ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Since a few days certain individuals have been sharing select contents of Chatterji Committee report of 1960 with much glee to somehow prove what all ails the institution built by Sir Syed and to suggest that it is tightly controlled by a few “families” and nepotism is the order of the day. This write up is to understand what the issue was, and does it mirror what is trying to be shown? Why invoke a report of 1960 now, and that too selectively?

*

In 1960, Aligarh Muslim University faced a searching enquiry into its finances, administration, appointments and recruitment. A committee headed by Professor G. C. Chatterji was constituted, with Professor A. R. Wadia, MP, Kartar Singh Malhotra, P. N. Sapru, MP, M. A. Shamiri and R. P. Naik, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Education, among its members. There were undoubtedly matters before the Committee which deserved investigation. Questions had been raised about financial procedures, appointments, promotions and the functioning of the University administration, and no public university could reasonably claim immunity from such scrutiny. Nor should Aligarh have expected it.

Yet one part of the enquiry has acquired an afterlife out of all proportion to its evidentiary value. This was not an audit objection, a manipulated Selection Committee, an appointment made in defiance of a recommendation, or the selection of an unqualified person over a demonstrably superior candidate. It was a list of University employees who were said to be related to one another.

On 24 October 1960, R. P. Naik wrote to Vice-Chancellor Colonel Bashir Husain Zaidi enclosing a list of persons employed in the University who were, it was said, closely related to one another. The Committee sought information regarding the exact relationship, if any, among persons mentioned in the list and the date of their entry into University service. The annexure was certainly striking. It arranged employees into groups around prominent figures: Colonel B. H. Zaidi, Dr A. Aleem, Professor Mahmood Husain, Professor A. A. Suroor and Dr A. R. Kidwai. Husbands appeared beside wives, brothers beside sisters, fathers beside sons, uncles beside nephews, cousins beside cousins and sons-in-law beside fathers-in-law. In several cases the relationship was not even specified with precision; the individual concerned was simply described as related to another person.

Placed together on a single sheet of paper, the effect was dramatic. It appeared to reveal an institution populated by a relatively small number of interconnected families. One can understand why an investigating committee might have considered this worthy of further enquiry. Kinship within an institution can create conflicts of interest, and an enquiry committee would have been failing in its duty had it ignored credible evidence that relatives were being favoured in appointments. But that should have been the beginning of the investigation, not its conclusion. A family tree can raise a question. It cannot answer it.

What the List Actually Proved

The fundamental difficulty with the annexure is remarkably simple. It established that certain people were related to one another. It did not establish that they had been appointed because they were related. That distinction is everything.

Nepotism does not mean the presence of relatives within the same institution. It means the improper use of influence to favour a relative. To prove nepotism, therefore, one has to demonstrate preference. Who exercised the influence? Who benefited from it? What rule was bent? What procedure was circumvented? Who was passed over? Was a less qualified candidate preferred to someone better qualified because of family connection? The annexure, by itself, answered none of these questions.

Indeed, the list mixed together radically different kinds of relationships. A brother and sister were treated in much the same evidentiary fashion as distant relatives. Husbands and wives were listed without necessarily establishing whether they had married before or after their appointments. People were sometimes simply described as related to one another without explaining the degree of relationship. Yet chronology is indispensable. If two academics entered University service independently and subsequently married, their later marriage could hardly travel backwards through time and transform their earlier appointments into acts of nepotism.

The Committee itself asked for the dates on which individuals entered University service, which suggests that it understood the importance of chronology. The University’s replies also disputed some alleged relationships and pointed out in certain instances that marriages had taken place after appointment. These were not trivial qualifications. They went directly to the logic of the allegation.

Zaidi’s Much-Ridiculed Defence

Colonel Zaidi’s reply has often been treated as one of the more amusing documents in the administrative history of AMU. Faced with a list of relatives, he appeared to respond by explaining that Aligarh had become a great matrimonial centre for educated Muslims. His actual argument deserves to be taken more seriously.

Zaidi pointed to the consequences of Partition. A large proportion of educated and comparatively well-to-do Muslim families, he argued, had migrated to Pakistan. The pool of educated Muslim young men and women remaining in India had consequently contracted. Aligarh was one of the few centres where a substantial concentration of educated Muslim families survived. Families from elsewhere naturally looked towards Aligarh for suitable marriages for their sons and daughters. Some sent their children there for education, young people encountered one another, and marriages followed. The children of teachers and University employees were themselves generally educated, and it was therefore hardly surprising that marriages took place among these families.

Detached from its historical setting, the explanation can certainly sound quaint. Restored to 1960, it looks considerably less ridiculous. Zaidi was describing the social consequences of a catastrophe.

The Great Depletion After 1947

Partition did not merely divide territory. It dislocated communities, professions, institutions and intellectual worlds. For the Muslim professional classes of North India, its consequences were particularly profound. Large numbers of educated Muslims migrated to Pakistan. Civil servants left, lawyers left, doctors left, teachers left, administrators left, students left and entire families moved across the newly created frontier. Pakistan itself desperately needed trained personnel for its new administrative, educational and professional institutions, and educated migrants from India supplied a substantial part of that need.

Aligarh experienced this haemorrhage directly. The University lost teachers, students and administrative personnel. Its student population fell sharply. The social and intellectual environment from which it had traditionally drawn its personnel was drastically reduced.

Those who actually lived through those years remembered the experience vividly. Irfan Habib recalled that AMU was virtually being denuded of its teachers, staff and students after Partition. He remembered student numbers falling dramatically and teachers leaving in succession. Yet one of the remarkable features of his recollection is that classes somehow continued. A teacher would leave, another would be found, and the University struggled to preserve academic routine in circumstances which were anything but routine. Contemporary recollections place student strength as falling from around 3,000 to roughly 800 during the crisis.

M. Athar Ali and others belonging to that generation narrated similar stories. They remembered an Aligarh in which departures had become part of everyday life. A colleague who was present one day might have gone to Pakistan the next. Students disappeared from hostels. Teachers migrated. Families divided themselves between the two countries. The depletion was not confined to the weeks immediately surrounding August 1947. Its consequences continued to be felt for years.

This oral testimony matters. It tells us what statistics alone cannot convey: the psychological and institutional experience of watching an intellectual community diminish almost before one’s eyes. By 1960 only thirteen years had passed since Partition. The Chatterji Committee was therefore not examining an ordinary university functioning within a stable and abundant national academic labour market. It was examining an institution which had recently survived an extraordinary demographic and intellectual rupture.

The Committee Counted Relationships, Zaidi Counted What Had Disappeared

This is where Zaidi’s reply acquires its real significance. The Committee looked at the number of relationships among those who remained at Aligarh. Zaidi was asking it to remember how many people had gone. The Committee saw concentration. Zaidi was describing contraction. One cannot remove a substantial portion of an educated social class and then express astonishment that those who remain appear unusually interconnected.

The denominator matters.

Aligarh after Partition became one of the principal centres in India where an educated Muslim professional society survived and reconstructed itself. Families converged there. Their children studied there. Teachers and administrators lived in a residential environment in close proximity. Young men and women from educated families encountered one another. Marriages inevitably connected households which were already connected socially, intellectually and professionally. This does not excuse nepotism. It explains kinship. The distinction is crucial.

Zaidi was not saying that because educated Muslims had become fewer, an unqualified nephew should be appointed. He was saying that the existence of relatives in the University had a social explanation quite apart from recruitment favouritism. On that limited but important point, his defence was perfectly reasonable. Indeed, with hindsight, one might say that Zaidi understood the sociology of post-Partition Aligarh better than those who found his explanation amusing.

