ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

October holds a singular place in the history of the modern world. It is remembered not merely as a month of political change, but as the month associated with two revolutions that transformed the very language of politics. On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong stood at the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Tiananmen Square in Beijing and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Thirty-two years earlier, in October 1917 according to the calendar then in use in Russia, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had seized power in Petrograd. Between them, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions redrew the political map of the twentieth century and shaped the lives, hopes and struggles of hundreds of millions of people far beyond their own borders.

There is, of course, a small calendrical irony in describing both as October revolutions. The Bolshevik seizure of power took place on 25 and 26 October 1917 according to the Julian calendar, corresponding to 7 and 8 November in the Gregorian calendar. Soviet Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, yet the name ‘October Revolution’ endured, and its anniversary continued to be celebrated on 7 November. The Chinese event, by contrast, belongs quite literally to October. On 1 October 1949, after decades of political upheaval, foreign intervention, Japanese invasion and civil war, Mao proclaimed the birth of a new state. The date remains China’s National Day.

The two revolutions were separated by more than three decades and emerged from very different historical circumstances. They should certainly not be treated as repetitions of one another. Yet a remarkable historical thread connects them. The Russian Revolution created the first durable state founded in the name of Marxist socialism, while the Chinese Revolution demonstrated how revolutionary Marxism could be reworked within the conditions of a predominantly agrarian Asian society. Together they shifted the centre of gravity of modern political history away from Western Europe and demonstrated that societies regarded by the imperial powers as peripheral could themselves become makers of world history.

Russia, 1917: A Revolution Born of War

The Russian Revolution cannot be understood apart from the catastrophe of the First World War. Imperial Russia entered the conflict burdened by enormous social inequalities, unresolved agrarian tensions, a rapidly expanding but increasingly restless industrial working class and an autocratic political order that had survived the Revolution of 1905 without adequately addressing its causes. The war sharpened every one of these contradictions. Military defeats, millions of casualties, shortages of food and fuel, inflation and administrative breakdown steadily eroded the authority of Tsar Nicholas II and the regime over which he presided.

The February Revolution of 1917 began with demonstrations over bread shortages and strikes in Petrograd. When soldiers who had been ordered to suppress the demonstrations instead joined them, the foundations of the monarchy collapsed with remarkable speed. The three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end, but the revolution did not resolve the questions that had produced it. The Provisional Government continued Russia’s participation in the war and postponed the redistribution of land, while soviets, councils representing workers and soldiers and, increasingly, peasants, emerged as alternative centres of political authority. Russia found itself living under the uneasy arrangement that came to be known as ‘dual power’.

Into this unsettled situation Lenin returned from exile in April 1917. His April Theses, demanding an end to the war and the transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’, initially appeared extraordinarily radical, even to some members of his own party. Yet the continuing war, the failure of the government’s military offensive and the Kornilov affair steadily weakened the Provisional Government. By September, the Bolsheviks had secured majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, while Leon Trotsky had become chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.

The October Revolution followed. Bolshevik-led soldiers, sailors and Red Guards, acting through the Military Revolutionary Committee, occupied bridges, railway stations, telegraph offices and other strategic points in Petrograd before taking the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was sitting. At almost the same moment, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets assembled and endorsed the transfer of power. The new government quickly issued its Decree on Peace, calling for an end to the war, and its Decree on Land, recognising the seizure of landed estates by the peasantry.

What occurred during those extraordinary days subsequently became one of the most fiercely contested questions in modern historiography. For its supporters, October represented the transfer of political power to workers and peasants and the opening of a new chapter in human history. For its critics, it represented the seizure of power by a disciplined revolutionary minority and the beginning of a process that eventually produced a one-party state. The dissolution of the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk and the bitter civil war that followed between 1918 and 1921 added further dimensions to this debate. The emancipatory hopes released by October and the coercive structures that subsequently developed both belong to its history.

Yet the significance of 1917 cannot be measured simply by what later happened within the Soviet Union. The Revolution almost immediately altered political expectations throughout the world. Ideas that had previously circulated mainly amongst intellectuals, socialist organisations and labour movements were suddenly associated with an actual state. Land redistribution, workers’ rights, public ownership, universal education and social welfare no longer appeared merely theoretical possibilities. A political experiment had begun which, whatever its subsequent trajectory, could not be ignored.

This had consequences even within societies that rejected communism. One of the striking paradoxes of twentieth-century history is that the challenge presented by socialism contributed to the transformation of capitalism itself. Labour legislation, trade-union rights, social insurance, public health, unemployment protection and the welfare state developed for many different reasons, and it would be simplistic to attribute them solely to the Russian Revolution. Nevertheless, they developed in a world in which governments and economic elites could no longer ignore organised labour or the attraction exercised by socialist alternatives. In this sense, the Russian Revolution influenced not merely those who followed it, but also those who feared and opposed it.

Its international importance was equally profound. The Bolsheviks openly denounced imperialism and colonial domination, and in 1919 established the Communist International, or Comintern, which sought to link revolutionary movements across national boundaries. Soviet practice was frequently more complicated than Soviet rhetoric, but the ideological consequences were immense. Colonised peoples could now imagine their struggles against empire as part of a much wider transformation of the world. From China and Vietnam to India, Africa and Latin America, socialism and communism became intertwined, in varying degrees and forms, with movements for national liberation.

China, 1949: Revolution Moves East

If Russia demonstrated that an apparently formidable imperial order could collapse, China transformed both the geography and the social composition of revolution. The Chinese Revolution emerged from a very different historical experience, but it too was born amidst the disintegration of an older political order, foreign intervention and the search for a new basis of national sovereignty.

The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911, but the Republic that replaced it failed to produce either political stability or effective national unity. China remained fragmented by warlordism while continuing to suffer from unequal treaties, foreign concessions and extraterritorial privileges. The May Fourth Movement of 1919, provoked in part by the Versailles settlement and the transfer of former German rights in Shandong to Japan, radicalised a generation of Chinese students and intellectuals. Some increasingly turned towards Marxism, encouraged by the example of the Russian Revolution. It was within this atmosphere that the Communist Party of China was founded in 1921.

Its road to power was neither simple nor inevitable. An early alliance with the Kuomintang ended violently in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Communists and thousands were killed. Driven from the great cities, the Communists gradually rebuilt themselves in rural areas. It was in these circumstances that the Chinese revolutionary movement began to depart significantly from the classical expectation that the urban industrial proletariat would necessarily constitute the principal force of socialist revolution.

China remained overwhelmingly rural. Under Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders, the peasantry therefore moved increasingly to the centre of revolutionary strategy. The countryside rather than the industrial city became the crucial arena of political mobilisation. Land redistribution, peasant organisation and guerrilla warfare were combined into a revolutionary strategy adapted to Chinese circumstances. Marxism was no longer simply being transplanted from Europe; it was being reshaped by the realities of rural Asia.

The Long March of 1934–35 subsequently acquired an almost foundational position within Chinese Communist memory. It was in reality a desperate military retreat, undertaken at enormous human cost, but it enabled the Communist movement to survive and helped consolidate Mao’s leadership. From the new base at Yan’an, the Communists subsequently participated in resistance to the Japanese invasion, strengthening the nationalist dimensions of Chinese Communism. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, civil war resumed between Communist forces and the Kuomintang. The decisive Communist victories of 1948–49 eventually forced Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government to retreat to Taiwan.

Then came 1 October 1949. Standing at Tiananmen before an immense gathering, Mao formally proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. It was the culmination of a revolutionary process extending across decades, although fighting continued in some regions afterwards. A country exhausted by war, invasion, fragmentation and civil conflict had entered an entirely new political and social experiment.

The consequences extended far beyond China. A country containing roughly one-fifth of humanity had undergone a revolutionary transformation, and an event of such magnitude could hardly remain a purely Chinese affair. It altered the international balance of power and, particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, became one of the defining developments of the early Cold War.

For many societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, however, the significance of the Chinese experience went deeper. It appeared to demonstrate that revolutionary transformation did not necessarily have to reproduce the Russian experience. A predominantly agrarian society subjected to foreign intervention and economic underdevelopment could develop its own revolutionary strategy. The peasant could become as important to revolutionary politics as the industrial worker. Across the colonial and post-colonial world, some movements attempted to reproduce Maoist methods while others emphatically rejected them, but few could entirely ignore the Chinese example.

