ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The land of Aligarh Muslim University is not merely real estate. Much of the material foundation upon which the University arose represents the accumulated generosity of generations of people who contributed money, property, buildings and land to create and sustain an educational institution. To understand the recurring disputes over AMU’s property, including the latest action by the Aligarh Nagar Nigam on 20 August 2026, one must therefore begin not with contemporary revenue records but with the origins of the University itself.

The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, established by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in the nineteenth century, was essentially a public enterprise. Its buildings, hostels, educational facilities and endowments were created through subscriptions and donations collected from across India. Princes contributed, but so did zamindars, merchants, professionals and ordinary supporters of the Aligarh Movement. The history of the institution is consequently inseparable from philanthropy. AMU’s own records provide numerous examples: Begum Sultan Jahan of Bhopal and her family contributed Rs 50,000 towards the College building fund, and when the campaign for a Muslim university gathered momentum she donated another Rs 100,000, while other rulers, landlords and benefactors supported buildings, hostels and educational activities.

The Riding Club itself grew from precisely this culture of benefaction. Horse riding began at the MAO College in 1889 after Sir Syed persuaded local landlords to send horses and grooms so that students could learn horsemanship. Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan Sherwani presented four horses, while the Nawab of Chhatari, Nawab Faiyyaz Ali Khan of Pahasu and the Bhikampur estate were among those who contributed horses or assistance. When the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920, the legal position of the accumulated property was explicitly addressed by Parliament. Section 4 of the Aligarh Muslim University Act, 1920 dissolved the MAO College and Muslim University Association and transferred to the new University all their movable and immovable property, rights, powers and privileges, together with those of the Muslim University Foundation Committee. They became vested in AMU for the objects for which the University had been incorporated.

The process of benefaction did not end in 1920. A Government of India reply placed before the Rajya Sabha on 27 November 2024 provides a remarkable catalogue of later gifts and waqfs made to AMU. Among them were 7 acres and 18 dismil in Bahraich donated by Chaudhary Santram; 4.59 acres at Jawan Sikandarpur donated by the Land Management Committee and used for AMU’s Rural Health Training Centre; 1.970 hectares donated in long lease by Amar Pratap Singh, part of which accommodates the Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh AMU City School; and numerous waqf properties endowed by Bibi Fatima, Musharraf Ali Khan, Noor Jahan, Professor Moinuddin, Amir Mustafa Khan, Mohammad Habib-Ullah Khan, Dr Wali Mohammad, Abdur Rehman Khan and Sheikh Abdullah. Today these properties accommodate institutions ranging from the Faculty of Theology and Nadeem Tarin Hall to the AMU Picture Gallery, NSS office and Abdullah Nursery School. This history matters because AMU’s estate is not simply an accumulation of vacant plots around a modern university campus but a historical trust assembled over generations.

The Riding Club and a History of Vulnerable Land

Among the most contested areas has been the land associated with the Muslim University Riding Club and Riding Field. The University’s connection with horse riding goes back to the MAO College period, but the present dispute concerns land in the Bhamola Maafi-Nagla Patwari area which AMU says was lawfully acquired and has remained in University possession and use for many decades. For those who lived through the University of the 1990s, however, disputes surrounding the Riding Club land carry darker memories. When Mahmood-ur-Rahman became Vice-Chancellor in 1995, one of the issues confronting him was encroachment upon University property. At the welcome function organised for him by the Aligarh Muslim University Teachers’ Association, he publicly expressed his determination to have University lands freed from illegal possession. At that meeting, Dr Rajiv Sharma of the Department of History, who was then President of the Muslim University Riding Club, responded to the Vice-Chancellor’s declaration and assured him that he would hand over documents relating to the Riding Club lands which demonstrated the University’s claim over the property. Within about a week, Rajiv Sharma was murdered.

It is essential to state precisely what can and cannot be inferred from this sequence. No investigation or court ever established that Rajiv Sharma was murdered because of the Riding Club land, and it would therefore be historically irresponsible to present such a connection as established fact. Yet historical writing must also record contemporary perceptions when they themselves become part of the history of an institution. At the time, the proximity between Sharma’s undertaking regarding the property papers and his murder created widespread suspicion within sections of the University community that his death might somehow have been connected with disputes over valuable University land. The needle of suspicion in contemporary University discussions also pointed towards an advocate who was widely perceived at the time as being associated with controversial land transactions and alleged land-grabbing activities, including disputes concerning AMU property. That suspicion, too, must be described as contemporary perception rather than proven criminal responsibility, for I have found no judicial determination establishing that individual as responsible for Sharma’s murder.

A later account of Mahmood-ur-Rahman’s vice-chancellorship nevertheless confirms the wider background. It describes his campaign against encroachments as one of the major initiatives of his administration and states that prime land adjoining the Riding Club faced serious threats from land-grabbers. According to this account, encroachments were removed and a substantial area of University land was protected. The same narrative places Rajiv Sharma’s murder within this fraught atmosphere surrounding the Riding Club area. The murder remained one of the unresolved traumas remembered at AMU, and as late as 2007, an account of violence at the University grouped the murders of history teachers Rajiv Sharma and I. G. Khan among killings which had generated a profound sense within the University that justice had not been secured.

I. G. Khan: Another Riding Club President is Murdered

The later murder of Dr I. G. Khan of the Department of History inevitably revived these memories. I. G. Khan, too, had been closely associated with the Riding Club and had served as its President. He was also remembered within the University as someone concerned with protecting University property and resisting illegal encroachments. On 14 February 2003 he was murdered, and contemporary reporting records that he was shot near Jhunjhunupur/Jujharpur in the Akrabad area outside Aligarh and that his car was taken away. How did he reach there, is spite of his allegedly returning home from JNMC, a route quite different from where he was found murdered. Once again, suspicion circulated within sections of the University community that the murder might have had something to do with his activities and the conflicts surrounding property. The coincidence appeared especially sinister because another former President of the Riding Club, Rajiv Sharma, as noted above, had already been murdered.

Here the subsequent judicial record requires an important qualification. Unlike the Rajiv Sharma case, the investigation into I. G. Khan’s murder was transferred to the CBI. Arrests followed, and in January 2016 a Special CBI Court convicted three accused while acquitting two others for lack of evidence. The prosecution case accepted by the court treated the killing as connected with robbery of Khan’s car and other belongings. However the judgment left many un-answered questions and since then no follow up happened. It would therefore be incorrect today to describe the I. G. Khan murder as legally unsolved or to assert that a land dispute was judicially established as its motive. Yet the official verdict has done little to dispel the lingering sense within the University community that there was more to the killing than simple robbery. The circumstances of the murder, combined with the earlier killing of Rajiv Sharma and the intense local conflicts over AMU’s valuable land, continue to generate unease and speculation, even in the absence of legal proof connecting the two events. What remains historically significant is something different: at the time of the killings, sections of the University community perceived a relationship between violence, local vested interests, encroachment and the protection of University property, and that perception formed part of the atmosphere in which subsequent disputes over the Riding Club land were understood.

The Land Question Returns

The issue did not disappear. The origins of the present phase of the dispute can be traced at least to 2023, when the district administration was identifying government land and construction was underway for the flyover between Nagla Patwari and Purani Chungi. According to subsequent reporting, officials initially approached AMU for permission to erect a flyover pillar on land in University possession. AMU maintained that the property belonged to it, but revenue officials then examined the records and concluded that AMU’s name did not appear in the relevant khatauni and that the property was recorded as municipal or government land. That discovery became the basis of the Nagar Nigam’s case. AMU’s case was entirely different: it maintained that the land had been lawfully acquired under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, and that the University possessed acquisition papers, archival records and other documentary evidence establishing its title. Thus emerged the fundamental contradiction which remains unresolved: the Nagar Nigam relies principally upon present revenue entries, while AMU relies upon historical acquisition proceedings and long possession.

The First Major Nagar Nigam Action: April 2025

On 30 April 2025, the conflict became physical. The Aligarh Nagar Nigam, accompanied by district officials, entered approximately 41,050 square metres, or about 41 bighas, of land in the Nagla Patwari-Bhamola area that had been in AMU’s possession for roughly eighty years and had been used for Riding Club activities. Municipal boards declaring the property to belong to the Nagar Nigam were installed, and the land was valued in contemporary reports at more than Rs 100 crore. Municipal officials said that revenue records showed the land as government or municipal property and claimed that AMU had been given opportunities to establish its ownership but had failed to produce satisfactory documents. AMU categorically disputed this version, stating that the Riding Field rightfully belonged to the University, that it had been obtained under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, and that it had remained in uninterrupted University possession for nearly eighty years. The University further alleged that it had received no formal notice before the municipal action and therefore no proper opportunity to place its documentary evidence before the authority taking possession.

This was not a minor disagreement over a boundary. Reports published immediately afterwards indicated that the Nagar Nigam was examining another approximately 50 bighas in the same Nagla Patwari area which it also claimed as municipal property and which remained in AMU’s possession, with municipal officials making clear that verification of further plots was continuing and that additional land would be recovered wherever the Corporation concluded that it belonged to the Nagar Nigam. Thus the 2025 operation was not presented by the Nagar Nigam itself as an isolated action but formed part of a wider programme of identifying and taking possession of lands recorded in municipal revenue records. From the University’s perspective, however, this amounted to a continuing threat to an estate that AMU claimed on the basis of historical acquisition and possession.

The Allahabad High Court Did Not Decide Ownership

The 2025 action was challenged before the Allahabad High Court by a group of AMU students. Their PIL asked the Court to prevent the Municipal Commissioner from interfering with AMU’s possession of the Riding Club land and to require removal of the municipal ownership board. The Court dismissed the petition on 21 May 2025, but the meaning of that dismissal is important. It did not hold that the land belonged to the Nagar Nigam. The Court observed that AMU was itself a juristic person possessing the resources and legal capacity to defend its property rights, and it also found that the student petition had not adequately identified the disputed land. Crucially, however, the Bench expressly clarified that dismissal of the PIL should not be treated as an expression of any opinion regarding the title of either the Nagar Nigam or Aligarh Muslim University, and if the title question arose in properly constituted proceedings, it was to be decided independently. This distinction is fundamental: the 2025 High Court order cannot legitimately be cited as judicial confirmation of Nagar Nigam ownership, for the High Court expressly left the title question open.

The State Government Orders an SIT Inquiry

The controversy did not end there. AMU took its case to the authorities, and in February 2026 the Uttar Pradesh Government ordered an SIT investigation into the 41-bigha episode. The Principal Secretary sought an investigation and the Aligarh divisional authorities asked the district administration to prepare a detailed report. Contemporary reports described the inquiry as examining the circumstances in which the land, which had remained in AMU’s possession since approximately 1945, came to be taken over by the Nagar Nigam. The ordering of an SIT inquiry itself demonstrated that the matter was not administratively closed. Meanwhile, the vulnerability of AMU’s larger estate was demonstrated from the opposite direction when in April 2026 the University itself acted against private encroachments on approximately 18 bighas of AMU land behind Nagla Qila, using machinery to remove illegal structures and announcing that fencing would be erected to protect the property. The problem, therefore, is wider than a single confrontation with the Nagar Nigam: AMU possesses a large and historically complicated estate surrounded by an expanding city in which land values have risen enormously, and such property inevitably attracts competing claims.

20 August 2026: The Nagar Nigam Moves Again

On 20 August 2026, the Nagar Nigam, district administration and police once again entered land associated with the Riding Field in the Bhamola Maafi-Nagla Patwari area. This time the authorities measured approximately 3.863 hectares, fenced the land with wire and erected boards identifying it as Nagar Nigam property. Municipal authorities described the land as government banjar and usar land and said that it had been freed from AMU’s possession, with its reported market value now being placed at approximately Rs 500 crore. Municipal Commissioner Prem Prakash Meena stated that the land would be used for public purposes, with possibilities including a police station, school, intermediate college, hospital and sports complex. AMU immediately rejected the action, and this time the University has put forward considerably more precise historical dates. According to the statement issued by AMU after the 20 August operation, the land is lawfully owned by the University, and the University possesses the documentary and legal evidence supporting that claim. Most importantly, the University states that the property was brought under acquisition proceedings under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, from 13 June 1925, and that on 19 November 1940 the Governor of the United Provinces acquired the land for Aligarh Muslim University.