Were These People Undeserving?

There is an even more fundamental difficulty with treating the annexure as evidence of nepotism. Each and every person named must ultimately be judged on his or her own academic or professional qualifications. Where are the obvious incompetents? Where are the people who possessed no qualifications for the positions they occupied? Where are the academic nonentities imposed upon unwilling departments solely because they were somebody’s son, daughter, nephew, cousin, husband or wife?

The names themselves make such an argument difficult to sustain. Irfan Habib became one of the foremost historians of medieval India. Nurul Hasan became a distinguished historian, academic institution-builder and public figure. Moonis Raza emerged as an important geographer and subsequently played a major role in the development of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Zahoor Qasim became one of India’s leading marine scientists and a pioneer of the country’s Antarctic programme. Moonis Raza rose to academic excellence to be known through out the world. Shahid Mehdi had a distinguished academic and administrative career. Others named in the annexure similarly made substantial contributions in their respective fields. The Department of English owes a lot to Zahida Zaidi, as does Department of Education to her sister Sajida. Obaid SS and Siddiquis all emerged as stars of not only Aligarh but the entire academic world. Take any name in the list and check their credentials. They were all scholars in their own right.

This does not mean that later achievement automatically proves the regularity of an earlier appointment. A talented individual can still benefit from influence. Merit and patronage are not mutually exclusive. But the opposite proposition is equally important. Kinship cannot retrospectively extinguish merit. One cannot reduce Irfan Habib to somebody’s husband, Nurul Hasan to somebody’s cousin, Moonis Raza to somebody’s relation or Zahoor Qasim to somebody’s brother-in-law and imagine that their professional identities have thereby been explained. They were scholars and professionals in their own right. AMU did not merely employ them. It gained from their association.

Where Are the People Who Lost?

This brings us to the question that should dominate any serious discussion of the Chatterji annexure. At whose expense were these people appointed? If nepotism occurred, somebody must have suffered from it. Who?

If Irfan Habib was favoured, who was the historian who should have been appointed instead? If Nurul Hasan obtained a position through connections, who was the superior candidate who lost? If Moonis Raza was preferred because of a relationship, who was the better geographer excluded from consideration? If Zahoor Qasim benefited from kinship, where is the scientist whose stronger claim was sacrificed? Were these unsuccessful candidates more qualified? Were they equally qualified? Were they less qualified? Did they even apply?

These questions cannot be avoided because they constitute the difference between an allegation and proof. For each supposedly nepotistic appointment one needs the advertisement, the applicants, the shortlist, the qualifications, the Selection Committee, the outside experts, the rankings and the final decision. One needs to know whether the related official participated in the process. One needs to know whether qualifications were relaxed, whether a post was tailored to fit a particular candidate, whether a recommendation was altered or whether someone ranked lower was appointed over someone ranked higher. Then we would have a case. Without this evidence, we have a relationship.

It would be irresponsible to accuse anyone of mala fides merely because he or she cites the Chatterji Report. But if the report is being deployed to construct a general indictment of AMU, questions about intention become legitimate. If the intention is not mala fide, there is a straightforward answer. Open everything.

Being a Relative Was Not a Crime

There is also a principle of fairness involved which should not be obscured by the emotive power of the word nepotism. Being related to somebody already employed at a university is not a disqualification. A professor’s daughter may be mediocre, but she may also be outstanding. A Vice-Chancellor’s nephew may be unsuitable, but he may also be the strongest candidate. Two brothers may independently be excellent scholars. A husband and wife may both possess impeccable academic qualifications. A son may be a better scholar than his father.

The proper principle is therefore neither favour nor exclusion. A relative should receive no advantage because of kinship, but neither should a deserving candidate suffer a disadvantage because of it. If a professor’s son is the best candidate and is selected by a genuinely independent committee from which the professor has completely withdrawn, there is nothing inherently corrupt about the appointment. If an unrelated but mediocre candidate is appointed because he belongs to the dominant academic faction, the absence of blood relationship does not make the appointment honest. The real subject is power, not genealogy.

Genuine Irregularities Must Still Be Confronted

None of this should become an apologia for everything that happened at AMU. There were genuine administrative and recruitment controversies, and where the Chatterji Committee investigated actual procedures rather than family relationships, its work becomes much more significant.

The Satish Chandra case illustrates the difference. Here one had an actual candidate, an actual Selection Committee, an actual recommendation and subsequent intervention. Questions could therefore be asked about who intervened, why the recommendation was frustrated and what institutional interests were involved. That is evidence about the operation of academic power. It is methodologically far more valuable than discovering that two University employees were cousins.

The point is not that nepotism never existed at Aligarh. Such a claim would be impossible to defend and historically unnecessary. The point is that nepotism must be proved case by case. Genuine irregularities do not magically convert weak evidence in unrelated cases into strong evidence.

Nepotism, Is Not the Same as Inbreeding

The Committee’s concern about inbreeding deserves separate treatment because academic inbreeding is a real institutional danger. It is, however, not synonymous with nepotism. A university can be thoroughly inbred without employing a single pair of relatives. Professor A trains Student B. B becomes a lecturer. B supervises C. C joins the department and eventually supervises D. After several decades the department is populated by successive generations trained within the same intellectual lineage. They may share methods, assumptions, loyalties, prejudices, academic friendships and institutional enemies. Nobody needs to marry anybody. The result can still be intellectually suffocating.

AMU has not always been successful in preventing this kind of internal reproduction. Nor is it alone among Indian universities in suffering from it. An internal candidate enters a Selection Committee with an invisible advantage. The outsider carries a CV; the insider carries a history. His teachers know him, his supervisor knows him, his colleagues know him, his strengths are familiar, his weaknesses are familiar and therefore often forgiven, and his institutional loyalties are understood. None of this needs to appear in the minutes.

That is why universities need intellectual migration. Departments require people trained elsewhere who bring different questions, methods and intellectual cultures. Excessive internal recruitment deserves criticism precisely because it can narrow the intellectual horizons of an institution. But that is an argument about academic ecology. It is not an argument about cousins.

The Remarkable Achievement Was That AMU Survived

There is another side of the story which disappears completely if we read the years after 1947 merely as a prehistory of nepotism. AMU survived. That was no small achievement. It lost teachers, students and administrators. Its social constituency was disrupted. Its political position in independent India was uncertain. The wider Muslim intelligentsia from which it recruited had been severely depleted. Yet departments continued, classes continued, appointments were made, students were taught and the University gradually rebuilt itself.

Irfan Habib’s memories are particularly moving in this respect. Teachers disappeared, but another teacher would somehow take the class. Academic life was not allowed simply to collapse. The generation which remained therefore deserves to be judged not only by whom it married but also by what it preserved. That is the context in which Zaidi’s defence should be read.

Why 1960, and Why Now?

There is, however, another question which becomes unavoidable when this material is resurrected in 2026. Why this report? Why now? Historical documents do not emerge from archives by themselves. Someone selects them. Someone decides which pages to reproduce. Someone chooses which passages to circulate and which to leave unread. Someone gives an old document a new political or institutional meaning.

There is nothing objectionable about revisiting the Chatterji Committee. On the contrary, AMU should examine its history honestly, including its failures. If the Committee uncovered financial irregularities, let them be discussed. If it identified improper appointments, let those cases be reconstructed. If it warned against institutional inbreeding, let us consider whether that warning remains relevant. But why make the genealogical annexure the centrepiece? Why relationships rather than qualifications? Why marriages rather than Selection Committee minutes? Why no rejected candidates? Why no comparison? Why no Partition? And, above all, why leap back sixty-six years when there were later enquiries into AMU appointments which are much closer to our own time?