Revolution, Emancipation and Their Contradictions

To commemorate a revolution is not necessarily to romanticise it. Revolutions are rarely tidy historical events, and neither the Russian nor the Chinese Revolution can adequately be understood through heroic imagery alone. Both generated immense hopes and produced remarkable transformations, but both also created systems capable of considerable coercion and human suffering.

The Soviet experiment brought enormous advances in literacy, education, scientific research and industrialisation. The Soviet peoples also bore an immense human burden in the defeat of Nazi Germany. At the same time, Soviet history witnessed forced collectivisation, devastating famine, political repression, the Great Terror and the vast system of labour camps known as the Gulag. Particularly under Stalin, millions experienced displacement, imprisonment, persecution or death. The hopes generated by 1917 therefore existed alongside the coercive institutions subsequently constructed by the Soviet state.

China presents its own set of contradictions. The Revolution unified most of a country that had endured decades of war and foreign intervention and initiated sweeping transformations in landholding, education, public health and social relations. The Marriage Law of 1950 sought to transform the position of women by challenging forced and arranged marriages and strengthening women’s rights within marriage and divorce. Literacy and life expectancy subsequently increased substantially. Yet land reform itself involved considerable violence, while the Great Leap Forward produced a catastrophic famine and the Cultural Revolution brought persecution, political chaos and enormous damage to individuals, institutions and cultural heritage.

These contradictions do not diminish the historical importance of either revolution. Rather, acknowledging them allows us to understand revolution as history rather than mythology. Human beings made these revolutions, and like other human undertakings they contained aspiration and sacrifice, achievement and violence, emancipation and coercion, hope and tragedy.

The Revolutions, the Colonial World and India

Perhaps one of the most enduring consequences of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions was their effect upon the colonial imagination. Before 1917, European imperialism appeared to many contemporaries almost permanent. A relatively small number of European powers controlled or dominated vast territories in Asia and Africa. Colonialism was routinely justified through theories of racial hierarchy and the supposed civilising mission of Europe, while colonised peoples were often represented not as makers of history but merely as its objects.

The revolutions of the twentieth century helped unsettle this intellectual order. The Russian Revolution challenged the legitimacy of imperialism at the level of political ideology. The Chinese Revolution added another dimension. Here was one of the world’s oldest civilisations, subjected through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to unequal treaties, foreign concessions, invasion and political fragmentation, asserting its sovereignty through a revolutionary transformation. Whatever one’s judgement of the political systems that followed, the psychological consequences for colonised societies were considerable. European supremacy no longer appeared inevitable, and history could clearly move in another direction.

India’s relationship with these developments was particularly rich and complex. Indian communists naturally drew inspiration from the Russian Revolution, but its influence reached far beyond the organised communist movement. M. N. Roy participated in debates within the Comintern and disagreed with Lenin on important questions concerning colonial strategy. Bhagat Singh and his comrades read Lenin and other socialist writers closely. Rabindranath Tagore, during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1930, was deeply impressed by the effort to extend education amongst ordinary people, although he retained reservations about political regimentation. Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and followed its experiment with considerable interest. His later thinking about economic planning and state-led development formed part of a much broader international debate about alternatives available to societies emerging from colonial rule.

The Chinese Revolution, arriving only two years after Indian independence, posed a somewhat different set of questions. India was among the first non-communist states to recognise the People’s Republic of China. During the following decade the two countries attempted to fashion a relationship around Asian solidarity and the Panchsheel principles of peaceful coexistence. The optimism surrounding this relationship was badly damaged by the border conflict of 1962, but the comparison between Indian and Chinese paths of development remained an important feature of post-colonial intellectual debate.

India did not adopt either the Soviet or Chinese political model. It chose constitutional parliamentary democracy and developed a mixed economy. Yet debates about land reform, Five-Year Plans, public-sector industrialisation, labour rights, mass education and social equality took place within an international intellectual environment that had been profoundly altered by the events of 1917 and 1949. The impact of these revolutions, therefore, extended well beyond communist parties or states.

Two Revolutions, Two Paths

The differences between the Russian and Chinese experiences are as revealing as their similarities. The Russian Revolution began within one of Europe’s great imperial capitals and its decisive seizure of power occurred within a remarkably short period. The Chinese Communists, by contrast, eventually triumphed after more than two decades of struggle in which the countryside played a central role. Russia gave twentieth-century revolutionary politics the imagery of the industrial worker, the soldier and the soviet. China added the revolutionary peasant, the rural base, guerrilla warfare and the idea of protracted struggle.

Lenin and Mao therefore came to represent two distinctive moments in the history of revolutionary socialism. Lenin confronted the question of how a revolutionary movement might seize power amidst the collapse of an imperial state. Mao confronted a different problem: how revolutionary politics might operate in a vast agrarian society confronted by imperialism, invasion, warlordism and civil war. The Chinese Revolution was influenced profoundly by the Russian experience, but it was never simply its reproduction.

The difference eventually mattered enormously. After 1949 there was no longer a single uncontested centre of communist revolutionary experience. The Sino-Soviet split that developed from the late 1950s and became increasingly bitter during the following decade revealed profound disagreements about ideology, international strategy and national interests. Communism itself fragmented into competing interpretations and political centres, and the resulting rivalry would eventually contribute to the dramatic rapprochement between China and the United States during the early 1970s.

Their Place in the Making of the Modern World

The world in which we live cannot easily be understood without either 1917 or 1949. The Russian Revolution led eventually to the creation of the Soviet Union and shaped the ideological conflicts of the inter-war years, the politics surrounding the Second World War, the Cold War and the growth of communist movements across the world. The Soviet Union itself disappeared in 1991, but many of the institutions, political arguments and international relationships created in the world after October survived its dissolution.

The Chinese Revolution followed another trajectory. The People’s Republic established in 1949 continues to exist, although the China of the twenty-first century differs profoundly from the society imagined by Mao and his revolutionary contemporaries. The economic reforms begun under Deng Xiaoping after 1978 introduced market mechanisms, encouraged foreign investment and transformed China into one of the major centres of the world economy. Hundreds of millions experienced rising living standards and movement out of extreme poverty, even as the political authority of the Communist Party remained intact. The party-state governing contemporary China thus traces its institutional origins to a revolution whose economic assumptions have subsequently been transformed in remarkable ways.

The deeper significance of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, however, extends beyond the states they created. They altered what millions of ordinary people believed politics might accomplish. Questions that had once been treated as natural, inevitable or beyond political intervention became matters of intense public debate. Why should enormous concentrations of wealth coexist with mass poverty? Who should possess the land? What rights should workers enjoy? Should education and healthcare remain privileges or become social rights? Could one people legitimately rule another? What obligations did the modern state have towards the employment, welfare and dignity of its citizens?

Neither revolution provided answers that could command universal acceptance. Indeed, some of the answers attempted by revolutionary governments produced their own injustices and tragedies. Yet after 1917 and 1949 the questions themselves could no longer easily be ignored. That may ultimately be one of the most profound ways in which these revolutions contributed to the making of the modern world.

October and the Memory of Revolution

October therefore deserves to be remembered as a month of revolutions, not because the two events were identical, nor because everything done in their names should be celebrated, but because both changed the possibilities within which twentieth-century humanity imagined its future. On 1 October 1949 a new China announced itself to the world. Thirty-two years earlier, according to Russia’s old calendar, October had witnessed another upheaval whose repercussions travelled far beyond Petrograd. One arose from the crisis of a European empire shattered by world war, while the other emerged from decades of fragmentation, foreign encroachment, invasion and civil conflict. Both produced powerful states, both generated enormous hopes, and both eventually produced forms of coercion and suffering that must remain part of any serious historical reckoning.

Their significance to humankind nevertheless lies in something larger than the histories of the Soviet Union or China. Together they helped overturn the nineteenth-century assumption that Europe alone determined the direction of modern history. They brought workers, peasants and colonised peoples into the centre of international politics. They made questions of economic inequality, land, labour, social welfare, imperialism and national sovereignty impossible to confine to academic or philosophical debate. They inspired liberation movements, unsettled empires and compelled even societies deeply hostile to communism to reconsider the relationship between the state, economy and social welfare.

One need neither romanticise revolution nor erase its tragedies to recognise its historical power. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution that culminated in 1949 changed more than governments and ruling elites. They enlarged the range of historical possibilities that millions of human beings believed to be open to them. In that sense, they belonged not simply to Russia and China, but to the history of humankind.

