his head. Libraries could perhaps be assembled elsewhere. An Irfan Habib could not. I knew that neither advantage would be available to me in quite the same way in Kolkata. So I stayed. Once again, some friends thought I was being foolish. By then I had considerable experience in being told this.

A few years passed and the wait for further promotion at Aligarh seemed endless. Then Delhi University advertised a Professorship. This time I decided that I would not repeat my old habit of refusing opportunities before they had even had the opportunity to refuse me. Our senior and a fellow student of Professor Habib, Professor Jafri, was then the Chair of the Department. I rushed to apply and prepared seriously for the interview. There were, however, excellent candidates. Almost at the last moment, another candidate applied from the United States. He was very good and was eventually appointed. I had gone into the Selection Committee fully prepared and also sufficiently aware of the competition to understand the result. Academic life should teach one, among other things, that not every unsuccessful interview is an injustice. Sometimes someone else is simply the stronger candidate. I returned to Aligarh. Destiny had once again stamped my passport: DEPARTURE DENIED.

Then came JNU. There was a certain symmetry in this because JNU had already appeared much earlier in my story. As a young academic I had applied there and then, at the last moment, failed to muster the courage to appear for the interview. Decades later, JNU returned for a second attempt. The person then holding charge of the Department encouraged me to apply. Indeed, when I read the required qualifications, I could almost have imagined that someone had prepared them after looking at my CV. They suited my academic profile remarkably well. I applied. Then came the interview. And once again I did not go. There was no great ideological reason. There was no administrative obstacle. No one prevented me. I simply could not bring myself to leave Aligarh. Everyone told me I was foolish. They may well have been right. But by then Aligarh was no longer merely the university which paid my salary. Its libraries contained my intellectual memories. Its corridors carried the voices of my teachers. Its classrooms contained generations of my students. Even its quarrels had become familiar. One may spend years complaining about an institution and still discover, when an opportunity to leave actually arrives, that complaining about home and leaving home are two entirely different things. So JNU came and went for the second time. I remained.

Meanwhile, destiny found another way of promoting me without actually making me Professor. A University Grants Commission Visiting Committee came to evaluate the Centre of Advanced Study in History. I had not applied for any administrative position. In fact, during the Committee’s visit I had argued with some of its members. Apparently the argument did me no harm. On the basis of my CV, the Committee recommended my name for a leading role in the Centre. There was, however, a technical difficulty. I was still a Reader and not a Professor, and therefore, I was informed, they could not recommend me as Coordinator. An ingenious solution was discovered. I would be Deputy Coordinator. Thus, perhaps for the first and last time in its history, the Centre of Advanced Study in History at Aligarh acquired a Deputy Coordinator. Academic bureaucracy is capable of remarkable creativity when sufficiently provoked. I continued to be associated with the Centre through its later years. Eventually, in March 2023, with the completion of its eighth cycle, the Centre of Advanced Study in History came to an end.

Long before that, however, the great Aligarh Selection Committee finally materialised. By then I was counted among the senior most Readers in the Faculty. Years had passed since I had become eligible for promotion. When posts were finally advertised, I applied both for a general Professorship and for Professor under the Centre of Advanced Study, for which I was qualified. The Selection Committee met. I performed well. Indeed, the Vice Chancellor, Lieutenant General Zameeruddin Shah, personally congratulated me and told me that mine had been the best performance. The Selection Committee recommended me as Professor under CAS with effect from 2008, the date of my eligibility. After all those years, the wait appeared to be over. I should by then have known better than to assume that destiny had finished with the script.

Months passed before the results were announced. One day we were conducting a viva voce examination when a clerk entered carrying the selection orders. Names were announced. Mine was not among them. For a few moments I could not understand what had happened. I had appeared before the Committee. I had been recommended. The Vice Chancellor himself had congratulated me and told me that mine had been the best performance. Yet I had not been appointed.

Eventually an explanation emerged. I was told that since I did not possess a PhD when I had originally been appointed Reader, I was somehow not eligible. I protested that the advertisement under which I had been appointed Reader had specifically required either a PhD or qualifications equivalent to a PhD. At that time a PhD was not an absolute requirement. I had been selected and appointed according to the rules then in force. My protestations fell on deaf ears. Thus began my confrontation with Lieutenant General Shah.

Our relations deteriorated further when the University administration turned its attention towards the Aligarh Historians Society. When an attempt was made to “investigate” the Society and restrain it from functioning from the Department of History, my patience finally deserted me. I wrote an angry Facebook post questioning the wisdom of a Vice Chancellor who, in my view, had dared to cast aspersions upon a man through whom the University was known across the academic world. Yes, it was a post which, under ordinary circumstances, I probably should not have written. Anger is an excellent source of energy but a poor editor. My frustration had been building for months. In every meeting the Vice Chancellor had assured me that my performance had been excellent. Yet when the appointment was finally to be made, I believed that he had yielded to a lobby determined to block it, even though the rules, as I understood them, did not prevent my appointment.

My detractors could hardly believe their luck. For years they had perhaps been waiting for me to provide them with ammunition. I had now supplied it myself. A copy of my Facebook post began travelling through the University. I learnt much later that one lady from the Department itself was actually deputed to carry a copy to the Pro Vice Chancellor. Many of these details were revealed to me, with considerable irony, by the former Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor themselves after their tenures had ended. I was summoned. I was asked to apologise. I refused. Flatly.

The matter then reached the Executive Council. There, a person who had been my senior at school, and who would eventually succeed General Shah as Vice Chancellor, delivered an argument of such extraordinary constitutional ingenuity that it deserves preservation. I had criticised the Vice Chancellor. The Vice Chancellor was a retired officer of the Indian Army. Therefore I had criticised a retired officer of the Indian Army. That meant I had criticised the Indian Army. To criticise the Indian Army was to criticise the country. Therefore I was anti national. I assure the reader that I am not making this up. I still retain an audio recording of the speech. A member of the Executive Council recorded it during the meeting, forwarded it to a friend, and it eventually reached me. Today that person occupies a significant position in the University. Even more remarkably, my suspension order contains almost the same charge. I have preserved that document carefully. Some people collect medals. I collect administrative absurdities.

There is another document in this unusual archive. Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Purohit, who had been arrested in connection with the 2008 Malegaon blast case, somehow learnt about my suspension. From jail he wrote to Lieutenant General Shah suggesting that instead of suspending me, he should have called me and settled the matter “over a couple of drinks”. He sent me a copy of the letter. I still remember the day the envelope arrived. We stared at it in considerable puzzlement. It carried endorsements from jail authorities and government officials and looked as though it had passed through half the administrative machinery of the Republic before reaching my house. Whatever else may be said about my suspension, it certainly enriched my personal archive.

The suspension lasted six long months. What followed, however, was something I had never anticipated. Academics across the country spoke out. Professor Romila Thapar and numerous scholars, colleagues and friends condemned what they regarded as the high handedness of the action. Teachers’ associations at universities whose names I had scarcely heard issued statements in my support. Newspapers reported the controversy. Members of civil society also spoke out. Until then I had been known largely within my professional circle, among historians, colleagues and students. The Vice Chancellor solved that problem rather efficiently. Suddenly people across the country knew who I was.

One newspaper account particularly disturbed me. The Indian Express carried a column by Seema Chishti which, as I read it, substantially repeated the Vice Chancellor’s allegations against me. Among these was the claim that I habitually spoke disparagingly of former Vice Chancellors, from Dr Zakir Husain to Hamid Ansari. Those who knew me on campus would have found the allegation rather strange. I had always regarded these men with respect. What troubled me even more was that neither the newspaper nor the journalist had contacted me before publishing the allegations. On Professor Habib’s advice I wrote to both the journalist and the editor giving my side of the matter. I waited for a reply. By then I was an Aligarh academic of many years’ standing. Waiting was one of my strongest professional skills. No acknowledgement came. Nor, needless to say, did an apology.

Eventually, after six months and considerable intervention by friends within and outside the University, my suspension was revoked. Then, towards the end of 2016, the weather began to brighten again. Academic life has peculiar seasons. People who oppose you today may become your supporters tomorrow, while those whom you confidently regard as permanent allies can sometimes demonstrate that permanence is a highly overrated concept. The most remarkable change concerned the very person who had signed my suspension order. By the end of 2016, he had emerged as one of my strongest supporters. Before leaving office, he saw to it that I was given charge of the Department as its Chairman and also that of Coordinator of the Centre of Advanced Study in History. After everything that had happened, there was a delicious irony in this transformation. The administration under which I had been suspended now entrusted me with two of the Department’s most important academic responsibilities. There were, naturally, certain last minute manoeuvres by some friends who were not particularly delighted by this turn of events. Universities are supposed to be institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, but they are also exceptionally good laboratories for the study of human nature. I had spent much of my career studying factions within the Mughal nobility. By this stage I sometimes wondered whether I really needed Persian chronicles for the purpose. A departmental corridor could provide remarkably similar source material. Despite these machinations, I finally received what was my due.