What About Mathew and Jafri?

The Chatterji Committee was not the last enquiry to raise questions about recruitment and appointments at AMU. There were later investigations, including the Mathew enquiry and the Jafri Commission. These belong to periods considerably nearer to the present and, more importantly, dealt with allegations concerning actual recruitment processes. The contrast is important.

The Mathew enquiry dealt with alleged irregularities in faculty appointments in departments including History, Geography and Political Science. Contemporary discussion of the report spoke of violations in recruitment and subsequently complained that little action had followed its findings. The enquiry belonged to the late twentieth century and its findings were discussed publicly years later.

The Jafri material raises still more direct questions about appointments. Here the issue was not simply that one candidate happened to be somebody’s cousin. There were cases involving the fate of actual candidates and, most disturbingly, instances where candidates who had been rejected nevertheless came to be appointed. That is an entirely different category of evidence. If a duly constituted process rejects a candidate and that candidate nevertheless subsequently obtains the appointment, we have something concrete to investigate. Who reversed or circumvented the decision? Under what authority? Was a fresh process undertaken? Was a rule invoked legitimately or manipulated? Who intervened? Who benefited? Who was denied the position? These questions take us directly into the anatomy of institutional power. No family tree is required.

Why Chatterji and Not Mathew? Why Not Jafri?

This is where the contemporary selectivity becomes uncomfortable. If the purpose of resurrecting old enquiry reports is genuinely to expose irregular appointments, why should Chatterji enjoy such privileged attention while Mathew and Jafri recede from view? Why 1960 rather than the 1990s or later? Why Zaidi rather than later Vice-Chancellors and administrations? Why Irfan Habib’s marriage rather than the appointment of a candidate who had actually been rejected? Why a cousin rather than a Selection Committee decision that was circumvented? Why genealogy when later records may provide evidence of actual administrative intervention?

The more recent the enquiry, one would ordinarily suppose, the greater its relevance to the present condition of the institution. The academic labour market was also vastly different by then. The extraordinary depletion of educated Muslim professionals caused by Partition could no longer provide anything approaching the same historical context. India’s universities had expanded enormously, the number of qualified candidates had increased and academic mobility had widened. If irregular appointments continued under those conditions, they are in some respects more troubling than the dense family networks of 1960. Yet somehow the distant report is safer to discuss.

The Further Back We Travel, the Safer Our Indignation Becomes

Perhaps that is not accidental. The people of 1960 are largely beyond the reach of contemporary institutional politics. Many are dead. Others disappeared from active university life decades ago. Colonel Zaidi cannot answer. A. Aleem cannot protest. Abid Husain cannot demand that his record be examined alongside the insinuation. Their reputations can be dissected without seriously disturbing present structures of power.

Later enquiries are another matter. They involve people nearer to our own time. Some may still be living. Their colleagues are living. Their students are living. Their protégés may occupy positions. Their academic networks may survive. Their beneficiaries may have risen in the institution. Reopening those files might do something much more consequential than provoke an amusing discussion about whom somebody married in 1955. It might ruffle contemporary feathers. That possibility cannot simply be dismissed.

One need not accuse any particular person of suppressing inconvenient history. But one is perfectly entitled to ask why some episodes of institutional wrongdoing are repeatedly remembered while others fade conveniently from view. Institutions, like individuals, can cultivate selective memories. Sometimes the safest scandal is the oldest scandal.

If the Intention Is Not Mala Fide, Comparison Should Be Welcomed

Read Chatterji. Read Mathew. Read Jafri. Examine every enquiry into recruitment and appointments. Compare their evidence. Identify the candidates. Reconstruct the Selection Committees. Examine qualifications. Identify irregular interventions. Determine who was rejected and who was appointed. Ask whether rules were bent and by whom. And compare AMU with other Indian universities.

How many interconnected academic families existed at Banaras Hindu University in 1960? What was the position at Allahabad, Lucknow, Delhi, Calcutta, Punjab or Osmania? How many professors’ children entered academic life? How frequently did academics marry academics? How extensively did universities recruit their own students? What role did caste, region, family and intellectual patronage play? One cannot identify an abnormality without establishing the normal pattern against which it is being measured. If only Muslim families at Aligarh are placed under the genealogical microscope, the exercise becomes methodologically suspect.

If the Concern Is 2026, Investigate 2026

There is an even simpler proposition. If nepotism at AMU today is the concern, investigate AMU today. How many current appointments have gone to internal candidates? How many outsiders have been selected? How many advertisements appear suspiciously tailored? How many temporary appointments have become pathways to permanent employment? How many close relatives work within the same institutional networks? How often are conflicts of interest declared? How often do related decision-makers recuse themselves? How independent are outside experts? How many excellent scholars have left because they believed the institutional odds were stacked against them?

These are uncomfortable questions. They should be. Universities improve only when uncomfortable questions can be asked. But one cannot substitute the relatives of 1960 for the recruitment files of 2026. There is something intellectually evasive about prosecuting the dead when the living institution is available for examination.

Follow Power, Not Blood

The deeper lesson is that some of the most damaging forms of academic patronage have nothing to do with biological kinship. There are factional relatives. There are ideological relatives. There are administrative relatives. There are teacher-disciple networks whose loyalty exceeds that found in many families. A mediocre candidate appointed because he belongs to the dominant faction is no less a beneficiary of patronage because he shares no surname with his patron. A brilliant daughter appointed by an independent Selection Committee does not become undeserving because her father happens to be a professor.

The historian interested in corruption must therefore follow power rather than blood. Who could influence the appointment? Who did influence it? Who benefited? Who lost? Those are the questions that matter.

A Family Tree Is Not a Verdict

The rhetorical power of the Chatterji annexure lies precisely in its simplicity. Take a scholar, remove his qualifications, publications and achievements, and write beside his name “related to”. Repeat the process twenty times and the reader no longer sees academics. He sees a clan. Irfan Habib becomes somebody’s husband. Nurul Hasan becomes somebody’s cousin. Moonis Raza becomes another relation. Zahoor Qasim becomes a brother-in-law. The individual disappears into genealogy.

It is an extraordinarily effective form of insinuation because nobody needs to identify an unqualified appointment. Nobody needs to produce the superior candidate who was rejected. Nobody needs to prove interference. The lines joining the names create the suspicion. A historian should resist precisely this kind of reasoning. Kinship is not guilt. Association is not evidence. Opportunity for influence is not proof that influence was exercised. And later academic distinction cannot be erased merely by drawing a family tree.

The Question That Remains Unanswered

The Chatterji Committee was entitled to investigate AMU. Where it found financial irregularities, they deserved exposure. Where appointment procedures were violated, they deserved condemnation. Where factional intervention frustrated academic judgement, it should be acknowledged. Where excessive internal recruitment encouraged intellectual inbreeding, the criticism remains worth considering. But the famous family list proves much less than is sometimes claimed for it.

The decisive question remains unanswered: at whose expense were these people appointed? Who was better qualified? Who was equally qualified but unfairly rejected? Who was pushed aside? Who was the victim? If those candidates can be identified and the records demonstrate that relatives were improperly preferred, then let us call it nepotism without hesitation. But if the people named were qualified, if no superior candidate can be shown to have been displaced, if some relationships arose only after appointment, and if the University subsequently benefited substantially from the academic and professional contributions of those concerned, then the genealogy cannot carry the burden of accusation placed upon it.

Being somebody’s relative was not a crime. The crime, if any, would have been sacrificing merit to relationship. That sacrifice must be demonstrated.