October is thus more than a coincidence of dates. It provides an occasion to remember a century during which people across continents attempted, sometimes magnificently and sometimes disastrously, to remake the societies in which they lived. The Soviet Union born from one of these revolutions has passed into history, while the China created by the other has been transformed almost beyond recognition. Yet the questions that animated both, questions concerning inequality and dignity, labour and exploitation, sovereignty and foreign domination, and above all the right of ordinary human beings to participate in shaping their own future, have hardly disappeared.

The revolutions belong to history. The arguments they opened do not. That is why, more than a century after Petrograd and more than three-quarters of a century after Beijing, the Month of Revolutions continues to speak to the modern world.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Mahatma Gandhi remains profoundly significant in today’s India, not as a remote statue or a textbook ideal but as a living challenge to the ways we practise politics, education and social life, since his insistence that means matter as much as ends, that communal harmony is a necessity rather than a favour, and that the poorest citizen is the true test of freedom still speaks directly to a nation wrestling with inequality, sectarian tension and the temptations of easy conformity. His ideas of non-violence, truth, Swadeshi, dignity of labour and sacrifice may be quoted often, yet their real value lies in whether we are willing to live them when they become inconvenient. As we commemorate his birth anniversary, I have decided to focus on what he said and did during his visits to Aligarh, especially his address to the students of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College on 12 October 1920, because that occasion captures both the courage of his appeal and the difficult work of unity he placed before the young.

The relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Aligarh, especially the campus of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College that became Aligarh Muslim University, remains one of the most instructive episodes in the story of India’s freedom struggle. On 12 October 1920, Gandhi visited Aligarh and was awarded honorary membership of the Students’ Union of the institution, which had only recently been upgraded as Aligarh Muslim University by an Act of Legislation passed in September, with its formal inauguration scheduled for the coming December. A function was held in the Union within the College premises, where students interacted with the Mahatma and then listened as he spoke with characteristic directness against colonialism and the British yoke that had to be thrown out. That day transformed a campus gathering into a lesson in citizenship, sacrifice and unity, and its echoes are still worth hearing on his birth anniversary.

Gandhi did not flatter his young audience or appeal to their career prospects; he asked them to examine the moral cost of the loyalty they were expected to profess. He said, “How can you adhere to that institution where you have to pay allegiance to the Union Jack, be it for a moment, and where you have to state, to an august visitor like the Governor or some high officer, that you are loyal to the Empire though in fact you are not?” These words were not merely a criticism of one college or one government; they were a challenge to every institution that demanded outward obedience while inwardly denying freedom. Their relevance even today is uncomfortable, for while the flags and offices may have changed, the pressure to conform, to flatter power and to trade conscience for position has not disappeared. The nature of our masters and handlers may have altered, but the Gandhian question remains: can true education flourish where the mind is asked to bow before authority?

From this challenge, Gandhi moved to the deeper wound that colonial rule had inflicted upon Hindu-Muslim relations. He reminded the students that “the heart of the Muslim brethren have, therefore, been pained,” and he linked that pain to the government’s actions in the Punjab after the passing of the Rowlatt Act, which had convinced both Hindus and Muslims that it was impossible to get justice from that government. He exposed the strategy of division with plain words: “They made us, Hindus and Muslims, to quarrel among ourselves. They used to speak very ill of Hindus before Muslims and Muslims before Hindus.” Then came the warning that remains central to his thought: “If Islam is in danger today, Hinduism is also in danger, for if it is Islam’s turn today, it will be ours tomorrow.” This was not a plea for one community to protect another out of charity; it was a recognition that injustice, once tolerated against one, soon becomes licensed against all. Gandhi also pointed out that both communities had decided that fighting with the sword would only lose their money, their precious lives and leave them unsaved still more, since they did not possess guns and ammunition in such quantities and had received no such training from the government. The logic was stark, and it led him to the remedy of non-cooperation.

The speech then turned to education itself, and here Gandhi was at his most radical. He declared, “We are taught the lessons of slavery in the Aligarh College. We should boycott this slavish education. This is my first lesson.” He went on to say, “When thirty crore of men combine and organise with a view not to have this Government in their midst, it would be impossible for the government to remain in India,” and from that confidence he urged, “we should boycott Government Educational Institutions.” He did not stop at a single institution, for he asked students to boycott government educational institutions generally, just as the Non-Cooperation Movement had been in existence for a few months and had not yet been fully embraced by all. He called upon lawyers to give up practising, saying, “We will become mendicants. We will beg. We will subsist on rice and pulses. We will accept bare bread but will take our liberty also with. It is then alone we can be counted among the human beings. No one who is not free can engage himself in devotion of God.” He rejected titles as “badges of slavery” and wanted them returned; he did not want a single soldier or labourer sent into the government’s army; and he insisted that the people were not going to enter their legislative councils. For Gandhi, “Non-Cooperation is nothing more than sacrifice,” and it was inseparable from the Swadeshi Movement, since India had to pay seven crore of rupees for cloth. His formula was clear: “Non-Cooperation with one means Cooperation with others. Unless we have mutual regard for each other we can not become united or Organised.”

What makes the Aligarh visit so moving is that his words did not remain in the air. The students were divided, and the loyalist trustees were deeply uncomfortable, but the nationalist fervour could not be contained. On the following day, the students boycotted their classes, and in a meeting at the Union (Sidon’s) Club a young Zakir Husain declared that he would forgo his scholarship, a sacrifice that gave flesh and blood to Gandhi’s call. Mohammad Ali, addressing a gathering at the Aligarh (Lytton) Library, is said to have wept as he recited a verse, and the students began to demand another college where they could study free from government influence. That impulse contributed to the founding of a National Muslim University, with Maulana Mohammad Ali as its Principal, which later evolved into Jamia Millia Islamia. Gandhi returned to Aligarh in August 1921, arriving from Bombay with Maulana Syed Subani and Maulana Mohamed Ali, and the journey became a procession of enthusiasm as crowds greeted him with cries of “Mahatma Gandhi ki-jai” and showered flowers upon his compartment. At Agra Cantonment he spoke on Hindu-Muslim unity and urged the people to take to Khadi, and in Aligarh he visited the National Muslim University (Jamia Milia) and addressed meetings of women and the public. In 1929 he came again to propagate the Swadeshi Movement, staying once more at Nishat Kothi (now where stands Aligarh Public School), and his relationship with the institution deepened to the point that the Aligarh Muslim University Students’ Union, founded in 1920, conferred its first lifetime membership on him.

Gandhi’s respect for Aligarh was not one-sided, for he regarded Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as a “Prophet of education” and acknowledged him as one of the architects of modern India who foresaw the need for Indians to acquire proficiency in English and modern sciences. Handwritten letters from the Mahatma to student leaders such as Abdul Majid Khwaja and Abdul Bari are preserved in the Maulana Azad Library, tangible relics of a living relationship rather than a distant memory. The Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements provided the immediate context for his visits, but the deeper significance lay in his attempt to construct a shared political community in which Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs could act together as communities without surrendering their distinct identities. The outcome was complex, for Khilafat propaganda sometimes heightened a separate Muslim consciousness rather than dissolving it, and the colonial policy of divide and rule continued to bear poisoned fruit. Yet the sincerity of Gandhi’s effort is not diminished by the difficulty of the task, and Aligarh remains a crucial arena where he experimented with mass mobilisation and inter-communal dialogue.

As we commemorate the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the memory of his 1920 speech at the Students’ Union in Aligarh should disturb as much as it inspires. He asked students to refuse slavish education, to surrender titles and privileges, to accept bare bread with liberty, and to recognise that non-cooperation with an unjust system means cooperation with one another. In a time when divisions are amplified and loyalties are often demanded without conscience, the Gandhian legacy in Aligarh invites us to rediscover dialogue, non-violence and the courage to place the poorest and most marginalised at the centre of patriotism. The Mahatma’s birthday is therefore not only an occasion for garlands and speeches; it is a call to renew the unity and harmony he pursued, and to ask whether we, like those students in 1920, are ready to become fakirs for the service of the motherland.