But destiny had reserved an even better joke for me. The man who, as a member of the Executive Council, had delivered that fiery argument linking my criticism of the Vice Chancellor to criticism of the Indian Army and ultimately to anti nationalism was Professor Tariq Mansur. In the years that followed, Professor Tariq Mansur became one of my principal sources of support during my entire tenure at the helm of the Department. Life has a sense of humour which no memoirist can hope to improve upon.

I have always believed that one should remember assistance as carefully as one remembers opposition. It would therefore be unfair to tell the story of my suspension without recording what happened afterwards. The person who had once spoken fiercely against me later supported me as Chairman. The person who had signed my suspension order later helped ensure that I became Chairman and Coordinator. And the Archaeology Section that had been closed was opened again. Perhaps this was reconciliation. Perhaps it was simply the strange rhythm of university life. Or perhaps all of us had grown older and discovered that yesterday’s battles need not determine tomorrow’s relationships. Whatever the explanation, I learnt another useful lesson. In academic life, never write the final footnote about anyone too early.

A few months into my Chairmanship, I received a call from the VC around 7:00 am. “Have morning tea with me at my residence”. I rushed and by 8:00 am he took me in his car to Musa Dakri Museum. “I want to give its charge to you”. There were some from the Museology who were desperate to take the charge themselves. He asked them to come to his office and asked me to sit in the car. I obeyed but as we reached the Library Gate, and I asked him to drop me there, he stopped the car and said “I am getting the order typed in your name”. I requested him not to do so, but get the order typed in the name of the Chairman Department of History. He listened to me intently and asked are you sure? And by afternoon the gentleman holding the charge was removed and me, as Chairman and Coordinator of CAS Department of History also became the Coordinator of Musa Dakri Museum.

When I became Chairman, one matter particularly close to my heart was the revival of the Archaeology Section. Historical archaeology had been part of my academic life almost from the beginning. My work at Fathpur Sikri had grown out of my conviction that historians of medieval India needed to interrogate buildings, landscapes, archaeological remains and material culture alongside chronicles and documents. The Archaeology Section, however, had been closed during Lieutenant General Shah’s tenure. Its revival was therefore particularly important to me. It could not have been achieved by the Chairman alone. Professor Tariq Mansur extended his support and the Section was revived. Something which had been shut down, was brought back to life. His assistance did not stop there. During my tenure we were able to organise an International Seminar on Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and a Symposium on Medieval Archaeology. Both required institutional support, resources and administrative cooperation, and Professor Mansur helped us obtain them.

There was another irony. My suspension itself turned out to have been something of a boon in disguise. For one thing, it provided me with something university teaching rarely gives an active teacher: time. For six months I had no classes and few routine departmental responsibilities. I returned to books I had been intending to read for years. I caught up with scholarship that the demands of teaching, research and administration had forced me to postpone. The University had unintentionally granted me a rather unusual sabbatical. Then came the financial surprise. The salary withheld during the suspension was eventually restored. Not a penny was lost. The accumulated amount proved remarkably useful. It helped towards buying a new car, jewellery for the family and meeting various other expenses. Thus General Shah’s punishment ultimately left me better read, better known and, temporarily at least, with more money in the bank. I remain grateful to him for all three. There is a certain pleasure in discovering that a punishment has failed so comprehensively in its intended purpose.

There are two events which happened during my tenure as the Chairman of the Department: one, my attempt to propose a Chair of Modern Indian History named after Late Mushirul Hasan who had then recently expired due to an accident, and an attempt to get the Board of Studies pass a resolution recommending the position of Professor Emeritus for Professor Shireen Moosvi who had contributed so much for Medieval Indian History and the Department which she had served. Both attempts came to a naught due to a coterie amongst our Faculty. In the first case, the coterie alleged that Mushirul Hasan had harmed JMI, was rabidly “anti-Left” and opposed Irfan Habib! These allegations coming from those who were rabid Left haters was actually quite thing! And then they alleged that as and he “were related”, I was trying to create a Chair in his name! In the second case too, the same persons opposed my move and alleged that I had “vested interests” to propose such a move! What was more interesting was that an old retired professor too expressed his grudge: if at all anyone else was to be elevated as Professor Emeritus after Irfan Habib, why did I not consider his name? It was a good question as he too had done a lot of work!

The years continued to pass. Almost imperceptibly, I had moved from being one of the youngest members of the Department to being among its senior academics. Students now came to me with the sort of questions with which I had once gone to my teachers. Younger colleagues sought advice. Administrative files arrived in quantities which occasionally made me wonder whether becoming senior was really the reward we had imagined it to be. But there was satisfaction too. I had seen the Department change across generations. I had taught students who themselves became teachers. I had watched research interests expand and new approaches enter the discipline. I had been able, during my own tenure at the helm of the Department, to contribute to its academic activities and to revive an Archaeology Section which had particular personal significance for me.

Eventually the journey reached its formal end. When I retired from active service after decades at Aligarh, I was certainly not the same man who had entered the University as an uncertain young researcher. I remembered the young scholar who had once been so embarrassed after delivering a dud speech that he had shaved off his beard. I remembered the research student who had no idea where life was leading him. I remembered Union School, Minto Circle and the brakeless bicycle at Women’s College. And then I remembered all the universities I had almost joined. JNU had called me once when I was young. I did not go. Baroda selected me as Reader. I prepared to leave, bought household goods and almost shifted there. I stayed. Calcutta University virtually offered me a Professorship over the telephone. I declined. Delhi University interviewed me. Someone better was appointed. JNU called again. I applied and once again did not appear. If one looked only at these episodes, my career might appear to be a catalogue of missed opportunities.

I see them differently. Each was a road that might have produced another life. Had I taken the JNU position, had I moved to Baroda, had I accepted Calcutta, or had Delhi selected me, my academic journey would undoubtedly have been different. Perhaps it would have been better. Perhaps worse. History does not provide control experiments. What I do know is what staying gave me. It gave me access to extraordinary libraries and collections. It allowed me to remain within an intellectual environment created by some of the finest historians of medieval India. Above all, it allowed me to remain close to teachers such as Irfan Habib, whose advice over a cup of tea could sometimes save weeks of wandering through the wrong sources. It gave me generations of students. It gave me colleagues, friends, opponents and, occasionally, people who managed to occupy all three categories at different moments. It gave me battles I would rather not have fought, but also the satisfaction of having survived them.

Aligarh frustrated me, promoted me, delayed me, suspended me, restored me, made me Chairman, and occasionally drove me nearly mad. But it also made me. That, perhaps, is why I could never quite leave. The young man who had once wondered whether he would ever secure a permanent job had eventually spent an entire professional lifetime in the same institution. The teachers before whom he had once nervously presented his work were gone or retired. The student had become the teacher, the Lecturer had become the Professor, and eventually the Professor had reached the end of his formal service.

Through all those twists and turns, one thing had remained remarkably constant. Whenever another road opened before me, something kept pulling me back towards Aligarh. For years I thought I was repeatedly refusing destiny’s call, battling against the current of my own career, forever saying no to what the universe seemed to be offering. Looking back, I realise that I had misunderstood the summons entirely. I had been listening for a voice that would carry me away, when all along a quieter, more persistent voice had been speaking from the very ground beneath my feet. I had mistaken departure for destiny and arrival for accident. The truth was far simpler and far more profound.

Destiny had never really been calling me away. It had been telling me, all along, to stay. And so I did. I stayed through the frustrations and the promotions, through the suspensions and the restorations, through the battles that I would rather not have fought and the satisfactions that made every struggle worthwhile.

Now that my formal service to the Department has ended, I find myself contemplating what comes next. The official designation of Professor may have been retired, the administrative files no longer arrive on my desk, and the classroom no longer summons me at appointed hours. But the call, I have come to understand, was never really about a job or a position. It was about something far more enduring. It was about a place that had shaped me so completely that even if destiny were to carry me to the farthest corner of the earth, it would find that it could not take Aligarh out of me. The students I have taught, the colleagues I have worked alongside, the corridors I have walked for decades, and the spirit of this institution that has become woven into the very fabric of my being, these will remain close to my calling for as long as I live.