The Politics of Selective Memory

There are ultimately two historical questions before us. One concerns what happened at AMU in 1960. The other concerns why one particular part of what happened in 1960 is being resurrected in 2026.

The first requires us to understand an institution only thirteen years removed from Partition, struggling to replenish itself while the Muslim intelligentsia of India had been drastically depleted by migration. It requires us to take seriously the memories of Irfan Habib, M. Athar Ali and others who watched teachers, students and families disappear from Aligarh. It requires us to read Zaidi’s defence not as a joke but as testimony from a society trying to reconstruct itself after an extraordinary rupture.

The second requires us to examine our own selectivity. If we invoke Chatterji, why not Mathew? If Mathew, why not Jafri? If we are interested in irregular appointments, why not begin with cases in which actual selection decisions were allegedly circumvented? If we are interested in nepotism today, why not investigate today’s appointments? If we are interested in the history of Indian university patronage, why not compare Aligarh with other universities? And if some reports are remembered while others are allowed quietly to disappear because their findings might inconvenience people nearer to the present, then the problem is no longer simply nepotism. It is selective memory.

AMU should never be protected from its history. No serious historian would ask for that. Every genuine irregularity should be acknowledged, every improper appointment criticised and every abuse of academic power exposed. But history must not be turned into a charge-sheet by insinuation, nor should one safely prosecute the distant dead while tiptoeing around the more recent past.

Let us therefore open the files. All of them. Let us examine Chatterji, Mathew and Jafri with the same standards and the same severity. Let us ask who was qualified, who was rejected, who intervened, who benefited and who suffered. Let us distinguish merit from relationshipism from inbreeding, evidence from association and historical explanation from institutional apologetics. Then, perhaps, we shall discover something far more interesting than a family tree. We may discover how power actually operated at Aligarh, how it changed over time, and why some episodes are so eagerly remembered while others are so conveniently forgotten. Only then can the past become an instrument of institutional self-criticism rather than a weapon of selective accusation.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Something is seriously wrong at Aligarh Muslim University, and the evidence is not difficult to find. Open the newspapers in almost any given week and AMU appears for reasons that would have been unimaginable for an institution which once measured itself by its scholars, its intellectual debates, its libraries, laboratories and classrooms. Students assaulting other students. Illegal occupants in residential halls. Weapons and fake currency allegedly recovered from a hostel room. A student reportedly beaten with an iron rod over an altercation that began with something as trivial as asking for a water jug. A man scaling the wall of a women’s hostel and allegedly attempting to molest a student. Protests and confrontations involving the Proctor’s Office. Students taking, or attempting to take, their own lives. And beyond the campus walls, enormously valuable University lands becoming the subject of repeated attempts at takeover. These cannot indefinitely be dismissed as unrelated incidents, for patterns emerge when one looks closely enough, and the pattern here is deeply troubling.

On 8 September 2026, for example, it was reported that three AMU students had been suspended following an assault in which a student suffered a fractured jaw after allegedly being struck with an iron rod. In April, police searching a University hostel room reportedly recovered ammunition, counterfeit currency, multiple identity documents and other material while investigating an accused in a firing case. In May, a man accused of stalking women students was arrested after allegedly scaling the boundary of a women’s hostel, and police said a knife was recovered from him. And now, on 12 September, another disturbing case has been reported involving alleged blackmail and honey-trapping, with a student arrested and suspended, ten rooms in V. M. Hall reportedly sealed after suspicious activities were found, and a person described in the report as a history-sheeter allegedly found to have been residing illegally on the campus.

What does all this tell us? It is easy to blame students, and it is even easier to invoke that favourite administrative phrase, law and order. But a residential university is not merely a collection of young people over whom guards must maintain control. Its halls are institutions. They have Provosts, Wardens, Senior Hall functionaries, Proctors and an elaborate administrative machinery. AMU’s own description of the Proctor’s Office states that its responsibilities include maintaining law and order, preventing unwanted elements from entering the campus, protecting University property and preventing antisocial activities. If unauthorised persons can nevertheless establish themselves in halls, if rooms can become centres of activities having little connection with student life, if weapons can allegedly find their way into hostel accommodation, the question cannot simply be what is wrong with AMU students. The question must also be who allowed the residential system to reach this condition.

The Official Goonda

This problem did not arise yesterday, and it will not be solved by pretending that it is new. For years AMU has suffered from a phenomenon that deserves to be called by its proper name: the emergence of the official goonda. I use the expression deliberately because it captures something that ordinary language about indiscipline fails to convey. Every large university may occasionally have violent or troublesome students, and that is not peculiar to AMU. What is far more dangerous is the individual who acquires power because he enjoys administrative protection. He may occupy a room to which he has no legitimate entitlement, establish his own kitchen, gather followers around himself, cultivate officials and politicians, and conduct personal activities from within a University hall. Everyone knows who he is, yet somehow the rules that apply to ordinary students cease to apply to him. Such people do not survive because the administration is unaware of them. They survive because someone finds them useful.

We saw the grotesque extent of this phenomenon during the COVID lockdown. Ordinary students could be ordered to leave the halls, yet favoured elements could continue to enjoy access to residential spaces, operate kitchens and maintain their networks. If rules are enforced against the ordinary student but suspended for the politically or administratively useful individual, this is not simply a failure of discipline. Selective lawlessness protected by authority becomes an instrument of authority. The latest revelations therefore need to be understood historically. They are not merely isolated failures of the present Proctor or the present Vice-Chancellor. They are the accumulated consequence of an administrative culture that AMU has allowed to develop over many years.

Where Did This Culture Come From?

A recent article in Muslim Mirror has attempted a sweeping diagnosis of AMU’s problems, speaking of patronage, parasites, sexual predators and persons occupying lucrative administrative positions such as OSDs and Directors. Much of what it identifies deserves serious discussion. But there is a remarkable silence at the heart of that indictment. It attacks the beneficiaries without adequately examining the system that produced them. The practice of maintaining sponsored goondas is not new. It may have existed in rudimentary form earlier, but it was perfected and made systematic from the period of Mahmoodur Rahman as Vice-Chancellor. By the time of Tariq Mansoor, it had been turned into a fine art. What changed over the decades was not the existence of protected troublemakers but the sophistication with which they were cultivated, deployed and shielded. Under Mahmoodur Rahman, the practice acquired a more organised character. Under later administrations, and most openly under Tariq Mansoor, it became embedded in the everyday workings of the University. The goonda was no longer merely tolerated. He became an instrument of governance, useful for managing halls, intimidating rivals, delivering political access and enforcing informal discipline where formal authority preferred not to appear directly responsible.

The later, more visible phase of that genealogy takes us back at least to 2012, when Lt General Zameer Uddin Shah became Vice-Chancellor. Shah did not arrive alone. His administration brought other retired military officers into important positions, including Brigadier Ahmad Ali as Pro-Vice-Chancellor and another former military officer, perhaps a Major, as Registrar. Thus a remarkable military troika came to occupy the upper reaches of a great academic institution.

The significance was larger than the individuals involved. A different culture of governance began asserting itself, one emphasising command, personal loyalty and administrative authority rather than consultation and the collegiate traditions of a university. Then came 2014, when the victory of Narendra Modi and the BJP transformed the political landscape. Sections of the Muslim elite began arguing that Muslims must accommodate themselves to the new political order, and Lt General Syed Ata Hasnain publicly argued that Muslims should not miss the bus and should find ways of engaging with the BJP. Within AMU, something similar was happening. The Shah administration began cultivating access to the new political establishment. Persons with dubious reputations could become useful as intermediaries because they possessed political connections. Shah eventually obtained his meeting with the Prime Minister, but some of those who facilitated such access proved considerably more successful in ingratiating themselves with the emerging political order than Shah himself.

