ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

October in some ways is a month which makes us talk about Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar. He was not only born, but died during this month. 15 October 1542, is the alleged date when Hamida Bano Begim gave birth to him in the Rajput court of Umarkot in Sindh, where his father Humayun had taken refuge after losing his Indian territories. Sixty-three years later, on 27 October 1605, Akbar ultimately closed his eyes at Agra, leaving behind an empire vastly different from the fragile inheritance into which he had been born. Between those two October dates unfolded one of the most consequential reigns in Indian history, an age that witnessed not only the consolidation of Mughal power but also a remarkable experiment in reconciling faith, political authority and the religious diversity of the subcontinent.

Few rulers have exercised such a profound influence on the political, social and cultural life of medieval India. At the age of 14 he inherited an empire whose foundations were still insecure, whose ruling elite was divided by competing interests, and whose population embraced an extraordinary range of religious beliefs, languages and customs. By the time he left this world, he had transformed this fragile inheritance into one of the most formidable empires of the early modern world. Yet his achievement was not confined only to territorial expansion or administrative consolidation. It lay equally in his recognition that a durable empire in India could not be sustained by military superiority alone, nor by the assertion of a single religious authority. It required a political order capable of accommodating diversity and securing the allegiance of people who did not share the faith of their sovereign.

Akbar’s reign is often celebrated as an age of religious tolerance. The description is not misplaced, but it does not fully convey the complexity of his political and intellectual experiment. What distinguished Akbar was not simply a willingness to tolerate religious difference, but a gradual movement towards a conception of sovereignty in which the ruler’s responsibility extended beyond the boundaries of any particular religious community. His policy of sulh-i kul, or universal peace, was the culmination of a process in which political necessity, personal enquiry, intellectual engagement and the practical demands of imperial government came together. To understand this development, we must place Akbar within the historical circumstances of his age rather than interpret his actions through modern assumptions about secularism or religious freedom.

When Akbar ascended the throne in 1556, the Mughal position in India was precarious. Humayun had only recently recovered Delhi, and the Afghan challenge remained formidable. The victory over Hemu at the Second Battle of Panipat secured the dynasty’s immediate survival, but the task of building a stable political order had scarcely begun. During the early years of his reign, Akbar remained under the influence of Bairam Khan and subsequently of powerful figures within the imperial household. His gradual assertion of independent authority was accompanied by a growing understanding of the problems confronting a ruler in India.

The empire Akbar sought to establish was neither an exclusively Turkish nor a narrowly Muslim enterprise. Its population was overwhelmingly non-Muslim, while its political landscape contained numerous established centres of authority, including Rajput ruling houses, Afghan chiefs, zamindars and regional dynasties. The older political traditions of India could not simply be swept aside. They had to be understood, negotiated with and, wherever possible, incorporated into the developing imperial structure.

It was in this context that Akbar’s relations with the Rajputs acquired particular importance. His matrimonial alliances with certain Rajput families, beginning with the house of Amber, formed part of a much wider policy of political accommodation. Rajput chiefs were admitted into the imperial nobility, entrusted with important military and administrative responsibilities, and allowed considerable freedom in observing their religious and social customs. Raja Bhagwant Das and Raja Man Singh emerged as influential figures within the Mughal establishment, while Raja Todar Mal became closely associated with the organisation of imperial revenue administration.

Such appointments represented more than gestures of goodwill. They signified the gradual transformation of the Mughal ruling class into a politically integrated nobility whose membership was not determined solely by religion or ethnic origin. Imperial service brought together Turanis, Iranis, Indian Muslims, Rajputs and, increasingly, other groups within a common institutional framework, converting it into a cosmopolitan ruling class not found in any other contemporary empire of the period. The political standing of this ruling groups rested on their relationship with the emperor and their position within the evolving mansabdari system.

Nevertheless, Akbar’s policy towards the Rajputs should not be romanticised as an uninterrupted story of friendship and reconciliation. The conquest of Chittor in 1568, accompanied by extensive killing after the fortress fell, remains a stark reminder that imperial expansion could be ruthless. The resistance of Mewar, particularly under Rana Pratap, demonstrates that accommodation was not universally accepted. Akbar’s empire offered opportunities for cooperation, but it also demanded submission to imperial authority. Religious accommodation and military coercion were not mutually exclusive features of his rule; both formed part of the same process of empire-building.

The changing character of Akbar’s religious outlook can be traced through a series of measures undertaken during the earlier decades of his reign. In 1563, he abolished the tax on Hindu pilgrims, and the following year he removed the jizya, the poll tax traditionally imposed on non-Muslim subjects under certain interpretations of Islamic law. These measures carried considerable symbolic significance. They weakened the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects in the fiscal practices of the state and indicated that Akbar was beginning to question inherited conventions of religious differentiation.

His actions did not amount to a rejection of Islam. Akbar had been brought up within a Muslim environment and remained deeply engaged with Islamic religious thought throughout much of his life. He respected Sufi saints, visited their shrines and maintained a particular attachment to the Chishti order. His association with Shaikh Salim Chishti at Sikri is well known. The birth of his son Salim in 1569, following his prayers and visits to the saint, strengthened this connection. The establishment of Fathpur Sikri as an imperial capital subsequently gave architectural expression to the relationship between kingship, spiritual authority and imperial ambition.

Yet Akbar’s religious interests were never confined to inherited devotional practices. His intellectual curiosity encouraged him to question the authority of religious scholars and to examine the grounds on which competing claims to truth were made. This tendency became especially pronounced during the 1570s, when the imperial court at Fathpur Sikri emerged as a centre of theological debate and philosophical enquiry.

The construction of the Ibadat Khana, or House of Worship, in 1575 marked an important stage in this development. Initially intended for discussions among Muslim scholars, theologians and Sufis, it soon became the setting for increasingly contentious debates. Differences between Sunni scholars, disagreements involving Shiʿi participants, and disputes over theological interpretation revealed the absence of the unanimity that religious authorities frequently claimed for themselves.

The discussions eventually expanded to include representatives of other religious traditions. Brahmans, Jain scholars, Christian missionaries and Zoroastrian interlocutors took part in exchanges that brought diverse systems of belief into direct contact with the imperial court. The arrival of Jesuit missionaries from Goa, beginning with the first mission in 1580, introduced Akbar to Christian theology, biblical narratives and European religious imagery. Jain teachers, including Hiravijaya Suri, influenced his thinking on non-violence, animal slaughter and the ethical responsibilities of rulers. His interest in Hindu philosophical and devotional traditions similarly broadened the range of ideas under consideration.

These encounters were not without tension. Participants often sought to establish the superiority of their own beliefs, and the surviving accounts reflect the prejudices and expectations of their authors. The Jesuits hoped for Akbar’s conversion to Christianity, while some Muslim chroniclers viewed his experiments with growing suspicion. Yet the significance of these discussions lay in the fact that the emperor was willing to listen to competing religious claims without accepting that any single group of theologians possessed an exclusive right to determine imperial policy.

The disputes also had important implications for the nature of sovereignty. In 1579, a document commonly known as the Mahzar was issued, affirming the emperor’s authority to choose among differing interpretations of Islamic law where qualified jurists disagreed, provided that his decision conformed to the principles of the Quran and the welfare of the community. Its provisions were more limited than the sweeping claims sometimes made on its behalf. It did not declare Akbar infallible, nor did it formally transfer all religious authority to the emperor. Nevertheless, it strengthened his position against the claims of individual religious scholars and helped establish the principle that the requirements of government could not remain subordinate to the interpretations of any particular theological faction.

The intellectual foundations of this developing conception of kingship were articulated most systematically by Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s close associate, adviser and historian. In the Akbarnama and the Ain-i Akbari, Abu’l Fazl presented sovereignty as an institution invested with a special responsibility for maintaining justice, order and the welfare of humanity. The emperor was represented as the recipient of farr-i izadi, or divine radiance, an idea that drew on Persian traditions of kingship while being reinterpreted within the political circumstances of Mughal India.

This conception did not make the emperor a prophet or the founder of a new revealed religion. Rather, it invested kingship with an ethical responsibility that transcended sectarian divisions. A just sovereign was expected to rise above narrow religious prejudices and protect the interests of all his subjects. Abu’l Fazl’s emphasis on reason, enquiry and freedom from blind imitation reflected the intellectual atmosphere cultivated at Akbar’s court.

It was from this setting that sulh-i kul emerged as a central principle of imperial governance. Although often translated as universal tolerance, the expression carried a wider meaning. It implied a condition of peace among different communities and a political order in which the state did not identify itself exclusively with one religious group. Its practical significance lay in the expectation that the ruler should treat his subjects with justice irrespective of their religious affiliations.

Such a principle was particularly suited to the circumstances of a vast and diverse empire. It offered a means of reconciling the political unity sought by the Mughal state with the religious and cultural plurality of Indian society. In this sense, sulh-i kul was not merely an expression of personal benevolence. It was also a principle of imperial integration, enabling the state to draw on the services and loyalties of groups whose traditions differed substantially from those of the ruling dynasty.

At the same time, it would be misleading to describe Akbar’s political order as secular in the modern constitutional sense. Religion remained closely associated with the language and symbolism of kingship, while the emperor continued to exercise extensive authority over religious and social life. What changed was the basis on which religious differences were accommodated within the imperial system. The sovereign was increasingly represented not as the political representative of a single religious community, but as the guardian of an order embracing many communities.

The much-discussed “Din-i Ilahi”, or more accurately the spiritual discipleship associated with Akbar’s Tauhid-i Ilahi, must be understood within this broader development. It has frequently been represented as an attempt to establish a new religion combining elements of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and other traditions. Such an interpretation exaggerates both its institutional character and its historical significance. The circle of disciples was small, and there is little evidence that Akbar intended to create a mass religion with a separate scripture, organised priesthood or system of public worship. It was more closely associated with ethical discipline, personal loyalty and the emperor’s spiritual authority.

The controversy surrounding these developments also illustrates the difficulties of reconstructing Akbar’s religious ideas from contemporary sources. Abu’l Fazl presented the emperor as an enlightened sovereign whose pursuit of truth placed him above sectarian prejudice. Abdul Qadir Badauni, by contrast, regarded many of the same developments as dangerous departures from established Islamic practice. The Jesuit accounts offer yet another perspective, often interpreting Akbar’s interest in Christianity through the expectations of missionaries seeking converts. None of these narratives can be accepted uncritically. Their differences are themselves valuable evidence of the intellectual and religious tensions generated by Akbar’s experiments.