Ishwar Allah tero nām

Sab ko sanmati de Bhagwān

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The latest changes in the Class IX Social Science textbook, reported by The Indian Express in its Delhi edition of 30 September 2026, have drawn attention to substantial alterations in the organisation and emphasis of the history syllabus. The new textbook, Understanding Society: India and Beyond, Part 2, describes seven hundred years of medieval Indian history from 1000 to 1700 AD as a period of resistance and resilience, a time when Indian society not only defended itself from external threats but also preserved its traditions. It replaces four older textbooks, including India and The Contemporary World, and introduces a new concentration upon medieval and early modern India, foreign invasions, regional resistance, Sikh struggles against Mughal authority, and the resistance of Jats, Rajputs, Ahoms and others. At the same time, subjects which earlier occupied an important place at this stage, particularly the French and Russian Revolutions, have been relocated to Part 1 of the new textbook, released in June, which deals with themes such as socialism, the rise of Nazism, and democratic politics. A qualification is necessary at the very outset. What follows is a preliminary response to what has been reported, considered alongside the changes already introduced in textbooks for the preceding classes. A detailed analysis must await a careful reading of the complete new Class IX textbook, including its text, illustrations, extracts, maps, exercises and questions.

This caution is particularly necessary because a textbook communicates its historical argument not merely through explicit statements. Selection itself is interpretation. What is placed at the beginning of a chapter, what is repeatedly emphasised, which events are juxtaposed, which illustrations are selected, what questions are asked and what subjects quietly recede from view can collectively produce an interpretation more powerful than any single sentence. What has been reported deserves attention because the new Class IX textbook does not stand alone. When read alongside the manner in which medieval India was introduced in the revised textbooks of the preceding class, a discernible pattern begins to emerge.

The issue is not whether NCERT should revise its textbooks. It certainly should. Historical knowledge changes, new research appears, and regions and communities neglected by older narratives need to be recovered. The real questions are what is being removed, what is being introduced, how the new material is being framed, and what conception of India’s past is gradually being placed before schoolchildren. The NCERT chief, Dinesh Saklani, writes in the foreword that social science learning at this stage is expected to cultivate analytical and discursive abilities, encourage critical inquiry, and promote intercultural understanding. These are admirable aims, but the framing of the content must be examined against them.

To understand the significance of the latest Class IX changes, we need to remember what had already happened a year earlier. In 2025, NCERT released its new Class VIII Social Science textbook, Exploring Society: India and Beyond. The treatment of medieval Indian history began with Chapter 2, significantly entitled “Reshaping India’s Political Map”. This was not some incidental discussion buried in the textbook. It was the point at which the Class VIII child was introduced to the medieval period and therefore helped establish the conceptual framework through which the centuries that followed were to be understood. The opening of the chapter is particularly revealing. Carrying an aerial photograph of the Qutb Minar complex, it confronts the pupil with three “Big Questions”. The first asks how foreign invasions and new dynasties reshaped India’s political boundaries. The second asks how Indian society responded to invasions and how India’s economy adapted during periods of political instability. The third turns towards the impact upon ordinary people. Before the pupil had learnt anything substantial about the Delhi Sultanate or the complicated political, economic and social transformations of these centuries, the categories through which the period was to be understood had already been supplied.

The introductory narrative goes considerably further. It describes the early eleventh century as beginning a new era in India’s journey, characterised by invasions from beyond the Hindu Kush, and says that many of the Turkic and Afghan invaders were attracted not only by India’s riches and territorial ambitions but also by a desire to spread their versions of religion, if necessary through force. The medieval period thus begins not principally with historical transformation, but with intrusion. This is precisely why the changes now being reported in the Class IX textbook cannot be examined as an isolated curricular experiment. A preceding textbook, introduced in 2025, prepared the conceptual ground. The Class VIII pupil was introduced to medieval India through the language of foreign invasion and Indian response; a year later the Class IX pupil encounters an expanded narrative structured around resistance and resilience, with the new textbook explicitly shifting away from the themes of cooperation and composite culture that were central to Indian historiography for over fifty years.

The formulation asking how Indian society responded to invasions deserves interrogation. Who precisely constituted this single Indian society supposedly standing on one side while invaders stood on the other? Political India during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries was divided amongst numerous kingdoms and ruling lineages. Rajputs fought other Rajputs. Indian rulers resisted incoming powers on some occasions, negotiated with them on others, and sometimes allied with them against other Indian rulers. Political loyalties were structured around dynasties, clans, kingdoms, localities and material interests rather than around a modern national consciousness dividing Indians from foreigners. To project the modern nation backwards into the medieval centuries is therefore deeply problematic.

This is not merely a terminological objection. Once Indian society and foreign invaders have been established as the two principal categories, they can easily acquire religious identities. The foreign invader increasingly becomes Muslim; those resisting him become indigenous and therefore implicitly Hindu. A geographical distinction can imperceptibly be transformed into a communal one. The new textbook reinforces this framing by describing the period as one accompanied by religious discrimination and social distress, and by presenting acts of resistance as the defining feature of the era. It devotes sections to the resistance of the Ahoms, the Marathas and the Sikhs, and it invokes the worship of goddesses such as Kali, Durga and Bhavani as a long-standing tradition that kings and princes invoked as protectors in times of conflict. It cites the example of Annamraja, ruler of Bastar, who is believed to have received his sword from Manikyadevi, and Kumara Kampana of Vijayanagara, who was believed to have used a goddess-given sword against the Sultanate forces at Madurai. Shivaji is also traditionally believed to have obtained a sword from goddess Tulja Bhavani. These are legitimate cultural and historical traditions, but their placement within a narrative of resistance against foreign forces subtly frames the entire period as a religiously charged civilisational conflict.

Another implication of associating foreign invasion with political instability is the creation of an unstated contrast between an earlier age of indigenous stability and a later period of disruption. Pre-Sultanate India was hardly an uninterrupted political idyll. The Palas, Pratiharas and Rashtrakutas fought prolonged wars. The Cholas undertook extensive military campaigns. Regional kingdoms continuously competed for territory, resources and sovereignty. Rajput houses fought one another. Warfare, conquest, tribute and the displacement of ruling dynasties were normal features of pre-modern state formation. Political violence did not enter India with Islam, nor did territorial ambition, heavy taxation, the destruction of enemies’ political symbols or the appropriation of conquered resources. This does not diminish the violence accompanying the Turkish conquests. It merely places that violence where historians must place it, within the comparative history of pre-modern political power.

This is not merely a terminological objection. Once Indian society and foreign invaders have been established as the two principal categories, they can easily acquire religious identities. The foreign invader increasingly becomes Muslim; those resisting him become indigenous and therefore implicitly Hindu. A geographical distinction can imperceptibly be transformed into a communal one. The new textbook reinforces this framing by describing the period as one accompanied by religious discrimination and social distress, and by presenting acts of resistance as the defining feature of the era. It invokes the worship of goddesses such as Kali, Durga and Bhavani as a long-standing tradition that kings and princes invoked as protectors in times of conflict, explicitly asserting that these goddesses supplied divine swords to be wielded against the invading forces. It cites the example of Annamraja, ruler of Bastar, who is believed to have received his sword from Manikyadevi, and Kumara Kampana of Vijayanagara, who was believed to have used a goddess-given sword against the Sultanate forces at Madurai. Shivaji is also traditionally believed to have obtained a sword from goddess Tulja Bhavani. These are legitimate cultural and historical traditions, but their placement within a narrative of resistance against foreign forces subtly frames the entire period as a religiously charged civilisational conflict.

The choice of the Qutb complex as the visual introduction to the Class VIII chapter is itself instructive. It is entirely appropriate as a monument through which to approach the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. But what questions should a historian ask of it? The Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque provides evidence for the reuse of materials from demolished temples, and that evidence should be discussed openly. Temple destruction cannot be removed from history because it makes us uncomfortable. The new textbook refers to multiple instances of temple destruction and the construction of mosques on these sites, including the reconstruction of the Kashi Vishwanath temple by Todarmal and Man Singh, its destruction later by Aurangzeb, and its subsequent reconstruction by Ahilyabai Holkar. These are important historical facts. But the same monument opens an entirely different range of historical questions. Who were the craftsmen who constructed it? Why were the earliest arches corbelled rather than truly arcuate? How did trabeate Indian traditions interact with architectural forms introduced by new patrons? How was Arabic calligraphy incorporated into an architectural environment created largely through Indian craftsmanship? How did construction techniques change, and how did the Sultanate gradually develop an architectural vocabulary different both from Central Asian traditions and from those it encountered in northern India? The Qutb complex embodies conquest, appropriation, reuse, adaptation and architectural creativity simultaneously. A good history textbook should enable a child to see all these layers. The important question is not whether temple destruction should be mentioned. It certainly should. The question is whether temple destruction and religious conflict become the principal lenses through which an entire historical period is viewed.