These are not insignificant assertions. If AMU possesses the original acquisition notification, award, possession memorandum and associated government records corresponding to these dates, those documents require legal examination alongside the revenue entries relied upon by the Nagar Nigam. A contemporary khatauni entry cannot by itself settle a complicated historical question of title where an opposing public institution produces earlier statutory acquisition records. Conversely, AMU must place the complete chain of documents in the appropriate legal proceedings and explain any discrepancy between those acquisition records and the later revenue entries. That is precisely what adjudication is for.

A Pattern of Repeated Attempts

Viewed historically, the events of April 2025 and August 2026 cannot easily be treated as unrelated episodes. In April 2025 the Nagar Nigam entered land used by AMU for approximately eighty years, put up its ownership boards and claimed approximately 41 bighas, simultaneously announcing that further land in AMU’s possession was under scrutiny. AMU protested, asserted documentary title and pursued the matter before the authorities. Students approached the High Court, and the High Court specifically refused to decide title against AMU. The dispute subsequently became serious enough for the Uttar Pradesh Government to order an SIT investigation in February 2026. Yet on 20 August 2026, while the fundamental dispute over ownership remained unresolved, the municipal and district authorities again physically measured, fenced and asserted possession over another substantial tract associated with the Riding Field. It is this recurrence that should concern the University community. The question is no longer merely whether one particular plot measures 41 bighas, 4.105 hectares or 3.863 hectares: it concerns a continuing conflict between historical title claimed through acquisition and long institutional possession on one side, and contemporary municipal revenue entries on the other. Physical possession by an administrative authority cannot substitute for adjudication of that conflict.

Revenue Records Are Not the Whole History of Ownership

There is another lesson here. Universities often possess property whose history extends across different legal regimes. AMU’s estate includes land inherited from the MAO College, property vested in it by the 1920 Act, land acquired under colonial land-acquisition legislation, gifts, purchases and waqfs. Records relating to such properties may therefore be dispersed among University files, Collectorate records, acquisition proceedings, old revenue maps, government notifications, mutation registers, waqf deeds and court records. That makes accurate record-keeping essential. AMU cannot simply rely upon the argument that everyone has always known a particular field to belong to the University, for long possession is important evidence but valuable property requires an unbroken documentary chain. The University administration consequently has an obligation to undertake a comprehensive audit of every parcel of AMU property: its gata number, area, mode of acquisition, original deed or notification, mutation history, present revenue entry, physical possession, encroachments and litigation status. Every nineteenth- and twentieth-century acquisition document should be digitised, certified copies should be obtained from government archives, and revenue entries inconsistent with title documents should be challenged and corrected before another crisis develops. The 2025 controversy itself demonstrated the consequences of allowing discrepancies between historical ownership documents and current revenue records to persist.

But administrative deficiencies, if they exist, do not transfer ownership. If the Nagar Nigam believes that land occupied by AMU belongs to it, it is entitled to establish that claim through law. AMU is equally entitled to have its acquisition records and other evidence adjudicated before being dispossessed. Neither side should determine title merely by arriving with officials, police, fencing material and an ownership board.

From Rajiv Sharma to 2026

That is what gives the present dispute its extraordinary historical resonance. More than thirty years ago, a newly appointed Vice-Chancellor, Mahmood-ur-Rahman, stood before the AMU Teachers’ Association and announced his determination to recover University land from illegal possession. Rajiv Sharma, President of the Riding Club, responded that he would give the Vice-Chancellor the documents concerning the Riding Club property, and within days he was dead. No court established that his murder resulted from the land dispute, and it should never be presented as though one had. But the suspicion that surrounded the killing became embedded in the University’s institutional memory because it occurred amid conflicts over valuable land and because Sharma had so recently undertaken to produce the documents. Years later another history teacher and another former Riding Club President, I. G. Khan, was murdered. Contemporary suspicion again generated speculation about property disputes, although the subsequent CBI prosecution produced convictions on a robbery case and did not establish land as the motive. Yet the official verdict has not entirely dispelled the unease within the University community, where the circumstances of the two killings continue to invite reflection on the powerful local interests that surround AMU’s valuable land. The lesson is therefore not that the murders prove some continuing conspiracy, for they do not, but that disputes over AMU’s land have a long and troubled history and have repeatedly become entangled, in University memory, with questions of local influence, encroachment, administrative weakness, enormously valuable real estate and the ability of the institution to defend its property.

A Public Trust Must Be Defended

There is finally a larger principle involved. The people who gave land and property to the MAO College and later to Aligarh Muslim University did not donate it so that future generations could treat it casually. Nor did they give it to be absorbed, through administrative neglect or competing claims, into the expanding real-estate economy of Aligarh. They gave it for education. The AMU Act of 1920 recognised that continuity when it vested the accumulated movable and immovable property of the MAO College, Muslim University Association and Foundation Committee in the University. Generations after 1920 continued the tradition through gifts and waqfs, and the Government of India’s own statement before Parliament in 2024 confirms the remarkable extent of this continuing benefaction. AMU therefore carries a fiduciary as well as an administrative responsibility towards its estate. It must defend every acre that legally belongs to it, identify and remove private encroachments, correct defective revenue entries, preserve and digitise its title documents, and where another public authority claims ownership, pursue the matter relentlessly through the appropriate judicial and administrative forums.

The Nagar Nigam, for its part, is entitled to protect genuine municipal property. But where AMU produces acquisition records dating to 1925 and 1940, where University possession extends across generations, where the High Court has expressly not decided title in favour of the Nagar Nigam, and where the State Government itself has considered the earlier action sufficiently contentious to warrant an SIT investigation, the proper course is transparent legal adjudication, not repeated assertions of possession on the ground. The events of 20 August 2026 therefore raise a question larger than the fate of 3.863 hectares of Riding Field: who protects the historical property of a public university, and by what process may that property be taken from it? For Aligarh Muslim University the answer should be clear. The land entrusted to the institution by benefactors, acquired for it under law and inherited from the movement that created it belongs not to any particular Vice-Chancellor or administration. It constitutes an institutional inheritance held for generations yet to come. Its protection is therefore not simply a dispute over land: it is the protection of a public trust. AMU administration should therefore be more pro-active than they have been in the past.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

By the sixth instalment of this memoir, destiny had finally relented enough to let me secure a teaching position at Aligarh Muslim University. After years spent as a research scholar, living on fellowships, presenting papers at seminars and travelling across the country in search of archives and conferences, I had finally become a temporary Lecturer in the Department of History in February 1989. In those days there were no Assistant Professors. We were simply Lecturers, a designation that sounded reassuringly simple until one actually became one.

My appointment, however, was temporary. Permanency, much like paradise, was promised only to those who displayed sufficient patience. It eventually arrived in 1992, after three years of waiting. Three years during which I learned that the University’s definition of “temporary” bore absolutely no relation to the dictionary definition.

Professor Irfan Habib, my supervisor, meanwhile ensured that no one under his care remained idle. If there was a shortage of teachers anywhere in the University, one of his research scholars was quite likely to be volunteered. I sometimes suspected he kept a mental ledger of everyone’s free time and treated it as University property.

Thus my first teaching assignment was not in the Department of History but at the Students’ Union School. There was a shortage of teachers but an even greater shortage of funds. Permanent appointments were impossible, so the solution was beautifully economical. Seema Singh, Jawaid Akhtar, Sumbul Haleem Khan, Farhat Hasan and I were “requested” to teach there. It was a ‘gratis’ assignment where instead of getting paid, you contributed. A request from one’s supervisor was a curious thing. It sounded optional but rarely was. In fact, it occupied a peculiar space in the academic vocabulary where “optional” meant “compulsory” and “request” meant “command delivered in a gentle tone”.

Soon afterwards I was shifted again, this time to ST School, better known as Minto Circle. That move carried a small but memorable distinction. For the first time since qualifying the UGC NET Fellowship in 1984, I stopped withdrawing fellowship money and began receiving the salary of a Post Graduate Teacher. Looking at my first salary slip gave me a quiet sense of achievement. After years of being a professional student, I had finally become a salaried employee. The amount was modest, but the feeling of respectability was immense.

Not for long, however.

After my temporary appointment as Lecturer in the Department, another assignment came my way. A teacher in the Women’s College had gone on leave and someone was needed to teach the course on History of England. Naturally, the newest recruit was considered the ideal candidate. There was a certain logic to this. If you were the most recent arrival, you were also the most expendable. And if you had not yet learned to say no, you were practically irresistible.

I entered the Women’s College with all the confidence that only an inexperienced young lecturer can possess. I had prepared my lectures meticulously. I had memorised dates, rehearsed arguments and practised my delivery in front of a mirror. What I had not prepared for was the students.

To say that I was nervous would be an understatement.

I was young, untrained, painfully shy and convinced that the hallmark of a good teacher was to remain permanently serious. I never gossiped, never smiled unnecessarily and carefully maintained what I imagined to be an appropriately scholarly distance from my students. I believed that familiarity bred contempt and that a stern expression was the foundation of classroom discipline. How wrong I was.

The students, bright young women that they were, saw through me almost immediately. They recognised my nervousness, my discomfort and my desperate attempts to appear authoritative. They were kind enough not to mock me openly, but I could see the amusement dancing in their eyes.

One afternoon, after finishing my classes, I tucked the attendance register into the carrier of my bicycle and rode away.

My bicycle, unfortunately, had a characteristic common to many owned by young people of modest means.

It had no brakes.

This particular detail is important not because it caused any accident, but because it explains why I was pedalling so slowly. My progress was stately, almost regal. I moved at a pace that would have embarrassed a tortoise. And it was during this leisurely journey that fate, or perhaps a mischievous student, decided to intervene.

Somewhere between the College gate and my destination, one enterprising student quietly removed the attendance register from the carrier without my noticing anything at all. I pedalled merrily home, blissfully unaware that the most important document in my possession had disappeared.

When I finally realised what had happened, I entered a state bordering on administrative despair. The attendance register was not merely a book. It was proof that I had actually been teaching. It was evidence that students had actually been attending. Without it, my entire academic existence could be called into question. I imagined the Principal asking, “How do we know you were ever there?” and myself replying, “Well, I remember being there,” which would hardly count as documentary evidence.

For several days I wandered about wondering whether it was easier to recover the register or simply remain quite. Both options seemed equally plausible. Fortunately, another student, who happened to be rather more responsible than her mischievous friend, managed to recover it. She returned it to me safely and then, instead of expecting gratitude, delivered a stern lecture on the importance of vigilance. She explained, with the patience of someone addressing a particularly slow child, that attendance registers should not be left unattended in bicycle carriers, even if the bicycle was moving at a glacial pace.

The student had become the teacher.

I accepted the lesson with due humility. It was the first of many occasions on which my students would educate me far more effectively than I ever educated them.

Destiny had a great role through out my career. Within a a couple of years of my appointment, it played one of its favourite tricks.

This was before my confirmation as Lecturer. Like every young academic anxious about his future, I was exploring opportunities elsewhere. An advertisement appeared from Jawaharlal Nehru University. I applied and, to my pleasant surprise, was called for an interview.

The difficult part was not qualifying.

It was actually going.

Even today I cannot satisfactorily explain why I lost my nerve. Perhaps it was uncertainty. Perhaps it was diffidence. Perhaps I simply could not imagine leaving Aligarh. Whatever the reason, at the very last moment I decided not to travel to Delhi.

The following day the Selection Committee at Aligarh was scheduled.

As I sat outside the Committee Room rehearsing sensible answers and praying that no difficult questions would be asked, Professor Irfan Habib emerged.

He walked past me.

Stopped.

Turned around.

Looked at me with an expression that suggested I had personally sabotaged Indian historiography.

“Why did you not appear at JNU?” he growled.

“The Vice Chancellor was waiting for you!”