Akbar’s engagement with India’s religious traditions also extended beyond theological discussion into literature, language and artistic production. His translation bureau, the Maktab Khana, established at Fathpur Sikri, brought together scholars capable of working across Sanskrit and Persian intellectual traditions. The translation of the Mahabharata into Persian, known as the Razmnama, was among the most ambitious undertakings of this enterprise. The Ramayana, Harivamsha and other Sanskrit works were also translated or adapted into Persian.

These projects were not simply exercises in literary curiosity. Persian was the principal language of Mughal administration and elite intellectual life. By making Sanskrit texts available in Persian, the court opened important elements of Indian philosophical, religious and literary traditions to readers who might otherwise have remained unfamiliar with them. The translations were shaped by the assumptions of their patrons and translators, and they did not always reproduce the originals without alteration. Nevertheless, they created opportunities for intellectual exchange across linguistic and religious boundaries.

The imperial painting atelier similarly reflected the cultural encounters encouraged by the court. Artists trained in different regional traditions worked alongside one another, while the arrival of European engravings and paintings introduced new techniques of representation. The resulting Mughal style was neither a simple continuation of Persian painting nor an unaltered adoption of Indian forms. It emerged from a sustained process of experimentation, adaptation and collaboration.

Architecture provides another striking expression of this cultural synthesis. The buildings of Fathpur Sikri, particularly the palaces and residential structures, incorporated forms and techniques associated with different architectural traditions of the subcontinent. Trabeate construction, carved brackets, projecting eaves, chhatris and other features appeared alongside arches, vaults and forms associated with the wider Persianate world. Such combinations should not automatically be interpreted as deliberate symbols of religious harmony, since architectural forms do not belong exclusively to particular religious communities. Yet they reveal the ability of imperial workshops to draw on a wide range of regional skills and established building practices.

The Jami Masjid and the monumental gateways of Fathpur Sikri, together with the palace complexes, demonstrate how the imperial capital brought different architectural languages into a coherent political setting. The city itself embodied Akbar’s ambition to create a courtly environment in which political authority, religious devotion, artistic production and intellectual activity could coexist.

The same processes were visible in the social composition of the empire. Mughal administration required the cooperation of accountants, revenue officials, merchants, artisans, military specialists, scholars and local intermediaries drawn from diverse backgrounds. The consolidation of the mansabdari and jagirdari systems, the expansion of revenue administration and the growing integration of regional elites helped create institutional bonds extending beyond religious affiliation. The empire was sustained not merely by the emperor’s ideas but by the material interests and practical relationships that connected different sections of society to the imperial state.

This does not mean that religious distinctions disappeared from everyday life or that social inequalities were overcome. Caste hierarchies, local conflicts, sectarian rivalries and inherited prejudices continued to shape society. The Mughal state itself remained hierarchical and coercive. Peasants bore substantial revenue demands, military campaigns inflicted suffering, and the imperial nobility enjoyed privileges unavailable to the majority of the population. Akbar’s religious accommodation did not constitute a programme of social equality in the modern sense.

Nor was the emperor’s tolerance entirely consistent. Certain measures, particularly those associated with restrictions on animal slaughter or the regulation of religious practices, reflected his own ethical convictions and could affect different communities unequally. His increasingly elaborate court rituals and claims to exceptional spiritual insight also raised questions about the relationship between personal belief and political authority. The very concentration of power that enabled Akbar to challenge religious orthodoxy also allowed him to impose his own preferences on others.

These contradictions should not be ignored, for they help us distinguish historical achievement from idealised memory. Akbar was an early modern monarch, not a modern democrat. He sought to consolidate an empire, not establish a constitutional order founded on individual rights. His policies of accommodation were inseparable from the requirements of sovereignty. Yet it would be equally mistaken to dismiss them as mere political expediency. His sustained engagement with religious ideas, his willingness to question inherited authority and his patronage of intellectual exchange suggest a genuine interest in understanding the diversity of human belief.

Indeed, the distinction between conviction and political calculation may itself be too rigid. In the world of early modern kingship, ethical ideas and practical considerations frequently reinforced one another. Akbar’s recognition that religious exclusiveness could weaken imperial unity did not prevent him from developing a serious intellectual commitment to broader principles of justice. His achievement lay partly in transforming the necessities of government into a more comprehensive vision of political responsibility.

The long-term significance of this experiment becomes clearer when Akbar is situated within the wider history of early modern empires. Religious conflict was a defining feature of much of the sixteenth-century world. Europe experienced the upheavals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, including the devastating violence of the French Wars of Religion. The Ottoman and Safavid empires also confronted the relationship between political sovereignty and competing religious identities, although they developed different institutional and ideological responses.

Against this background, Akbar’s efforts to create an imperial order capable of accommodating religious plurality acquire particular importance. They were not wholly unprecedented, nor did they eliminate conflict. Traditions of coexistence, negotiation and shared cultural practices had long existed in India. Sufi and Bhakti movements, regional courts, mercantile networks and local societies had already created numerous spaces of interaction. Akbar’s contribution was to elevate accommodation into a consciously articulated principle of imperial governance and to give it institutional expression through the composition of the nobility, the practices of the court and the language of sovereignty.

The consequences extended beyond his own lifetime. Under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, many features of the composite Mughal political order continued, although the balance between imperial authority and religious accommodation changed according to circumstances. The later history of the empire, including the policies of Aurangzeb, cannot be reduced to a simple contrast between tolerance and intolerance. Mughal political culture remained complex, and religious policies were shaped by changing administrative, ideological and military considerations. Nevertheless, the conception of sovereignty articulated during Akbar’s reign became an enduring reference point in discussions of the nature of the Indian state.

Akbar’s legacy also invites reflection on the ways in which history is remembered and appropriated. In modern India, he has often been celebrated as a symbol of religious harmony and cultural synthesis. At other times, his achievements have been minimised or interpreted primarily through the language of conquest and religious identity. Both approaches can obscure the historical circumstances in which he operated. A critical understanding requires us to recognise the violence of imperial expansion without overlooking the intellectual and institutional innovations that distinguished his reign.

The importance of Akbar lies neither in presenting him as a flawless champion of tolerance nor in reducing him to a foreign conqueror. He was a ruler who understood that the diversity of India was not a temporary obstacle to be removed but a permanent reality with which political power had to engage. His response was to construct an imperial order in which allegiance to the sovereign could coexist with differences of religion, custom and cultural inheritance.

There is also a deeper lesson in the intellectual culture fostered at his court. The debates of the Ibadat Khana demonstrated that religious certainty did not necessarily produce agreement, and that those claiming exclusive possession of truth could themselves be divided by bitter disputes. Akbar’s willingness to hear different voices represented an important departure from the assumption that political authority must depend on the enforcement of a single religious interpretation. His experiments suggested that the pursuit of knowledge required openness to disagreement, and that the responsibilities of government demanded a wider perspective than sectarian loyalty.

In this respect, Abu’l Fazl’s formulation of sulh-i kul remains perhaps the most enduring contribution of the age. It recognised that peace was not simply the absence of conflict but a condition sustained by justice, restraint and the acceptance of difference. Although framed within the language of imperial sovereignty, it expressed an insight whose relevance extended beyond the immediate requirements of Mughal administration.

The age of Akbar was therefore remarkable not because it resolved the tensions between faith and political power, but because it attempted to negotiate them through a new understanding of kingship. Faith remained important, empire remained coercive, and tolerance remained conditioned by the authority of the sovereign. Yet within these limitations emerged a political imagination that sought to transcend the narrow boundaries of religious affiliation.

More than four centuries after Akbar’s death, his reign continues to invite debate because the questions with which he grappled have not disappeared. How can political authority secure the loyalty of people belonging to different religious traditions? Can a state maintain its legitimacy without privileging the beliefs of one community over those of others? What place should reason, dialogue and intellectual enquiry occupy in public life? These are not questions confined to the sixteenth century.

Akbar’s answer was shaped by the institutions and assumptions of his own age, and it cannot simply be transplanted into the present. Nevertheless, his recognition that political unity need not demand religious uniformity remains historically significant. His greatest achievement was perhaps the realisation that an empire as diverse as India could not be held together by the sword alone. It required a broader conception of justice, a willingness to accommodate difference and an understanding that the strength of political authority ultimately depended on its ability to command allegiance across the divisions of faith.

As we approach 15 October and we move towards the anniversaries of Akbar’s birth and death, we remember an emperor and reflect on the political and intellectual experiment associated with his reign. His legacy was neither without violence nor free from contradiction, but it included a conception of political authority that recognised the necessity of accommodating India’s many faiths and traditions. Between the October of 1542 and that of 1605, Akbar had travelled a remarkable distance, from the vulnerable child of a displaced dynasty to a sovereign who sought to make diversity a foundation of imperial strength rather than a cause of political division. That remains one of the most significant and enduring aspects of his place in Indian history, and we honour it by remembering him and his legacy.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

This is, perhaps, the last write up of mine on the executive heads of AMU. The period after his time are too close to us to assess: they were mostly a continuation or a response to what happened under Shah. And I am writing this as yet another ‘crisis’ involving mass mobilisation of both boys and girls and another vc appears to be moving towards resolution (hopefully).

The Vice-Chancellorship of Lt General Zameeruddin Shah, from 2012 to 2017, remains one of the more unusual chapters in the recent history of Aligarh Muslim University. He came to Aligarh after a distinguished career in the Indian Army, carrying with him the reputation of a soldier, an administrator and a man accustomed to discipline. When he arrived, there were many within the University, including myself, who welcomed precisely these qualities. Aligarh had known periods of indiscipline, factionalism and administrative drift, and there was a widespread feeling that a firm hand might restore order. To an extent, particularly during the earlier part of his tenure, this expectation was fulfilled. The campus appeared more orderly, discipline became visible, cleanliness received attention and the administration projected an impression of decisiveness.