In academic life, I have often reminded myself, never write the final footnote about anyone too early. Perhaps the same holds true for one’s relationship with an institution. My formal service may be over, but the story remains unfinished. The footnote has not yet been written. There will always be students to guide, scholarship to pursue, and memories to cherish. The Department of History at Aligarh will always be home, not because I never left, but because even if I do, a part of me will forever remain within its walls. The call I had mistaken for departure was never really asking me to go. It was asking me to belong, to commit, to become inseparable from the place that had made me what I am. And that, I now understand, was the only destiny that mattered.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

There are periods in the history of a university when the office of Vice-Chancellor demands considerably more than administrative competence, requiring instead intellectual stature, moral courage, political judgement and, above all, the ability to understand what an institution requires at a particular historical moment. For Aligarh Muslim University, no moment was more precarious than the immediate aftermath of Partition, when India had been divided amid terrible communal violence, millions had been uprooted, relations between communities had been poisoned, and Muslims who had chosen India as their country faced uncertainty about their place in the new Republic. AMU confronted an additional difficulty because important sections of its students and teachers had supported the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan during the preceding decade, rendering the University itself politically suspect in the eyes of many. It was at this extraordinary moment, in November 1948, that Dr Zakir Husain assumed office as Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, remaining there until September 1956, and his task was not simply to administer a university but, in a very real sense, to secure its future in independent India.

The significance of his appointment becomes clearer when one remembers who Zakir Husain was, for he was not someone who discovered Indian nationalism after Partition made political choices unavoidable; his nationalist credentials went back to the struggle against colonial rule. He had been educated at Aligarh, but as a young man responded to the intellectual and political ferment created by the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements, and out of precisely this atmosphere emerged Jamia Millia Islamia at Aligarh in 1920, conceived as a nationalist educational institution independent of colonial patronage. Mahatma Gandhi strongly supported the experiment, and although Gandhi and Zakir Husain cannot simply be described as the two founders of Jamia – its establishment involved such eminent figures as Maulana Mahmud Hasan, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Muhammad Ali Jauhar, Dr Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari and Abdul Majeed Khwaja – Gandhi’s moral support was fundamental, and Zakir Husain subsequently became one of the principal architects of the institution. Jamia itself remembers this history as part of the nationalist movement and of the attempt to construct an education simultaneously Muslim in cultural inheritance and uncompromisingly Indian in political allegiance.

After pursuing higher studies in Germany and receiving his doctorate, Zakir Husain returned to India in 1926 and threw himself into the struggle to keep Jamia alive, for the institution was passing through an acute financial crisis, and he and his colleagues accepted extraordinary personal sacrifices, committing themselves to work for modest salaries so that the institution would survive. Gandhi remained one of Jamia’s strongest supporters and, when its financial condition became desperate, famously expressed his willingness to go about with a begging bowl if that was what was required to sustain it. This experience is essential to understanding Zakir Husain’s subsequent role at Aligarh, for the man who came to save AMU in 1948 had already spent much of his adult life saving another university. But there was a still deeper connection, for Jamia embodied a particular conception of Indian Muslim nationalism, and for Zakir Husain, there was no contradiction between being deeply rooted in Muslim intellectual and cultural traditions and being unequivocally committed to a plural India; his nationalism, unlike that of many of his later successors, did not require the abandonment of Muslim identity, just as his commitment to Muslim education did not require political separatism. At a time when Partition appeared to have rendered these identities mutually exclusive, Zakir Husain’s own life demonstrated that they were not, and that was precisely what Aligarh needed.

The University had suffered severely from Partition, with teachers and students migrating to Pakistan, established academic networks disrupted, enrolment declining and older sources of financial support weakening, but more damaging still was the crisis of confidence. AMU carried the burden of its recent political past, and because Aligarh had been an important arena of Muslim League mobilisation during the 1940s, critics could now ask whether a Muslim University had any legitimate place in a secular Indian Republic after the creation of Pakistan; this was not merely an administrative problem but an existential one. The survival of AMU during the immediate violence of 1947–48 was not, of course, the achievement of Zakir Husain alone, for he had not yet become Vice-Chancellor when Partition occurred, and the Government of India took important measures to protect the campus, with Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad all playing roles in ensuring that the institution was not overwhelmed by the passions of the time, while local political figures also intervened and the University continued teaching despite the extraordinary disruption around it. What Zakir Husain subsequently accomplished was something different, for he gave the institution that had physically survived Partition a purpose for surviving it; he neither denied Aligarh’s past nor permitted it to remain imprisoned by that past, recognising that AMU had to redefine its relationship with independent India without surrendering its historical and cultural personality. It needed to rebuild its faculty, restore academic standards, regain public confidence, secure financial stability and convince the new Republic that Aligarh could become an asset rather than a political liability, and his answer to the crisis was therefore reconstruction rather than defensiveness.

Zakir Husain’s understanding of the task was remarkably sophisticated, and in a letter to President Rajendra Prasad in July 1950, he described the work at Aligarh as involving one of the fundamental problems confronting Indian statesmanship: the creation of integrated nationhood in a secular democratic state, believing that successful work at Aligarh could restore confidence among Indian Muslims and help establish their secure place within the Republic. The importance of this conception cannot be exaggerated, for Zakir Husain saw saving AMU and consolidating Indian secular democracy as undertakings that were not separate; if a university so closely identified with Muslim intellectual and political history could flourish within independent India while retaining its distinctive inheritance, the Republic would have demonstrated that citizenship did not require cultural homogenisation, and equally, AMU itself had to demonstrate that its future was in India. Zakir Husain articulated the same idea at the University’s Convocation in December 1951, explaining why he had left his long association with Jamia to accept responsibility at Aligarh, for there was work of national significance to be undertaken there, and the task was connected with nothing less than building integrated nationhood within a secular democratic state. Those words acquire their full meaning only when placed against the background of the time, when Partition was barely four years old, refugee camps and abandoned homes remained visible reminders of what had happened, families had been divided across the border, Kashmir had already brought India and Pakistan into conflict, and Indian Muslims were repeatedly being asked, explicitly or implicitly, to demonstrate where their loyalties lay. At precisely this moment the Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University was asserting, through both words and actions, that their future was here.

Zakir Husain understood that noble declarations would mean little unless accompanied by institutional reconstruction, for AMU had lost teachers, students and resources, and its reputation could be restored only through academic excellence. He therefore worked to rebuild its faculty and intellectual life, and his years were associated with the recruitment or strengthening of an impressive range of scholars, where what mattered was scholarly distinction rather than communal identity; Aligarh had to become again a university to which serious scholars wished to come and where serious scholarship could flourish. This was itself an important statement about the kind of institution AMU was to become, for a university accused of political separatism would demonstrate its national character not by repudiating its inheritance but by opening itself to intellectual excellence and participating fully in the academic life of India. Zakir Husain also had to negotiate the University’s relationship with the central government, because without stable financial support, rhetoric about reconstruction would have been meaningless; the Government of India assumed increasing responsibility for the institution, while the Aligarh Muslim University Act of 1951 provided a new statutory framework, and the University that had entered independence under a cloud of political suspicion was gradually becoming securely embedded within the institutional structure of the Republic. There was nevertheless nothing narrowly utilitarian about Zakir Husain’s conception of a university, for laboratories and classrooms mattered, but so did libraries, archives, manuscripts and the preservation of inherited knowledge. One relatively small appointment made during his vice-chancellorship illustrates this dimension particularly well: in 1954, Saiyid Sibtul Hasan was appointed to the University Library and placed in charge of its Manuscripts Section, bringing with him considerable knowledge of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, having earlier been associated with important manuscript collections, and his work at Aligarh contributed to the organisation and preservation of a collection that would become one of the University’s greatest scholarly assets. Today, the Manuscripts Division of the Maulana Azad Library preserves one of India’s important collections of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, alongside works in several other languages, and the appointment of a manuscript specialist may have appeared a small administrative decision amid the immense political and financial problems confronting the University, but in retrospect it reveals something important about Zakir Husain’s understanding of institution-building: a university is saved not merely by keeping its doors open but by investing in knowledge that may bear fruit decades later. His tenure also witnessed important developments in the University’s library infrastructure, and on 6 November 1955, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone of the new University Library building, subsequently named the Maulana Azad Library, so that a university whose survival had seemed uncertain only a few years earlier was once again building confidently for generations to come.

One measure of the transformation was the remarkable range of national and international personalities who came to Aligarh during Zakir Husain’s vice-chancellorship: President Rajendra Prasad delivered the Convocation Address in December 1951, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur laid the foundation stone of the Institute of Ophthalmology in 1952, Nehru came for the foundation ceremony of the Library in 1955, and King Saud bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia visited AMU in December of that year. Then, in February 1956, came one of the most memorable international visits of Zakir Husain’s tenure, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, accompanied by Queen Soraya, visited Aligarh Muslim University, where an honorary Doctor of Laws degree was conferred upon him; the distinction in the name is important because it was Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi who visited AMU, not his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had abdicated in 1941 and died in 1944. The visit had particular resonance for an institution with such deep connections to the Persianate intellectual world, and Professor Hadi Hasan welcomed the Shah in Persian on behalf of the Students’ Union and reportedly impressed him greatly, while there are also recollections of Saiyid Sibtul Hasan showing manuscripts to the Iranian royal visitors in the presence of Vice-Chancellor Zakir Husain. The episode beautifully brings together several strands of his vice-chancellorship, for a scholar whom he had appointed to care for manuscripts was displaying Aligarh’s Persian intellectual inheritance to the monarch of Iran, while the University that only a few years earlier had been uncertain of its future was once again receiving international dignitaries. These visits should not be dismissed as ceremonial trivia, because universities express their standing partly through the intellectual and political networks in which they participate, and Aligarh under Zakir Husain was once again becoming a place to which presidents, prime ministers, monarchs, scholars and statesmen came; the institution had returned to the national and international stage.