Meanwhile Shah became embroiled in noisy public confrontations with the local illiterate BJP MP, Satish Gautam. Those quarrels have sometimes been treated as proof that Shah stood against the BJP, but that is to mistake public theatre for the deeper political process. One could quarrel with the local BJP representative while simultaneously seeking accommodation with Narendra Modi and the national leadership. The saffronisation of AMU did not begin with Tariq Mansoor. Its foundations were being laid during the Shah years after 2014. Under Tariq Mansoor, the process became more open and acquired far greater impetus. What had initially required intermediaries, manoeuvring and political bridge-building increasingly became an identifiable relationship with the ruling establishment. Mansoor’s subsequent political career merely made visible a transformation whose origins preceded his vice-chancellorship.

And what happened to the University while enormous administrative energy was being consumed by politics, image management and the cultivation of power? The most important question received progressively less attention. What about education? Universities do not become great because their Vice-Chancellors possess access to Prime Ministers, Governors or ministers. They become great because they appoint outstanding teachers, protect academic freedom, encourage research, maintain libraries and laboratories, attract excellent students and create an atmosphere in which intellectual distinction is rewarded. AMU increasingly developed another culture, the culture of the OSD, the Director, the Coordinator, the favourite and the indispensable intermediary. The Centres of Excellence closed or were let to rot. This is precisely why those who today attack particular individuals occupying lucrative positions should look backwards. Patronage has a history. Today’s favourites did not invent favouritism. They inherited it.

The question of who is fit to lead a university is therefore not a side issue. Irfan Habib often recalls that when Jawaharlal Nehru was asked why India was not establishing more universities, Nehru replied, in substance, that he did not know where he would find people qualified to be appointed Vice-Chancellors to lead them. The anecdote is usually remembered as a comment on the scarcity of academic leaders in the early years of the Republic, but it carries a sharper lesson for AMU today. If a university’s fate depends on the calibre of those chosen to lead it, then the selection of Vice-Chancellors, Pro-Vice-Chancellors, Registrars, Provosts and Deans cannot be treated as an exercise in political accommodation or administrative convenience. Nehru’s standard was qualification to lead an academic institution. AMU’s recent history suggests that the standard has too often been political usefulness, personal loyalty or the capacity to manage patronage. That inversion lies close to the heart of the present crisis.

The Women Who Rebelled

One of the earliest serious challenges to Shah’s conception of authority came, significantly, from women students. The controversy over access by Women’s College students to the Maulana Azad Library was not merely an argument about library membership. It revealed an entire conception of the university. Women students wanted access to the Central Library. The administration responded with arguments about security, boys and girls being together late in the evening, and the alleged danger of the route between Women’s College and the Central Library. The contradiction was breathtaking. If women students were unsafe travelling between two institutions belonging to the same University, whose responsibility was it to make the campus safe? Instead of making the road safe for women, their inability to travel safely became an argument for restricting them.

The women students resisted, and in retrospect, that episode deserves to be remembered as an important moment in AMU’s recent history because it exposed the limitations of an administrative philosophy that confused discipline with control and paternalism with protection. It also revealed something about the relationship between power and vulnerability within the institution. Those who are most vulnerable to harm are often the ones whose freedoms are curtailed in the name of protecting them, while those who pose the threat remain untouched. This inversion of responsibility lies at the heart of much that has gone wrong at AMU, and it continues to shape the experience of women students on campus today.

When Students Begin Losing Hope

There is, however, another crisis unfolding today which cannot be discussed in the language of discipline. It concerns the mental well-being of AMU’s students, and it demands attention that goes beyond periodic gestures. On 12 August, a second-year student was found dead in her room in Indira Gandhi Hall, and contemporary reporting described it as the third student suicide on the campus within nine months. Another AMU undergraduate died by suicide later in August at his rented accommodation outside the campus. More disturbing still, an investigation published on 30 August reported that five students had died by suicide over roughly two years and that, during seven months, five students had themselves written that they were experiencing suicidal thoughts. The same report stated that none of the Provosts of AMU’s twenty halls had approached the Psychology Department for counselling assistance. Then, on 5 September, came another report of a student attempting suicide after being made to vacate a room.

These cases should not be casually joined together as though they necessarily had a single cause. Suicide is complex, intensely personal and cannot responsibly be attributed to the University merely because the person concerned happened to be an AMU student. But when several such tragedies and warning signs occur within a relatively short period, an institution has a duty to ask difficult questions. Do our halls possess functioning systems for identifying students in distress? Do Wardens actually know their residents? Where is professional counselling? What happens when a student begins withdrawing from classes and friends? Is there a mechanism through which roommates can quietly alert someone? Are Provosts trained to recognise psychological distress? And above all, does the University still possess that older residential ethos in which the hall was supposed to be something more than a collection of rooms?

AMU has responded with programmes around World Suicide Prevention Day, including awareness and wellness initiatives, and that is welcome. But mental health cannot be addressed by commemorating a day. It requires a permanent institutional structure, a culture of care that permeates the residential system, and a recognition that the well-being of students is not a peripheral concern but a central responsibility of the University. A university which speaks endlessly about controlling its students must learn once again how to care for them.

Law and Order Cannot Mean Policing Alone

The present administration is clearly attempting to restore order. Suspensions have been issued. Rooms have been searched or sealed. Police have been called where criminal allegations are involved. AMU officially proclaims zero tolerance towards indiscipline. Some of this is necessary, and no one should suggest that rules can be flouted without consequence. But AMU should beware of believing that the answer to decades of administrative failure is simply a more powerful Proctor’s Office. A Proctor can punish a student who assaults another student. He cannot by himself restore the intellectual culture of a university. A security guard can stop an unauthorised person at a gate. He cannot explain why unauthorised people were permitted to acquire influence inside halls in the first place. A CCTV camera can record a crime. It cannot reconstruct a residential system in which teachers, Wardens and students actually know one another.

The danger is that AMU may respond to the consequences of failed governance by constructing an increasingly elaborate apparatus of surveillance and punishment while leaving untouched the patronage structures that produced the crisis. There must certainly be law and order. But there must also be law applied equally. The politically connected student, the Vice-Chancellor’s favourite, the protected hostel occupant and the ordinary first-year student must encounter the same rules. Otherwise discipline becomes merely another word for selective power, and the resentment it generates will only deepen the problems it claims to address.

And Now They Come for the Land

There is another dimension to AMU’s present vulnerability which has received insufficient attention: its land. The University possesses an extraordinarily valuable estate, much of it acquired through donations, historical grants and acquisition proceedings extending back to the MAO College and early University periods. As Aligarh has expanded, land that once lay on the outskirts has become immensely valuable urban property. The consequences are now before us. In April 2025, the Aligarh Nagar Nigam took possession of a substantial tract in the Bhamola-Nagla Patwari area that AMU claimed as its Riding Club land. The Municipal Corporation relied upon contemporary revenue entries, while AMU maintained that the property had been legally acquired and remained University land.

The dispute returned with extraordinary force in August 2026. Municipal authorities entered approximately 3.863 hectares claimed by AMU, brought earthmoving equipment, levelled parts of the area, erected fencing and asserted municipal ownership. Contemporary reports valued the disputed property at around five hundred crore rupees. AMU responded that it possessed historical acquisition documents and announced its intention to pursue the matter legally. Eventually the District Magistrate ordered maintenance of the status quo pending determination of the ownership dispute, and students subsequently demonstrated against the attempted takeover of Riding Club land. This is not merely a dispute about 3.8 hectares.