It would therefore be unfair to write the history of the Shah years merely as a catalogue of controversies. There were achievements, and there were people within the University who admired him. He was energetic, physically active, accessible in his own fashion and capable of taking decisions rapidly. He placed considerable emphasis upon punctuality, cleanliness and discipline. The campus, for substantial periods, was peaceful, and the endless disruptions which had afflicted Aligarh at other moments did not define his entire tenure. He wanted AMU to rise in national rankings and repeatedly spoke of improving its standing. Nor should every attempt to enforce discipline be dismissed merely because it came from a former General. A residential university with thousands of young students requires rules, and Aligarh certainly had problems which demanded firm action.

Yet the great weakness of the Shah administration lay elsewhere. Lt General Shah appeared never fully to understand the difference between administering a college and presiding over a research university. Still less did he appear to understand that the habits of command which serve a military officer extraordinarily well cannot simply be transplanted into an academic institution. A university is not merely a larger college. A college may principally concern itself with teaching prescribed courses, examinations, attendance and student discipline. A university must also create knowledge. Research, doctoral supervision, laboratories, archives, archaeological exploration, museums, libraries, seminars and intellectual disagreement constitute its life. Its professors are not simply employees delivering lectures according to a timetable. They belong to disciplines extending far beyond the boundaries of their own institution. A Vice-Chancellor therefore administers something he does not intellectually own. This distinction repeatedly became blurred during the Shah years.

One small but extraordinarily revealing example concerned the appointment of examiners for PhD theses. Restrictions were placed upon inviting examiners from distant places and departments were encouraged to choose scholars located nearer Aligarh. The administrative logic presumably appeared impeccable: why incur unnecessary expenditure when an examiner could be found closer home? But this was precisely where the difference between a college administrator and the head of a research university became apparent. A PhD examiner is not selected according to railway distance. The question is not whether an examiner lives in Delhi rather than Chennai, Kolkata or elsewhere. The question is who possesses the expertise necessary to judge the thesis. If the leading authority on a subject lives a thousand kilometres away, the thesis should travel a thousand kilometres. Scholarship has never recognised geographical proximity as an academic qualification.

Nothing, however, illustrated this incomprehension of university life more painfully than what happened to the Archaeology Section of the Department of History. The Archaeology Section was one of the prides of our Department. It represented decades of painstaking work by archaeologists and historians, including Professor Nurul Hasan, Professor R. C. Gaur and others who had created at Aligarh a significant tradition of archaeological teaching, exploration and excavation. The University’s own account today acknowledges the importance of finds from Atranjikhera, Jakhera, Lal Qila, Daulatpur, Sidhpur and Fatehpur Sikri, while the restored Archaeology Section now houses more than 15,000 artefacts and antiquities. It was considered as good as, if not better, the Archaeological sections of ASI itself. It had all the equipment, staff and expertise required from such units. During the Shah administration the building in which this Section functioned was identified for another purpose. As those of us who were present in the University witnessed, the premises were wanted to provide an office for a fellow Army officer who had been inducted into the administration. An academic institution painstakingly built over decades suddenly became expendable because its physical space appeared administratively useful.

What followed was far worse than a simple relocation. Archaeological collections are not collections of beautiful things. Much of archaeology consists of objects which appear singularly unimpressive to the untrained eye: potsherds, fragments of terracotta, bricks, pieces of metal, slag and other apparently insignificant remains. Their importance lies not in their beauty but in their archaeological context. A potsherd may establish chronology. A piece of pottery may reveal trade connections. A fragment may identify a cultural phase. The archaeologist is trained precisely to discover historical meaning in things which others might throw away. During the displacement of the Archaeology Section, however, much of this material appeared to be treated as though it were useless. Why, after all, should anyone preserve ugly potsherds when there were sculptures and attractive antiquities which could be placed in showcases?

The consequences were disastrous. Material regarded as sufficiently attractive or worthy was selected for removal to the University Museum. Other archaeological material (a back bone for any research) was dumped into a structure which had itself earlier been identified for demolition. The transfer was anything but the careful movement of a scholarly collection. Furniture and tables were damaged, some expensive pieces crumbled during the process, and archaeological material was in places treated virtually as garbage. The technical staff of the Archaeology Section were transferred elsewhere. Once the collections, staff and working space had been separated from one another, meaningful archaeological work became virtually impossible. There is an almost painful symbolism here. The potsherd which appeared ugly and useless was actually a test of whether the administration understood what a university was. A museum curator may display the beautiful sculpture, but an archaeologist also needs the broken pot. Knowledge frequently resides in precisely those things which have no aesthetic appeal.

The University’s present account of the Musa Dakri Museum itself confirms the provenance of the collection. It acknowledges the sculptures collected by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the archaeological material subsequently assembled through Professor R. C. Gaur’s excavations and explorations, and the eventual shifting of the collection to the Kennedy Hall complex. There was a further irony. The collection had an obvious historical association with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, whose Āsār-us-Sanādīd itself demonstrates his remarkable interest in monuments, inscriptions and the material remains of the past. Yet the Museum came to be named not after Sir Syed but after Musa Dakri, described in the University’s own account simply as a magnificent donor. There is nothing wrong with honouring philanthropy. Universities need donors and should acknowledge generosity. But the academic identity of a museum ought surely to reflect the intellectual history of its collections. Sir Syed possessed a direct relationship with archaeology and antiquarian scholarship. A donor need possess no such qualification beyond generosity. It was therefore a matter of considerable satisfaction that the Archaeology Section could subsequently be revived and rebuilt. The later cataloguing of its holdings and the publication of History Through Archaeology in 2019 represented, in a sense, the intellectual reclamation of something which ought never to have been dismantled. The present Section again possesses technical staff, a laboratory, drawing facilities, archaeological collections and other facilities, but at a much reduced level: something once violently dismantled, can never gain its former glory. Till date the vacancies in the technical staff due to subsequent retirements have yet to be filled.

There was another curious feature of these years. Alongside the ordinary professoriate appeared a small category whom one might, with some humour, call the super professors. These were individuals whose arrival and position within the University appeared to many teachers to bypass the normal rhythms through which academic careers are built. Questions were consequently raised about qualifications, procedures and the relationship between the posts against which people were appointed and the functions they actually performed. One particularly revealing case involved an individual appointed as a Professor who, as we observed within the University, did not function in the Department where his selection was, in the normal manner. His work was instead associated with students entering the University from the Deeni Madaris and with the special programme established for them.

There was nothing inherently objectionable about the programme. Indeed, the Bridge Course for Graduates of Deeni Madaris was one of the genuinely imaginative initiatives associated with the Shah years. The attempt to equip madrasa graduates with English and other subjects required for entry into mainstream higher education addressed a real educational problem. The programme survives at AMU today, which itself demonstrates that the underlying idea had value. The question was different. Why should someone appointed as a Professor of English not function as an ordinary Professor within the Department of English? If the Bridge Course required a Director, Coordinator or Professor, an appropriate position could have been be created or advertised according to the University’s procedures. A professorship is not simply a salary grade which can be detached from the discipline against which it was sanctioned.

This became particularly galling when placed alongside the treatment meted out to established teachers who disagreed with the administration. During these years three teachers were suspended, including the Secretary of the Teachers’ Association (AMUTA). I too was subjected to disciplinary proceedings and suspension following my public criticism of the Vice-Chancellor. Contemporary reporting records the special meeting of the Executive Council convened in July 2014 in connection with my Facebook remarks. This was where the military conception of authority became particularly troublesome. In the Army, public criticism of a commanding officer by a subordinate is incompatible with the chain of command. In a university, the situation must necessarily be different. A professor or any teacher is not the intellectual subordinate of the Vice-Chancellor. Universities exist because people disagree. Historians challenge interpretations, scientists overturn established propositions and teachers criticise institutions. A Vice-Chancellor has to possess the capacity to be criticised, sometimes unfairly and sometimes unpleasantly, without confusing criticism of himself with an attack upon the University. The Vice-Chancellor is not the University.

Mustafa Zaidi too was suspended. He was suspended in October 2015 after participating in an AMUTA dharna. The agitation was a cause considered genuine by the majority of the staff: it was not for a personal cause. The administration characterised the matter as dereliction of duty and misconduct; AMUTA regarded it as action against dissent. 

The Shah administration justified the action against Zaidi on the grounds that he had remained absent from his assigned academic duties without obtaining proper leave and had conducted himself inappropriately towards the Vice-Chancellor. Shah subsequently portrayed his activities as “disruptive”. Zaidi, however, argued that he had been taking part in a peaceful protest in his capacity as Secretary of the Teachers’ Association. AMUTA, together with the Federation of Central Universities Teachers’ Associations, viewed the disciplinary action rather differently, seeing it as an attempt to curb organised criticism of the administration.

The matter did not end with suspension. In 2016, the Executive Council under Shah’s direction went considerably further and ordered Zaidi’s compulsory retirement on charges that included neglect of duty, misleading the authorities, misconduct and insubordination. Zaidi challenged the decision in the Allahabad High Court, which set aside the compulsory retirement order on 6 April 2017. The change of Vice-Chancellor subsequently brought the episode to a close. After Professor Tariq Mansoor assumed office, Zaidi was reinstated, the period of suspension was counted as duty with full pay and allowances, and both the charge-sheet and the disciplinary proceedings against him were withdrawn.

The third was a case where the charges were obscure and never explained: Professor Hasan Mateenul Islam of the Department of Statistics and Operations Research was suspended following two fact-finding enquiries. One, conducted by Professor Ali Athar, concerned “issues relating to his appointment”, that is, his earlier forms / documents had Syed and S prefixed to his name, while the later documents did not; the other, by Professors Iqbal Parwez and Shoaib Zaheer, examined allegations of “misconduct, violation of University rules and wilful disobedience”. He had actually indulged in a lawful practice which many do in Aligarh: he had sent a substitute to perform his invigoration duties. The Shah administration maintained that both enquiries substantiated the allegations and consequently initiated disciplinary proceedings. However, it was never publicly clarified as what those specific alleged irregularity in his appointment were nor details of his alleged acts constituting misconduct ever revealed. Islam contested the proceedings, and Executive Council records of August 2015 show that he objected to his continued suspension, the sealing of his chamber, and the conduct of the enquiry without first obtaining his clarification.