Those were hardly the words one wished to hear a few minutes before facing one’s own interview. I felt my carefully rehearsed answers evaporate from my mind. The dates I had memorised suddenly seemed uncertain. The theories I had prepared appeared flimsy. I sat there contemplating the various ways in which I had managed to disappoint my supervisor before I had even entered the interview room.

The Vice Chancellor was Professor M. S. Agwani, a distinguished scholar who had heard me present at least two conference papers and had shown considerable interest in my early work on medieval archaeology. He had even gone through my preliminary Survey Report on the structures of Fatehpur Sikri, a modest piece of work into which I had poured enormous enthusiasm. And I had stood him up. Magnificently.

As Professor Habib disappeared down the corridor, I could think only of the opportunity that had slipped away.

Surely I had missed the chance of a lifetime.

The following day I was confirmed at Aligarh.

Looking back now, I have no regrets. Had I gone to JNU, life would certainly have followed an entirely different course. Instead, destiny quietly whispered, “Not yet.”

I did not realise then that this whisper would return many years later.

Nearly a decade passed.

I had settled comfortably into teaching and research. My work on Fathpur Sikri had begun attracting attention and several papers had appeared in print. Professionally, however, I remained a Lecturer, though by then I had reached the Senior Scale. Promotions at Aligarh had almost become mythical creatures. Everyone spoke about Selection Committees. Very few had actually seen one. They occupied the same category as unicorns and sensible administrative decisions.

Then came another opportunity.

There was a vacancy for the post of Reader at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.

Friends encouraged me to apply.

I did.

Soon both my senior colleague and friend, Dr Jabir Raza, and I found ourselves travelling by train to Baroda for the interview. The journey was long, the seats were uncomfortable and our conversation consisted entirely of speculation about what questions might be asked. We constructed elaborate theories about the composition of the Selection Committee and debated the relative merits of various possible responses.

We stayed at a modest hotel near the railway station and spent the evening discussing probable interview questions with the supreme confidence that only anxious candidates possess. By the time we went to bed, we had convinced ourselves that we were prepared for every possible question. We were prepared for nothing.

The interview, however, itself proved unexpectedly pleasant.

Among the experts sat Professor Zamiruddin Siddiqui from Aligarh, who represented what was politely called the “other side” in the long-running academic debates that surrounded Professor Irfan Habib. We had never exactly belonged to the same intellectual camp. In fact, we occupied different continents of intellectual thought. I entered the room expecting a thorough interrogation about my academic loyalties.

The second expert was Professor Kapil Kumar, who by then had begun moving towards the Right and had become an increasingly vocal critic of Professor Habib. Between the two of them, I anticipated a vigorous cross-examination that would test both my scholarship and my diplomatic skills.

I therefore entered the interview room with modest expectations.

To my surprise, neither gentleman dominated the proceedings.

Instead, the Acting Vice Chancellor, an accomplished civil servant and a remarkably well-read lady, conducted most of the interview herself. She seemed genuinely interested in my work, asked probing questions and demonstrated a familiarity with medieval history that I had not anticipated from an administrator.

She questioned me extensively on historical archaeology, medieval architecture and my work on Fathpur Sikri. I found myself warming to the subject, forgetting my nervousness and actually enjoying the conversation.

Halfway through she suddenly asked,

“Are you genuinely interested in joining Baroda?”

One does not usually expect philosophical questions in a job interview.

I assured her that I certainly was. I had prepared a list of reasons why Baroda would be an excellent career move. I had rehearsed my enthusiasm. I was ready.

After the interview was over she called me back once again.

This, I thought, could either be very good news or very bad news.

Fortunately it was neither.

She wanted to show me the University’s Archaeology Laboratory.

Much of its equipment still lay unopened in its original packing cases. The machines were gleaming, sophisticated and entirely foreign to me. They looked as though they belonged in a science fiction film rather than a history department.

Pointing towards the instruments, she asked,

“Can you use these?”

The machines looked extremely impressive.

I looked considerably less so.

With confidence far greater than my actual knowledge, I replied,

“Yes.”

It remains one of the boldest answers I have ever given. It was also one of the least truthful. I had no idea what those machines did, how they worked or even what they were called. But I had learned that in academic interviews, confidence often counted for more than competence. It was a lesson I would later regret.

That evening Jabir and I decided to visit our senior from Aligarh, Iftikhar Bhai, who taught in the History Department at Baroda.

Finding his house, however, became an education in itself.

As we asked residents of the colony for directions, they looked at us rather coldly.

“We don’t know any Mulla.”

The same reply came again.

And again.

No one said “Iftikhar”.

No one said “History Department”.

Simply, “We don’t know any Mulla.”

The words were spoken casually.

Their effect was anything but casual.

They remained with me long after the interview had ended. I could not shake the feeling that I had glimpsed something important about the world beyond Aligarh, something that my comfortable academic existence had sheltered me from.

A few months later the results were announced.

I had been selected.

Reader.

It was a tremendous leap.

At a time when promotions at Aligarh appeared frozen indefinitely, I was being offered a position above the one I held. That too at a place like Vadodara, the city of palaces. Many of those waiting for promotion were my seniors. Some had even been my teachers. The promotion was not merely professional advancement. It was a complete transformation of my academic status.

Naturally I decided to go.

Or so I imagined.

My wife Annie and I began preparing in earnest. Household items were purchased. Utensils appeared from nowhere. Furniture was discussed. The Registrar at Baroda informed me that University accommodation had been identified and that I would receive possession within a month or two. In the meantime he said a Guest House room had been booked for us.

Everything appeared settled.

Except destiny.

Professor Irfan Habib opposed my leaving.

Professor Shireen Moosvi, then Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, also advised against it.

I argued. I pleaded. “This is a promotion.”

“There is no Selection Committee at Aligarh.” “I may wait forever.”

Nothing worked.

Professor Moosvi even enlisted my mother.

That, I realised, was unfair.

My mother naturally trusted Professor Moosvi’s judgement far more than mine. She had heard me speak about my academic achievements with characteristic modesty, which in my case meant not mentioning them at all. Professor Moosvi, on the other hand, spoke with authority. When she advised against the move, my mother listened.

Then came another surprise: Professor Aniruddha Ray telephoned from Calcutta. He too advised me not to leave Aligarh. So did a number of others.

By this stage I had begun wondering whether the entire fraternity of medieval historians had secretly conspired to keep me imprisoned within the walls of Aligarh. I imagined them gathered in some hidden chamber, plotting my confinement while I blithely packed my belongings.

Then history intervened.

The year 2002 arrived.

Ahmedabad burned.

Baroda witnessed violence.

Large parts of Gujarat were engulfed by one of the darkest communal tragedies in independent India. The images on television were horrifying. The reports from the ground were worse. Neighbourhoods that had coexisted peacefully for generations turned against each other. Families were displaced. Lives were destroyed. All over Gujarat thousands were killed. Ahsan Jafri was murdered. The tomb of Wali Dakani disappeared overnight. At Baroda I and Jabir Bhai had visited a Dargah: it was vandalised. NDTV flashed these news for all to see. The PM Atalbihari Bajpai was see reminding rāshtra dharma to the butchers.

Watching those horrifying events unfold on television, I slowly realised what my teachers had perhaps sensed much earlier than I had.

Sometimes the road we fail to take turns out to be the safer one.

Professor Hasan Mahmood himself, a senior Historian at MS University of Baroda at Vadodara eventually had to leave Gujarat but was fortunate to find a new beginning at Jamia Millia Islamia. Many others were not so lucky. The academic opportunities that had seemed so attractive just months earlier now appeared in a very different light.

When I think back today, I cannot help thanking Providence for preventing my departure. I think of all the things I might have lost, all the dangers I might have faced, all the colleagues who had to flee their homes.

Soon afterwards, a Selection Committee was finally held at Aligarh itself.

Farhat Hasan and I were promoted as Readers.

Several of our seniors unfortunately continued waiting. The system was slow, inefficient and deeply frustrating. But it had finally moved.

Although Professor Moosvi had advised both of us not to go to the Selection Committee, as, according to her, we would be humiliated and rejected. For that opportunity I remain deeply grateful to the then Vice Chancellor, Mr Mahmoodur Rahman, who insisted that the Selection Committee be held and, despite considerable opposition from different quarters, ensured that the appointments went through. He was a man who believed in doing what was right, regardless of the consequences. I am also beholden to Professor SP Gupta, the then Chairman, who despite his animosity towards my supervisor, supported me. We had been friends since long: remember he and I had actually visited many historical places together as friends, in spite of all departmental back room politics and groupings.

Looking back over those years, I am struck by a curious pattern.

Whenever I tried to leave Aligarh, something happened.

First it was JNU.

Then it was Baroda.

On both occasions I believed I had lost the opportunity of a lifetime.

On both occasions destiny quietly compensated me without my even realising it. I got what was my due.

There is perhaps a lesson somewhere in all this, though I am still not entirely sure what it is.

Maybe destiny occasionally knows more than we do. Or perhaps Aligarh simply refused to let me escape. Either way, I stayed. And flourished.

The next twist in this improbable journey was still to come.

It involved another promotion, another battle and another chapter in the strange conversation between ambition and destiny.

But that story and some more, must wait until the next instalment.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia hosted the 44th Dr M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture on 20 August 2026, featuring Professor Rajan Gurukkal, the incumbent General President of the Indian History Congress, as the distinguished speaker. The lecture, delivered in the Seminar Room, was, at least for me, an intellectually provocative intervention in one of the oldest and most persistent controversies of ancient Indian historiography. Entitled “Writing the Mauryan State from the South: Rethinking the Arthaśāstra,” Professor Gurukkal’s address returned to a text that has exercised an extraordinary influence upon modern reconstructions of the Mauryan state, subjecting its status and authority to a searching and rigorous re-examination.

At the outset, however, a qualification is necessary. The assessment offered here of Professor Gurukkal’s argument must remain provisional, for what he presented on this occasion was essentially a summary of a much more detailed paper, necessarily compressed to fit the limits of a memorial lecture. The full argument, the evidence on which it rests and the precise relationship Gurukkal establishes between manuscript transmission, textual composition and the historical reconstruction of the Mauryan state can properly be evaluated only after his paper becomes available and has been read in its entirety. What follows, therefore, is less a definitive critique of his thesis than (a) a response to the important historical and methodological questions raised by the lecture as it was heard, and (b) my understanding of the lecture as I heard him giving.

Even in its necessarily abbreviated form, however, the argument was fascinating in its ambition. Professor Gurukkal’s purpose was not to offer yet another description of Kautilyan administration, a task that has occupied generations of scholars and produced a vast and often repetitive literature. He raised instead the more fundamental question of what exactly the Arthaśāstra is, when and through what stages it assumed its surviving form, and whether the conventional association between the text, Kautilya or Chanakya, Chandragupta Maurya and the Mauryan Empire can any longer be accepted without qualification. This was not, as he made clear, a merely antiquarian exercise. The stakes were epistemological: how do historians know what they claim to know about the ancient state?

What made the lecture particularly stimulating was Professor Gurukkal’s decision to approach this familiar problem from an unfamiliar direction. Histories of the Mauryan Empire are naturally centred upon northern India: Pataliputra, Magadha, Chandragupta, Bindusara and Ashoka. The Arthaśāstra, when treated as the work of Chandragupta’s minister Kautilya, consequently becomes almost automatically a northern text and, more specifically, a document of the Mauryan state. Professor Gurukkal unsettled this apparently self-evident geography by turning attention to something historians have too often treated merely as a preliminary technical matter: the manuscript history of the text itself.

The core of his argument concerned the manuscript tradition of the Arthaśāstra, particularly the southern recensions that have survived in Kerala and Travancore. He started with the, yet satisfactorily answered question as to who was the actual author of this text? Kautilya? Chanakya? Or someone else. He went on to show that the root meaning of the term kautilye means ‘corrupt’. And the text time and again refers to “written by Kautilya”. Definitely no author would self proclaim himself as such. Definitely it is an attribution by some later editor. He also similarly dissected the term Chanakya. He asked his audience to consider why the text survived in the form it did, and what the geographical distribution of its manuscript traditions might tell us about its composition and transmission. The implication was provocative: if the Arthaśāstra is indeed a Mauryan text composed in the fourth century BCE by a minister at Chandragupta’s court in Pataliputra, why did its most important manuscript traditions emerge from the far south? And what does the textual history of the work suggest about its relationship to the Mauryan state?