AMU’s land question has a much longer history. University land has repeatedly attracted encroachment and competing claims. The Riding Club lands themselves have been the subject of anxiety for decades. Those of us who remember the University of the 1990s also remember the unease surrounding attempts to protect its estate and the extraordinary sensitivity that attached to questions of land. Today those lands are worth hundreds of crores. The University therefore needs something much more substantial than episodic litigation after somebody arrives with bulldozers. It needs a professionally maintained Land and Estate Cell, digitisation of every title deed, acquisition notification, revenue entry, map and mutation record, GIS mapping of every parcel belonging to AMU, regular physical inspection and immediate legal intervention whenever an adverse revenue entry or encroachment appears. A university that cannot protect its land today may discover tomorrow that a court is being asked to decide ownership on the basis of records altered decades earlier. The defence of AMU’s estate is not a real-estate issue. University land is a public educational endowment entrusted to one generation for transmission to the next.

What, Then, Ails AMU?

It would be comforting if there were one answer, but there is not. AMU suffers from the accumulated consequences of patronage, political accommodation, administrative authoritarianism, declining academic priorities, the weakening of the residential system, selective enforcement of discipline, protected intermediaries, institutionalised favouritism and the gradual disappearance of accountability. The crisis did not begin with the present Vice-Chancellor, nor did it begin with Tariq Mansoor. Its recent genealogy must be traced at least to the Zameer Uddin Shah period, and particularly to the political realignment that followed 2014. Under Tariq Mansoor the process acquired a much more explicit political character. Successive administrations inherited structures that had already become entrenched.

But identifying this genealogy does not absolve the present administration. Every administration inherits problems. The question is whether it perpetuates them or dismantles them. Today AMU faces an extraordinary convergence of challenges. It must recover its academic standards. It must clean up its halls without turning them into police barracks. It must remove unauthorised occupants irrespective of their political connections. It must dismantle the culture of administrative favourites and unnecessary sinecures. It must create a serious mental-health and counselling system. It must restore confidence among women students that the campus belongs equally to them. It must defend its enormous landed estate with professional competence. And it must establish that the same rules apply to everyone. And most importantly, once again give some emphasis to academics, which has been neglected since long.

Above all, it must recover its purpose. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan did not create the MAO College so that generations later its energies would be consumed deciding who should become an OSD, who should control a hall, who has access to a politician, who can retain an unauthorised room, or which official can obtain another extension. He created an educational institution. The tragedy of contemporary AMU is that governance has increasingly become an end in itself, while education, which should have been the reason for governance, has too often become secondary.

The question before AMU is therefore larger than who should be the next Proctor, Provost, Registrar, Director or OSD. It is whether the University can once again make scholarship, teaching, intellectual freedom, integrity and the welfare of its students the standards by which authority is judged. Those who criticise the parasites are right to do so, but they must also ask who created the conditions in which parasites prospered. Those who condemn student rowdyism must ask who protected rowdies when they were useful. Those who demand discipline must demand it first from those who exercise power. Those who lament suicide among students must build an institution in which a distressed young person knows where to turn before despair overwhelms him or her. And those entrusted with AMU’s property must remember that they are custodians, not owners, of an inheritance created through the sacrifices and benefactions of generations before them.

What ails AMU is therefore not simply bad students, bad officials, bad teachers or bad appointments. It is the erosion of institutional principle. Until that principle is restored, changing individuals will accomplish very little. One set of favourites will replace another, one group of OSDs will succeed the previous group, yesterday’s protected strongman will give way to tomorrow’s, and every new administration will announce that it is cleaning up the mess left by its predecessor. AMU does not need another cycle of patrons and protégés. It needs its institutions back. It needs its robust educational system back.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Today, as we mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, my thoughts return to a journey I made exactly a year after those attacks. On 11 September 2002 I was travelling from Delhi to Dushanbe in Tajikistan, via Tehran. At the time it seemed merely an inconvenient date on which to undertake an international journey, but looking back after nearly a quarter of a century, the date has become inseparable from my memories of the trip.

We were quite a large academic group. Among my companions were Professor Ishtiaq Ahmad Zilli, our revered teacher; Professor Azhar Ansari; Professor Azermi Dukht Naheed Safavi; several other colleagues from the Persian stream; Dr Iqbal Ghani Khan; Najaf Haider; and myself. There were others whose names, after all these years, I no longer recall with equal certainty. The moment we entered Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, it became apparent that we had chosen the wrong date to travel, because it was the exact first anniversary of the attacks in the United States and the airport was tense, with extra security everywhere. Zilli Sahib surveyed the situation and gave us some very sensible advice: we should be cautious, he said, and under no circumstances do anything that might attract unnecessary attention towards ourselves. We dutifully joined the queue for baggage check-in.

Najaf handed over his luggage before me. I checked in my suitcase, received my boarding pass and had just begun walking away when Zilli Sahib called out to me; he wanted me to wait for him. All hell broke loose. Here was a bearded gentleman in a sherwani, looking every inch a traditional Maulana, calling out to a passenger who had just handed over his luggage, and that too on the first anniversary of 9/11. Security personnel immediately stopped me, my suitcase, which had already disappeared behind the counter, was retrieved, and I was asked to identify it, open it, and submit its contents to a particularly thorough examination. Later, when we reached the security check, I could see that poor Zilli Sahib himself was receiving perhaps the most intensive scrutiny of us all. So much for his excellent advice that we should avoid attracting attention.

Our journey took us first to Tehran, where we had to spend a few days before catching our connecting flight to Dushanbe. As we landed at Mehrabad Airport, those of us from History were rather excited. It was my first visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and for some of us Iran was still an unfamiliar world, while our colleagues from the Persian Department were perfectly cool, having travelled there several times before and being quite happy to remind us of the fact. Najaf, I. G. Khan and I decided that we should have coffee. I confidently announced that I possessed Iranian currency, a 500-rial note, which I assumed would comfortably take care of our requirements. It turned out that my great reserve of Iranian currency could buy us precisely one cup of coffee. I. G. Bhai immediately came to our rescue, because he had a few sachets of tea in his carry bag; he walked confidently to the tea shop and asked how much they charged for hot water. “Free,” he was told, and so we obtained our hot water, produced the tea sachets, and sat at Mehrabad Airport enjoying cups of tea which at that particular moment tasted better than anything we might have purchased.

One episode in Tehran has remained particularly vivid in my memory. Najaf and I had to visit Tehran University, for which we needed a taxi, so naturally we turned to Zilli Sahib. He was madrasa educated and had an impressive command of classical Persian, and we asked him to summon a taxi and explain to the driver exactly where we wished to go. Zilli Sahib did what, to Najaf and me, appeared to be an admirable job, speaking at some length in fluent, chaste Persian and carefully explaining our destination. The taxi driver listened patiently, then turned towards me and said, “Āqā, man Hindustāni nemidānam,” which meant, “Sir, I don’t know Hindustani.” For a moment Najaf and I were taken aback, then we realised what had happened. Zilli Sahib was certainly speaking Persian, but it was the Persian of the Indian scholarly tradition, preserved in our madrasas and inherited from the Indo-Persian world of the Sultanate and Mughal periods; its pronunciation, cadence and even aspects of its vocabulary were far removed from the everyday Persian spoken in the streets of contemporary Tehran. To our taxi driver, Zilli Sahib’s magnificent Persian apparently sounded like some variety of Hindustani: and why not? After all it had been the official language in India for a thousand years!