What followed the suspension made Professor Hasan Mateenul Islam’s treatment particularly degrading. His chamber in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research was sealed, depriving a senior academic of access to his normal place of work and to the papers and other academic material kept there. Similar action was reportedly taken in the my case and that of Mustafa Zaidi. Mine was locked after one month into suspension. To many teachers, the locking of chambers appeared unnecessarily punitive, turning an administrative suspension into a visible demonstration of exclusion before colleagues and students.

There was also a powerful symbolism in physically sealing a professor’s room. Suspension from official duties did not necessarily require that an academic be literally locked out of his chamber. Such an action publicly marked him as someone who had been cast out of the institution’s normal academic life.

The controversy over dress reflected the same desire to regulate university life from above. In 2013 male students wishing to meet the Vice-Chancellor were instructed to wear sherwanis. At Abdullah Hall an order went further, prescribing salwar-kameez with dupatta for women residents, regulating mobile telephones and movement outside the hostel, and threatening disciplinary action including a five hundred rupee fine. Following criticism, the dress order was withdrawn. There was something almost touching in Shah’s desire to recover the old Aligarh sherwani. But riwāyat cannot be resurrected by administrative order and tahzīb cannot be produced through circulars. The sherwani had meaning in the old Aligarh precisely because generations of students voluntarily made it part of their identity. Once culture becomes compulsory, it ceases to operate as culture and begins to operate as regulation.

But by far the darkest episode in this sphere was the controversy concerning the undergraduate women students of the Women’s College and the Maulana Azad Library. It deserves to be remembered precisely because it exposed, in a single moment, the limitations of the administrative outlook which had developed. The immediate issue possessed complications which subsequent public discussion sometimes obscured. Women postgraduate students and research scholars already had access to the Maulana Azad Library, while undergraduate students of the Women’s College had their own library. Shah subsequently maintained that the real difficulty was shortage of space in the central library, and the administration pointed to money sanctioned for improving the Women’s College library. These facts need to be recorded if the episode is to be judged historically rather than polemically. But none of them can erase the extraordinary statement which came to define the controversy. When the demand was raised that undergraduate women students should have access to the Maulana Azad Library, Shah remarked that admitting the girls would bring four times more boys into an already overcrowded library. The Allahabad High Court subsequently issued notices to the Vice-Chancellor and Registrar on a PIL seeking access for the women students, while the Union HRD Ministry sought an explanation.

For me this remains one of the darkest moments of the Shah Vice-Chancellorship. A library is the intellectual heart of a university. Access to books cannot be made dependent upon speculation about how male students might respond to the presence of women. If there was insufficient space, create more space. If there was overcrowding, regulate numbers according to academically neutral criteria. If there were problems of discipline, discipline those who misbehaved. But why should the possible behaviour of boys determine whether girls were entitled to enter a library? The argument was troubling not merely because it disadvantaged women. It transferred responsibility from those whose conduct was supposedly feared to those whose presence might supposedly provoke that conduct. The girl seeking a book became the problem because boys might follow her. For a university which had played such an important historical role in the advancement of women’s education, this was a particularly unfortunate message. The controversy also did considerable damage to the public image of AMU. It allowed an institution with a long and complicated history of women’s education to be caricatured nationally as a university which did not permit women into its library. That caricature was inaccurate: women postgraduates and research scholars already used the Maulana Azad Library. But the administration had itself supplied the sentence which made the caricature possible. Even the Students’ Union became involved in protesting what it regarded as misleading media coverage. Good leadership does not merely require making the correct decision. It requires understanding how one’s words represent an institution.

Yet balance demands that the other side of the Shah years also be remembered. There was, particularly for substantial stretches of his tenure, a visible sense of order on campus. Discipline improved in several areas. He attempted to confront unauthorised occupation and criminal elements. He emphasised cleanliness and physical appearance. The Bridge Course was an innovative experiment. His supporters believed that after years of drift the University once again possessed an administration willing to take decisions rather than endlessly postpone them. Indeed, one reason Shah initially attracted support was that many Aligarians were tired of disorder. A Vice-Chancellor who walked around the campus, demanded punctuality and insisted upon discipline could appear refreshingly different. There is much to be said for administrative energy, and no serious university can flourish in an atmosphere where rules have ceased to matter. The tragedy was that discipline gradually became too closely associated with obedience.

And even the claim of restored order suffered a devastating blow in April 2016. On the night of 23 April rival groups clashed on the campus, firearms were used, two people were killed, vehicles were torched and a mob attacked the Proctor’s Office and vandalised the office of the Dean Students’ Welfare. Shah himself subsequently acknowledged that some mistakes may have been made by University authorities while demanding a CBI or Special Task Force investigation to identify those responsible. The Teachers’ Association accused his administration of failing to contain criminal gangs, an allegation Shah rejected as part of a campaign by disgruntled elements. The irony was painful. A former Lieutenant General had been brought to Aligarh amid expectations that he would restore discipline, yet one of the most serious armed confrontations in the recent history of the campus occurred during his tenure.

More disturbing were the persistent allegations that, in the effort to control student agitation, the administration came increasingly to depend upon favoured non-student and anti-social elements who enjoyed an unusual degree of access and protection. Within the University they were sometimes spoken of, with bitter irony, as a species of ‘official goondas’. The charge acquired greater seriousness after the violence of April 2016, when AMUTA publicly alleged that unauthorised occupants of University hostels were able to operate with impunity because they enjoyed patronage from sections of the administration, and demanded a CBI enquiry to uncover their sponsors and financiers. Shah emphatically denied such accusations, maintaining instead that criminal outsiders, expelled students and a handful of serving students were responsible for the violence. What remained deeply troubling was the widespread perception that, in attempting to contain organised student opposition, the administration had allowed a parallel culture of patronage and muscle power to take root.

Still, that tragedy should not retrospectively erase every peaceful day which preceded it. History should resist such simplification. Shah did bring a certain order to AMU. He did restore confidence amongst those who believed that the University required firmer administration. He did undertake initiatives which deserve acknowledgement. The Bridge Course is one. His insistence upon cleanliness and punctuality was another. There were periods of genuine campus peace, and many students went about their studies without the repeated closures and disturbances that had characterised some other phases of Aligarh’s history.

The problem was not discipline itself. It was the conception of discipline. A university needs discipline, but it needs the discipline of scholarship rather than the discipline of the parade ground. The scholar’s discipline consists in checking evidence, acknowledging contrary arguments, respecting expertise, submitting oneself to criticism and accepting that intellectual authority cannot be created by administrative rank. This is why the seemingly minor restriction concerning PhD examiners, the destruction of the Archaeology Section, the dispersal of its technical staff, the emergence of the super professors, the suspension of teachers, the dress-code controversies and the library episode belong within the same history. They were not identical events. But behind them one can discern a recurring difficulty in understanding the peculiar character of a university.

The Archaeology Section offers perhaps the perfect metaphor. To an administrator, a broken potsherd may look like rubbish and a room containing thousands of such objects may look like valuable office space being wasted. To an archaeologist, that same room is a laboratory of history. The difference between those two ways of seeing is precisely the difference between administering buildings and understanding a university. This was ultimately the contradiction of the Zameeruddin Shah years. He possessed many qualities of a strong administrator: energy, decisiveness, physical courage, personal discipline and an impatience with disorder. These qualities produced some positive results. But the virtues of a military commander do not automatically become the virtues of an academic leader. Indeed, without modification, some can become liabilities.

A General commands. A Vice-Chancellor must persuade. A General operates through a chain of command. A Vice-Chancellor presides over colleagues who possess independent intellectual authority. A General expects an order to be obeyed. A Vice-Chancellor must sometimes listen while a professor tells him that his decision is wrong. A military establishment requires uniformity for operational effectiveness. A university requires disagreement for intellectual effectiveness. This does not mean that universities should become anarchic. Quite the contrary. AMU needed discipline then and needs discipline now. Criminality, intimidation, unauthorised occupation and violence cannot be romanticised as student politics or academic freedom. Shah was right to recognise these as problems and right to attempt to confront them. Where his administration went wrong was in allowing the boundary between enforcing legitimate discipline and demanding conformity to become blurred.

His five years therefore resist a simple verdict. They contained peace as well as violence, administrative energy as well as institutional disruption, worthwhile initiatives as well as deeply questionable decisions. The Bridge Course deserves acknowledgement. The greater emphasis upon discipline had positive consequences. His desire to see AMU perform better nationally was legitimate and welcome. But there were also wounds. For those of us associated with the Department of History, the treatment of the Archaeology Section remains one of them. For teachers who saw colleagues suspended for confronting authority, the assault upon academic dissent remains another. And for the history of women’s education at Aligarh, the Maulana Azad Library controversy remains especially difficult to forget. The image of undergraduate women students standing outside the intellectual heart of their own University while their access was debated partly in terms of how many boys might follow them is not an image which belongs comfortably with Aligarh’s claims to educational progress. It should remain in our institutional memory precisely so that it is never repeated.

Lt General Zameeruddin Shah came to Aligarh believing, I think genuinely, that discipline could cure many of its ailments. In some respects he was right. Aligarh needed discipline. What he did not sufficiently understand was that the greatest discipline of a university is the discipline imposed by scholarship upon power itself. A university is not a parade ground. Its professors are not soldiers, its students are not recruits, its departments are not battalions and its Vice-Chancellor is not a commanding officer. Its strength lies not in how obediently everybody falls into line but in how freely its members can think, research, question and disagree. The Shah years brought Aligarh a measure of order. They also demonstrated the price that can be paid when order becomes confused with academic governance. That is why his Vice-Chancellorship deserves neither unqualified condemnation nor nostalgic celebration. It deserves to be remembered as a period of achievement, contradiction and controversy, but above all as a warning that administering a university requires something more difficult than command. It requires understanding what a university actually is.

Atif Syed, Aligarh: The City That Outlasted Empires, John Murray India/Hachette India, 2026, 336 pp., ISBN 9789357317092, ₹799. Foreword by Irfan Habib.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Some cities are overshadowed by the institutions they contain. Aligarh is a striking example. To most people outside the region, the name immediately evokes Aligarh Muslim University, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the movement for Muslim educational regeneration that grew around the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. So powerful has this association become that the considerably older city within which the College arose has almost disappeared from popular historical memory. Atif Syed’s Aligarh: The City That Outlasted Empires seeks to recover that city and restore to it a history extending far beyond, and long before, the University.