This brings us to an important point. A historical narrative does not need to invent facts in order to distort the past. Distortion can operate through selection, accumulation, repetition, juxtaposition and omission. Mahmud of Ghazni attacked temples. Muhammad Ghuri was a conqueror. Sultanate armies could be enormously destructive. Guru Arjan was executed during Jahangir’s reign. Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed under Aurangzeb. Jats rebelled against Mughal authority because of economic hardships and Aurangzeb’s religious practices. Sikhs developed traditions of armed resistance. Rajputs, Marathas and Ahoms fought Mughal armies. All are legitimate subjects of history. The new textbook does acknowledge the cooperative relationships of the Kachwahas of Amber with the Mughals, noting that the latter had a strong incentive to collaborate with the Rajputs, and it devotes a section to Mewar and Maharana Pratap’s resistance to Akbar. But place these episodes repeatedly beside one another, describe protagonists predominantly through religious identities, foreground foreign invasion, follow it with Indian resistance, emphasise temple destruction and religious persecution, and allow political accommodation, economic transformation and cultural interaction progressively to recede, and an entirely different narrative emerges. Every individual brick may be genuine. It is the structure constructed from those bricks that the historian must examine.

The category of foreignness itself demands interrogation. Babur undoubtedly entered India as a Central Asian conqueror. But how long does that description remain historically meaningful? Humayun spent his political career struggling for possession of an Indian empire. Akbar was born at Umarkot. Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb were born and brought up in the subcontinent. Some of them were born to Hindu women. The empire they ruled depended upon Indian agricultural resources and an increasingly diverse nobility containing Rajputs, Indian Muslims, Afghans, Marathas and numerous other groups alongside Iranian and Central Asian immigrants in equal measure. Its revenues came overwhelmingly from Indian agriculture. Its cities were Indian cities. Its soldiers, officials, peasants, artisans and merchants overwhelmingly belonged to the subcontinent. At what point, therefore, does conquest become state formation? That is an excellent historical question. Simply continuing to describe succeeding generations through the language of foreignness avoids answering it. Nor does the political society of the period conform to a Hindu-Muslim binary. Rajputs fought Rajputs. Muslim dynasties fought other Muslim dynasties. Vijayanagara fought the Deccan Sultanates but also entered alliances with them. Rajput rulers rebelled against Mughal emperors and served them. Maratha chiefs served the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughals as well as fought them. Rajputs fought against the Marathas and Marathas invaded Rajput territories. Mughal armies contained large numbers of non-Muslim commanders and soldiers, while forces opposing them could contain Muslims. Medieval India stubbornly refuses to behave according to the communal categories subsequently imposed upon it.

It is against this background that the reported new Class IX chapter on resistance and resilience acquires particular significance. There is nothing inherently objectionable about such a theme. Resistance is an important part of history. So is resilience. Regional political formations have too often been overshadowed by Delhi-centred narratives, and any serious revision of Indian history should give the Ahoms, Jats, Rajputs, Sikhs, Marathas and southern kingdoms their proper place. The new textbook devotes a section to the Ahom kingdom of Assam, underlining that it maintained its political independence for almost six centuries and successfully defended its territories from the Mughals, making specific mention of the Battle of Saraighat where the Ahom commander Lachit Borphukan defeated a Mughal fleet. It also includes a section on the resistance of Vijayanagara, underlining that resistance to foreign invasions was not confined to northern India, and it moves to the Marathas and their idea of Swarajya, explaining it as the idea of an independent, self-governing territory free from external control. The question is how these histories are organised. The sequence across the new textbooks is striking. Foreign invasion leads to Indian response and political instability, followed subsequently by invasion, persecution, resistance and resilience. The danger is that what ought to be one dimension of medieval history begins to become its governing narrative.

Sikh history illustrates this difficulty well. The new Class IX textbook reportedly devotes considerable attention to Mughal relations with the Sikh Gurus and uses particularly strong language concerning Mughal brutality, mentioning the martyrdom of Sikh gurus and the rigid religious and discriminatory practices of the Mughals. Guru Arjan, Guru Hargobind and Guru Tegh Bahadur appear within a narrative connecting Mughal pressure with the subsequent development of organised Sikh resistance. There is absolutely no reason why these subjects should not be taught. Guru Arjan’s execution is fundamental to Sikh history. Jahangir’s own memoir provides important evidence concerning his attitude towards the Guru. Guru Hargobind’s miri-piri, the Akal Takht, Guru Tegh Bahadur’s execution, Guru Gobind Singh and ultimately the Khalsa are indispensable to understanding the development of Sikh political identity. But explanation requires context. The growth of Sikh authority needs also to be situated within Punjab’s agrarian society, Mughal sovereignty, local politics, the expanding following of the Gurus, imperial anxieties concerning autonomous centres of authority, succession disputes and changing relations between the Sikh community and the state. To describe violence is history. To make violence self-explanatory is not.

The same difficulty arises with the category of resistance. Resistance is not automatically a national struggle. Historians must ask who resisted whom, and why. Jat rebellions cannot adequately be explained merely as Hindu resistance to a Muslim emperor. Revenue demands, zamindari rights, agrarian structures, local power and imperial authority all mattered. Religion could matter too, but its importance has to be demonstrated in particular contexts rather than assumed as the universal explanation. Likewise, Rajput conflicts could involve succession, territorial claims, honour, imperial service or relations between particular ruling houses and the Mughal sovereign. Maratha expansion involved regional politics, military entrepreneurship, revenue rights and state formation alongside religious idioms. A seventeenth-century zamindar refusing imperial revenue demands was not necessarily fighting a war of Indian national liberation. To transform every conflict between a Hindu chief and a Muslim sovereign into indigenous resistance is to place nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism inside societies which did not possess it in that form.

The greatest cost of organising medieval history predominantly around invasion and resistance is what the child may cease to see. Where is the iqta? How did the mansab-jagir system function? What was the relationship between jagirdars, zamindars and peasants? Why did cultivation expand? Why did towns grow? Why did the Mughal economy become so extensively monetised? Why did European merchants desperately seek Indian textiles? Where are Surat, Agra, Lahore, Burhanpur, Patna and Dhaka? Where are merchants, artisans, peasants, bankers and revenue officials? Where is the Indian Ocean? Where are Persian, Sanskrit and the developing regional languages? Where are translation movements, painting, music, legal culture and technological transmission? The new textbook does mention Bhakti and Sufi traditions, noting that Bhakti is credited with providing devotees non-material forms of worship when temple construction got restricted or temples could be destroyed, and that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu led a public sankirtan in Bengal against restrictions imposed by a Qazi on devotional practices. Sufism, while being seen as a comparatively liberal dimension of Islam, is also credited with contributing to its spread. These are valuable inclusions, but they sit within a framework that prioritises religious conflict and resistance over the broader social, economic and cultural transformations that shaped medieval India.

None of this should be mistaken for an argument against giving greater prominence to regional histories. Quite the contrary. The Ahoms have long deserved greater attention. So have the political histories of the Northeast, the Deccan and southern India. Women rulers who were reduced to passing references in older narratives deserve serious treatment. Sikh history deserves considerably greater depth. So do the Jats, Rajputs, Marathas and numerous regional political formations. The old Delhi-centred narrative of Indian history undoubtedly requires correction. But the problem is not inclusion. It is instrumentalisation. The Ahoms do not require the Mughals to become caricatures in order for Lachit Borphukan to matter. Sikh history does not require the entire Mughal period to be reduced to religious persecution. Regionalising Indian history is a necessary historiographical correction. Communalising it is not.

This brings us to the other major aspect of the reported Class IX restructuring: the changed position of the French and Russian Revolutions. The new textbook replaces four older textbooks, and Part 1, released in June, dealt with themes like the French Revolution, socialism in Europe, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Nazism and democratic politics. If material has merely been shifted to another part or class, that should be clearly acknowledged. But the larger pedagogical question remains. Why should an Indian child learn about the French Revolution? Not because France deserves some privileged place in Indian education, but because the Revolution transformed the political vocabulary of the modern world. Liberty, equality, citizenship, popular sovereignty, republicanism, constitutionalism and rights acquired meanings during the revolutionary age that travelled far beyond France. Indian nationalism itself did not develop inside a sealed civilisational container. Indian intellectuals and political activists engaged with liberalism, nationalism, republicanism and socialism. Concepts travelled, were translated, contested and transformed. The French Revolution is therefore not merely French history. It forms part of the intellectual history of modern India.