I had already encountered the same linguistic divide in our guest house. Iranian television serials were being shown, but however hard I tried, I could barely follow the dialogue, because the rapid colloquial Persian of ordinary conversation defeated me. Then a Mullah would appear on television and begin delivering a sermon, and suddenly I could understand him. The Mullah had moved into a more formal register, with vocabulary, constructions and rhetorical conventions much closer to the Persian with which we in India, specially those used to majlis tradition, were familiar. I could not understand the lovers quarrelling in an Iranian television serial, but I could understand the cleric telling them how they ought to live.

The taxi ride, however, had another surprise for us. Once the driver realised that I understood at least some Persian, (I having been exposed to Iranians coming home since my childhood and my father conversing with them), he began speaking to me slowly and asked my name. I told him, and he immediately asked, “Shomā Sayyid hastid?”, meaning, “Are you a Saiyid?” I confirmed that I was. “Husaini Saiyid?” I said Rezavi, and he appeared pleased; then he looked into his rear-view mirror at Zilli Sahib, studied our revered teacher for a moment, and delivered his judgement: “Kheyli makrūh!” I had no answer, because the casual sectarian prejudice behind the remark was obvious. In the course of a single taxi ride we had encountered both the linguistic distance separating Indo-Persian from modern spoken Iranian Persian and some of the sectarian assumptions through which strangers could still read one another.

In Tehran we were lodged in a guest house belonging to Danishgah-i Nur, with four or five of us sharing a suite. I. G. Bhai, meanwhile, had a problem of a different sort. On our way to the guest house he expressed a desire for a drink, and we informed him that this was the Islamic Republic of Iran and that his chances were not particularly promising. We had underestimated both I. G. Bhai and the Islamic Republic, because by evening he had somehow managed to discover and wrest a bottle from the university’s PVC, who otherwise appeared to be a bearded and exceedingly pious gentleman. Thus, while some of us were discovering Iran, I. G. Bhai was discovering its exceptions, and he thoroughly enjoyed his stay in the Islamic Republic.

After a few days in Tehran we flew onwards to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. As our plane, an Aeroflot, entered and landed at Dushanbe International Airport, a few quite Russian-looking officers entered the plane and in a very authoritative order barked at us to come with our passports in our hands. As we queued out, our passports were literally snatched from us. Out of the plane, we were made to board a bus and taken to a large iron gate with many military personnel with guns standing there. There was no shade, except a tree which could shelter us from the scorching sun above, and here we were made to stand for what appeared an hour before the gate was clanged opened. Once again a fierce-looking army officer appeared, and this time he would call out a name and the person had to scramble towards him; he would push the passport in his face and bark, “Enter!” It all appeared to be straight from some old Russian war movie. Once one entered the dark iron gate, there was a shed to one side from where we were supposed to claim our baggage from a static belt, but once outside the airport finally, it was then that the natural and the maintained beauty of Dushanbe would hit you.

There were certain things about Dushanbe which struck me almost immediately. The first was its cleanliness: the roads appeared spotlessly clean, and I saw neither beggars nor vagabonds wandering along them. There were covered markets where people could buy and sell their goods with considerable ease and order, but what impressed me most were the children. Every schoolchild appeared to have a uniform, and those uniforms were spotless; during school hours the children were in school, and I do not remember seeing children loitering in the markets or performing odd jobs when they should have been studying. Tajikistan had been independent for only about eleven years, and the destructive civil war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union had ended only a few years earlier, yet in the ordered streets, the organised markets and, above all, the visible place given to schooling, reminiscences of the old Soviet era still lingered. Of course, a visitor spending a few days in a city sees only its surface, and I could not pretend to know the realities of poverty, employment or education in Tajik society from such a short visit; but these were my impressions of Dushanbe in 2002, and they have stayed with me.

Our accommodation was in what was described as a five-star hotel. It was comfortable enough, but two features of the room have remained fixed in my memory. The first was the plumbing: the toilet seat and the bathtub seemed to depend upon a single water tap, and one simply turned it in whichever direction one required the water. It was ingenious and economical, although not quite what I had expected in a five-star hotel. The second surprise was the television, because among the channels available in the room was an adult channel, accompanied, if my memory serves me correctly, by an indication that a certain kind of room service could also be arranged should the guest so desire. My Maulana companion was quite scandalised.

Dushanbe also solved a historical problem for me. I had, of course, read the Baburnama, and one of the things that repeatedly strikes a reader is Babur’s longing for Central Asia after he had established himself in India. He had conquered Hindustan and acquired an empire, but he continued to pine for the things he had left behind: its climate, its gardens, its fruits and, very particularly, its melons. Sitting in India and reading these passages, one understands Babur intellectually, but one can also wonder why a man who had just conquered an empire should become quite so emotional about a kharbuza. Then I tasted the Central Asian kharbuza and tarbuz, and only then did I understand Babur. They were something else, and their flavour and sweetness have to be experienced before one understands why Babur remembered them so fondly after reaching Hindustan. There are some historical sources, it seems, which require a rather unusual form of fieldwork, because to understand certain passages of the Baburnama one really ought to taste a Central Asian melon. Four and a half centuries after Babur wrote of the fruits he had left behind, there I was in Dushanbe thinking that I now understood why the man complained.

One evening we were invited to a grand official banquet. The gathering seemed to include the entire who’s who of Dushanbe, senior officials, scholars, dignitaries and religious figures, and among them was the Imam-i Juma, who immediately reminded me in appearance of the senior Imam Bukhari of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. The seating arrangements produced very different reactions among members of our group. I. G. Bhai discovered, with considerable satisfaction, that he had been seated safely at some distance from the Imam, while Zilli Sahib, on the other hand, was delighted to find that his seat was beside the revered religious gentleman. He turned towards me with evident satisfaction and said, “Nadeem Miyan, we are sitting next to the revered man. Thus we will be saved from the haram drinks!” His reasoning appeared impeccable, because if there was one table at an official banquet in Muslim Central Asia where alcohol was unlikely to appear, surely it would be the table at which the Imam-i Juma himself was seated. Events proved otherwise. As the banquet progressed, wine began to flow, and indeed, to our increasing astonishment, the table where it seemed to flow most freely was ours. Poor Zilli Sahib remained steadfast, and although glasses were being filled all around him, he would not touch the grape wonder flowing so generously across our table. Eventually the Imam noticed, and he looked at Zilli Sahib, apparently puzzled by this strange Indian Maulana who persistently refused what everyone else around him was happily drinking. Then came the question: “Āqā, shomā Musalmān nist?”, meaning, “Sir, are you not a Muslim?” One had to see Zilli Sahib’s face at that moment to understand his plight, because the man who had happily taken his seat beside the Imam in the confident belief that proximity to a revered religious figure would save him from haram drinks was now being asked by that very Imam whether his refusal to drink meant that he was not a Muslim. There was very little any of us could add, and Dushanbe had once again overturned our assumptions.

Academic conferences have hazards of their own. Unfortunately for I. G. Bhai, I was asked to chair the session in which he was presenting his paper, and before the session began he came to me with a very clear instruction that I was to give him sufficient time. I did, and indeed I gave him as much time as I reasonably could, but eventually the responsibilities of the chair prevailed and I rang the bell signalling that he should conclude. Without pausing, without losing his rhythm and without changing his expression, I. G. Bhai smoothly shifted into Urdu; since apparently nobody else in the room understood the language, he inserted a private communication into his scholarly presentation: “Saaley, waapas chal, bataunga!” Then, just as smoothly, he returned to his paper. It was extraordinarily difficult not to laugh, while the audience remained completely unaware that anything unusual had happened.