It is an ambitious undertaking. Syed follows Aligarh, known for much of its earlier history as Kol or Koil, across a remarkably long chronological span. Archaeology and traditions concerning the earliest settlement lead into the medieval period, the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, followed by the political turbulence of the eighteenth century, when Jats, Marathas, Afghans, regional magnates and European military adventurers struggled over this part of the upper Gangetic plain. The narrative subsequently encounters British expansion, colonial Aligarh, Sir Syed and the MAO College, before moving towards the modern city. The publisher appropriately describes the result as a “panoramic biography” of Aligarh.‌

Syed himself has an interesting relationship with his subject. He grew up in Aligarh but is not a professional historian. Trained in computer engineering in Singapore, he eventually settled in Austin, Texas, and pursued a career in technology. His engagement with his native city, however, is clearly much more than an exercise in nostalgia. He has read widely, investigated monuments and archaeological remains, followed scattered references in textual sources, and paid attention to the histories concealed within neighbourhoods, buildings and place names. The result is a book written with affection, but also with the curiosity of someone who repeatedly asks what existed here before the familiar Aligarh took shape.‌

Irfan Habib and the Problem of Recovering Koil

The volume carries a brief but significant Foreword by Professor Irfan Habib. It deserves attention because Habib does more than provide the customary words of commendation. He identifies quite precisely what he considers Syed’s principal historical contribution. Habib begins by giving Syed credit for producing a comprehensive study of Aligarh, or Kol/Koil as it was known in medieval times. He then draws attention to the central difficulty confronting anyone attempting such a history. For long periods Koil remains practically unmentioned in written sources. Syed has therefore had to make archaeological evidence perform work that written documents cannot. Habib particularly commends his survey of this archaeological material. When the textual record becomes somewhat firmer from the thirteenth century onwards, Syed painstakingly assembles scattered references in medieval sources and combines them with the evidence of a remarkable surviving thirteenth-century inscription. Habib again singles out the archaeological material for the later period and draws attention to the notable examples of Anglo-Indian architecture that Aligarh acquired.

This endorsement is important because Irfan Habib himself represents an Aligarh historical tradition in which archaeology, historical geography, cartography and material remains have long been taken seriously. His observation that Syed’s use of archaeological evidence is “particularly noteworthy” should therefore not be regarded as casual praise. It identifies one of the genuine strengths of the book: its willingness to allow objects, buildings, inscriptions and landscapes to supplement the silences of chronicles. Yet Habib’s Foreword is also admirably restrained. He does not claim that Syed has discovered an entirely unknown history of Aligarh or overturned an existing historiography. His emphasis is upon comprehensiveness, careful reconstruction and the assembling of dispersed evidence. His concluding hope that Syed’s work receives a broader readership points towards another of the book’s achievements. Material scattered through archaeological studies, medieval chronicles, inscriptions, local histories and specialist scholarship has been brought together into a narrative accessible to readers outside the professional historical community.

Before Atif Syed: Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui

This qualification is important because the history of pre-modern Aligarh was certainly not an untouched field. Any assessment of Syed’s achievement must acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui’s Aligarh District: A Historical Survey, from Ancient Times to 1803 A.D., published by Munshiram Manoharlal for the Centre of Advanced Study, Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, in 1981. A limited reprint was made in 2018. The substantial volume ran to 346 pages, with plates, maps and an extensive bibliography. Siddiqui’s book belonged to a somewhat different genre. It emerged from an academic tradition of regional history and historical archaeology cultivated at Aligarh. Its range of sources was formidable, extending across historical works, mystical and administrative literature, travel accounts, memoirs, letters, archaeological reports, administrative records, biographies, regional and local histories, topographical works, gazetteers, settlement and census reports, and linguistic material. Its very organisation, with substantial sections devoted to the Sultanate, Mughal and eighteenth-century periods, reveals the seriousness with which the pre-British history of Aligarh had already been investigated.

Thus the Dor traditions, Sultanate Koil, Mughal administration, Sabit Khan, Suraj Mal, Najaf Khan, the Jats and Marathas, local zamindars and the complicated political developments preceding British occupation were not chapters entirely forgotten until the appearance of Syed’s book. Siddiqui had already demonstrated more than four decades earlier how much could be recovered by combining the written record with historical geography, inscriptions and archaeology. This does not reduce Syed’s achievement. It enables us to define it more accurately. Siddiqui wrote primarily as an academic historian of a district. Syed writes something closer to the biography of a city. The relationship between the two works is consequently better understood as one of continuity and enlargement rather than discovery and repetition. Indeed, Habib’s Foreword makes it difficult to dismiss Syed as simply a populariser of material already available in Siddiqui. Syed has returned to archaeological evidence, gathered dispersed medieval references, used inscriptions and attempted to bridge periods in which written documentation becomes frustratingly thin. Moreover, his narrative continues far beyond 1803. He is interested not simply in who controlled Aligarh, but in what traces successive political and cultural worlds left upon the city.

From Kol or Koil to Aligarh

One of the most attractive features of the book is its recovery of Koil as a historical place. The modern name Aligarh has become so dominant that it can obscure the earlier identity of the settlement. Syed restores the continuity between the two. Here, however, lies one of the difficulties inherent in writing history across such an enormous chronological span. The earliest phases have to be reconstructed from evidence of very unequal value. Archaeology, local traditions, later gazetteers and textual references cannot automatically be placed upon the same evidential plane. Traditions concerning early rulers or communities may preserve important historical memories, but they require a different kind of handling from contemporary inscriptions or chronicles. At places, therefore, the reader must remain alert to the distinction between what can be demonstrated, what can reasonably be inferred and what belongs to remembered antiquity.

One object demonstrates particularly well both the possibilities of material history and the remarkable continuity connecting medieval Koil with modern Aligarh. This is the inscription from the minaret erected at Koil in the reign of Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud when Balban, the future Sultan Ghiyasuddin Balban, was an enormously powerful figure in the Sultanate. The inscription is dated 10 Rajab 652 AH, corresponding to 26 August 1254. The minaret itself was eventually demolished under the colonial administration in 1862, but its inscription survived. The story of its survival deserves to be told, but Syed misses out on it. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan recognised the historical importance of the inscription, acquired it after the demolition of the minaret and ensured its preservation within the institution he founded. It was eventually fixed into a wall of the building which had housed the Nizam Museum of the MAO College. Thus, even before the professional institutionalisation of archaeology at Aligarh, Sir Syed was acting as a custodian of the material remains of Koil’s past.

The history of the inscription did not end there. When I was in charge of the University Museum, I felt that an object of such significance should no longer remain embedded in a wall but should be displayed as part of the archaeological history of Aligarh and of Sir Syed’s own antiquarian interests. In 2019, with the necessary permission and the technical assistance of the Archaeological Survey of India, the slab was carefully removed and transferred to the Sir Syed Gallery within the University Museum. Its removal produced an unexpected discovery. The reverse of the slab carried earlier sculptural work in the Jain tradition, apparently datable to the tenth or eleventh century. The same piece of stone therefore preserves multiple layers of Aligarh’s past. An earlier Jain sculptural fragment was reused for an inscription associated with Balban’s thirteenth-century Koil; the inscription was rescued by Sir Syed in the nineteenth century; it became part of the MAO College’s museum heritage; and in the twenty-first century it was moved to the Sir Syed Gallery for proper display. Few objects could illustrate more vividly the idea of Aligarh as a historical palimpsest. Wish Syed had included some of this in his book.

The Mughal Landscape and an Unexpected Link with the Taj Mahal

From the medieval period onwards, Koil can be placed more securely within the political geography of northern India. Its importance was related to its position in the upper Gangetic doab and to its relationship with Delhi, Agra and the routes connecting the two. Political authority, agricultural resources, military movement and revenue administration tied the locality to much larger structures of power. Aligarh’s history was never simply that of an isolated town. A fascinating documentary survival provides an unexpected illustration of this relationship during Shah Jahan’s reign. Preserved in the Taj Museum within the Taj Mahal complex at Agra is a document recording that the revenues of the village of Dodhpur in Kol were reserved for the maintenance of the Maqbara-i Munawwara, the Taj Mahal. Dodhpur, now so completely absorbed into the urban geography of modern Aligarh, was thus once connected through the Mughal revenue system with Shah Jahan’s celebrated mausoleum at Agra.

The significance of this evidence extends beyond local curiosity. Great Mughal monuments did not exist as isolated architectural creations. Their continued maintenance required resources, personnel and revenue assignments extending across a much wider imperial landscape. The document concerning Dodhpur reveals one small part of that fiscal geography. An apparently ordinary locality in modern Aligarh was connected economically with one of the most celebrated monuments of the Mughal Empire. It is precisely evidence of this kind that makes local history important. A village name, an inscription displaced from its original monument or a document preserved in a museum a hundred kilometres away can suddenly connect the history of Koil with the larger structures of the Sultanate or Mughal Empire. The inclusion of this would have made the book richer.

An Eighteenth-Century Crossroads

The eighteenth century is among the most fascinating parts of Syed’s story. Here Aligarh becomes entangled in the redistribution of political authority that followed the weakening of central Mughal power. Jats, Marathas, Afghan interests, Mughal grandees and European military officers enter the narrative, while the fort assumes increasing strategic importance. The story also warns us against treating the eighteenth century merely as an age of “decline”. What we encounter at Aligarh is not the simple disappearance of authority but its reorganisation. New military establishments emerged, revenue resources were contested, alliances changed rapidly and European military knowledge became incorporated into Indian political formations.

The French connection is particularly revealing. European officers serving Indian powers belonged to a world very different from that produced by mature British colonialism. Some became deeply immersed in Indo-Persian and north Indian cultural environments. Syed’s references to Europeans participating in Urdu literary culture are therefore more than amusing anecdotes. They reveal the fluidity of an age in which political allegiance, military employment, language and cultural affiliation had not yet hardened into the colonial binaries of European ruler and Indian subject. Aligarh Fort stands at the centre of much of this history. Its importance eventually brought the locality directly into the military expansion of the East India Company. The events of 1803 thus represent not simply another change of rulers but a decisive alteration in the political order within which Aligarh operated.