Professor Gurukkal did not claim to have discovered an alternative author or a southern origin for the entire text. His argument was more subtle and, in many ways, more consequential. He suggested that the Arthaśāstra, as it has come down to us, is not a single work composed at a single moment but rather a text that underwent significant revision and redaction over a considerable period. The association with Kautilya, he proposed, may belong to a later stage of this textual history rather than to the work’s original composition. What historians have treated as the administrative manual of Chandragupta’s empire might instead be the product of a much longer intellectual tradition concerned with statecraft, political economy and the exercise of power.

This argument placed Professor Gurukkal’s lecture within a broader and increasingly influential current of scholarship on the Arthaśāstra. He acknowledged the work of earlier scholars who had raised doubts about the traditional attribution. The statistical analysis of Thomas Trautmann, which demonstrated that the internal structure of the text raises serious problems for the hypothesis of single authorship, was cited with approval. Patrick Olivelle’s editorial work and Mark McClish’s textual criticism were also invoked, particularly McClish’s demonstration that features seemingly fundamental to the work, including aspects of its attribution to Kautilya, belong to its redactional history rather than to the original composition.

What Professor Gurukkal contributed to this conversation was a new emphasis upon the material and geographical history of the manuscripts themselves. He argued that the southern manuscript tradition, far from being merely a peripheral curiosity, might offer crucial evidence for understanding how the text was received, transmitted and ultimately transformed. The Kerala and Travancore manuscripts, in his reading, are not simply copies of a lost northern original. They represent a distinct textual community with its own intellectual concerns and its own relationship to the traditions of statecraft that the Arthaśāstra embodies.

The convergence of different scholarly approaches was one of the most striking features of the lecture. Philology, textual criticism, manuscript history and the archaeology of state formation all pointed in the same direction: towards caution in treating the Arthaśāstra as a transparent window onto Chandragupta Maurya’s government. None of this diminished the importance of the text. On the contrary, it made the Arthaśāstra historically more interesting. Instead of being simply the administrative manual of one emperor written by one famous minister at the end of the fourth century BCE, it emerges as the product of a much longer intellectual engagement with power, kingship, political economy, law, warfare and the techniques of governance. The text becomes, in this reading, not a single document but a tradition, not a moment but a process.

Professor Rajan Gurukkal’s lecture was consequently an impressive exercise in historical criticism. Beginning with the Mauryan state, it led his audience eventually to a more fundamental problem: how historians know what they think they know about the ancient state. The title captured the method particularly well. To write the Mauryan state “from the South” is not simply to relocate Kautilya from Pataliputra to Kerala, nor is it to propose a southern origin for the text. It is to change one’s standpoint sufficiently to see that assumptions which appear self-evident from one historiographical location become questions when viewed from another. What from the north appears as a seamless administrative manual from the south reveals itself as a layered and composite text, the product of multiple hands and extended transmission.

And that, perhaps, was the most valuable achievement of the lecture. Professor Gurukkal did not merely ask his audience to rethink the authorship of the Arthaśāstra. He asked them to reconsider the historical procedures through which the Arthaśāstra became, in modern scholarship, the textbook of the Mauryan state in the first place. The lecture was thus a contribution not only to the history of ancient India but also to the history of historiography. It reminded historians that their sources are never transparent, that texts have histories of their own, and that the most familiar documents may conceal the most complex stories.

The discussion did not, however, end with the Arthaśāstra. The lecture was presided over by Professor Iqtidar Mohammad Khan, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Languages at Jamia Millia Islamia, whose concluding observations brought the occasion back to Dr M. A. Ansari and to the history of Jamia Millia Islamia itself. Professor Khan recalled Ansari as one of the founders of Jamia, but made an interesting distinction within the institution’s founding generation. Alongside those who had participated in its original establishment, he drew attention to what he described as a “second group” of founders: the men and women whose contribution lay in sustaining Jamia through its difficult formative years and thereby ensuring that an experiment begun in the political and intellectual ferment of the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements actually survived as an institution. Founding an institution, his remarks suggested, is not necessarily a single historical moment. Those who preserve a fragile institution and give it permanence may have as legitimate a claim upon its foundational history as those who formally establish it. This observation invited a more expansive understanding of institutional origins, one that recognises continuity, preservation and consolidation as acts of founding in their own right.

Professor Khan’s second observation was equally interesting, particularly for anyone familiar with the histories of both Jamia and Aligarh. He questioned the familiar description of Jamia Millia Islamia as essentially a “rebel” institution that broke away from the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College and the Aligarh movement. Such a formulation, he suggested, simplifies a considerably more complicated intellectual genealogy. In his interpretation, Jamia could instead be understood as carrying forward important elements of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s original educational vision: the creation of a modern institution founded upon scientific and rational education and intended to serve society without being confined within narrow communal boundaries. The later political circumstances surrounding Jamia’s establishment undoubtedly produced a rupture with Aligarh, but that institutional separation did not necessarily amount to a complete rejection of the intellectual principles with which Sir Syed had begun his educational enterprise.

It was a provocative observation because it complicates the conventional opposition between Aligarh and Jamia. Their institutional histories diverged sharply, particularly during the politics of the early twentieth century, yet Professor Khan’s remarks invited his audience to look beneath that divergence for an older shared commitment to modern education, scientific enquiry and intellectual emancipation. The genealogical relationship, in this reading, was not one of simple rupture but of selective continuity and reinterpretation.

There was, in fact, an unexpected coherence between these concluding remarks and Professor Gurukkal’s lecture. Professor Gurukkal had asked his audience not to accept an inherited account of the authorship and provenance of a canonical text merely because long repetition had made it appear self-evident. Professor Khan, speaking about Jamia, similarly invited his audience to reconsider an inherited institutional narrative: who counts as a founder, what constitutes an act of founding, and whether Jamia’s relationship with Aligarh should be understood solely through the language of rebellion and rupture. Both discussions, in rather different ways, reminded those present that history advances when familiar narratives cease to be treated as conclusions and are restored to their proper status as questions.

The Dr M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture has over the years established a distinguished tradition of intellectual rigour and scholarly innovation. It is worth recalling that the very first lecture in this series was delivered by Professor Irfan Habib, whose own contributions to the historiography of ancient and medieval India have been foundational. Since that inaugural address, the series has played host to a remarkable array of historians, including Professor Shireen Ratnagar and Professor Shireen Moosvi, whose work on ancient economies and Mughal history respectively has enriched the discipline in profound ways. These names, alongside a host of other eminent scholars, attest to the enduring significance of this memorial occasion as a forum for critical historical engagement. It was fitting, therefore, that Professor Gurukkal’s lecture on 20 August 2026 should continue this legacy, challenging inherited assumptions and opening new perspectives on a text as consequential as the Arthaśāstra.

Professor Khan’s concluding remarks, meanwhile, situated the occasion within Jamia’s own institutional history, inviting reflection upon the nature of founding, continuity and intellectual inheritance. The juxtaposition was particularly apt: just as the Ansari lecture series has maintained a continuous tradition of scholarly excellence since its inception, so too does Jamia’s own history reward careful reconsideration of what it means to build and sustain an institution over time. The lecture was thus an event of considerable significance, not only for specialists in ancient Indian history but for anyone interested in the methods and assumptions of historical scholarship more broadly. It demonstrated that the most fundamental questions about the past are often raised by the most meticulous attention to the sources, and that intellectual renewal comes not from discarding tradition but from subjecting it to critical scrutiny. In the conversation between Gurukkal’s critique of the Arthaśāstra and Khan’s reflections on Jamia’s founding, the audience was offered a rich and rewarding meditation on history, text and institution.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The attacks upon Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb in recent years have been mounted from several directions, some arising from a commendable desire to correct romanticised accounts of India’s past, others proceeding from a more troubling impulse to rewrite Indian history as an uninterrupted narrative of civilisational conflict. What unites these various critiques, however, is a shared conviction that the concept of a shared Indo-Persianate culture is essentially a secularist fabrication, a sentimental construction that conceals the grim realities of conquest, political inequality and religious discrimination. The argument runs that because Muslim rulers exercised political power over a Hindu majority, the cultural interaction that occurred under their patronage could not have been genuinely reciprocal; the Jamuna, as it were, dictated terms to the Ganga, and the language of synthesis merely masks what was in fact a process of imposition.

This line of reasoning, for all its apparent sophistication, rests upon a series of historical and conceptual errors that deserve careful examination. The most fundamental of these is the anachronistic projection of modern categories of nationhood, foreignness and indigenous belonging onto societies that operated according to entirely different logics of identity and political legitimacy. When we describe the Sultanate or Mughal ruling classes as a “foreign minority” dominating a “national majority”, we import into the thirteenth, sixteenth or seventeenth century concepts that acquired their modern political meaning only much later, during the transformative upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pre-modern societies certainly distinguished between insiders and outsiders, between rulers and subjects, between believers and non-believers, but these distinctions were not identical to the modern binary of national and foreigner, and to treat them as such is to commit a serious historical error.

Consider the logical consequences of applying this framework consistently. If every Muslim ruler was foreign because Islam originated outside India, then we must decide how many generations were required before a family became indigenous. Was Akbar, born at Umarkot in Sindh, foreign? Was Jahangir, born at Fathpur Sikri, foreign? Were the descendants of families who had lived in the subcontinent for five or ten centuries still foreign because their religion had originated elsewhere? The category quickly becomes untenable, collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. What this reveals is not that migration and conquest did not occur, for they plainly did, but rather that migration, conquest and cultural origin cannot simply be translated into the modern political vocabulary of foreigner versus national without doing violence to the historical realities of pre-modern India.

The more sophisticated critique of Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb, drawing particularly upon the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Indian Muslims and the work of scholars such as David Lelyveld, raises questions that are certainly legitimate and deserving of serious engagement. When we observe that major Muslim intellectuals like Shibli Nu’mani, despite their deeply Indian ancestry, imagined their historical community through Medina, Baghdad and Damascus rather than through Ashoka, Harsha or ancient India, we are compelled to ask how deep the celebrated synthesis really was. If the most influential Muslim thinkers of the nineteenth century remained so thoroughly oriented towards the Islamic past, can we honestly claim that a genuine cultural confluence had occurred? This question is worth asking precisely because it prevents Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb from becoming an unhistorical celebration of perpetual Hindu-Muslim harmony, and for that reason alone it deserves our gratitude.

Yet the conclusions drawn from this observation do not necessarily follow. The evidence, when examined carefully, reveals something considerably more complicated than either the romantic or the critical accounts would suggest. Cultural interaction can coexist with distinct religious memories; political cooperation need not require identical historical genealogies; and composite cultures do not require the communities participating in them to surrender their separate identities. The fact that Shibli Nu’mani wrote biographies of Caliph Umar, al-Ma’mun, al-Ghazali and Rumi rather than histories of ancient India tells us something important about his intellectual formation and his sense of community, but it does not tell us that he was culturally foreign to India. He wrote in Urdu and Persian, participated in the intellectual life of north India, engaged with the educational debates of his time, and belonged to a society whose everyday culture bore the marks of centuries of interaction between diverse communities.

The fundamental error in using Shibli as evidence against Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb lies in the assumption that participation in a composite culture requires the possession of a composite historical canon. This assumption is demonstrably false. A nineteenth-century Hindu intellectual could regard the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Vedas and ancient Sanskrit literature as his principal civilisational inheritance while simultaneously speaking Urdu, reading Persian poetry, wearing clothing shaped by Indo-Persian conventions and participating in a shared north Indian urban culture. Precisely the same possibility existed for Muslims, who could regard the great figures of Islamic history as belonging to their intellectual ancestry while remaining culturally, linguistically and socially products of north India. Indeed, to insist that because Shibli’s distant ancestors had been Rajputs he somehow ought to have identified intellectually with their pre-conversion religious past introduces a conception of cultural identity based almost upon blood, a conception that belongs more properly to the racial theories of the nineteenth century than to any serious understanding of how cultural identity actually operates.