The achievement becomes still more striking when we remember that Zakir Husain was performing this work not as an observer standing outside the trauma of Partition but as an Indian Muslim who had lived through it; in September 1947, at the height of the communal catastrophe in Delhi, he participated in discussions concerning refugees and communal violence and had first-hand knowledge of the desperate conditions prevailing in refugee camps, and he knew what communal hatred had done to India. His answer was not communal counter-mobilisation but citizenship, and this perhaps constitutes the deepest significance of his Aligarh years. Zakir Husain did not ask Muslims to forget what had happened in 1947, nor did he ask India simply to forget the complicated political history of Aligarh during the preceding decade; instead, he refused to allow either a community or an institution to remain permanently imprisoned by its past, for history had to be acknowledged but the future had to be built. In this sense there is an extraordinary symmetry between Jamia and Aligarh in Zakir Husain’s life: in the 1920s, he helped sustain Jamia Millia Islamia because nationalist Muslim education needed an institution, and in 1948, he came to Aligarh because Aligarh needed a nationalist Muslim educationist. The first task required sacrifice and the second required reconciliation. At Aligarh he had to persuade a wounded Muslim community that its future lay fully within India, while simultaneously demonstrating to a wounded India that an institution bearing the name Muslim University was not an alien remnant but part of the intellectual wealth of the Republic. He possessed unusual qualifications for doing so: he could speak to Nehru, Azad and Rajendra Prasad as a fellow nationalist, he could speak to Muslims as someone deeply rooted in their cultural and educational traditions, he could speak to academics as a serious educationist, and he could speak to students with the authority of a man who had himself sacrificed professional comfort for an educational ideal. His nationalism was therefore neither ceremonial nor retrospective; it had been tested before independence through Jamia and the national movement, and it was tested again after independence through Aligarh.

Zakir Husain’s conception of institutional protection was notably capacious, extending beyond shielding Aligarh from external majoritarian pressures to encompass the safeguarding of minorities within the Muslim community itself, for he understood that a university committed to pluralism could not afford to replicate hierarchies or exclusions within its own gates. The delicate fabric of India’s Muslim population was woven from diverse sectarian threads, and a genuinely national institution had to respect and accommodate that internal diversity; in a gesture that spoke volumes about his commitment to this principle, Zakir Husain sanctioned the construction of a substantial structure for the Nazim of Shia Theology, a building that came to be known as Bayt us Salat, situated just behind the modern Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge, to serve as a dedicated space for the community’s religious functions and prayers. This was not a grand public proclamation but a practical, behind-the-scenes decision that nevertheless carried profound symbolic weight, affirming that the university’s Muslim identity was not a monolithic or sectarian one but an inclusive umbrella under which different traditions of Islamic faith and practice could find a home and flourish. In an era when the very existence of a Muslim university was being questioned, Zakir Husain was quietly ensuring that within that university, no Muslim minority would feel marginalised or unseen, thereby demonstrating that his vision of citizenship and belonging was not merely theoretical but was being enacted in the very bricks and mortar of the institution he was rebuilding.

When Zakir Husain relinquished the vice-chancellorship in September 1956, AMU was a very different institution from the one whose leadership he had assumed eight years earlier: it had survived the immediate consequences of Partition, its academic life had been rebuilt, its relationship with the Government of India had acquired greater stability, its library and scholarly collections were developing, distinguished visitors once again came to its campus, and most importantly, the fundamental question had changed so that the debate was no longer primarily whether Aligarh had a place in independent India but what contribution Aligarh would make to independent India. Zakir Husain subsequently became Governor of Bihar, Vice-President of India and, in 1967, the third President of the Republic and the first Muslim to occupy that office, and his elevation to the presidency carried a symbolism difficult to miss, for the educationist who had helped demonstrate that Muslim cultural identity and Indian nationalism were compatible eventually became the constitutional head of the Indian Republic. Yet among all the distinctions that subsequently came to him, his years at Aligarh deserve a special place, for he entered the Vice-Chancellor’s office when the institution was vulnerable, politically suspect, financially insecure and uncertain of its future, and he left behind a university whose position and boundaries within independent India had been substantially secured. He had not achieved this alone, for Nehru, Azad, Patel, Rajendra Prasad, members of the University community and many others played important roles in AMU’s survival and reconstruction, but Zakir Husain supplied something that government assistance alone could never provide: leadership possessing credibility both within the University and beyond it. That is why Zakir Husain belonged to a generation for whom the Vice-Chancellorship was not merely an office to be occupied but a responsibility to be discharged, and when Aligarh most needed such a Vice-Chancellor, Zakir Husain was there.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for the present as well, for AMU may once again be passing through a moment when it needs a Zakir Husain, not because the circumstances of today can remotely be equated with the catastrophe of Partition, but because institutions periodically reach moments when ordinary administration is insufficient and they require leadership of intellectual stature, unimpeachable integrity, administrative courage and moral authority, leadership capable of placing the interests and reputation of the institution above personalities, factions and transient considerations. Today, when controversies surround the University’s administration and serious charges and counter-charges are being voiced concerning those at the helm of affairs, what Aligarh needs above everything else is credibility: leadership that commands confidence not merely by virtue of holding office but through scholarship, transparency, conduct and the ability to bring a divided university community together. Allegations, however serious, must of course be established by evidence and due process rather than treated as proven merely because they are loudly repeated, but when questions multiply around an administration, institutional confidence itself can become a casualty.

The circumstances of 1948 and those of today are profoundly different, and history should never be forced into easy parallels, yet one principle survives the comparison: great institutions emerge from crises when the people entrusted with them become larger than the crisis itself. Zakir Husain understood this, for he inherited an Aligarh weakened by Partition and helped restore its confidence, intellectual standing and place in India; he did not seek to become larger than the University but used the authority of his office to make the University larger than its immediate troubles. The manner in which he conducted himself during those eight years also left an enduring imprint on the University’s moral fabric, for he was not a Vice-Chancellor who governed from a distance, issuing memoranda and receiving reports, but one who was visibly present in the life of the campus, accessible to students and faculty alike, and attentive to the small details that together constitute the texture of institutional culture. His personal probity was beyond question, and in an environment where cynicism about leadership can easily take root, his example served as a quiet but persistent reminder that public office was ultimately a form of public trust; he did not cultivate a personality cult or surround himself with sycophants but built teams, delegated responsibility and trusted colleagues to do their work, intervening only when principle or necessity demanded it.

This style of leadership, rooted in humility and sustained by an unshakeable commitment to the ideals of education, proved remarkably effective in binding together a community that had been fractured by the traumatic events of Partition, so that students who had been divided by political allegiances found themselves united by a common purpose, and teachers who had been uncertain of their futures found renewed meaning in their scholarly pursuits; the Vice-Chancellor had not erased their memories or demanded that they abandon their pasts, but he had given them a future worth working towards.

It is also worth reflecting on the particular quality of Zakir Husain’s patriotism, which was neither defensive nor aggressive but quietly confident in the possibilities of the Indian experiment, for he did not believe that India needed to become a homogenised nation-state in the European mould where cultural differences were subsumed into a single national identity; rather, he saw the Republic’s strength precisely in its capacity to accommodate diversity within a framework of shared citizenship. His work at Aligarh was therefore not merely about saving a university but about demonstrating that a plural, secular democracy could thrive in a country as diverse as India, and the fact that he succeeded in this endeavour, against considerable odds, is a testament not only to his own extraordinary qualities but also to the resilience of the idea of India itself, for what he proved through the quiet and persistent labour of reconstruction was that the wounds of Partition, however deep, need not be permanent, and that communities which had been set against each other could find common ground in the shared project of nation-building.

Looking back from the vantage point of the present, it is difficult to overstate the magnitude of what Zakir Husain accomplished during his tenure at Aligarh; he took an institution that was on the verge of being written off, an institution that carried the burden of a complicated political legacy, and he transformed it into a thriving centre of learning that once again commanded respect and admiration, doing so not by abandoning the University’s Muslim character but by redefining it in terms that were compatible with Indian nationalism, and not by compromising on academic standards but by insisting that excellence was the only reliable foundation for lasting reputation. His achievement was all the more remarkable because it was accomplished with a minimum of fanfare, through patient and persistent effort rather than dramatic gestures, and the University that he left behind in 1956 was not the same institution he had taken over eight years earlier; it was stronger, more confident and more securely anchored in the life of the nation.