The Physical City as Historical Evidence

Syed is particularly effective when he turns our attention from dynasties and battles to the physical landscape. The Jāmiʿ Masjid, the fort, the memory of Koil Minar, shrines, temples and neighbourhoods cease to be merely familiar landmarks and names. They acquire histories. For anyone who has lived in Aligarh, this is perhaps the book’s most appealing quality. We frequently pass through places without asking why they bear particular names or what older settlement lies beneath a modern colony. Urban expansion is especially ruthless towards such memory. Tanks disappear, old houses are demolished, gateways vanish, roads are widened and archaeological remains become absorbed into densely populated neighbourhoods. Once the physical evidence disappears, even the questions that might have been asked about it are easily forgotten.

The Balban inscription and the Dodhpur document demonstrate the two different ways in which these histories can survive. The first is an archaeological object whose successive uses extend from the pre-Sultanate period to the present. The second is a written record preserved outside Aligarh which suddenly illuminates the history of a familiar Aligarh locality. Together they remind us that the archive of a city is never confined to one repository. Syed’s book therefore has an important heritage dimension. By attaching histories to apparently ordinary locations, it reminds us that preservation begins with recognition. A monument cannot be valued if nobody remembers what it represents.

Sir Syed, Beck and the Making of Modern Aligarh

Eventually any history of modern Aligarh must encounter the personality who transformed its identity. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan did not create Aligarh, but the institution he founded fundamentally altered what the city would subsequently mean in India and beyond. Syed is right to make the establishment of the MAO College a later chapter in Aligarh’s history rather than its point of origin. The College entered an existing city with its own social geography and accumulated historical landscape. Yet within a few decades the new institution began transforming that landscape itself. The episode of Balban’s inscription also reminds us of an aspect of Sir Syed that can easily be overshadowed by the educational reformer and political thinker. He possessed a serious antiquarian interest and an acute awareness of the importance of monuments and inscriptions as historical evidence. The author of Āsār-us-Sanādīd understood that stones could preserve histories which texts had forgotten. His decision to save the Koil inscription was therefore entirely consistent with his larger intellectual personality.

Syed’s discussion of Theodore Beck and his influence upon Sir Syed is interesting, though this is one area where greater qualification is necessary. There can be little doubt about Beck’s imperial loyalism or his hostility towards the developing Congress movement. Nor should his political activities around the MAO College be minimised. But it would be too simple to explain Sir Syed’s changing political position primarily through the influence of an English Principal. Sir Syed was far too formidable and independent an intellectual personality to be understood in those terms. His political evolution needs to be located within the experience of 1857, the Hindi-Urdu controversy, debates over representative institutions, Muslim educational backwardness, emerging majoritarian anxieties and the changing politics of the North-Western Provinces. His opposition to the Congress and his apprehensions regarding representative government had roots extending beyond Beck. Beck mattered, but he operated within an intellectual and political transformation already under way. To acknowledge his influence is not the same as making him the architect of Sir Syed’s politics.

The MAO College itself should similarly resist retrospective simplification. It was neither merely an instrument of colonial loyalism nor simply the prehistory of later Muslim separatism. It was simultaneously an educational experiment, an arena of religious and social reform, a site of intellectual debate and an institution through which a new Muslim middle class attempted to negotiate the realities of colonial India. The contradictions within it were partly the contradictions of the age itself.

What the Book Does Not Attempt

Apart from some exclusions pointed above, a balanced assessment requires acknowledging the some other limitations of the book alongside its considerable achievements. The most significant of these is the absence of sustained social and economic analysis. A comprehensive urban history of Aligarh would require systematic treatment of its markets and artisans, caste and community structures, mohallas, landholding patterns, demography, water systems, municipal administration, migration, occupational groups and economic relationships with the surrounding countryside. It would demand detailed examination of the transformation produced by colonial urbanism, particularly the relationship between the old city, Civil Lines and the new institutional settlement developing around the MAO College. Syed touches upon many of these worlds, but he does not attempt the kind of systematic social and economic anatomy that would justify describing the work as urban history in the strict sense. The book’s organisation around successive political formations and prominent architectural landmarks, while effective as narrative, tends to privilege the exceptional over the ordinary. We learn a great deal about rulers, monuments and significant events, but comparatively little about how the majority of Aligarh’s inhabitants lived, worked or organised their social worlds across the centuries.

A related limitation concerns the treatment of the pre-Sultanate and Sultanate periods. The evidential base for these centuries is extraordinarily thin, as Habib acknowledges. Syed’s willingness to work with archaeological fragments and scattered textual references is commendable. Yet the narrative occasionally smooths over the gaps in a manner that a more sceptical historian might resist. The distinction between what the material can support and what belongs to the realm of informed speculation is not always clearly maintained. A reader unfamiliar with the historiographical debates might come away with greater confidence in the reconstruction of early Koil than the evidence strictly warrants. The book would have benefited from more explicit discussion of its methodological choices and their limitations.

The treatment of Sir Syed’s political evolution similarly requires qualification. While Syed the author is right to resist reducing Sir Syed to a mere instrument of Beck’s influence, the countervailing danger is to underplay the significance of the colonial institutional context altogether. The MAO College was not established in a political vacuum. Its relationship with the British administration, the expectations placed upon it by its donors and well-wishers, and the broader dynamics of colonial educational policy all shaped the intellectual environment within which Sir Syed operated. A fuller account would need to situate the College within the wider landscape of nineteenth-century Indian educational experimentation, including comparison with institutions such as the Banaras Hindu University, whose founding followed a comparable though distinct trajectory. The book gestures towards these contexts but does not explore them in depth.‌

There is also the question of the book’s temporal imbalance. The pre-modern sections, while valuable, are comparatively brief. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the documentary record is richer, receive more extended treatment. The modern city – post-independence Aligarh – is treated somewhat cursorily, almost as an epilogue. Yet the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed transformations at least as consequential as anything that preceded them: the growth of AMU into a major national institution, the changing demographic and political composition of the city, the decline of traditional industries such as lock-making, the pressures of urban expansion and communal politics. A fuller biography of the city would need to engage more substantially with these contemporary dynamics.

Conclusion

Aligarh: The City That Outlasted Empires is an important and welcome book. It should be read not because it provides the final history of Aligarh, but because it opens so many doors through which future histories may enter. It also needs to be situated within the scholarship that preceded it. Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui’s Aligarh District: A Historical Survey remains fundamental. To describe Aligarh’s pre-modern past as previously “unexamined” would erase an important scholarly tradition associated with the Department of History at AMU. Siddiqui had already shown how textual evidence, inscriptions, archaeology and historical geography could be brought together to reconstruct the district’s history down to 1803. Atif Syed, however, does something sufficiently different to deserve recognition in his own right. As Irfan Habib perceptively observes, his particular strength lies in the use of archaeological material for those long stretches when Kol virtually disappears from written records and in his careful reconstruction of medieval history from scattered textual and inscriptional evidence. He then carries the story far beyond the chronological limits of Siddiqui’s study. If Siddiqui established an important scholarly foundation for the historical archaeology and political geography of Aligarh district, Syed has returned to the same landscape with additional material, different questions and a different audience. He has attempted to transform the accumulated fragments of Aligarh’s past into the biography of a city.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to Atif Syed’s book is that it encourages precisely the kind of historical curiosity that a city like Aligarh deserves. After reading it, one begins to look differently at familiar surroundings. The modern city begins to appear as a palimpsest in which successive histories survive, sometimes openly and sometimes in places where we least expect to find them.

Empires came to Koil, contested it, occupied it and renamed it. Sultans, Mughals, Jats, Marathas, Europeans and the British left their marks. Sir Syed then gave the place an entirely new intellectual significance, and the institution he founded eventually made the name Aligarh known throughout South Asia and far beyond it. Yet beneath all these transformations the city endured. In that sense, Atif Syed’s subtitle is more than a literary flourish. Aligarh really is a city that outlasted empires.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Let me return back to the theme of discussing those Vice Chancellors of Aligarh who made a difference, negative or positive. Today I will discuss a man who transformed the Aligarh as it existed before him and created an institution which then took a different trajectory after him. I am going to describe a period when I myself was mature enough to understand what was happening: I was a student of MA for a part of this period, and I don’t have to depend on either childhood memories or memories as communicated by others. I am also writing this at a time when once again a struggle between the students and the administration is going on, and when once again, the grey dominates over pure white or black. These shades are to be remembered and appreciated.

One has to remember that there are Vice-Chancellors who administer universities, and there are those whose tenure divides an institution’s history into a before and an after. In the history of Aligarh Muslim University, Dr Zakir Husain belonged unmistakably to the second category. So did Colonel Bashir Husain Zaidi and, in a rather different way, Badruddin Tyabji and Nawwab Ali Yawar Jung. Saiyid Hamid, who became Vice-Chancellor in June 1980, must also be placed among them. Yet the Aligarh he inherited was very different from the one his distinguished predecessors had known. Zakir Husain had confronted the existential crisis created by Partition; Zaidi had presided over expansion and institution-building; Tyabji had tried to consolidate that inheritance. Under Jung Aligarh had put forward its most ugly face till then. Saiyid Hamid inherited a university in which ordinary structures of authority had become dangerously weak, and in which strikes, gheraos, hostel politics and student agitations had increasingly come to define Aligarh in the public imagination.

The crisis had not begun with Saiyid Hamid, and its roots, as we have seen in my earlier blogs, went back considerably further. The events of the mid-1960s had already shown how rapidly a dispute within the university could become a major political confrontation. After that, the question of the minority character of AMU came to dominate campus politics for nearly a decade and a half. Professor Abdul Aleem, who served as Vice-Chancellor from January 1968 to January 1974, therefore governed in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Professor A. M. Khusro, who followed him from September 1974 to September 1979, inherited many of the same tensions. And then came Saiyid Hamid, an IAS officer and an Alig, who occupied office from June 1980 to March 1985.

The minority-character movement arose from a genuine and deeply felt question about the historical identity and constitutional position of the university. It would be quite wrong to dismiss it simply as student disorder. It mobilised students, teachers, old boys, Muslim organisations and political figures throughout India. Yet political movements also develop their own methods, and methods created for a larger struggle can eventually become habits of everyday institutional life. Strikes, demonstrations, deputations, boycotts and gheraos increasingly became accepted means of extracting concessions from an administration. The problem confronting successive Vice-Chancellors was therefore no longer merely how to administer a large residential university. It was how to administer one in which almost permanent political mobilisation had become a way of life.