The nineteenth-century setting of Shibli’s work is crucial here, for he wrote in a colonial environment in which Muslim rule had already been organised into powerful European narratives of Indian history. James Mill and later colonial writers represented the “Muhammadan period” as an era of despotism, fanaticism and decline, and Muslim intellectuals responded defensively, producing historical works that attempted to demonstrate that Islamic civilisation possessed traditions of rational enquiry, administration, philosophy, science, ethical government and intellectual creativity. History became simultaneously scholarship, apologetic and islah, an instrument of community regeneration, and this undoubtedly encouraged a self-conscious Muslim historical identity. Yet the same nineteenth century was producing increasingly self-conscious Hindu historical identities as well, as ancient India could be reconstructed as an exclusively Hindu golden age and the medieval centuries narrated as foreign Muslim interruption. The crucial development, therefore, was not simply the persistence of ancient Muslim separatism but the modern communalisation of historical memory, a process driven by colonial enumeration, print capitalism, representative politics and eventually nationalism.

The metaphor of two rivers, so central to the concept of Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb, is therefore more appropriate than its critics acknowledge, provided we understand it correctly. Rivers do not lose their sources when they meet. The Ganga remains the Ganga and the Jamuna remains the Jamuna, but at their confluence their waters intermingle, and neither emerges from the meeting unchanged. More importantly, the movement is not one-sided. The Jamuna does not simply pour itself into an unchanged Ganga, nor does the Ganga absorb a passive Jamuna. Both enter the confluence carrying their own sediments, and both are altered by the meeting. Both absorb, both reject, both accommodate and both transform. That is perhaps the most useful way of understanding the historical process of cultural interaction in India, and it is a model that applies across virtually every domain of cultural life.

The best example of the mutual exchange of Ganga giving to Jamuna and vice-versa in equal measure are the festivals: the rituals of Muharram or the celebration of Basant in a Chishti khanqah, or the pyrotechny and sweetmeats in Diwali and Dussehra.

Or consider architecture, perhaps the clearest example of this two-way process. The earliest mosques of the Sultanate period already reveal negotiations between forms associated with Islamic religious architecture and building traditions deeply rooted in India. Indian craftsmen brought with them mastery of trabeate construction, carved stone, corbelled forms, brackets, pillars and decorative vocabularies developed over centuries, and over time arcuate construction, domes and vaulting interacted with these traditions. The result was not Persian architecture simply transplanted to India but something genuinely new. By the Mughal period this interaction had become extraordinarily sophisticated, so that Fathpur Sikri cannot be understood as either Persian or “Hindu” architecture. Its brackets, chhatris, pillars, carved ornament, trabeate forms, arches, domes, spatial organisation and decorative traditions came from multiple architectural genealogies, all brought together through the work of Indian masons, stonecutters, architects, designers and craftsmen operating within an imperial culture itself increasingly rooted in India. Here the language of cultural conquest becomes almost meaningless, for one cannot say that a Fathpur Sikri pillar represents the imposition of one culture upon another when it so clearly embodies the creative synthesis of multiple traditions.

The same process appears even more dramatically in language, where the interaction among Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Sanskrit-derived vernaculars, Apabhramsha traditions and regional spoken languages contributed over centuries to the development of Hindavi, Rekhta and eventually Urdu. But this was not Persian replacing an Indian language; Indian grammatical structures remained overwhelmingly dominant, and while Persian and Arabic contributed enormously to vocabulary, literary idiom and stylistic register, the resulting language was structurally South Asian. Persian itself changed in India, developing its own vocabulary, imagery, themes and stylistic characteristics, while Hindu writers became some of the most accomplished masters of Persian prose and poetry. Chandar Bhan Brahman is only the most celebrated example of a much larger phenomenon involving Kayasths, Khatris, Brahmans and other literate groups, while Muslim poets wrote in Braj, Hindavi and other vernaculars. The language produced at the confluence belonged fully to neither source alone.

North Indian classical music makes the attempt to separate Hindu and Muslim cultural ownership still more difficult, for the traditions associated with temples, courts, Sufi establishments, devotional communities and hereditary performers interacted over centuries in ways that cannot be disentangled without destroying the historical tradition itself. Dhrupad received Mughal patronage; Muslim musicians performed compositions invoking Hindu deities; Hindu musicians served Muslim courts; Sufi traditions absorbed Indian musical forms; and courtly music developed through musicians belonging to different religious backgrounds. One may identify individual genealogies and influences, but it is impossible to dismantle Hindustani classical music retrospectively into separate Hindu and Muslim components, for the tradition itself is the product of that interaction. Here again, both rivers gave and received, and the attempt to assign ownership to one community or the other is a fundamentally ahistorical enterprise.

Culinary history offers an equally obvious example of this reciprocal process. Central Asian and Persianate cooking traditions introduced or popularised certain techniques, dishes and styles of preparation, yet once in India they encountered local grains, pulses, vegetables, spices, methods of cooking and dietary conventions, and the cuisines that subsequently developed in Delhi, Awadh, Hyderabad and elsewhere were not imported packages but creations of interaction. The supposedly “Muslim” kitchen became deeply dependent upon Indian ingredients and tastes, while dishes and techniques associated with elite Indo-Persian cooking travelled into much wider society. Khichdi emerged as a preferred Mughal cuisine. Even here, borrowing was selective; religious restrictions remained, caste rules mattered, and communities rejected particular foods while adopting others. Vegetable biryani is one such example. That combination of adoption and refusal is precisely how culture evolves, and it is a process that cannot be reduced to a simple model of imposition.

The same caveat applies to the question of class and social location, for Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb should not be collapsed into Indo-Persian elite culture. While Persian literary culture was disproportionately connected with courts, bureaucracies, scribal groups and educated urban strata, the social field of composite culture was considerably broader. It developed in bazaars, workshops, army camps, towns, shrines, neighbourhoods and households. It existed among artisans and performers as well as poets and nobles. The evolution of Hindustani cannot be explained through courts alone, nor can culinary exchange, popular musical traditions, shared craft vocabularies, everyday forms of dress or practices associated with shrines and festivals. Composite culture was certainly uneven, often more visible in cities than villages, stronger in some regions than others, and experienced differently by elites, artisans and peasants, but that makes it historically specific rather than imaginary.

The critics are nevertheless right about one thing: Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb was fragile, and the violence required to partition Punjab and Bengal reveals precisely how deeply intertwined the populations had become. Separation was catastrophic because the societies being separated were not hermetically sealed civilisations, and the fact that people who shared languages, food, music, neighbourhoods and regional identities could nevertheless kill one another does not prove that the preceding cultural intimacy had never existed. It proves something more disturbing: that politics can destroy in a few years what societies have created over centuries. Shared cultural practices cannot automatically prevent political mobilisation based upon religious identity, and Partition demonstrated this terribly, but the persistence of cultural intimacy even in the face of political violence testifies to its genuine historical existence.

The concept of Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb should therefore certainly be rescued from romanticism. Medieval India was not an endless celebration of interfaith harmony; there were wars, temple desecrations, political discrimination, religious polemics and sectarian conflicts, as well as enormous inequalities of caste, class and gender. But correcting romantic history does not require replacing it with an equally simplistic history of permanent Hindu-Muslim antagonism, for the opposite of mythology is not counter-mythology but history, and history requires us to understand how conflict and cooperation, borrowing and rejection, accommodation and assertion could occur simultaneously. That is precisely what happened, and it is precisely what the metaphor of two rivers captures so well.

The greatest mistake, ultimately, is the retrospective search for pure cultural ownership. Such classifications sometimes possess analytical value, but when pushed too far they become historically absurd. Urdu cannot be returned to Muslims, nor can Persian written in India be returned to Iran. North Indian classical music cannot be dismantled into Hindu and Muslim notes, nor can the Taj Mahal be excised from Indian architecture. The Razmnama cannot be detached from the history of the Mahabharata simply because it was written in Persian, nor can the cultural world that produced these syntheses be dismissed as a secularist fiction. Shibli Nu’mani does not refute Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb; he demonstrates that shared culture never abolished separate historical memories. Iqbal demonstrates that cultural belonging does not automatically produce political nationalism. Partition demonstrates the terrible fragility of composite societies. And the history of the Sultanate and Mughal periods demonstrates something equally important: that modern binaries of national and foreign, majority and minority, indigenous and outsider cannot be projected backwards without distortion.

The Ganga-Jamuni tradition was not a finished achievement; it was a historical process, continually being created, negotiated, challenged, damaged and renewed. The Ganga did not become the Jamuna, and the Jamuna did not become the Ganga. Each retained its source and its course, but each altered the other at the confluence, and once the waters had mingled, trying to identify every drop as exclusively belonging to one river or the other became both impossible and historically pointless. India was made, in considerable measure, in that confluence, and to defend Ganga-Jamuni Tahzeeb today is therefore not to defend a comforting myth but to defend a harder historical truth: that civilisations are created not by cultural purity but through encounter, selection, resistance, borrowing and transformation. Those who cannot understand this, who insist upon reading the past through the lens of present communal categories, will find themselves unable to comprehend the richness and complexity of India’s plural heritage, a heritage that belongs to all who inhabit this subcontinent regardless of the faith into which they were born.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

For the past several days, since the news emerged that the University of Delhi had removed the long-standing postgraduate paper on the Delhi Sultanate from its revised History syllabus, journalists, academics, and concerned citizens have been asking two pressing questions. First, what is the actual importance and significance of the Delhi Sultanate for understanding Indian history? Second, what would be the negative consequences of removing this period from the curriculum? These are not merely academic queries; they go to the heart of how we understand our past and how we educate future generations. These questions were put to me too. I will try to address them in my own way here.

The decision by Delhi University to drop the elective paper, titled “The Delhi Sultanate: Structures of Authority in Medieval North India (13th-14th Centuries)“, from the postgraduate syllabus is not an isolated incident. It is part of a broader pattern of invisibilising the so-called “Muslim Period” of Indian history. Some of the other omissions in the third semester include papers on “History of North India, c. 1400-1550”, “Gender and Women in Early India: 1500 BCE to 1000 CE”, “Political Processes and Structure of Polities in Ancient India” and “Religion and Society in Ancient Indian Literature”. This began with the “rationalisation” of NCERT school textbooks, which removed all references to the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal rulers from Class 7 textbooks and reduced chapters on the Mughal Empire in Class 12. Influential women icons like Raziyya Sultan and Nur Jahan were also omitted from new Class 8 NCERT textbooks. In the past I wrote and spoke on these at a number of places. Let me also state at the very beginning that I started my teaching career by teaching Delhi Sultanate to undergraduate level, before shifting to the Mughals, whom I generally taught to post graduate students.

The latest restructuring at Delhi University is part of the ongoing curriculum restructuring under the defective National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. The revised postgraduate programme has been prepared under the Postgraduate Curriculum Framework (PGCF) 2024 in accordance with NEP 2020. The university’s syllabus document confirms that the revised postgraduate programme is based on PGCF 2024 under NEP 2020 and is effective from July 2026. Of the 38 Discipline Specific Elective papers proposed by the History Department, only 16 were included in the final notification, leaving 22 proposed courses outside the final syllabus. Professor Maya John, a member of DU’s Academic Council, criticised the decision and described it as an “infringement of the autonomy of the History Department”. According to her, the reasons for the decision “appear political and not academic in nature”. CPI(M) general secretary M A Baby questioned whether excluding a major period of the capital’s history amounted to an attempt to erase Delhi’s own past. “Being in Delhi and attempting to erase Delhi’s own history requires some serious chutzpah,” he said. To me it is just anostep to replace history with mithya, the make believe which has no basis.

This essay argues that the Delhi Sultanate is of profound significance for comprehending Indian history and that its erasure, even as an elective paper, from educational curricula produces grave intellectual and cultural consequences.