Yet the full significance of his legacy extends beyond the institutional boundaries of AMU, for Zakir Husain’s years at Aligarh constituted a living demonstration of the proposition that Indian Muslims were not aliens in their own country but full and equal citizens of the Republic, entitled to the same rights and responsibilities as any other community. At a time when this proposition was being contested, when doubts and suspicions were rife on both sides, his work at Aligarh provided a powerful counter-narrative to the forces of division; the University itself, by surviving and flourishing, became a symbol of the possibility of reconciliation, a testament to the idea that the wounds of history could be healed through the patient work of education and institution-building, and Zakir Husain, by embodying this possibility in his own person and in his leadership, helped to create the conditions in which Indian Muslims could once again feel that they had a stake in the future of their country.

It is also worth noting that his vision for Aligarh was never narrowly parochial but always informed by a broader concern for the health of Indian democracy as a whole, for he understood that the fate of a minority institution was intimately connected to the fate of the Republic itself, and that the security of Muslims in India depended not on special privileges or exemptions but on the strength and vitality of India’s secular institutions. His work at Aligarh was therefore part of a larger project of consolidating Indian democracy, of building the kind of society in which citizenship mattered more than community, and in which every individual, regardless of faith, could pursue their aspirations without fear or favour; this was a vision that was both idealistic and pragmatic, rooted in a deep faith in the Indian people and a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges that lay ahead.

The relevance of Zakir Husain’s example for the present moment cannot be easily dismissed, however much the circumstances may have changed, for contemporary India, like the India of 1948, faces profound questions about the meaning of citizenship, the place of minorities and the character of the nation itself. These questions are being debated with increasing intensity, and the answers that are given will shape the future of the Republic for generations to come; in this context, the life and work of Zakir Husain offer a powerful reminder that leadership matters, that institutions can be saved and transformed through the exercise of vision and courage, and that the idea of India, properly understood, is capacious enough to accommodate the full diversity of its people. His example also reminds us that the work of nation-building is never complete, that each generation must renew the commitment to pluralism and democracy, and that the ultimate test of leadership lies not in the accumulation of power but in the building of institutions that can outlast any individual.

When Zakir Husain left Aligarh in 1956 to take up the Governorship of Bihar, he carried with him the gratitude of a university community that had been given a second chance, but he also left behind a legacy that would continue to inspire future generations; the institution he had helped to save would go on to produce scholars, scientists, administrators and leaders who would contribute to every sphere of Indian life, and its reputation would continue to grow as a centre of learning and excellence. The foundations he had laid, in terms of academic standards, institutional governance and moral integrity, would prove enduring, and the example he had set would serve as a beacon for those who followed in his footsteps; his years at Aligarh were not merely an episode in his own distinguished career but a defining moment in the history of the University and, indeed, in the history of modern India.

Perhaps the most fitting tribute to Zakir Husain’s memory is to recognise that the work he began at Aligarh remains unfinished, as all great work must remain, awaiting the commitment of new generations to carry it forward, for the challenges that confront Indian education today are different from those of the immediate post-Partition period but they are no less urgent, and they demand no less in terms of vision, courage and integrity. The universities of India, and particularly those that serve minority communities, continue to face questions about their identity, their purpose and their relationship to the nation, and the answers to these questions will not be found in slogans or in the empty rhetoric of politics but in the patient and dedicated work of education, scholarship and institution-building. In this work, the example of Zakir Husain remains as relevant as ever, a reminder of what is possible when leadership is informed by principle and sustained by conviction. He saved AMU when it needed to be saved, not through any single act of heroism but through the accumulated weight of countless decisions, gestures and commitments, each one informed by a clear vision of what the University could become; he gave it not only a future but a purpose, not only security but a sense of its own worth, and in doing so he demonstrated that the highest form of leadership is not the exercise of power but the service of an ideal, and that the truest measure of a life is not the offices it holds but the institutions it builds and the lives it touches.

Zakir Husain’s Aligarh years stand as a testament to these enduring truths, and they will continue to inspire those who believe in the transformative power of education and the promise of a plural, democratic India; the University that he helped to save remains today a living monument to his vision, a place where the ideals he cherished are kept alive in the hearts and minds of each new generation of students and scholars, and as long as Aligarh Muslim University continues to fulfil its mission of education and service, the spirit of Zakir Husain will endure, a quiet but powerful presence in the life of an institution that owes him so much.

In him there is a great lesson for his present day successors to learn.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Jayanta Sengupta’s recent essay in The Telegraph, “History Lessons“, (Published 14.09.26, 07:42 AM) reflects upon the passing of a remarkable generation of historians from Bengal. His five chosen figures, Ranajit Guha, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Ashin Das Gupta, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Sumit Sarkar, certainly constitute an extraordinary intellectual constellation. Sengupta himself makes it clear that his selection is personal rather than exhaustive. Indeed, no list of five, ten or perhaps even twenty names could adequately represent the richness of historical scholarship that Bengal produced during the second half of the twentieth century.

The names Sengupta has chosen are, as he acknowledges, a personal selection rather than a comprehensive roll call, and any such list inevitably leaves out scholars whose contributions have been equally foundational. We might think, for instance, of the late Professor Amales Tripathi, whose chronicling of the national movement remains indispensable to students of modern India, or the late Professor B.N. Mukherjee, who opened up hitherto uncharted territory in Kushana studies. The nonagenarian Professor Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, still living in Calcutta, redefined the agrarian history and the history of the adivasis of eastern India in the late precolonial and colonial periods. The late Professor Rajatkanta Ray showed us new avenues in the interpretation of modern India’s social, political and economic history, while the late Professor B.D. Chattopadhyaya established, with enduring scholarship, the beauty and complexity of early medieval India. And the late Professor Amiya Kumar Bagchi, an archetypal economic historian, widened our understanding of colonialism in British-ruled India. To remember one generation is not to forget the others who shaped the discipline

There are, however, two historians whom students of medieval and early modern India in particular would immediately wish to bring into this conversation: Professor Aniruddha Ray and Professor Sushil Chaudhury. They deserve to be considered together for more than the accident of being contemporaries. Both were associated with the Department of Islamic History and Culture at the University of Calcutta. Both devoted much of their scholarly lives to the centuries between the Delhi Sultanate and the beginnings of British colonial domination. Both recognised the extraordinary value of European archival records for writing Indian history. Both saw Bengal not as an isolated regional unit but as part of much wider networks of commerce, politics and cultural interaction.

There was yet another institution which connected them, namely the Indian History Congress. For historians of their generation the Congress was not simply an annual conference at which one occasionally presented a paper. It constituted one of the principal institutions of the historical profession in India. Both Ray and Chaudhury contributed to its proceedings, participated in its institutional life and eventually received its highest distinction through election to its General Presidency. Yet they were by no means historians of the same kind.

Aniruddha Ray possessed an unusually wide field of vision. The Delhi Sultanate and its administrative institutions, Mughal administration, medieval Bengal, urbanisation, archaeology, technology, European travellers, merchants, maritime commerce and the French East India Company all came within his range. Sushil Chaudhury was more consistently an economic historian, although his interests eventually extended deeply into politics and society. His great subjects were Bengal’s commercial economy, its merchants and bankers, the European companies, Asian trading networks and the circumstances surrounding the British conquest of Bengal. Read together, their scholarship reconstructs something often obscured by the retrospective shadow of British rule: the extraordinary vitality of the political, economic and urban world of eastern India before colonialism.

Aniruddha Ray belonged to a generation for whom serious historical research meant, among other things, the acquisition of languages and the willingness to move between different categories of evidence. Born in Calcutta in 1936, he studied at Presidency College and went to the Sorbonne in 1964, returning with his doctorate in 1967. The following year he joined the Department of Islamic History and Culture at Calcutta University, where he taught until his retirement in 2001. His years in France gave him access to French archives comparatively neglected by Indian historians. But it would be misleading to identify Ray simply as a historian of the French in India. His scholarly interests stretched backwards to the Delhi Sultanate and forward into the eighteenth century, and geographically from Delhi to Bengal and from the Indian interior to the maritime world. What held this apparently disparate scholarship together was his determination to understand historical institutions in their social and material settings.

One important dimension of Aniruddha Ray’s scholarship which deserves much greater recognition is his contribution to the history of the Delhi Sultanate and its administrative structure. For generations the history of the Sultanate had frequently been organised around dynastic succession: the Mamluks or so-called Slave dynasty, the Khaljis, Tughluqs, Sayyids and Lodis. Political history consequently tended to become the history of rulers, wars, rebellions and dynastic change. Ray did not discard political history. But he insisted that the Sultanate had to be understood as a functioning historical system. His work therefore directed attention towards the nature of Sultanate rule, its ideology of kingship, central administrative departments, revenue and land arrangements, urbanisation, commerce, technology, architecture, social formations and religious movements.