Meanwhile, another problem was developing within the residential system. It was less ideological but ultimately more corrosive. Aligarh had always possessed a powerful tradition of student politics. The Students’ Union was one of its great institutions, and to speak from its platform was an achievement. Its debates trained generations of students in public speaking and political argument, and its office-bearers frequently went on to distinguished careers in politics, administration, law, academia and public life. The Union Hall itself belonged to the intellectual and cultural landscape of Aligarh. But there is a distinction between student politics and student power exercised without institutional restraint. During the 1970s that distinction became increasingly blurred.

The residential character of AMU magnified the problem. A Hall at Aligarh was never merely a hostel. It was a community with traditions, loyalties, hierarchies and a memory of its own. This was one of Aligarh’s great strengths, but under conditions of administrative weakness the same structure could become a source of informal power. Students who remained in residence for long periods acquired influence over younger residents. Former students and persons whose academic connection with the university had become tenuous could continue to exercise influence. Admission to another course could prolong residence. The distinction between a student, an old student and an influential resident sometimes became difficult to maintain. By the end of the 1970s the expression “illegal boarder” had become part of the vocabulary of campus administration.

Certain large residential complexes acquired particular importance in this culture. S. S. Hall (both North and South) and Aftab Hall possessed formidable traditions and strong internal loyalties. It would be grossly unfair to describe the Halls themselves as centres of criminality. Hundreds of perfectly ordinary students lived there, attended their classes and had nothing whatsoever to do with violence. Yet during moments of confrontation particular hostel networks could become extraordinarily difficult for the administration to penetrate. Senior residents could mobilise juniors, former students could retain influence, and the collective strength of a Hall could become far greater than that of any individual student. Thus, by the time Saiyid Hamid arrived in 1980, AMU had acquired an unenviable public reputation. A university which had produced distinguished scholars, scientists, judges, administrators, writers and political leaders was increasingly mentioned in newspapers in connection with strikes, closures, student violence and administrative paralysis. This picture was unfair to the thousands who quietly attended classes, worked in laboratories and studied in the Maulana Azad Library, but neither was the problem entirely imaginary.

Saiyid Hamid was himself an Alig. He knew the institution from within, but he returned to it after a long career in administration. He therefore brought to the Vice-Chancellorship a temperament different from that of the traditional academic administrator. He understood the emotional vocabulary of Aligarh, but he was unwilling to accept the proposition that affection for the university required tolerating the erosion of its rules. Files had to move. Regulations had to mean something. Hostel rooms had to belong to those entitled to occupy them. Admissions could not simply become devices for perpetuating residence. Above all, the Vice-Chancellor could not govern if every administrative decision was ultimately subject to ratification by whichever organised group could assemble the largest crowd. It was inevitable that such an administrator would collide with the political culture which had developed during the preceding decade.

The explosion came in January 1981, and ironically its immediate cause was not an order issued by Saiyid Hamid but the controversy surrounding Professor Irfan Habib. Habib was then Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and already one of India’s most distinguished historians. His public criticism of conditions within the university, including the presence and protection of undesirable and criminal elements, touched the rawest nerve of campus politics. But there was already a history behind the confrontation. The subsequent Supreme Court judgment in Wasiuddin Ahmed v. District Magistrate, Aligarh recorded earlier disciplinary proceedings involving a leading agitator, Habib’s role in reporting misconduct and unfair means, threats against him, and Students’ Union pressure on the Vice-Chancellor even before the confrontation reached its climax.

The issue very quickly ceased to be simply whether Habib’s assessment of AMU was correct. A substantial section of organised student opinion interpreted the remarks attributed to him as an insult to Aligarh, and the demand arose that he should be removed as Dean and punished. The Students’ Union became the principal organisational vehicle of the agitation. Pamphlets circulated, meetings were held and slogans were raised. What might have remained a controversy between a professor and his critics became a confrontation over who possessed authority within the university. Then came the gherao of the Vice-Chancellor. The Supreme Court record provides a disturbing picture. Students began a dharna at the Vice-Chancellor’s residence; its main gate was locked and Saiyid Hamid was prevented from leaving. Doors of university departments were also locked and normal functioning came to a standstill. The gherao continued despite prohibitory orders. On 31 January the police arrested 213 students in a pre-dawn operation, and the university was closed indefinitely. This was no longer merely vigorous student protest. A fundamental question had arisen: who governed Aligarh? Was it the Vice-Chancellor and the statutory authorities, or could the Students’ Union and organised groups within the residential Halls compel the administration to punish a professor, reverse a disciplinary decision or accept a political demand? Whatever one’s opinion of Irfan Habib, the physical siege of the Vice-Chancellor represented something more than democratic dissent. Protest had crossed into coercion.

The great residential Halls now became part of the geography of confrontation. Again, the distinction between institutions and particular groups operating within them is essential. But the size of S. S. Hall and Aftab Hall, their internal networks and the influence exercised by politically active senior residents made such residential concentrations important in sustaining mobilisation. The very residential system which had once socialised generations of Aligs could now also provide the organisational structure for resistance to university authority. Then something happened which earlier generations of Aligs could scarcely have imagined. The police entered the campus. For those who know only the Aligarh of later decades, it is difficult to convey what this meant. The university had possessed a very strong conception of the autonomy of its residential space. The campus was not thought of simply as a collection of public buildings through which the district police might move whenever a law-and-order difficulty arose. Its Halls were homes. Its roads were university roads. Discipline within this world was expected to be maintained through the Vice-Chancellor, Proctor, Provosts, Wardens and the university’s own mechanisms of authority. The sight of armed police occupying this space had been almost unthinkable. The agitation of 1981 broke that barrier.

The scale of the deployment was extraordinary. The Supreme Court subsequently recorded that Section 144 was imposed inside as well as outside the university campus and that the district administration called in twenty companies of the Provincial Armed Constabulary and ten companies of the Central Reserve Police to assist the local police. The university eventually reopened on 17 August 1981 after remaining closed for more than six months. For months the appearance of the campus itself was transformed. Those who lived through the period remember police tents and vehicles becoming part of the landscape. Armed policemen moved through spaces which generations of students had regarded as their own. Guns were visible on roads where the normal traffic of Aligarh had once consisted largely of bicycles, rickshaws, students walking to their classes and the occasional university vehicle. Day and night the police presence remained. Parts of the university began to look almost like a police lines campus. The psychological impact was perhaps greater than the physical one. A student emerging from his Hall could encounter an armed policeman. The policeman was no longer somebody beyond the university gate. He had entered the residential world of Aligarh. This was a profound rupture in institutional memory.

Until then, whatever the intensity of student agitation, there had remained an underlying assumption that Aligarh would ultimately settle the problems of Aligarh. Students might strike. The Students’ Union might confront a Vice-Chancellor. Provosts and Wardens might lose control of their Halls. But the campus remained a university space. That assumption was destroyed in 1981. There is an important distinction between asking why the police were called and understanding what their entry did to the university. The administration faced a genuine breakdown of order. The Vice-Chancellor had been confined within his residence. University buildings had been locked. Academic functioning had been paralysed. The scale of the deployment itself indicates the seriousness with which the civil administration viewed the situation. But necessity does not erase consequence. Once armed police had entered and occupied the residential campus, a psychological boundary had been breached. What had earlier been regarded as inconceivable had happened. Formal coercive authority had entered where informal university authority had failed.

Then came the tragedy which gave the entire confrontation its most painful human meaning. During the disturbances a young student, Aftab Ahmad, was killed in police firing. His death could never thereafter be separated from the memory of those years. Whatever explanations may be advanced concerning the circumstances which produced the confrontation, a young student had lost his life. Administrative breakdown, political agitation, student indiscipline and the collapse of internal authority may help the historian understand how the university reached such a point. None of them diminishes the human tragedy. Aftab’s death transformed the emotional character of the crisis. The armed policemen who remained on campus could no longer be viewed simply as an emergency security arrangement. Every police tent, vehicle and rifle became a reminder that a student had been killed within the world which Aligs had traditionally thought of as their own. The Irfan Habib affair itself did not end with the original agitation. Habib was subsequently suspended, along with Professor Rehman Ali Khan, later in 1981. The chronology is important. The demand for action against Habib formed part of the earlier student agitation, but the suspension came later and should not simply be represented as the immediate capitulation of the Vice-Chancellor before the original gherao. Yet by then something much larger than the fate of one professor was at stake. The old mechanisms through which Aligarh had regulated itself had demonstrably failed. For an administrator such as Saiyid Hamid, the conclusion must have seemed unavoidable. If the university was to survive, it had to become governable.

The measures which followed were therefore not simply punitive. Saiyid Hamid attempted to alter the structures which had allowed the crisis to develop. Hostel discipline was tightened. Unauthorised residence was challenged. Administrative authority was strengthened. The power of informal hostel networks had to be broken. The assumption that an organised gherao could secure an administrative decision had to end. At the same time the academic and residential structure of the university was itself changing. The introduction of the 10+2 system gradually separated Senior Secondary education from the older Intermediate and undergraduate structure. Younger boys increasingly came to be housed separately. The Allama Iqbal Boarding House for Senior Secondary School boys belongs directly to this transition; its foundation stone was laid on 28 August 1984, during Saiyid Hamid’s Vice-Chancellorship. Other forms of residential differentiation also became increasingly important. Medical students inhabited an increasingly distinct professional and residential world. Engineering students similarly became concentrated around their own institutional environment. Younger students were placed together rather than being dispersed through a residential system in which several generations of students had once lived side by side. Administratively this possessed a clear logic. Socially, its consequences were far more complicated.

For the old residential Aligarh had rested upon principles which could never be reduced to ordinances. At their heart stood two concepts difficult to translate adequately into English: riwāyāt and tahzīb. The riwāyāt were the inherited traditions of Aligarh. They were not regulations issued by the Registrar. They were habits, conventions and memories transmitted from one generation of Aligs to another. Tahzīb was something more subtle still. It meant manners and etiquette, certainly, but also a particular way of conducting oneself: how one spoke to elders and juniors, how one disagreed without abandoning civility, how one received a guest, how one behaved at a formal dinner, how one dressed for a Hall function, and how one carried oneself in the Dining Hall, Common Room and Students’ Union. One did not acquire these things merely by obtaining admission to AMU. One had to become an Alig. And one of the principal mechanisms through which this happened was the distinction between senior and junior.