The Sultanate as a Historical Bridge

The period from the establishment of Ghurid power in the late twelfth century to the advent of the Mughals in 1526 was not an inert interval between “ancient India” and the Mughal Empire. As Aniruddha Ray argues in his integrated history of the Sultanate, this was a period in which political authority, agrarian relations, urbanisation, military organisation, technologies, social groups, languages, religious traditions, and cultural practices underwent transformations whose consequences extended far beyond the Sultanate itself. The Sultanate serves as a crucial historical bridge, and to remove it is to remove one of the principal links between early medieval and early modern India, thereby making much of what came afterwards unintelligible.

This methodological point is central to Ray’s organisation of The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture, where he deliberately divides his account between political history and a second part dealing with the structure of government, land, trade, commerce, urbanisation, architecture, science and technology, social life, and religious movements. His purpose is to move beyond narratives that merely recount political events and to offer an integrated understanding of the Sultanate as a formative phase in Indian civilisation. What disappears when the Sultanate disappears from a curriculum is therefore not simply the Khaljis and Tughluqs, but an entire phase in the development of the Indian economy, society, cities, technologies, and culture.

Challenging the “Dark Age” Paradigm

There is a revealing historiographical history behind attempts to marginalise medieval India. Ray recalls that colonial officials from the late eighteenth century onwards characterised India’s medieval centuries as a “Dark Age”, partly to contrast supposedly disordered pre-colonial conditions with the benefits claimed for British government. Some Indian writers subsequently reproduced this terminology. Ray consciously wrote his integrated history of the Sultanate partly to challenge precisely this representation.

To omit several centuries in which cities expanded, commercial networks intensified, coinage spread, new technologies appeared, architecture flourished, vernacular and Persian literary cultures developed, and major religious movements transformed Indian society risks reproducing in another form the old colonial assumption that medieval India was somehow an interruption in Indian civilisation. The Sultanate was certainly an age of warfare, conquest, exploitation, and social hierarchy. But so were many other periods of Indian and world history. None of these characteristics converts three centuries into an historical void. The task of the historian is to explain change, not to designate convenient centuries as darkness.

Mohammad Habib’s “Twin Revolutions”

A major historiographical contribution that must be considered is the pioneering work of Mohammad Habib, particularly his landmark introduction to the 1952 reprint of Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by Its Own Historians. Rejecting both the colonial narrative of a “Dark Age” and the mere chronicling of dynasties, Habib employed a framework of historical materialism to reinterpret the Sultanate’s advent. He argued that the Ghurian conquest was not simply a foreign invasion but should be viewed as “a revolution of Indian city-labour led by the Ghurian Turks”.

This bold thesis rested on his concept of an “Urban Revolution“. He contended that the conquest catalysed the creation of new cities, making them “the sole repositories of the country’s civic sense”. These urban centres became engines of change, concentrating the surplus of the working classes and giving the Sultans a powerful new base. This urban dynamism was followed by a “Rural Revolution“, a transformation of the agrarian administration that was fundamental to the stability and power of subsequent empires. As Habib argued, without this prior revolution in the administrative machine, Alauddin Khalji’s far-reaching agrarian policies would have been impossible. By proposing this “twin revolution” thesis, Habib placed the Sultanate at the very heart of a profound socio-economic transformation, making its study indispensable for understanding the emergence of a new India.

State Formation, Urbanisation, and Economic Transformation

The Sultanate period is indispensable for understanding how states are made. Older histories often described Sultanate institutions as though they were stable from the beginning: Sultan, wazir, iqtaʿ, provincial governor, army, and bureaucracy. But these institutions changed substantially over time. Sunil Kumar demonstrates that political relationships were intensely personal, with free military commanders, slaves, princes, jurists, and local chiefs operating through overlapping networks of service, patronage, and allegiance. The bandagān, or military slaves, could rise to the highest military and political positions, yet their authority remained rooted in personal dependence upon rulers. This tension between a slave elite produced through service and dynastic monarchy seeking to transmit sovereignty through hereditary succession is a central lesson in how political power was actually negotiated and exercised.

The economic history of the Sultanate is equally transformative. The Cambridge Economic History of India identifies the emergence and domination of the Delhi Sultanate as marking “a very clear break with the region’s political past” and introducing “innovations of profound importance”. These include the successful creation of a military power sustained by the regular extraction of resources from an extensive territory, the emergence of a new ruling class with direct claims over shares of the produce, a proliferation of urban centres, and the growth of new manufactures such as paper and lime mortar. Ray shows that maritime commerce between India and western Asia long predated the Sultanate but intensified and changed direction as larger Indian Ocean networks developed. Within the Sultanate, cash circulation expanded substantially, with the rapid increase in currency from the early fourteenth century linked with cash revenue payments, the movement of agricultural produce to towns, and the expansion of commercial exchange. A society in which agricultural surplus increasingly moves through markets, taxes are increasingly expressed in money, roads sustain caravans, and towns absorb rural produce is undergoing significant structural change.

Opening India to the Wider World

The Sultanate dramatically intensified India’s connections with the wider world. This was not a period of isolation but of unprecedented integration. The establishment of the Sultanate opened up India to a multitude of external economic, social, and religious influences, weaving the subcontinent more tightly into the fabric of the medieval world.

This external interaction is visible in the very structure of the state. As Sunil Kumar and Peter Jackson have shown, the Sultanate’s political and military elite was composed of a continuous flow of immigrants, slaves, and adventurers from Central Asia, Persia, and Afghanistan, who were then integrated into the Indian political order. Ray demonstrates how these immigrants, such as the Afghans, settled, acquired landed interests, and became key elements of the ruling class. Simultaneously, the Indian Ocean trade networks that Ray highlighted link India to West Asia, Southeast Asia, and China, making the subcontinent a vital node in a globalised medieval economy. To remove the Sultanate is to erase this crucial period of re-integration, making it seem as though India was a passive recipient of global forces rather than an active participant.

Delhi as a Political Idea

One of the most consequential developments of these centuries was the emergence of Delhi as a major centre of political authority. This did not occur instantaneously. Sunil Kumar demonstrates that north India during the thirteenth century contained numerous competing centres of power, with the rulers of Delhi not continuously dominant. Peter Jackson’s detailed political history reinforces this: governors rebelled, Bengal might remain beyond effective control for years, and the central government sometimes granted the same iqtaʿ to rival commanders, allowing political competition to resolve the issue. That makes Delhi’s eventual durability more historically significant, not less. The Sultanate period is the period during which Delhi became not simply another north Indian city but a political idea. Remove the Sultanate and the subsequent importance of Delhi under the Mughals and even in 1857 becomes historically inexplicable.

The Mongol Challenge and India’s Eurasian Connections

Peter Jackson brings another aspect of the Sultanate into particularly sharp focus: its confrontation with the Mongols. The Mongol invasions formed part of one of the greatest transformations in Eurasian history. States across Central Asia and Iran vastly more established than the Delhi Sultanate were overwhelmed. Yet the Mongols repeatedly failed to conquer the central territories of the Sultanate. Jackson shows that pressure became particularly intense during Alauddin Khalji’s reign, when invasions of unprecedented scale threatened Delhi itself. This danger reshaped military organisation, with Balban developing forces specifically intended to guard the frontier and Alauddin maintaining substantial armies both against the Mongols and for campaigns within India. Had the Sultanate collapsed under Mongol pressure, the subsequent history of the subcontinent might have developed very differently. The Sultanate consequently forms part of the history not merely of India but of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Eurasia.

Social Mobility and Complex Hindu-Muslim Relations

Perhaps one of Ray’s most useful contributions is his emphasis upon social mobility. The Sultanate’s political establishment initially favoured Central Asian immigrant elites, but such monopolies could not be sustained indefinitely. As the state expanded, it required administrators, soldiers, accountants, and educated personnel on a scale that established aristocratic families alone could not supply. Ray notes the increasing entry of Indian Muslims, converts, persons of comparatively humble background, Hindus, and other groups into state service. This is precisely where the chronicler Barani becomes especially revealing: his anxiety about “low-born” persons entering education and public service tells us that social barriers were in fact being breached.

Ray’s evidence is especially useful in challenging simplistic narratives of Hindu-Muslim confrontation. He notes that Hindu soldiers served in Sultanate armies, Hindu commanders could hold significant military positions, Muslim nobles employed Hindu managers and accountants, and Hindus participated in local administration. This does not mean that medieval society was free of religious discrimination, exclusion, or violence. It was not. But it does demonstrate that social and political life cannot be reduced to “Hindu rulers versus Muslim rulers”. People interacted through administration, commerce, warfare, employment, craft production, and neighbourhood life even when religious and social boundaries remained strong. The historian’s task is precisely to explain how cooperation, inequality, conflict, and accommodation existed simultaneously.

The Sufi-Bhakti Crucible

The Sultanate era was not defined by monolithic religious confrontation but by a dynamic and complex process of cultural and spiritual exchange. Mohammad Habib persistently emphasised the historical role of the Sufis in creating a “culture of tolerance, accommodation and appreciation of difference”. Figures like the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya, who maintained a deliberate independence from the court, were instrumental in this process. This was also the age of Amir Khusrau, who embodied the cultural synthesis of the period, seamlessly blending Persian and Indian traditions.

Simultaneously, the Bhakti movement was gaining momentum, with saints and poets across the subcontinent challenging orthodoxies and fostering personal devotion. The interaction between these two powerful currents created a fertile ground for new religious expressions and social ideas. Ray draws attention to another dimension: Sufi criticism of social inequality could attract members of disadvantaged social groups, including Hindus, and create spaces of interaction below the level of court politics. He even raises the suggestive question of whether such social experiences formed part of the much longer background against which Akbar’s sulh-i kul later emerged. One need not accept a simple linear progression from Sufism to sulh-i kul to recognise the larger importance of the point. The religious history of Mughal India did not begin with Akbar. Nor did Bhakti or Sufi interaction suddenly emerge in the sixteenth century. Their historical worlds had been taking shape for centuries. To excise the Sultanate is to remove the very crucible in which so much of India’s subsequent religious and cultural identity was forged.

Amir Khusrau and the Cultural Transformation of India

The Sultanate period is equally indispensable to linguistic and literary history. Amir Khusrau alone makes this evident. A major Persian poet, court intellectual, musician, and disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, he inhabited simultaneously the Persianate literary world and the social world of India. Ray stresses the extraordinary evidentiary value of his writings. Khaza’in al-Futuh, Tughluqnama, Qiran al-Sa’dain, his letters and literary writings provide information not only on campaigns but on education, court culture, social life, and the religious world of Delhi. Persian became deeply rooted as a language of administration, historical writing, and high culture while interacting with Indian vernaculars. The linguistic environment from which Hindavi and ultimately the Hindi-Urdu continuum developed cannot be explained if the Sultanate is omitted. Cultures do not appear suddenly when dynasties change.

Science and Technology: A Society That Was Not Stagnant

Ray’s discussion of science and technology makes the case even stronger. Among the developments associated with these centuries were the spinning wheel, improved irrigation devices, distillation techniques, advances in military technology, architectural engineering, and the expanding use of paper and specialised craft knowledge. Ray explicitly rejects the idea that Indian society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was technologically stagnant. He argues that peasants and artisans adopted new technologies when these increased production or market opportunities, and that technological change interacted with commercialisation and social relations. The spinning wheel is a particularly striking example. Ray, following earlier economic historians, notes that its adoption enormously increased the production of yarn, thereby influencing textile manufacture and commerce. He similarly links irrigation developments and the canals of Firoz Shah Tughluq with agricultural production. Even where historians disagree over precise origins and chronology, these debates demonstrate something fundamental: medieval India was technologically dynamic. To remove the Sultanate from education reinforces precisely the false image of technological immobility that historical scholarship has spent generations challenging.