This represented an important methodological shift. The question was no longer simply what Alauddin Khalji or Muhammad bin Tughluq did. It was also what kinds of institutions made government possible, how the State mobilised resources, how land and revenue were organised, how political authority interacted with society, and what material and technological structures sustained the Sultanate. Two of Ray’s important books need to be recalled in this connection: his Bengali work Madhyajuger Bharater Itihas: Sultani Amal and, above all, his major English synthesis The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture. The latter is especially revealing of his mature approach. Its first part reconstructs the political and dynastic history from the Ghurian conquest through the Lodi dynasty. But the second half deliberately changes the angle of vision. Here Ray examines the structure and ideology of Sultanate rule, departments of government and land relations, followed by trade and shipping, urbanisation, architecture and sculpture, science and technology, social life and religious movements. Thus the Delhi Sultanate emerges not merely as a succession of Muslim dynasties ruling from Delhi but as a complex political and social formation. That was also Ray’s answer to the old colonial representation of medieval India as a “dark age”. Political conflict could not constitute the totality of a civilisation. One had to reconstruct its institutions, cities, commerce, technologies, architecture, social relationships and intellectual life before making judgements about its historical character.

Another field in which Aniruddha Ray made a substantial contribution was administrative history. This was not a subsidiary interest arising out of his later work on the Delhi Sultanate. As early as 1984 he published Some Aspects of Mughal Administration, a work which became familiar to generations of students of medieval Indian history. Conceived in a form useful to students while at the same time engaging seriously with the problems of Mughal government, its chapters began with “The Mughal Concept of Sovereignty” and “The King and the Business of State”, before moving through the central and provincial administrative machinery, the mansab and jagir systems, revenue administration, officials, the nobility and related institutions. Administration, in his treatment, was therefore not simply a vocabulary of wazirs, diwans, bakshis, mansabdars, jagirdars and faujdars. The larger question was how the Mughal State actually worked.

This concern with the functioning of the medieval State eventually found an important counterpart in his study of the Delhi Sultanate. His The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture, published in 2019, extended this institutional approach backwards. It was consciously written as more than another dynastic narrative. Its second part began specifically with “Structure of Sultanate Rule: Nature, Ideology, Departments, Land”, before proceeding to commerce, urbanisation, architecture, technology, society and religion. There is thus an important continuity in Ray’s scholarship which deserves greater emphasis. He was a historian of administration before he became so prominently identified with cities, French commerce and the archaeology of Gaur. His work on Mughal administration and his later synthesis of the Delhi Sultanate belong to the same intellectual endeavour: an attempt to move beyond chronicles of rulers and battles towards an understanding of the institutions through which medieval Indian States exercised authority and interacted with society.

This also helps us understand the extraordinary breadth of his later scholarship. Ray could move from the imperial secretariat to the marketplace, from the mansab and jagir to merchants and shipping, and ultimately from written administrative records to the physical landscape of Gaur. These were not disconnected interests. They represented different ways of answering a common historical question: how did the political, economic and urban structures of medieval and early modern India actually function?

And yet Ray was never content to remain inside the secretariat. He moved from institutions to merchants, from revenue to cities, from political authority to technology and, most strikingly, from written documents to the archaeological landscape. That movement is nowhere more visible than in his work on Gaur.

If Ray’s work on the Delhi Sultanate demonstrates his concern with political institutions, his engagement with Gaur, the great medieval capital of Bengal, reveals another and perhaps less widely appreciated dimension of his historical method. Here Ray did not simply read chronicles describing a vanished capital. He went to the site. Gaur was one of the greatest cities of medieval eastern India. For a considerable period it served as the political centre of the independent Bengal Sultanate and remained an important centre into the sixteenth century. Yet the historian attempting to understand Gaur confronts a peculiar problem. The city survives not as a continuously inhabited urban organism but substantially as an enormous archaeological landscape. Mosques, gateways, tombs and other monumental remains are visible. But the monumental architecture represents only part of the historical city.

Where did ordinary people live? Where were the markets? How extensive were the habitation zones? How were different parts of the city connected? What can pottery, bricks, tiles, inscriptions, coins and surface remains tell us that political chronicles cannot? And how did the changing riverine environment affect the growth and eventual decline of the city? These questions demanded a different kind of historical investigation. Ray became deeply involved in the exploration and archaeological survey of Gaur. The work was collaborative and interdisciplinary. Historians and archaeologists examined the surviving urban landscape, conducted reconnaissance and sector-wise exploration, recorded surface material and attempted to relate archaeological evidence to textual sources. The objective was not simply to catalogue monuments. It was to recover the city.

That distinction is fundamental. A monument can be studied as an individual architectural object. A city requires the historian to understand spatial relationships: habitation, roads, markets, water systems, fortifications, religious structures, industrial activity, environmental setting and the relationship between monumental and non-monumental spaces. The Gaur project therefore sought evidence of settlement patterns and material culture across the larger walled city. Pottery scatters, glazed tiles, bricks, inscriptions, coins and other archaeological remains could indicate areas of occupation that had disappeared completely above ground. The archaeological survey thus provided evidence for the lived city that neither the great mosques nor the chronicles could adequately recover. For Ray this was an extension, rather than a rejection, of textual history. The written record and the archaeological record had to interrogate one another.

The intellectual outcome of this collaborative enterprise was especially visible in the 2012 special issue of Pratna Samiksha: A Journal of Archaeology, devoted entirely to Gaur: The Medieval City of Bengal, c. 1450–1565. The significance of that volume deserves emphasis. It was not a conventional collection of essays on the political history of the Bengal Sultanate. It was an attempt to reconstruct a medieval city by bringing together history, archaeology, environmental evidence, settlement studies, epigraphy, numismatics and the scientific examination of building materials. Ray’s intellectual presence ran through the volume. He provided an overview of the archaeology of medieval Bengal, reconstructed the dynastic framework of Gaur, examined its economic formation and contributed directly to the analysis of the city itself. Other contributors examined Gaur’s historiography, its pre-medieval background, environment and settlement pattern, newly discovered inscriptions and coins, glazed tiles and the technology of glazed bricks from Gaur and Pandua. This was precisely the kind of interdisciplinary history towards which Ray’s scholarship had increasingly moved. The city could no longer be reconstructed solely from the Persian chronicle. Nor could archaeology be reduced to the description of monuments. The two had to meet.

The importance of the Gaur project becomes clearer when placed alongside Ray’s wider work on Indian urbanisation. He was interested in why cities emerged, what sustained them and why they declined. Political patronage obviously mattered. A capital attracted officials, soldiers, artisans, religious establishments, merchants and service groups. But political command alone could not explain the life of a major city. Gaur required an economic hinterland. It required supplies of food and raw materials. It participated in networks of trade. It possessed craft production. It depended upon waterways. Its physical expansion was conditioned by the peculiar riverine environment of Bengal. Thus the rise and decline of Gaur could not be understood merely by saying that one dynasty replaced another or that a capital was transferred elsewhere. The environment itself had a history. Rivers shifted their channels. Routes of communication changed. Areas that were commercially advantageous in one period could become difficult to sustain in another. This sensitivity to the interaction between politics, economy, environment and urban space was one of Ray’s most valuable contributions to medieval urban history.

Gaur also needs to be seen within Ray’s larger engagement with urban history, culminating in Towns and Cities of Medieval India. His canvas there was remarkably wide: Delhi, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Shahjahanabad and Lahore appeared alongside Surat, Goa, Calicut, Cochin, Golconda, Bijapur, Burhanpur, Patna and the cities and ports of Bengal. Ray challenged, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the old image of pre-colonial India as overwhelmingly rural and of its cities as artificial creations of royal courts. The medieval Indian city was not simply where the Sultan or emperor happened to reside. Cities were centres of manufacture, commerce, administration, pilgrimage and cultural production. Artisans, merchants, bankers, officials, soldiers, religious specialists and labourers produced an urban life extending beyond the court. The work at Gaur gave this larger argument an archaeological foundation. It demonstrated that the historian of the medieval city must sometimes leave the archive and walk across the abandoned city itself.

Another Aniruddha Ray emerges when we turn towards European commerce. His monumental The Merchant and the State: The French in India, 1666–1739 was perhaps the fullest expression of his engagement with French archival material. But the larger subject was not simply the French East India Company. It was the relationship between commerce and political authority in early modern India. European merchants could not simply arrive, establish factories and conduct commerce on whatever terms they wished. They required permissions, concessions and protection. They depended upon Indian merchants, brokers, financiers, artisans and suppliers. Commerce was not external to politics. Nor was the State omnipotent. Merchants possessed resources, information and networks that rulers required. Commercial communities crossed political frontiers. Credit connected distant markets. Ray consequently helped recover a seventeenth-century India in which Europeans were participants rather than masters. We know that Plassey occurred in 1757. The people of seventeenth-century India did not. That distinction is essential to Ray’s historical world.