The relationship was hierarchical and could certainly be abused. Seniority could become arrogance; discipline could become bullying. Such abuses should never be romanticised. But that was not the whole institution. The senior was also expected to protect the junior. He introduced him to the Hall and its traditions. He explained how one behaved at dinner, how one addressed a teacher, how a formal function was conducted and what behaviour was considered unbecoming of an Alig. The junior in difficulty could turn to a senior. Seniority brought privileges, but traditionally it also imposed obligations. It was through this relationship that riwāyāt and tahzīb passed from generation to generation. The organisation of the old Halls facilitated this process. Students of different ages and disciplines lived together. An undergraduate encountered postgraduate students and research scholars. The engineer might live beside a historian, the student of physics beside someone studying Urdu or philosophy. The cricketer met the debater. The future doctor shared his Dining Hall with the future civil servant. The Hall was, in that sense, a miniature university.

The restructuring which gathered pace in the early 1980s began to disturb this social ecology. If medical students increasingly lived with medical students and engineers with engineers, professional identity began to replace the broader residential identity. If juniors were thrown overwhelmingly together with juniors, an even more basic question arose: who was to teach them traditions which none of them had yet inherited? A group of seventeen-year-olds could create friendships and traditions of their own. They could not transmit to one another a century of riwāyāt. The bifurcation of Sir Syed Hall in 1983 was almost symbolic of this larger change. The oldest Hall of the university, physically and emotionally connected with the M.A.O. College itself, was divided into Sir Syed Hall North and South for what the university’s own institutional history describes as “administrative reasons”. Administrative manageability was becoming the governing principle even within the historic residential heart of Aligarh.

Here lay the great paradox of Saiyid Hamid’s reforms. He confronted a corrupted form of seniority. Powerful senior residents, long-term occupants and former students could dominate younger students and mobilise hostel networks against the administration. Such concentrations of informal power had contributed to the siege-like conditions of 1981. An administrator determined to restore order naturally sought to weaken them. But in weakening the bad senior, the new arrangements also weakened the institution of the good senior. The old Hall had possessed a memory. Seniors remembered its personalities, customs, celebrated sportsmen and debaters, annual functions, rivalries, eccentricities and innumerable little conventions which had never been written down. When generations lived together, that memory travelled downwards. Once generations were separated, the chain weakened. Rules increasingly replaced riwāyāt. Administrative supervision replaced some of the functions once performed by seniority. What had previously been transmitted as tahzīb was increasingly expected to be secured through regulations. But regulations can prohibit misconduct. They cannot manufacture tahzīb.

The disappearance of mixed residential life also altered the intellectual texture of the university. The historian no longer necessarily encountered the engineer every morning over breakfast. The medico increasingly inhabited the company of other medicos. Professional identities grew stronger while the common culture of the residential university became weaker. This was not necessarily what Saiyid Hamid intended. Nor would it be historically fair to attribute the entire transformation to a single Vice-Chancellor. AMU was expanding. Professional education was growing. Student numbers had increased enormously. The national introduction of the 10+2 system itself required restructuring. Some processes had begun before Saiyid Hamid and others continued long after him. Nevertheless, his Vice-Chancellorship marked the moment when these tendencies converged.

There were important achievements as well. The university expanded academically and institutionally. Saiyid Hamid placed emphasis upon competitive examinations and the wider educational responsibilities of AMU. The Centre for Promotion of Science, established on 26 March 1985 under Section 5(2)(c) of the 1981 Amendment Act, explicitly sought to promote science education particularly among Muslim educational institutions across India. There was therefore another Saiyid Hamid alongside the disciplinarian: the educational reformer who wanted Aligarh once again to think beyond its campus. His revival of Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq was particularly significant. It consciously invoked Sir Syed’s intellectual inheritance and the reformist origins of the Aligarh Movement. There was, however, an extraordinary irony in this. At precisely the moment when Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq was being revived as an intellectual project, some of the social mechanisms through which the everyday tahzīb of Aligarh had traditionally been transmitted were disappearing.

This is why Saiyid Hamid’s legacy cannot be described either as a simple triumph of reform over disorder or as the destruction of an idyllic past. The disorder he inherited was real. The need for reform was real. His achievements were real. And the losses were real. Something had broken during those years which was never completely repaired. Aligarh never quite returned to its older self. The police eventually withdrew. The tents disappeared. The PAC and CRPF vehicles no longer defined the appearance of the campus. Classes resumed. Students again filled the Library and Dining Halls. Elections, debates, examinations, Convocations and Hall functions returned. But the old world did not return with them. The invisible assumptions on which that world had rested had been shaken. The campus had discovered that the police could enter it. The Vice-Chancellor’s residence had been placed under siege. A student had been killed. Teachers had become protagonists in factional conflicts. The Students’ Union had demonstrated both the enormous power of organised student mobilisation and its capacity to cross the boundary between representation and coercion. The administration had responded by centralising authority and regulating areas of student life which had previously been governed more informally.

Most importantly, the old chain of transmission had been damaged. The distinction between senior and junior became weaker. Mixed residential communities declined. Professional and Faculty identities became stronger. Younger students increasingly lived with those of their own age. Rules replaced convention; supervision replaced inherited authority; and the Hall gradually ceased to perform all the cultural functions which it had once performed. The Aligarh that emerged was still recognisably Aligarh, but it was no longer quite the Aligarh of the earlier generations. And the story did not end with Saiyid Hamid. The succeeding decades brought their own Vice-Chancellors, their own experiments, their own achievements and their own crises. It would be unfair, and historically inaccurate, to draw a straight line from 1981 to every problem which AMU subsequently experienced. Universities change because society changes around them. Student composition changed. Indian politics changed. Higher education expanded. Patronage networks changed. New social aspirations entered the campus. The relationship between universities and governments changed as well.

Yet the institutional restraints which had once softened conflict were becoming progressively weaker. Successive crises therefore tended to begin from a university already carrying the scars of earlier ones. Student politics repeatedly oscillated between representation and confrontation. Hostel indiscipline returned in new forms. Questions of admissions, appointments, patronage and administrative authority repeatedly produced controversy. Vice-Chancellors came with promises of restoration and reform, but each inherited structures already altered by his predecessors. The decline was therefore not one dramatic collapse. It was cumulative. One convention disappeared here, another weakened there. An institution lost authority. A Hall lost part of its corporate memory. A statutory body became less effective. A practice which had once depended upon mutual respect came increasingly to depend upon enforcement. Political alignments outside the university penetrated more deeply into its internal affairs. Teachers, students, administrators and old boys increasingly interpreted university questions through competing factions. And with every crisis the memory of how Aligarh had once regulated itself became a little more distant.

This is perhaps the larger historical significance of the Saiyid Hamid years. They did not create everything that followed. The crisis had begun before him, during the later years of Abdul Aleem and Khusro, and its causes reached still further back. Nor did the deterioration of subsequent decades arise simply from his reforms. But his period stands at the watershed. Before it lay an older Aligarh, already troubled and in many respects already breaking down, but still sustained by powerful informal structures of authority, seniority, Hall identity, riwāyāt and tahzīb. After it emerged another Aligarh: administratively more regulated, professionally more compartmentalised, increasingly dependent upon formal authority, and progressively less able to rely upon inherited conventions to regulate its everyday life. What followed in later decades was not a return to the older equilibrium. It was a succession of new adjustments and new crises. Some administrations repaired particular institutions; others weakened them. There were periods of academic achievement, expansion and relative tranquillity. It would be unjust to erase them. But the larger trajectory of campus politics and governance repeatedly exposed the fragility of the institutional culture. Crisis followed crisis, each leaving another layer behind.

The Aligarh of today has been shaped by that accumulated history. It cannot be understood merely by looking at the tenure of the present Vice-Chancellor, or the one before, or even the last several administrations. Nor can every contemporary problem be attributed to one political party, one government, one faction of teachers or one generation of students. What we see today is the product of several decades during which older forms of institutional authority were dismantled faster than equally effective new ones could take their place. That is why nostalgia alone cannot recover the old Aligarh. Buildings can be restored. Hostels can be renovated. Dining Halls can be modernised. Rules can be rewritten and security increased. A university can even revive the names and ceremonies of its past. But riwāyāt cannot simply be notified by an office order, and tahzīb cannot be imposed by a Proctor. They exist only when one generation receives them from another, understands their meaning, modifies what deserves modification and passes what remains valuable to those who come afterwards. This is what was gradually interrupted.

Perhaps, then, the Saiyid Hamid years should be remembered neither as the moment when Aligarh was “saved” nor as the moment when it was destroyed. They were the moment when one historical form of Aligarh finally gave way to another. Saiyid Hamid inherited a university approaching ungovernability. He restored the authority of administration, reorganised important parts of its academic and residential structure and sought to reconnect AMU with the larger educational mission of the Aligarh Movement. But the university which emerged from that process was different from the one which had entered it. The old Aligarh had believed that a university educated a student not merely through his teachers and textbooks but through his Hall, his seniors, his dining table, his Common Room, his Students’ Union and the generations which had occupied those spaces before him. It believed that an Alig was not merely admitted; he was formed. That world had already begun to decay before Saiyid Hamid. The upheavals and reforms of the early 1980s accelerated its passing. The police tents eventually came down. The armed men disappeared from the roads. The university reopened and life resumed. But Aligarh never really returned to where it had been.

The decades that followed carried it through further upheavals, further experiments and deeper institutional crises. Each generation inherited a little less of the old consensus and a little more of the unresolved conflicts of the generation before it. In that long process were fashioned the campus, the politics, the administration and the institutional culture that confront us today. The tragedy is not simply that the old Aligarh disappeared. No institution can remain frozen in time, nor should it. The deeper tragedy is that while much of the old order was dismantled, an equally compelling new culture of institutional responsibility did not always take its place. Somewhere in that transition, the balance between freedom and responsibility, protest and restraint, seniority and obligation, administration and community began to be lost. And with it faded something which generations of Aligs had once understood instinctively, without needing anyone to define it for them: the riwāyāt and tahzīb of Aligarh.

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