Architecture as Historical Evidence

The built environment provides the most visible demonstration of the formative character of these centuries. Mosques, tombs, minarets, forts, reservoirs, madrasas, and urban complexes developed through interaction among imported architectural traditions, Indian craftsmen, regional building materials, and existing techniques. The Qutb complex, Siri, Tughluqabad, Jahanpanah, Firozabad, Hauz Khas, and the Lodi monuments are not merely picturesque remains. They are historical documents. They reveal changing engineering, patronage, labour organisation, urban development, and aesthetic interaction. Ray’s decision to devote a separate chapter to architecture and sculpture is therefore important. His overall structure places architecture alongside economy, technology, and social history rather than treating monuments as decorative appendages to political narrative. To preserve Sultanate buildings as “heritage” while removing the history that produced them would be profoundly contradictory. Heritage without historical context becomes spectacle.

Different Historians, Different Sultanates

The significance of the period becomes still clearer when one examines the very different ways historians have interpreted it. A. L. Srivastava, Mohammad Habib, Peter Jackson, Sunil Kumar, and Aniruddha Ray do not present the same Delhi Sultanate. Their disagreements concern fundamental historical questions. Was the Sultanate essentially foreign, or did it become rooted in India? Was it a theocracy, a military state, an exploiting ruling order, or a political formation whose religious ideology had constantly to negotiate with social reality? Did centralisation originate with rulers in Delhi or emerge through negotiations among rulers, military commanders, and local chiefs? How important were cities and commercialisation? Did conquest produce social transformation? What was the relationship between migration and indigenous developments? How far did technology reshape production?

Such disagreements are not reasons for excluding the Sultanate. They are reasons for teaching it. History becomes meaningful when students see that interpretations are arguments grounded in evidence rather than truths handed down for memorisation. Students would lose an opportunity to understand historical disagreement itself if the Sultanate were removed. No single interpretation should be converted into an authorised narrative. They should be read against one another. That is what studying history means.

The Costs of Erasure

The damage caused by removing the Delhi Sultanate from historical study is not that students will forget the dates of Iltutmish, Razia, Balban, Alauddin Khalji, or Muhammad bin Tughluq. The real loss is conceptual. Students will lose the ability to understand:

· how Delhi became a major political centre;
· how conquest evolved into state formation;
· how personal military networks developed into changing administrative structures;
· how military slaves became nobles and rulers;
· how the Sultanate survived the Mongol transformation of Eurasia;
· how revenue, military necessity, and political centralisation became interconnected;
· how local chiefs negotiated with imperial authority;
· how northern India and the Deccan became more closely connected;
· how towns expanded and craft production developed;
· how monetary circulation and commercial exchange intensified;
· how India participated in Indian Ocean and Eurasian trade;
· how technological change affected textiles, irrigation, warfare, and production;
· how migrants, converts, slaves, artisans, and local elites experienced differing forms of social mobility;
· how Persian became an Indian language of administration and high culture;
· how Sufi and Bhakti worlds developed;
· how architecture emerged through interaction rather than civilisational isolation;
· how the foundations of much that characterised Mughal India had been laid centuries earlier.

As historian Mridula Mukherjee observed, “Continuity is essential to any historical narrative. Big gaps distort understanding. That’s not how history is written or taught”. She warned that excluding such formative periods disrupts the chronological flow and prevents students from grasping the evolution of Indian society. The removal of the Sultanate from educational curricula reinforces precisely the false image of technological and social immobility that historical scholarship has spent generations challenging.

The Sources Teach Historical Method

The Sultanate deserves a substantial place in education for another reason: its sources teach students how historical knowledge is produced. Minhaj-i Siraj, Amir Khusrau, Ziyauddin Barani, Shams-i Siraj Afif, Ibn Battuta, malfuzat, inscriptions, coins, and architecture do not tell identical stories. Ray himself begins with a chapter on sources and insists upon combining Persian and Arabic chronicles with inscriptions, coins, regional-language materials, and travellers’ accounts. He notes that political history provided the traditional framework, but after Independence historians increasingly investigated agrarian history, urbanisation, social conditions, and regional histories through a wider body of evidence. His treatment of Barani is particularly instructive. Ray regards Barani as indispensable, especially for economic and social information, yet simultaneously warns of inaccuracies, memory, personal circumstances, and authorial motivation. Sunil Kumar carries this methodological critique still further, asking not only whether chronicles are factually reliable but how their categories and narratives themselves construct political meaning. Students therefore learn one of the most important lessons of historical education: sources must be interrogated, not merely believed.

Why the Sultanate Is Essential for Understanding the Mughals

The most obvious consequence of removing the Sultanate is the enormous explanatory gap created before Mughal India. Babur did not enter an India without a political history. By 1526, Delhi had acquired centuries of political prestige. Persian was deeply rooted in government and literature. A monetised economy and extensive minting traditions already existed. The iqtaʿ had undergone centuries of experimentation. Revenue extraction had increasingly connected villages with the state. Long-distance trade linked northern India to the coasts and Indian Ocean. Urban centres supported large populations of artisans, merchants, officials, and scholars. North India and the Deccan had been brought into sustained political interaction. Sufi institutions were deeply established. Military elites had long incorporated Turks, Afghans, Indian Muslims, Rajputs, and others. State workshops, or karkhanas, were already established institutions. Ray explicitly observes that the karkhana was among the Sultanate institutions that continued into Mughal times and that its basic structure displayed substantial continuity. The Mughal Empire therefore transformed an already transformed India. To jump from an earlier period directly to Akbar is to make Mughal state formation look almost miraculous.

History Cannot Be Understood by Removing Difficult Centuries

There is a larger principle at stake. The purpose of historical education is not to manufacture a comforting genealogy for the present. Nor is it to divide the past into centuries that supposedly belong to one religious community and centuries belonging to another. Historical periods do not become dispensable because they are politically uncomfortable.

The Delhi Sultanate was born from conquest, but it became rooted in India. Its rulers invoked Islamic legitimacy, but political necessity repeatedly constrained religious prescription. Its armies fought Hindu rulers and also employed Hindu soldiers. Its nobility contained Turks, Khaljis, Afghans, Indian Muslims, converts, and men of slave origin. Its cities drew migrants while creating opportunities for Indian artisans. Its Persian literary culture interacted with Indian languages. Its economy became increasingly monetised. Its merchants participated in commercial networks extending across Asia. Its Sufis could challenge both social hierarchy and political authority. Its architects created forms that could not have emerged without the labour and skills of Indian craftsmen. Its institutions became part of the inheritance received and transformed by the Mughals.

To conclude, Aniruddha Ray’s integrated treatment is especially important here. His entire book is, in effect, an argument against defining the Sultanate by its dynasties alone. By including trade, cities, technology, architecture, society, and religion, he demonstrates that these three centuries belonged to the continuing history of Indian civilisation rather than constituting a blank space between two supposedly more legitimate periods.

To erase the Sultanate would therefore do more than shorten a syllabus. It would break historical connections. It would leave the Mughal period without its institutional and cultural prehistory, urbanisation without part of its development, economic history without crucial stages of monetisation and commerce, religious history without the formative centuries of Sufi-Bhakti interaction, and architectural history without some of India’s most important experiments in form and technology.

The past is not an inheritance from which inconvenient centuries may be deleted. It is a connected process of continuity, rupture, conflict, adaptation, and change. The Delhi Sultanate belongs in the curriculum not because it must be celebrated, defended, or condemned, but because without understanding these three centuries we cannot adequately understand the making of medieval India, the emergence of early modern India, or the historical processes through which the society we inhabit eventually came into being.

Select Reading List

1. Elliot, H. M., and John Dowson. The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians. Vol. II. With an Introduction by Mohammad Habib. Cosmopolitan Publishers, 1952.
2. Habib, Mohammad. Studies in Medieval Indian Polity and Culture: The Delhi Sultanate and Its Times. Edited by Irfan Habib. Oxford University Press, 2015.
3. Habib, Mohammad, and Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, eds. A Comprehensive History of India: The Delhi Sultanate (A.D. 1206-1526). Vol. V. People’s Publishing House, 1970.
4. Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
5. Kumar, Sunil. The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192-1286. Permanent Black, 2007.
6. Kumar, Sunil. “When Slaves Were Nobles: The Shamsi Bandagan in the Early Delhi Sultanate.” Studies in History 10 (1994): 23-52.
7. Ray, Aniruddha. The Sultanate of Delhi (1206–1526): Polity, Economy, Society and Culture. Routledge, 2019.
8. Raychaudhuri, Tapan, and Irfan Habib, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1: c. 1200-c. 1750. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
9. Srivastava, A. L. The Sultanate of Delhi. Shiva Lal Agarwala, 1950.

Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947. New Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2014 edition. ISBN 978-93-325-3574-9. 441 pp.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

With the passing of Professor Sumit Sarkar (b. 1939) on 13 August 2026, India has lost one of the tallest historians of modern India. There will appropriately be assessments of his entire scholarly career: of The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, Writing Social History, his essays on nationalism, popular politics and religious identities, his early engagement with Subaltern Studies and his subsequent disagreements with some of its directions. Yet for several generations of students and teachers, there is one book through which Sumit Sarkar first entered their intellectual lives: Modern India, 1885–1947. I pay my tribute to him through this review.

It is difficult to think of many works of Indian history that have shaped so many historians before they became historians.

Published originally in the early 1980s, Modern India was ostensibly a general history of the last six decades of British rule. Sarkar himself described it much more modestly than its subsequent influence would warrant. The book, he explained, had two purposes: to synthesise the enormous body of specialised research that had accumulated on the political, social and economic history of modern India, and simultaneously to explore the possibilities of a “history from below”, moving away from the conventional concentration upon the activities, ideas and manoeuvres of political leaders.

Those two objectives transformed what could have been another textbook into something altogether different.

A Textbook That Was Never Merely a Textbook

Students approaching Modern India for the first time could be forgiven for finding it intimidating. Sarkar did not simplify history by removing its difficulties. He compressed an extraordinary quantity of research, argument, statistics and historiographical controversy into a narrative of remarkable density.

The structure of the book itself announces its difference. Political history is continually interrupted and enriched by the colonial economy, the drain of wealth, deindustrialisation, the commercialisation of agriculture, land relations, capitalist development, caste and communal consciousness, labour, business groups, peasants, tribal movements and the social roots of the intelligentsia. The Swadeshi movement is accompanied by labour unrest and the samitis; Non-Cooperation by its social composition and regional variations; Civil Disobedience by business attitudes, peasant movements and “pressures from below”; Quit India by its social composition and sharply differing regional trajectories. The final years bring together the INA trials and the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny with Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar and Telangana.

This organisation was itself an argument about what constituted history.

Before Sarkar, the history of Indian nationalism could still quite easily be narrated as the history of the Indian National Congress: Moderate politics, Extremism, Gandhi, Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, constitutional negotiations, Quit India, Mountbatten and Independence. Sarkar retained all of these. He did not replace political history with social history. What he did was more important: he altered the relationship between them.

Gandhi remained indispensable, but so did the peasant who interpreted Gandhi in ways Gandhi himself might not have approved. Congress resolutions mattered, but so did rumours in villages. Political leaders mattered, but workers, tribals, tenants, zamindars, businessmen, students, lower-middle-class activists and anonymous crowds acquired historical agency.

This was a profound pedagogical revolution.

Bringing the People into Modern Indian History

Perhaps the most consequential heading in the entire book appears near the beginning of Chapter Three: “Towards a ‘History from Below‘”.

Sarkar begins from a striking historiographical problem. Historians knew a great deal about the Western-educated intelligentsia but comparatively little about the historical experience and changing consciousness of peasants, agricultural labourers, artisans, industrial workers and other social groups. The consequence, he argued, was that the history of nationalism tended to become history written “from the top downwards”. He therefore imagined a history in which the rebellion of Birsa Munda could receive attention before the disputes between Moderates and Extremists.

Today such an approach may appear almost self-evident. It was not self-evident when Sarkar was writing.

His achievement becomes clearer if we recognise that Modern India appeared at a remarkable historiographical moment. Marxist history had already redirected attention towards colonial exploitation, class formation and material structures. The Cambridge School had challenged nationalist narratives through its analyses of locality, faction, patronage and elite competition. Subaltern Studies was just beginning its enormously influential intervention.