This brings us back to Jayanta Sengupta’s essay and particularly to Ashin Das Gupta. Das Gupta transformed our understanding of Indian Ocean commerce by placing merchants, ports, Asian commercial communities and networks of trust at the centre of the story. Ray and Chaudhury occupied adjoining historical territories. Ray’s French merchants moved through this Asian commercial world. Chaudhury’s Bengali, Armenian, Dutch and English merchants inhabited it. Das Gupta’s Indian Ocean connected their histories. But Ray added another dimension. He could move from a French commercial document to the administrative structure of the Delhi Sultanate, and from there to the archaeological surface of an abandoned medieval capital at Gaur. That extraordinary range should form an essential part of our assessment of him. He was a historian of texts who understood the value of objects. He was an administrative historian who became an urban historian. He was a historian of Bengal who understood that Bengal belonged to an Indian Ocean world. And he was a historian of European commerce who never allowed Europeans automatically to become the protagonists of Indian history.

If Aniruddha Ray’s great strength was the breadth of the worlds he explored, Sushil Chaudhury’s achievement lay particularly in the depth with which he reconstructed Bengal’s commercial economy. His scholarly career extended for more than half a century. His Trade and Commercial Organization in Bengal, 1650–1720, published in 1975, already announced many of the questions that would occupy him throughout his life. What made Chaudhury’s scholarship particularly important was the archive upon which it rested. He did not depend exclusively upon the records of the English East India Company. He made extensive use of Dutch records preserved at The Hague. This changed the perspective. Read only through English records, the English Company can easily become the protagonist of Bengal’s commercial history long before it actually possessed political supremacy. Dutch evidence made such assumptions much harder to sustain. The economy of Bengal was larger than any European company.

This became one of Chaudhury’s most important historiographical interventions. Colonial historiography had frequently represented eighteenth-century Bengal as a society already moving towards economic and political collapse before Plassey. Such a picture served an obvious explanatory purpose. If Bengal was already disintegrating, British conquest could appear as the consequence of indigenous decline. Chaudhury challenged this interpretation. His research into companies, merchants, commodities, textile production, prices, credit and commercial organisation led towards a very different conclusion: mid-eighteenth-century Bengal remained one of the richest and most commercially dynamic regions of the contemporary world. Its textiles commanded international markets. Its merchants possessed capital and commercial expertise. Its banking networks were sophisticated. Indian and Asian merchants remained important participants in inland and overseas commerce. The British did not conquer a commercial wasteland. They acquired control over one of the great manufacturing and commercial regions of early modern Eurasia.

Chaudhury also challenged the assumption that European companies progressively displaced indigenous merchants from long-distance trade. Indian, Armenian and other Asian merchants remained formidable commercial actors. They possessed advantages Europeans could not easily reproduce: local knowledge, access to credit, relationships with producers and political authorities, and commercial networks extending across regions and seas. Chaudhury’s work on Armenian merchants was particularly valuable because the Armenians cannot easily be fitted into histories organised around modern national boundaries. Their presence reminds us that early modern commerce cannot be reduced to a binary encounter between “India” and “Europe”. The Bay of Bengal was not a boundary separating India from the outside world. It was one of the great highways connecting them.

Chaudhury’s interest in commerce naturally took him towards bankers and financiers, especially the Jagat Seths. The great banking house of eighteenth-century Bengal stood at the intersection of commerce, credit and politics. Rulers required credit. Revenue had to be transmitted. Merchants needed bills of exchange. European companies required advances. Financial history consequently became political history. This brought Chaudhury directly to the problem of Plassey. He resisted explanations that treated British conquest as the inevitable consequence of a decaying indigenous order. Siraj-ud-Daulah, Mir Jafar, the Jagat Seths, the English East India Company and other political and commercial interests had to be reconstructed within the specific conjuncture of 1757. Plassey was not the inevitable triumph of modernity over medievalism. It was a contingent political event produced by military power, commercial interests, financial networks, court politics and betrayal.

There was another arena in which the scholarly lives of these two historians converged, namely the Indian History Congress. Both were associated with it over decades. For historians of their generation the annual Congress was not simply an occasion for ceremonial speeches. Research was brought before a national community of historians. Arguments were challenged. New evidence was presented. Young scholars encountered established historians. Sectional Presidential Addresses reviewed entire areas of scholarship, while the annual Proceedings created a cumulative record of the development of Indian historiography. Aniruddha Ray occupied several positions in the Congress before being elected General President in 2011. This was recognition of an unusually wide-ranging scholarly career: Sultanate administration, Mughal institutions, Bengal, urbanisation, technology, archaeology, merchants, maritime trade and European companies. His relationship with the Congress is particularly appropriate because his scholarship itself resisted narrow compartments. A paper on medieval Bengal could become an intervention in the national debate on urbanisation. A study of administration could raise larger questions about the nature of the medieval State. Archaeological exploration at Gaur could contribute to discussions about Indian urban history as a whole.

Sushil Chaudhury likewise had a long relationship with the Congress. He served as President of the Medieval India Section and contributed repeatedly to its Proceedings on Bengal’s commerce, shipping and the transition towards British political power. Eventually he too was elected General President, for the 79th session. He died in January 2019 before he could preside over the session. But he had already completed his General Presidential Address, “Overland Trade vis-à-vis Overseas Commerce: Which Enjoyed Primacy? Early Modern Era.” It was read posthumously when the Congress met at Bhopal. There was something extraordinarily appropriate about that final address. A historian who had spent his life reconstructing merchants, markets, shipping, credit and commercial networks ended his scholarly journey by returning to one of the fundamental questions of early modern economic history: the relationship between inland and overseas commerce.

Perhaps we should therefore speak cautiously of another strand within the celebrated historical tradition of Bengal. It was not the Subaltern Studies tradition associated with Ranajit Guha. It was not primarily the history of nationalism associated with Sumit Sarkar. Nor was it identical with the intellectual and economic history represented by Tapan Raychaudhuri. It was a historically grounded reconstruction of the institutional and material world of medieval and early modern India: States and administrative systems, merchants and bankers, cities and ports, ships and textiles, monuments and pottery, European companies and Asian commercial networks. Ashin Das Gupta was one of its greatest practitioners. Aniruddha Ray and Sushil Chaudhury unquestionably belong within that larger constellation.

All three shared another quality increasingly worth remembering. They took evidence seriously. They learnt languages because the sources demanded them. They entered archives because assertions had to be tested against documents. And, in Ray’s case at Gaur, when the written archive could take the historian only so far, he went out into the field with archaeologists and other historians to examine what remained upon and beneath the ground. That is an important expansion of what we mean by the historian’s craft. The archive is not always a room filled with paper. Sometimes the archive is an abandoned city. A scatter of pottery can be evidence. A change in brick technology can be evidence. A coin, an inscription, the alignment of a ruined wall, the location of a water body and the changing course of a river can all become historical documents when the right questions are asked of them. The Gaur project embodied precisely this understanding.

This brings us finally to the larger concern of Jayanta Sengupta’s essay. The importance of the generation he remembers does not lie simply in the fact that its members wrote famous books. It lies in a particular conception of what being a historian required. One had to learn languages. One had to enter archives. One had to read documents produced by people whose assumptions were radically different from one’s own. One had to submit one’s findings to criticism by other historians. And sometimes one had to leave the library altogether, walk across the remains of an abandoned medieval city, examine its walls, pottery, coins, inscriptions and landscape, and ask whether the material evidence confirmed what the texts appeared to say.

Aniruddha Ray and Sushil Chaudhury belonged emphatically to that scholarly culture. Ray moved between the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal administration, between Persian India and French archives, between Bengal’s commercial networks and the ruins of Gaur. Chaudhury followed Bengal’s merchants and textiles through Indian, English and Dutch records and reconstructed an economy whose vitality could not easily be reconciled with inherited assumptions about eighteenth-century decline. And both brought their scholarship repeatedly to the Indian History Congress, the institution that provided Indian historians with perhaps their most important national forum for presentation, criticism and debate.

Neither historian needed to make the past resemble the present. They attempted instead to recover a world whose inhabitants did not yet know what was going to happen to them. The merchants of seventeenth-century Bengal did not know that Plassey was coming. The Sultanate official did not imagine the Mughal Empire that would succeed his political world. The inhabitants of Gaur could not foresee that their magnificent capital would one day become an archaeological landscape. The French and Dutch companies did not know that their English competitor would eventually become a territorial sovereign. The historian does know. The historian’s responsibility is nevertheless to resist allowing that knowledge to predetermine the story. That is what the best historical scholarship does.