The same is true of 1917. Whatever one’s judgement of Bolshevism or the subsequent Soviet experiment, the Russian Revolution was one of the defining events of the twentieth century. It transformed global discussions concerning capitalism, socialism, labour, land redistribution, imperialism, colonial liberation and economic planning. Its consequences for India were substantial. How does one eventually understand the emergence of the Communist movement in India, trade unionism, peasant organisations, socialist currents within Indian nationalism, Jawaharlal Nehru’s intellectual development, the Congress Socialist Party or Bhagat Singh’s movement towards socialist thought without understanding something of the world created by 1917? Reducing the place of these histories does not simply mean teaching less Europe. It potentially deprives Indian students of some of the conceptual equipment required to understand modern India itself. A genuinely India-centred history does not require an India-isolated history.

The present changes also follow earlier NCERT revisions and rationalisation exercises which produced controversies over the reduction or deletion of material relating to the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals as well as politically sensitive modern subjects. This background matters because the character of the rewriting now appears to be changing. At one stage, much criticism centred upon the apparent disappearance of the Mughals. The present development may prove more consequential because medieval India can return, but in a different form. The Sultanate need not disappear if it is principally approached through invasion. The Mughals need not disappear if they repeatedly appear through persecution and resistance. The new textbook devotes one page to the period of the Delhi Sultanate, mentioning acts of resistance by local kings, while the Mughal period is somewhat more elaborate but focuses on resistance rather than cooperation with the Mughals. Medieval India may occupy many pages while its social, institutional and economic history occupies progressively less conceptual space. The relevant question is therefore no longer simply how many pages the Mughals have received. It is what kind of Mughals, and what kind of medieval India, the child is being taught to imagine.

This is where the possible social consequences become particularly serious. There is an enormous difference between saying that Aurangzeb ordered a particular act and constructing a narrative which encourages the reader to understand that Muslims did this to Hindus. The first is a historical proposition capable of investigation through evidence. The second transforms the action of a seventeenth-century ruler into a transhistorical relationship between two modern religious communities. A ruler who professed Islam is not interchangeable with all Muslims. A Hindu who suffered under his government does not automatically represent every Hindu living centuries later. Yet if medieval history is repeatedly presented as Muslim aggression followed by Hindu or Sikh resistance, children can gradually learn to identify themselves with historical protagonists according to present-day religious identities. A Hindu pupil may begin to see the victim of a sixteenth-century conquest as us. A Muslim pupil may consequently find the conqueror classified as them. Neither child bears responsibility for those events. Modern Indian Muslims bear no responsibility for Mahmud of Ghazni, just as modern Indian Hindus bear no responsibility for acts of violence committed by pre-modern Hindu rulers. History should liberate citizens from hereditary guilt and hereditary grievance, not manufacture them.

This is ultimately the distinction between history and communal memory. Memory asks what they did to us. History asks what happened, why it happened, what evidence survives, who produced that evidence, what political, economic and social structures were involved, how contemporaries understood the event, and what changed afterwards. The distinction is fundamental. A temple destroyed five hundred years ago is an important historical fact deserving investigation. The historian asks who destroyed it, why, in what circumstances, whether religion, wealth, political sovereignty or several motives were involved, what contemporary evidence survives, and what subsequently happened at the site. Communal memory does something different. It transforms that historical event into an injury personally inherited by someone living today. Once that happens, historical distance collapses. Historical distance is one of the greatest gifts the discipline of history can give a society.

This does not mean sanitising medieval India. There is an opposite error which must equally be resisted. Medieval India should not be romanticised as an uninterrupted paradise of syncretism and composite culture. There was violence. There was religious persecution. Temples were destroyed. Political enemies were brutally punished. Cities were devastated. Peasants were exploited. States extracted substantial agricultural surpluses. Sectarian conflict existed. Religious identity could influence political action. All this should be taught. But so should accommodation, alliance, migration, economic integration, artistic borrowing and cultural interaction. The choice is not between concealing atrocities and making atrocities the organising principle of medieval history. Good history does neither.

The most important issue, therefore, is not any single sentence in any single textbook. It is the cumulative historical imagination being created across successive school years. In the Class VIII textbook introduced in 2025, the child encounters medieval India through foreign invasion, Indian response and political instability. In the reported Class IX restructuring of 2026, the same pupil encounters persecution, resistance and resilience. Meanwhile, the relative position of histories through which children encounter revolution, equality, citizenship, socialism and transformations of the modern state is altered. The cumulative effect can privilege civilisation over society, religious community over class and political interest, invasion over state formation, resistance over negotiation, and historical grievance over explanation. That would represent a profound transformation in the teaching of history.

There is absolutely no need to choose between Indian history and world history. Teach Naiki Devi, Rudrama Devi and Rani Abbakka. Teach the Ahoms properly and give the Northeast the space it has long deserved. Teach Rajput political formations in all their diversity. Teach Sikh history in considerably greater depth. Teach the Jats and Marathas. Teach Vijayanagara and the Deccan Sultanates. Teach women, peasants, artisans, merchants, Dalits, tribal communities and pastoral societies. But alongside them teach the French Revolution, industrialisation, capitalism, the Russian Revolution, imperialism, nationalism and fascism. Teach Mahmud of Ghazni’s raids and temple destruction. But teach the iqta too. Teach Guru Arjan’s execution. But also teach the transformation of Punjab. Teach Aurangzeb’s temple destructions where the evidence establishes them. But also explain Rajput mansabdars, Maratha nobles, zamindars, revenue administration and the circumstances under which temples could be patronised, protected, appropriated or destroyed. Teach the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque and its reused temple material. But also ask children to examine the craftsmen who constructed it, its architectural techniques and the process through which different building traditions encountered one another. Above all, whenever the word resistance occurs, encourage pupils to ask the historian’s indispensable questions. Resistance to whom? By whom? For what reason? In defence of what interests? Those questions transform memory into history.

The debate over the latest NCERT textbooks is therefore not fundamentally about whether Akbar receives twenty pages or ten, whether the Ahoms receive additional space, or even whether a particular European revolution is taught in Class IX or Class X. It concerns something much larger. What do we believe history education is for? If history is intended primarily to produce pride, almost every society can manufacture a past filled with heroes and victories. If it is intended to produce grievance, every civilisation can assemble an equally impressive catalogue of injuries. Neither exercise requires much historical training. The more difficult task is to teach young people that the past was populated by human beings whose identities, loyalties and assumptions were often very different from our own, that states could be brutal without representing entire religious communities, that victims and perpetrators cannot simply be divided retrospectively according to the religious categories of modern India, that cultural interaction can coexist with political violence, and that societies are transformed as profoundly by agriculture, commerce, technology, migration and ideas as by battles.

India particularly needs such history because its past belongs to everyone. No Indian Muslim should be made to carry Aurangzeb upon his shoulders. No Indian Hindu should be encouraged to inherit personally the wounds of every Hindu who suffered under a medieval ruler. Neither community can monopolise the achievements of those who happened to profess its faith. The Qutb complex, the forts of Rajasthan, the monuments of the Mughals, the temples of Vijayanagara, the gurdwaras of Punjab, Sanskrit intellectual traditions, Persian historiography, Bhakti literature, Sufi poetry, Hindavi literary culture and the commercial worlds of Surat and Masulipatnam are not exhibits in separate communal museums. Together they constitute the enormously complicated historical inheritance of the Indian subcontinent.

This is why the changes beginning with the Class VIII textbook released in 2025 and apparently continuing into the new Class IX curriculum of 2026 deserve close scrutiny. The danger lies less in any isolated factual statement than in the architecture of the narrative. If invasion, foreignness, religious atrocity and resistance become the principal categories through which the medieval centuries are introduced, pupils can be led towards a predetermined interpretation before acquiring the historical knowledge necessary to evaluate it. A definitive judgement on the new Class IX textbook should await a careful reading of the book itself. We need to establish precisely what has been removed, what has merely been shifted elsewhere, what has been added, how older themes have been rewritten, what qualifications accompany contentious claims, and what exercises pupils are being asked to undertake. The reports appearing at the end of September provide important indications, but they cannot substitute for that textual examination. What they reveal nevertheless matters because the direction is already visible in the Class VIII textbook of 2025.

A history textbook should not tell a Hindu child whom to resent. It should not make a Muslim child feel obliged to defend a medieval emperor. It should not transform Sikhs, Jats, Rajputs, Marathas, Ahoms or any other historical community into pieces upon a contemporary ideological chessboard. It should teach children to ask questions. Who wrote this source? Why? What evidence supports the claim? Was religion the principal cause, one amongst several causes, or the language through which another conflict was expressed? Why did enemies become allies? Why did allies become enemies? Why did institutions survive changes of dynasty? Why did cultures borrow from one another even while rulers fought? Those are historical questions.