Sarkar engaged with all of these without becoming imprisoned within any one of them.

He could appreciate the Cambridge historians’ excavation of local politics while rejecting their tendency to reduce nationalism to competition, patronage and individual ambition. He could employ Marxist categories while criticising mechanistic class analysis. He could recognise the achievement of nationalist historiography while refusing its tendency towards the celebration of great leaders. And he could turn towards popular autonomy without pretending that “the people” constituted a homogeneous revolutionary subject.

That intellectual independence is one reason the book has aged so remarkably well.

Sarkar was unusually candid about his own standpoint. No historian, he wrote, could be free of bias; unconscious or concealed bias was more dangerous than acknowledged assumptions. He therefore stated his premises openly: colonial exploitation and resistance to it were central; Indian society contained profound internal tensions; class remained important but had to be handled flexibly; and conventional nationalist, communalist, Cambridge and even some Marxist historiographies shared, despite their differences, an excessive preoccupation with elites.

It was an extraordinary lesson for students: historical objectivity does not require pretending that the historian has no standpoint. It requires making one’s assumptions visible and submitting them to evidence.

Leaders and Masses

One of Sarkar’s most enduring contributions was his treatment of the relationship between nationalist leadership and popular initiative.

Consider Non-Cooperation. Sarkar refuses to describe it simply as a movement launched by Gandhi and obeyed by millions. He argues that it must be understood simultaneously at three levels: the all-India movement shaped by Congress leadership, the participation of distinct social classes and groups, and, perhaps most importantly, the regional and local variations.

That three-level method became enormously influential.

It allowed historians to ask questions that transformed research. What did swaraj mean to a peasant? Did a tribal community understand forest satyagraha in the same way as the Congress Working Committee? What happened when a national slogan entered a village? Were peasants merely mobilised by elite politicians, or did they appropriate nationalist language for their own struggles over rent, land, forests, wages and social dignity?

Sarkar repeatedly encountered moments when popular politics escaped elite control. In Bengal during Non-Cooperation, official reports themselves recorded movements moving “beyond the control of the leaders”. Villagers refused taxes and rents, entered forests and created their own institutions of “Swaraj”. Sarkar emphasised that some of the most striking examples occurred precisely in districts seldom visited by major nationalist leaders.

Yet he never romanticised spontaneity.

Popular movements could be courageous, creative and autonomous; they could also be fragmented, caste-bound, communal, locally limited or politically contradictory. National leadership could restrain radical possibilities, but it could also provide organisation, language and an all-India framework to dispersed grievances.

The tension between leadership and popular initiative therefore became not an inconvenience to be eliminated but the very substance of historical explanation.

Gandhi After Sarkar

The Gandhi who emerges from Modern India is consequently much more interesting than either the Mahatma of nationalist hagiography or the bourgeois manipulator of crude Marxist caricature.

Sarkar understood Gandhi’s extraordinary ability to discover symbols capable of connecting politics with everyday existence. Salt is perhaps the finest example. It transformed the abstraction of swaraj into something universally intelligible, particularly to the rural poor. Yet almost immediately, local pressures pushed beyond the carefully constructed Gandhian programme. Villagers along the route of the Dandi March demanded revenue refusal, something Gandhi accepted only reluctantly.

Thus the nationalist movement was neither simply commanded from above nor spontaneously generated from below. It emerged through negotiation, appropriation, misunderstanding, discipline, resistance and interaction between the two.

For generations of researchers, that insight opened entire fields of enquiry.

Region Matters

Another enduring lesson of Modern India was that there was no single Indian experience of nationalism.

Sarkar continually breaks the all-India narrative into regional histories. Non-Cooperation had different social foundations in Bengal, Bihar, Punjab, Awadh, Andhra and Kerala. Civil Disobedience could not be understood simply through Dandi. Quit India looked entirely different depending upon whether one stood in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Midnapur, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Punjab, Kerala or the North-West Frontier Province.

His discussion of 1942 is exemplary. Sarkar contrasts the relative quiet of Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province with the formidable mass rebellions in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Midnapur, Orissa and Maharashtra-Karnataka, and seeks explanations in agrarian structure, communal politics, wartime employment, political organisation and earlier histories of mobilisation.

This insistence upon regional variation helped reshape the research agenda of modern Indian history. The national movement could no longer adequately be studied from Delhi, Bombay or Calcutta alone. District archives, vernacular newspapers, police reports, oral memories and local records became indispensable.

The “nation” had to be reconstructed from its regions.

Neither Celebration nor Denunciation

One reason students repeatedly return to Sarkar is that his history refuses easy moral comfort.

Colonialism is not neutralised. Sarkar’s analysis begins from the structural reality of imperial domination and exploitation. Yet nationalism is not sanctified merely because it opposed colonialism.

Congress could mobilise millions and simultaneously contain them. Capitalists could support nationalism while fearing labour militancy. Rich peasants and poorer cultivators could participate in the same movement for different reasons. Caste mobilisation could challenge hierarchy while creating new exclusions. Religious identities could coexist with nationalism but could also harden into communal politics.

Even Independence appears as both triumph and tragedy.

The movement had accomplished what once appeared impossible: the entry of masses into political life and the destruction of the permanence claimed by the Raj. Yet Partition, communal violence and the survival of major structures of colonial administration complicated any triumphalist ending. Sarkar’s opening chapter therefore describes the transition between 1885 and 1947 as immense but “grievously incomplete”.

That phrase captures something essential about his historical imagination.

History was made through contradictions.

The Extraordinary Ending: 1945–47

The final chapter perhaps best demonstrates Sarkar’s method.

A conventional narrative of the transfer of power would naturally concentrate upon Wavell, Attlee, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah, the Cabinet Mission and Mountbatten. Sarkar discusses them all. But beside constitutional negotiation he places the INA agitation, the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, strikes, Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar and Telangana.

His formulation is crucial: the decisions of British and Indian leaders cannot be understood without the “counterpoint” of pressures from below. Popular mobilisation helped make continued British rule untenable; fear of uncontrolled popular radicalism simultaneously encouraged Congress leaders towards negotiation and compromise; and the limitations of popular anti-imperialist mobilisation helped determine the settlement eventually reached in August 1947.

In a few sentences, the distinction between political history and social history collapses.

Negotiations at the top become unintelligible without movements below.

That was Sumit Sarkar’s craft at its finest.

How Modern India Shaped Historians

The influence of this book cannot be measured merely through citations.

Its deeper impact lies in the questions generations of historians learned to ask after reading it.

A student who read Sarkar seriously could no longer be satisfied by knowing what happened. One had to ask: Who participated? From which social groups? Why did the movement succeed in one district and fail in another? What happened to a political slogan when it travelled from the Congress platform to the village? What were the economic circumstances behind mobilisation? Who benefited? Who remained outside? Where did caste intersect with class? How did religious identity acquire political meaning? When did leaders lead, and when were they themselves being pushed by movements they only partially controlled?

Perhaps even more importantly, Sarkar taught students to distrust neatness.

Historical movements do not proceed according to textbook categories. The “Moderate”, “Extremist”, “Gandhian”, “Communist”, “peasant”, “bourgeois”, “communal” and “nationalist” inhabit overlapping historical worlds. People move between categories. Political meanings change according to place and circumstance.

Once one had learned to read history this way, it was difficult to return to a chronicle of governors-general, Congress sessions and constitutional Acts.

Beyond the Specialists: A Book Read Across the Historical Profession

There is another measure of the extraordinary reach of Modern India: it was never read only by specialists in modern Indian history.

Alongside the major works of Bipan Chandra and, for a somewhat later generation, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Sarkar’s Modern India became one of those rare books that crossed the artificial chronological boundaries within which university departments often organise the Indian past. Ancient historians read it. Medievalists read it. Archaeologists read it. Scholars whose own research ended centuries before 1885 nevertheless kept returning to it.

I can say this personally. Although my own specialisation has been medieval India, this is one of the books on modern Indian history that I have read, returned to, and learned from repeatedly, much as I have from the major works of Bipan Chandra and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. One did not need to be a specialist in colonial India to recognise what Sarkar was doing. The book offered lessons in historical method that travelled far beyond its chronological limits: how structures and events should be connected; how political history must be anchored in social and economic realities; how elite sources can be read for evidence of popular action; how regional variation complicates generalisation; and, above all, how the historian must continuously ask who is missing from an apparently complete narrative.

That is perhaps one of the clearest signs of a truly important historical work. It changes the habits not only of scholars working on its own period but also of historians working on entirely different centuries.

A medieval historian reading Sarkar could begin asking differently about peasants beneath the Mughal revenue system, artisans beneath courtly descriptions, local society beneath chronicles of emperors, and regional experience beneath the apparently uniform institutions of an empire. An ancient historian might similarly be reminded that dynasties and inscriptions cannot exhaust the social history of a civilisation. In this sense, Modern India taught a methodological lesson that was never confined to modern India at all.

A Book That Shaped Lives

There is another history of Modern India that will probably never be adequately documented.

It is the history of the book in classrooms, university libraries, hostels and teachers’ studies across India.

Copies were underlined until entire pages became marked. Margins accumulated questions, exclamation marks and disagreements. Students preparing for examinations discovered that what appeared to be a textbook demanded the concentration normally reserved for a monograph. Teachers returned to particular passages year after year and discovered another argument concealed within Sarkar’s compressed prose.

Some readers became historians.

Some became teachers.

And those teachers placed the book before another generation.

That is how scholarship shapes lives.

Sarkar himself acknowledged this relationship beautifully. In the preface he thanked the students of his modern Indian history classes upon whom he had tested his ideas for years, adding that their questions and criticisms had been indispensable in helping him refine his formulations.

The acknowledgement tells us something important about the origins of the book. Modern India was not simply written and then taken into the classroom. It grew partly out of the classroom itself.

Perhaps that is why it has lived there for so long.

A Book to Argue With

No great historical work survives because every proposition in it remains correct.

Much has happened in modern Indian historiography since Modern India appeared. Subaltern Studies developed in directions Sarkar himself subsequently criticised. Gender history transformed our understanding of nationalism and domesticity. Dalit and caste histories raised questions inadequately addressed by older class-centred frameworks. Studies of Adivasi politics, environmental history, religious identities, print culture, everyday life and global and transnational connections have greatly expanded the field.

Parts of Modern India inevitably belong to the historiographical moment in which it was written.

But that does not diminish the book’s greatness. It establishes it.

A classic is not a book that ends debate. A classic is a book after which debate cannot return to where it was before.

By that measure Modern India, 1885–1947 is unquestionably a classic.

Students may disagree with Sarkar’s Marxism. They may question particular class formulations, interpretations of Gandhi, assessments of bourgeois politics or explanations of communalism. Sarkar himself would surely have preferred disagreement grounded in evidence to ritualistic reverence.

What cannot easily be escaped are the questions he placed before us.

Where are the people?

What is happening beneath the resolutions of political organisations?

What is the relationship between material circumstances and political consciousness?

How does an all-India movement change as it enters different regions?

How do ordinary people appropriate the language created by leaders?

And what happens when those people begin making history on their own terms?

The Historian’s Afterlife

On 13 August 2026, Sumit Sarkar left this world. But historians have a peculiar afterlife.

They survive not simply in books bearing their names but in the questions other people ask because they once read them.

Somewhere a student encountering modern Indian history for the first time will open Modern India, 1885–1947. Perhaps she will initially search for Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Civil Disobedience or Quit India. But if she continues reading, she will encounter peasants, workers, tribals, students, women and men in provincial towns, village activists, businessmen, zamindars, tenants and anonymous crowds. She will discover that nationalism was simultaneously an idea, an organisation, a social coalition and millions of individual experiences. She may begin wondering why the history she previously knew contained so few of these people.

At that moment Sumit Sarkar will have done it again.

He will have produced another historian.

That may ultimately be the deepest measure of the achievement of this book. It did not merely tell generations of Indians what happened between 1885 and 1947. It taught them how to think historically.

And books that teach us how to think do not die with their authors.