The historian in me found his greatest reward during our visit to Qalaʿ-i Hisor, outside Dushanbe. The qalaʿ, or fort, stands upon a hill overlooking the surrounding landscape, and immediately below it are a number of structures, including several tombs associated with Naqshbandi saints and a large sarai. The moment I saw the sarai, I experienced an extraordinary sense of familiarity, because it reminded me immediately of the sarai of Shaikh Chilli at Thanesar in India. The resemblance was remarkable, and indeed my feeling at the time was that if someone familiar with one of the two buildings were blindfolded, taken to the other and then asked where he was, he might genuinely be confused, because they appeared almost like replicas of one another. For me this was much more than an architectural curiosity. As historians of Mughal India, we routinely speak of Central Asian architectural influences, and we use terms such as Timurid, Central Asian and Persianate while tracing the movement of arches, domes, courtyard plans, decorative forms and building techniques; but standing before that sarai at Hisor was different, because here was the architectural relationship between Central Asia and India suddenly made tangible. Of course, architectural influence does not mean that one building was simply copied from another, since forms travelled with craftsmen, merchants, Sufis, soldiers, political elites and patrons, and once they reached India they were adapted to local materials, requirements and aesthetic traditions. India did not merely copy Central Asian architecture, because it absorbed and transformed it, yet the resemblance between the Hisor sarai and that of Shaikh Chilli at Thanesar was so striking that, for me, the Central Asian connection was no longer an abstraction in an architectural history; it stood there in brick and mortar.

But Hisor had another surprise awaiting me. Below the fort gate was a platform associated with a tree and a spring or fountain, known as Shajar-i Sher ʿAli and Chashma-i Sher ʿAli. When I first heard the name Sher ʿAli, I naturally thought of the famous poet and statesman ʿAli Sher Nawaʾi, but I was wrong, because I was informed that Sher ʿAli was none other than Imam ʿAli ibn Abi Talib. The local tradition was extraordinary. Imam ʿAli, I was told, had come personally to this region, and it was at his hands that the Turks here had become Muslims; the spring itself was one of his miracles, because when Imam ʿAli struck the ground with his foot, water gushed forth, and the tree had grown to provide shade for him while he rested. What fascinated me even more was that this was not simply an old story being recounted for the benefit of visitors. People came reverentially to the spot, drank water from the Chashma-i Sher ʿAli, ate a leaf from the Shajar-i Sher ʿAli, and carried away some of the water and leaves as tabarruk. As a historian, I knew that Imam ʿAli had never travelled to Tajikistan and had not personally converted the Turks of Central Asia, but in a sense that was beside the point. What I was witnessing was the historical geography of sacred memory, because here was ʿAli, transported by collective memory hundreds of miles beyond the geographical limits of his actual life, transformed into the miraculous bringer of Islam to Central Asia; a spring, a tree and an entire local landscape had absorbed him into their sacred history.

There was something else which made the experience particularly striking. This was a region deeply associated with Sunni Islam and the Naqshbandi tradition, and we were standing close to the tombs of Naqshbandi saints, yet people were reverentially drinking water and consuming leaves associated with Imam ʿAli, carrying them home as tabarruk. It was a vivid reminder that popular Islam has never observed sectarian boundaries quite as rigidly as theologians, and sometimes historians, would have us imagine, because reverence for ʿAli could travel easily across Sunni and Shiʿi divisions, just as saints, shrines, springs, trees and local sacred landscapes acquired lives of their own. Hisor therefore offered me two very different connections between Central Asia and India. One was material and architectural, embodied in the extraordinary resemblance between its sarai and that of Shaikh Chilli at Thanesar, while the other belonged to sacred memory and popular belief, where stories and forms of devotion had travelled across enormous distances and become thoroughly localised.

There was yet another Central Asia waiting for us in the museum at Dushanbe. Among its attractions were images of the Buddha, votive stupas and remains associated with the Buddhist past of the region. For someone accustomed to thinking about Central Asia principally through its Persianate, Turkic and Islamic history, these objects were a powerful reminder of a much older world. Long before the coming of Islam, Central Asia had formed part of the great networks through which Buddhism travelled from the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan into the regions beyond, and eventually towards China; monks, merchants, pilgrims, texts and artistic forms had moved along these routes for centuries. Within a few days in and around Dushanbe, therefore, one could encounter several Central Asias: Buddhist, Iranian, Turkic, Islamic, Sufi, Soviet and post-Soviet. None had entirely erased what came before it.

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since that journey, and oddly enough it is not the formal conference proceedings that I remember most clearly. I remember the tense atmosphere at Delhi airport on 11 September 2002, and Zilli Sahib warning us not to attract attention, only to call out to me moments later and inadvertently ensure that security took a very special interest in my suitcase. I remember arriving at Mehrabad with my magnificent 500 rials and discovering that my fortune would purchase only one cup of coffee, and I remember I. G. Bhai triumphantly producing his tea sachets and discovering that hot water was free. I remember a Tehran taxi driver listening patiently to Zilli Sahib’s chaste Persian before turning to me and saying, “Sir, I don’t know Hindustani.” I remember my discovery that I could not understand an Iranian television serial but could quite comfortably follow the Mullah’s sermon. I remember I. G. Bhai’s remarkable ability to procure a drink in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I remember the spotless roads of Dushanbe, its covered markets and the children going to school in their immaculate uniforms, and in them I could still see something of the old Soviet order lingering in a newly independent country. I remember tasting the melons of Central Asia and finally understanding a complaint Babur had made nearly five hundred years earlier. I remember Zilli Sahib happily sitting beside the Imam-i Juma in the belief that the holy man’s presence would protect him from haram drinks, only to discover that the wine flowed most freely at our table, and I remember the expression on his face when the Imam himself, puzzled by his abstinence, asked, “Āqā, shomā Musalmān nist?” I remember I. G. Bhai’s threat, delivered seamlessly in Urdu in the middle of his academic paper when I had the temerity to ring the chairman’s bell. I remember the peculiar plumbing of our five-star hotel and my Maulana companion’s horror at discovering what other forms of room service were apparently available. But above all, perhaps, I remember Hisor.

I remember standing before a Central Asian sarai and seeing Thanesar in India. I remember a tree and a spring below an old fortress, and people gathering around them because they believed that Imam ʿAli had once rested there. I remember Buddhist remains in a museum reminding me that the Islamic Central Asia I had come to see was itself only one layer of a much older historical landscape. Perhaps that is what travel does to a historian. We travel carrying books in our heads, and places then begin to correct, complicate, illuminate and occasionally laugh at what those books have taught us. Babur’s melons cease to be a literary trope once one has tasted them, and Central Asian influence on Indian architecture ceases to be a textbook phrase when one stands before a sarai at Hisor and sees Shaikh Chilli’s sarai at Thanesar. Indo-Persian reveals the distance it has travelled when a Tehran taxi driver mistakes it for Hindustani, and assumptions about Muslim practice collapse when an Imam asks a teetotal Maulana why he is not drinking. The Soviet past survives not simply in political histories but in a clean street, a covered market and the uniform of a schoolchild, while Imam ʿAli’s presence in Central Asia survives not in a chronicle but in a tree, a spring and the faith of those who still approach them for tabarruk. That was my Dushanbe of September 2002, reached on a journey begun on the first anniversary of 9/11, a trip of scholarship and friendship, anxiety and laughter, history and legend; above all, it was one of those journeys in which history repeatedly escaped from the books and confronted us in the most unexpected places.