A history syllabus worthy of India must therefore resist two temptations equally. The romanticisation of the medieval past and its communalisation. The first conceals conflict. The second makes conflict the whole story. Medieval India was neither an idyll of uninterrupted harmony nor seven centuries of Hindu-Muslim warfare. It was a changing world of conquest and accommodation, exploitation and prosperity, mobility and hierarchy, religious contestation and intellectual exchange, political violence and extraordinary cultural creativity. Our children deserve to encounter that world in all its contradictions. For once the past is rearranged principally to establish who were the historical victims and who were the historical villains, history ceases to enlarge the mind. It begins instead to distribute inherited grievances amongst living communities. That is not the recovery of India’s past. It is the fragmentation of its historical memory, and potentially of the society that inherits it.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

On 30th September 2026 Professor Farhat Hasan retires from the Department of History, University of Delhi, and retirement notices being what they are, they will doubtless reduce an entire academic life to a tidy succession of appointments, publications and honours. In Farhat’s case, at least for me, that would hardly suffice, since our association goes back much further than our professional careers. We grew up in the same Aligarh world, passed through the same Department of History, entered teaching on precisely the same day, and then followed scholarly trajectories that frequently ran parallel, sometimes intersected, and at other times diverged rather sharply, so that a tribute to Farhat cannot be merely an assessment of a historian but is inevitably also a recollection of a friend and colleague with whom I have shared almost an entire academic lifetime.

I was senior to Farhat in school, though after completing our schooling both of us eventually entered the Department of History at Aligarh Muslim University, which was then at the height of what came to be called the Aligarh School of History. Irfan Habib, M. Athar Ali, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Shireen Moosvi and others had created an intellectual environment in which history was expected to rest upon evidence, rigorous source criticism and an understanding of social and economic structures, and one could agree or disagree with particular interpretations, but one could hardly remain untouched by the intellectual discipline of the place.

Our personal backgrounds also contained curious parallels, since Farhat’s family, like mine, was settled in Aligarh, and our fathers were both associated with the University. My father was a theologian and was in charge of the Manuscripts Section of the Maulana Azad Library, while Farhat’s father, Professor Ishrat Hasan Enver, taught Philosophy and was deeply immersed in the Sufi tradition, and the Hasan household possessed something of that older Aligarh cosmopolitanism which did not find religion and culture arranged in mutually exclusive compartments. Their house near Amir Nishan, behind Kothi Rani Dulhan, was called Prem Nishān, and I still remember visiting it and seeing, hanging on a wall of the drawing room, a picture of Shri Krishna, which is a small memory perhaps, but memories such as these sometimes tell us more about an age than formal descriptions can. A Muslim Professor of Philosophy, deeply influenced by Sufism, living in a house called Prem Nishān with an image of Sri Krishna upon its wall did not appear to us particularly extraordinary, and it belonged to the cultural landscape of the Aligarh in which we had grown up.

Then came the curious coincidence which permanently linked our professional careers, for in February 1989 Farhat and I were appointed temporary lecturers in the Department of History on the same day, and we entered the profession together. Our subsequent administrative fortunes were not quite identical, since Farhat was confirmed before me while I had to wait another year and was eventually confirmed after completing three years as a temporary lecturer, and such differences appeared immensely important when one was young, though seen from the other end of a career extending over more than three and a half decades, they seem little more than milestones beside a very long road.

Farhat’s intellectual formation at Aligarh was closely connected with Professor Irfan Habib and Shireen Moosvi. It was under the later under whose supervision he completed his MPhil, and he subsequently went to the University of Cambridge for further research, where his doctoral work, supervised by Gordon Johnson, eventually became a study of state and local power relations in the towns of Gujarat, particularly Surat and Cambay, with his Cambridge PhD being completed in 1997. The Cambridge experience was important, but it did not simply replace his Aligarh training, and rather it added another historiographical vocabulary to it, which becomes apparent if one looks at Farhat’s early publications. His article on “Conflict and Cooperation in Anglo-Mughal Trade Relations during the Reign of Aurangzeb”, published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient in 1991, already questioned overly simple pictures of Mughal-European relations, while his essay “Indigenous Cooperation and the Birth of a Colonial City: Calcutta, c. 1698–1750”, published in Modern Asian Studies in 1992, similarly drew attention to indigenous agency in processes too easily described simply as European expansion, and his 1993 article, “The Mughal Fiscal System in Surat and the English East India Company”, again used Company records not merely to reconstruct European activities but to illuminate Mughal institutions and commercial taxation. These were significant indications of the direction his scholarship was taking, and the Mughal state would remain central to Farhat’s work, but increasingly he would refuse to see it only from the imperial centre.

The full significance of this approach became visible with the publication of State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 by Cambridge University Press in 2004, and it remains one of Farhat’s most important contributions to Mughal historiography. The book consciously shifted the historian’s gaze away from the imperial court and towards the locality, and instead of asking only how the Mughal state imposed authority upon society, Farhat asked how imperial sovereignty actually operated when it encountered merchants, local officials, landed groups, families, urban communities and other networks of power, so that the state, in his formulation, was not simply an institutional machine standing above society but was continually being constituted through negotiation with society. It was after this book that I increasingly came to regard Farhat as occupying an interesting position between two historiographical traditions, since he had been trained at Aligarh and the imprint of Aligarh remained unmistakable in his respect for documentation, Persian sources, fiscal structures and the material foundations of power, yet Cambridge had exposed him to a different set of questions about locality, negotiation, political process and the relationship between state and society. For a while, therefore, Farhat appeared to a number of us almost as a bridge between Aligarh and Cambridge, not merely importing the so-called Cambridge School into Mughal studies nor simply reproducing the established propositions of the Aligarh School, but attempting to use what he considered valuable in both, and indeed State and Locality explicitly engaged the Aligarh model of the Mughal state while questioning what Farhat regarded as its excessively centralised conception of authority, with his emphasis increasingly upon the state as a process rather than merely a structure. This was also what made the book important, for whether one accepted all its criticisms of earlier Mughal historiography or not, it compelled historians to look again at the relationship between the imperial system and local society, and the book attracted considerable international attention and was shortlisted by the International Convention of Asian Scholars for its humanities book prize, besides being reviewed in major historical journals, including the American Historical Review and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

But scholarship was only one part of Farhat’s Aligarh career, since between 1989 and 2000 he taught as Lecturer in the Centre of Advanced Study, Department of History, and from 2000 to 2007 as Reader, and during these years he became involved in several institutional responsibilities beyond the Department. He was associated with the Indira Gandhi National Open University Study Centre on the AMU campus, and in 2006–07 he served as Member-in-Charge of the Public Relations Office of the University. One institutional association deserves particular remembrance, for when Professor Shireen Moosvi became Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies, she set about developing a Centre which had for long remained comparatively static under its previous in-charge, Professor Zakia Siddiqui, and Farhat joined her as Deputy Director, so that his association with the Centre, formally recorded from 2005 onwards, became an important part of that formative phase. It was not merely an administrative appointment, since the Centre expanded its academic activities, seminars, research and intellectual visibility, and Farhat made a substantial contribution to this process, and in retrospect the association also seems to anticipate an important direction that his own scholarship would later take towards gender, cultural memory and women’s literary voices. In 2006 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, and in 2007 he left Aligarh after being selected Professor of Medieval and Early Modern South Asian History at the University of Delhi, thus ending nearly two decades of his professional life in the Department where he had first been trained and where both of us had begun teaching together in February 1989.

Delhi opened another phase in his intellectual career, and the questions raised in State and Locality gradually widened as Farhat moved from locality and political authority towards communication, legal culture, property, literacy, performance and the public sphere, with his work increasingly asking how ordinary people experienced the state, how they used its institutions and how the apparently impersonal structures of law and government were transformed when they entered the social world. His essay “Towards a Theory of Social Communication in Pre-colonial India”, presented to the Indian History Congress, already pointed towards this shift, while other writings ranged considerably more widely across madrasas and modernity, Muslim liberal reform movements, globalisation and postmodernism, religion and the Revolt of 1857, and forms of civility and publicness in pre-British India, and his work on 1857, for example, drew attention to the religious language of rebellion without reducing the uprising simply to religion, so that his scholarship was gradually moving from the institutional history of the state towards the cultural practices through which authority was understood, negotiated and contested. His interest in legal culture proved particularly productive, and in “Property and Social Relations in Mughal India: Litigations and Disputes at the Qazi’s Court in Urban Localities, 17th–18th Centuries”, published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient in 2018, Farhat questioned the tendency to understand property simply as an economic commodity, arguing instead that property was embedded within relationships of family, caste, honour and community, so that documents consequently did not speak independently of the social world in which they were produced, writing coexisted with oral and performative practices, and litigation itself became a field in which social relations were continually negotiated.