And that is why, when we remember the remarkable constellation of historians Bengal gave to modern India, Aniruddha Ray and Sushil Chaudhury deserve places of their own. Their long association with the Indian History Congress adds another dimension to their legacy. They were not simply authors of books read within specialised fields. They were participants in, and ultimately leaders of, a national community of historians committed to the patient reconstruction of India’s past. In remembering them, therefore, we remember not merely two outstanding Bengali historians. We remember a particular culture of doing history: archival and archaeological, multilingual and interdisciplinary, argumentative yet collegial, and always grounded in evidence.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

A recent lecture in Pakistan reportedly dismissed Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s edition of Abu’l Fazl’s Āʾīn-i Akbarī as virtually worthless. A brief mention of it was made in a social media post. This judgement, if actually made during the course of the lecture, is historically unfair and methodologically questionable. Although the full lecture is to be heard before a comment is made on it, yet a pioneering nineteenth-century scholarly undertaking cannot be assessed solely by the conventions of a modern critical edition, and to do so is to commit the kind of anachronism historians normally warn their students against. Here, instead of the lecture, I will confine myself to assess the endeavours of Saiyid Ahmad Khan.

Before Sir Syed (as he is popularly known) became primarily associated with Muslim educational and social reform, he was deeply engaged with the monuments, inscriptions, documents and Persian historical literature of Mughal India. His Āsār al-Ṣanādīd belongs to this antiquarian world, and his work on the Āʾīn emerged from the same intellectual milieu. Abu’l Fazl’s text presented formidable editorial problems. Its administrative regulations, numerical tables, revenue statistics, geographical information and technical vocabulary made accurate transmission unusually difficult. Copyists could easily corrupt figures, names and technical expressions, while tables were especially vulnerable to displacement and error. Sir Syed published his edition in 1855, making the work far more accessible at a time when manuscripts remained scattered in private and institutional collections and modern Persian textual criticism in India was still developing. Printing such a large and technically difficult work widened its circulation and helped transform an elite manuscript tradition into a historical source that scholars could cite, compare and examine systematically.

The judgement must nevertheless become more qualified. Sir Syed’s edition cannot be treated as a critical edition in the modern philological sense. A modern editor would identify and describe all manuscripts used, establish their dates and relationships, record significant variants in an apparatus and explain editorial interventions. Sir Syed provided no such transparent textual apparatus. This matters greatly in the case of the Āʾīn. When manuscripts disagree over a literary sentence the consequences may be limited, but when they disagree over the assessed revenue of a sarkār, the number of cavalry attached to a mansab, a price or a statistical total, a single scribal error can materially change the historian’s conclusion. The printed page can therefore create an illusion of certainty. Sir Syed transformed a fluid manuscript tradition into a fixed printed text, but the fixing of the text did not necessarily resolve all the textual uncertainties lying behind it.

It would, however, be unfair to conclude that Sir Syed simply reproduced an available manuscript mechanically. His undertaking involved substantial scholarship. He was deeply familiar with Persian, Mughal institutions and the physical remains of Mughal India, and his antiquarian interests gave him an unusual sensitivity to historical terminology, places, buildings and institutions. Sir Syed belonged to a generation standing at the intersection of two traditions. Behind him lay the Persianate world of the munshi, the maulavi, the calligrapher and the manuscript collector; before him was emerging the modern world of printed texts, archaeology, epigraphy and institutional historical research. His edition of the Āʾīn belongs precisely to that transitional moment, and it is best described as more than a reproduction of a manuscript but less than a critical recension in the modern philological sense.

The limitations of his edition become clearer when placed beside the subsequent scholarship associated with Henry Blochmann. Blochmann represented a further stage in the critical study of the Āʾīn. His English translation of the first volume, published in the Bibliotheca Indica series in 1873, together with his extensive notes, transformed the study of Abu’l Fazl for European and subsequently Indian historians. Yet we should be wary of constructing a crude progression in which a supposedly traditional Sir Syed was simply superseded by scientific European scholarship. Blochmann himself worked within an Indo-Persian scholarly environment upon which European Orientalism depended heavily. Manuscripts had to be located, read and compared; difficult Persian expressions had to be understood; administrative terminology required explanation; names and places had to be identified. Indian maulavis, munshis, copyists and manuscript owners formed an indispensable part of this intellectual infrastructure. Sir Syed therefore belongs within the genealogy of modern Āʾīn scholarship rather than outside it.

There is also a fascinating intellectual episode associated with the edition. Sir Syed asked Mirza Ghalib to write a taqrīẓ, the conventional laudatory notice, for his edition. Ghalib did something quite different. His Persian poem effectively questioned the value of expending so much scholarly labour upon recovering Akbar’s administrative world when the British had created a radically different order based upon new forms of knowledge, science and technology. He wrote that Sir Syed had done something like freeing a servant who was already free, and urged him to look at the Sahibs of England and the laws and rules they had made. The episode is sometimes treated merely as an amusing encounter between two great nineteenth-century figures. It was considerably more significant. Ghalib was confronting Sir Syed with a question that would soon dominate his own intellectual life: what should knowledge of the past be for? The Sir Syed who edited the Āʾīn was deeply immersed in recovering Indo-Muslim civilisation; the later Sir Syed increasingly turned towards education, science and engagement with modern European knowledge. Ghalib’s refusal to provide uncomplicated praise thus seems almost to anticipate Sir Syed’s subsequent intellectual transformation.

From the standpoint of the historian, however, Ghalib was wrong in one important respect. The value of editing the Āʾīn cannot be measured by whether Akbar’s institutions could be resurrected in nineteenth-century India. Sir Syed was preserving the documentary foundations through which an entire historical civilisation could subsequently be reconstructed. The great twentieth-century scholarship on Mughal administration and economy, from W. H. Moreland and Jadunath Sarkar to M. Athar Ali, Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib, asked questions Sir Syed had not asked and subjected the evidence to forms of criticism he had not developed. Yet those historians inhabited, in part, a scholarly landscape that nineteenth-century editors such as Sir Syed had helped to create. There is therefore a certain irony in dismissing his edition from the vantage point of a mature modern historiographical tradition.

We can now return to the methodological problem of Abu’l Fazl himself. It has become customary to describe him as an imperial historian, and the description is correct, but it can become misleading when allowed to do too much explanatory work. Abu’l Fazl was unquestionably an ideologue of Akbar’s sovereignty, and his presentation of Akbar and the ordering of the empire must be read within that political and intellectual context. But it does not follow that the factual and statistical material contained in the Āʾīn was invented by Abu’l Fazl in order to glorify the emperor. Much of it rested upon the actual records of the Mughal administration. Abu’l Fazl had access to the documentation maintained by the imperial revenue establishment, including the kāghaz-i khām, the working papers or primary revenue records made available to him through the clerks of the revenue department. The figures incorporated into the Āʾīn were therefore not simply literary representations of an ideal empire. They were derived from the bureaucratic documentation through which that empire assessed, recorded and collected its revenues.

This distinction is fundamental. A figure may represent assessment rather than actual collection, and the historian must establish which it represents. The historian must distinguish between at least three separate stages in the history of the evidence. First, what did the Mughal revenue record originally contain? Second, how did Abu’l Fazl select, organise and reproduce that information in the Āʾīn? Third, how accurately was Abu’l Fazl’s text subsequently transmitted through manuscripts and eventually reproduced by editors such as Sir Syed? Confusing these stages produces unnecessary scepticism. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the Āʾīn is precisely the conjunction of ideology and bureaucracy. Abu’l Fazl’s imperial vision was not constructed in opposition to administrative information; in significant measure, it was constructed through the organisation of administrative information. The enumeration of revenues, resources, officials, horses, crops, prices and territories was itself part of the representation of an ordered imperial polity. The statistics are therefore simultaneously bureaucratic evidence and components of an imperial discourse.

Sir Syed’s edition should neither be canonised nor dismissed. As textual criticism, it has been superseded. Its manuscript base and editorial principles are insufficiently explicit by present standards; it lacks the critical apparatus we would now expect; and individual readings, particularly numerical and tabular ones, should where necessary be checked against manuscript evidence and later editorial work. As nineteenth-century scholarship, however, it was a considerable achievement. Sir Syed recognised the extraordinary historical importance of Abu’l Fazl, undertook the difficult labour of bringing a vast and technically complicated Persian work into print and helped transform an elite manuscript tradition into a historical source accessible to a much larger scholarly community. As an intellectual event, it is more interesting still, capturing Sir Syed at a transitional moment between the recovery of Indo-Muslim civilisation and the later turn towards educational and social reform.

To ask why Sir Syed did not produce the sort of critical apparatus expected of a modern editor is legitimate. To judge the entire scholarly value of his undertaking by his failure to meet standards that had yet to become established is another matter. Sir Syed’s Āʾīn-i Akbarī is not the last word on Abu’l Fazl. It was one of the important early words in the modern scholarly recovery of Abu’l Fazl. Textually superseded does not mean historically insignificant. Editorial imperfection does not amount to scholarly incompetence. Sir Syed’s edition remains a landmark in the history of Indian historical scholarship: pioneering in its own time, limited when measured against subsequent advances, but indispensable for understanding how the modern study of the Mughal Empire itself came into being.