This long intellectual journey culminated in his second major monograph, Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, and if State and Locality had moved the study of Mughal authority from the centre to the locality, Paper, Performance, and the State went further by attempting to recover the state in activity. Farhat examined property disputes, qazi’s courts, petitions, legal pluralism, literacy, oral traditions and the public sphere, and the Mughal Empire appears here as what he calls a vast regime of paper, but paper did not eliminate performance or oral culture, since the written, oral and performative constantly interacted. The book’s most interesting intervention lies perhaps in Farhat’s insistence upon a socially embedded state, for authority did not merely descend from emperor to official and from official to subject, as subjects themselves used petitions, complaints, documents and courts to negotiate with authority, and markets, coffee houses, courts and other spaces became arenas in which perceptions of the state were produced, while the concept of a “performative public sphere” allowed him to explore forms of political communication outside the institutional categories inherited from European historical experience. In 2022, as Sectional President of the Indian History Congress, he brought together many of these concerns in his address, “Social Change and Imperial Sovereignty in Micro-Spaces: Exploring the Mughal State Formation from Below”, and the title itself captures the distance travelled since the older debates about whether the Mughal Empire was a centralised or decentralised state, since Farhat’s concern had become the micro-space, the locality, the ordinary transaction and the small arena in which sovereignty actually acquired social meaning.

His scholarship, however, has not remained confined to the Mughal state, and his most recent major work marks another important widening of his intellectual interests, for Voices in Verses: Women’s Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth-Century India, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024, enters the world of nineteenth-century women’s Urdu poetry. Drawing especially upon neglected tazkira-i zanāna, or biographical compendia of women poets, Farhat challenges the assumption that the Urdu literary public sphere was overwhelmingly male, and he reconstructs the presence of women from very different social locations, including elite households, bazaars and kothas, besides examining their participation in the making of literary culture. There is, in fact, an interesting continuity between this apparently very different book and his earlier scholarship, since the historian who once moved from the imperial court to the locality now moves from canonical male literary culture towards voices at its margins, and the scholar interested in paper, performance and communication turns towards poetry, memory and emotion, so that Voices in Verses is therefore not quite the departure it might initially seem but continues Farhat’s persistent attempt to discover historical agency in spaces where conventional narratives have often failed to look. There is also something of Aligarh in this book which deserves notice, for Farhat himself has acknowledged the Urdu literary environment in which he grew up, recalling figures such as Ale Ahmad Suroor, Waheed Akhtar, Khalil-ur-Rahman Azmi, Qazi Abdus Sattar and Shahryar, as well as the influence of his own family, and the world of Prem Nishān, one might say, was never entirely left behind, since his journey through Cambridge, Mughal Gujarat, qazi’s courts, public spheres and the University of Delhi eventually returned him, by another route, to the Urdu literary culture of the world in which he had grown up. Farhat’s academic interests have continued to expand, and since August 2022 he has been a Partner Investigator in the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, “Pursuing Public Health in the Pre-Industrial World, 1100–1800”, whose principal investigator is Professor Guy Geltner of Monash University, while his teaching at Delhi has similarly ranged beyond conventional Mughal political history to Ottoman history, gender relations in the Persianate world, Indo-Persian source reading, legal history and questions of early modernity, so that his intellectual movement has consequently been from political and fiscal history towards social, legal, cultural and gender history without completely abandoning the questions about power with which he began.

And yet there is another Farhat Hasan whom I have known, and it would be dishonest to suppress him in a retirement tribute. The Farhat who left Aligarh intellectually was not quite the Farhat who had entered it, nor should he have been, since historians are not required to remain disciples of the institutions in which they were trained, and indeed a school of history that cannot produce its own critics has failed as an intellectual tradition. Farhat increasingly became a critic of what is described as the Aligarh School, and some of his criticisms are explicit in his writings, particularly his objections to what he considers its excessive emphasis upon centralisation, institutions and the fiscal foundations of the Mughal state, and here our perspectives have sometimes differed. I continue to regard the fundamental contributions of the Aligarh historians, particularly their reconstruction of the agrarian system, mansab-jagir structure, revenue administration, social classes and material foundations of Mughal power, as indispensable, while Farhat has increasingly been interested in precisely those areas which the older structural history was less equipped to illuminate, namely locality, negotiation, micro-spaces, legal pluralism, communication, performativity and the public sphere. The difference is not insignificant, yet it need not always be understood as an either-or proposition, and indeed Farhat’s best work demonstrates why it should not be, since one cannot understand negotiation without knowing the structures within which negotiation occurred, but neither can one assume that structures operated everywhere precisely as they were prescribed at the imperial centre. Institutions matter, but so do the people who inhabited them, revenue records reveal one reality while petitions, court papers, poetry and public performance may reveal another, and the historian requires both. That, to my mind, remains Farhat’s most interesting historiographical position, for he may today be more readily recognised as a critic of Aligarh than as its representative, but the Aligarh training remains embedded in the very scholarship through which he criticises it, and the insistence upon evidence, the mastery of Persian material, the seriousness with which the Mughal state is treated, and the refusal to substitute attractive theory for archival labour are all part of an intellectual inheritance that cannot easily be discarded, since Cambridge widened his questions but did not erase Aligarh. Perhaps that is why I still prefer to think of Farhat not simply as a historian who moved from one school to another, but as someone who, at his most productive, stood between traditions and compelled them to speak to each other.

There is finally the personal dimension, for academic careers have their agreements and disagreements, their friendships and silences, their collaborations and contests, and those of us who entered the profession together in the late 1980s have now begun to leave it. I retired from the University in June 2026, and three months later, Farhat reaches the same formal boundary at Delhi, so that suddenly February 1989 seems both very distant and strangely close. We were young temporary lecturers then, uncertain of what lay ahead, and we had no way of knowing that one of us would spend his career largely at Aligarh and the other would eventually move to Delhi, that books would be written, institutions administered, controversies encountered and historiographical positions revised, or that nearly thirty-eight years later we would find ourselves looking back upon careers that began on exactly the same day.

When I think of Farhat, therefore, I do not think first of Cambridge or Delhi, or even of State and Locality, but I remember Aligarh. I remember two young historians entering the same Department in February 1989, and beyond that I remember an older Aligarh, the Aligarh of our fathers, of teachers, libraries, manuscripts, philosophy, poetry and long conversations, and I remember Prem Nishān behind Kothi Rani Dulhan and that image of Krishna hanging quietly upon its wall. Much has changed since then, for Aligarh has changed, universities have changed, the discipline of History has changed, and we too have changed with it.

Farhat Hasan leaves formal university service with three substantial monographs and a wide body of essays behind him, and from State and Locality in Mughal India through Paper, Performance, and the State to Voices in Verses, one can trace a remarkable widening of historical vision from state to society, from institutions to interactions, from imperial sovereignty to micro-spaces, from fiscal documents to legal performances, and eventually from the predominantly male archive to women’s voices, poetry and cultural memory. Retirement, of course, is an administrative category, and it need not be an intellectual one, for a historian it can provide precisely what university administration so frequently denies us, namely time to read, think and write. And so, as Farhat retires, I wish my old schoolmate, fellow Alig, colleague, friend, fellow traveller and, yes, sometimes intellectual opponent many more years of scholarship, since we began together as temporary lecturers in February 1989 and our paths subsequently diverged, crossed and diverged again, but perhaps that is precisely what makes an academic friendship worth remembering. A friend need not always agree, a colleague need not always follow the same road, and a critique, when it grows out of a shared intellectual world, remains in its own curious way a part of that world, and Farhat Hasan’s career has been all three.

A very happy and fruitful post-retirement life to him!

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

The Siddons Union and the Making of a Debating Culture

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

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

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

From Debate to Representation

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

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

The Presidential Debate and the Rooftop Speech

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

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

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

The Orators of Aligarh

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

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

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

AMUSU at its Best

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

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

Its Failures and Excesses

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

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

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

Representation as a Check upon Authority

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

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

From Degeneration to Dysfunction

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

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

What the University Loses

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

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

Reform, Not Extinction

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

The Right to Argue

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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