Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
Since a few days certain individuals have been sharing select contents of Chatterji Committee report of 1960 with much glee to somehow prove what all ails the institution built by Sir Syed and to suggest that it is tightly controlled by a few “families” and nepotism is the order of the day. This write up is to understand what the issue was, and does it mirror what is trying to be shown? Why invoke a report of 1960 now, and that too selectively?
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In 1960, Aligarh Muslim University faced a searching enquiry into its finances, administration, appointments and recruitment. A committee headed by Professor G. C. Chatterji was constituted, with Professor A. R. Wadia, MP, Kartar Singh Malhotra, P. N. Sapru, MP, M. A. Shamiri and R. P. Naik, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Education, among its members. There were undoubtedly matters before the Committee which deserved investigation. Questions had been raised about financial procedures, appointments, promotions and the functioning of the University administration, and no public university could reasonably claim immunity from such scrutiny. Nor should Aligarh have expected it.
Yet one part of the enquiry has acquired an afterlife out of all proportion to its evidentiary value. This was not an audit objection, a manipulated Selection Committee, an appointment made in defiance of a recommendation, or the selection of an unqualified person over a demonstrably superior candidate. It was a list of University employees who were said to be related to one another.
On 24 October 1960, R. P. Naik wrote to Vice-Chancellor Colonel Bashir Husain Zaidi enclosing a list of persons employed in the University who were, it was said, closely related to one another. The Committee sought information regarding the exact relationship, if any, among persons mentioned in the list and the date of their entry into University service. The annexure was certainly striking. It arranged employees into groups around prominent figures: Colonel B. H. Zaidi, Dr A. Aleem, Professor Mahmood Husain, Professor A. A. Suroor and Dr A. R. Kidwai. Husbands appeared beside wives, brothers beside sisters, fathers beside sons, uncles beside nephews, cousins beside cousins and sons-in-law beside fathers-in-law. In several cases the relationship was not even specified with precision; the individual concerned was simply described as related to another person.
Placed together on a single sheet of paper, the effect was dramatic. It appeared to reveal an institution populated by a relatively small number of interconnected families. One can understand why an investigating committee might have considered this worthy of further enquiry. Kinship within an institution can create conflicts of interest, and an enquiry committee would have been failing in its duty had it ignored credible evidence that relatives were being favoured in appointments. But that should have been the beginning of the investigation, not its conclusion. A family tree can raise a question. It cannot answer it.
What the List Actually Proved
The fundamental difficulty with the annexure is remarkably simple. It established that certain people were related to one another. It did not establish that they had been appointed because they were related. That distinction is everything.
Nepotism does not mean the presence of relatives within the same institution. It means the improper use of influence to favour a relative. To prove nepotism, therefore, one has to demonstrate preference. Who exercised the influence? Who benefited from it? What rule was bent? What procedure was circumvented? Who was passed over? Was a less qualified candidate preferred to someone better qualified because of family connection? The annexure, by itself, answered none of these questions.
Indeed, the list mixed together radically different kinds of relationships. A brother and sister were treated in much the same evidentiary fashion as distant relatives. Husbands and wives were listed without necessarily establishing whether they had married before or after their appointments. People were sometimes simply described as related to one another without explaining the degree of relationship. Yet chronology is indispensable. If two academics entered University service independently and subsequently married, their later marriage could hardly travel backwards through time and transform their earlier appointments into acts of nepotism.
The Committee itself asked for the dates on which individuals entered University service, which suggests that it understood the importance of chronology. The University’s replies also disputed some alleged relationships and pointed out in certain instances that marriages had taken place after appointment. These were not trivial qualifications. They went directly to the logic of the allegation.
Zaidi’s Much-Ridiculed Defence
Colonel Zaidi’s reply has often been treated as one of the more amusing documents in the administrative history of AMU. Faced with a list of relatives, he appeared to respond by explaining that Aligarh had become a great matrimonial centre for educated Muslims. His actual argument deserves to be taken more seriously.
Zaidi pointed to the consequences of Partition. A large proportion of educated and comparatively well-to-do Muslim families, he argued, had migrated to Pakistan. The pool of educated Muslim young men and women remaining in India had consequently contracted. Aligarh was one of the few centres where a substantial concentration of educated Muslim families survived. Families from elsewhere naturally looked towards Aligarh for suitable marriages for their sons and daughters. Some sent their children there for education, young people encountered one another, and marriages followed. The children of teachers and University employees were themselves generally educated, and it was therefore hardly surprising that marriages took place among these families.
Detached from its historical setting, the explanation can certainly sound quaint. Restored to 1960, it looks considerably less ridiculous. Zaidi was describing the social consequences of a catastrophe.
The Great Depletion After 1947
Partition did not merely divide territory. It dislocated communities, professions, institutions and intellectual worlds. For the Muslim professional classes of North India, its consequences were particularly profound. Large numbers of educated Muslims migrated to Pakistan. Civil servants left, lawyers left, doctors left, teachers left, administrators left, students left and entire families moved across the newly created frontier. Pakistan itself desperately needed trained personnel for its new administrative, educational and professional institutions, and educated migrants from India supplied a substantial part of that need.
Aligarh experienced this haemorrhage directly. The University lost teachers, students and administrative personnel. Its student population fell sharply. The social and intellectual environment from which it had traditionally drawn its personnel was drastically reduced.
Those who actually lived through those years remembered the experience vividly. Irfan Habib recalled that AMU was virtually being denuded of its teachers, staff and students after Partition. He remembered student numbers falling dramatically and teachers leaving in succession. Yet one of the remarkable features of his recollection is that classes somehow continued. A teacher would leave, another would be found, and the University struggled to preserve academic routine in circumstances which were anything but routine. Contemporary recollections place student strength as falling from around 3,000 to roughly 800 during the crisis.
M. Athar Ali and others belonging to that generation narrated similar stories. They remembered an Aligarh in which departures had become part of everyday life. A colleague who was present one day might have gone to Pakistan the next. Students disappeared from hostels. Teachers migrated. Families divided themselves between the two countries. The depletion was not confined to the weeks immediately surrounding August 1947. Its consequences continued to be felt for years.
This oral testimony matters. It tells us what statistics alone cannot convey: the psychological and institutional experience of watching an intellectual community diminish almost before one’s eyes. By 1960 only thirteen years had passed since Partition. The Chatterji Committee was therefore not examining an ordinary university functioning within a stable and abundant national academic labour market. It was examining an institution which had recently survived an extraordinary demographic and intellectual rupture.
The Committee Counted Relationships, Zaidi Counted What Had Disappeared
This is where Zaidi’s reply acquires its real significance. The Committee looked at the number of relationships among those who remained at Aligarh. Zaidi was asking it to remember how many people had gone. The Committee saw concentration. Zaidi was describing contraction. One cannot remove a substantial portion of an educated social class and then express astonishment that those who remain appear unusually interconnected.
The denominator matters.
Aligarh after Partition became one of the principal centres in India where an educated Muslim professional society survived and reconstructed itself. Families converged there. Their children studied there. Teachers and administrators lived in a residential environment in close proximity. Young men and women from educated families encountered one another. Marriages inevitably connected households which were already connected socially, intellectually and professionally. This does not excuse nepotism. It explains kinship. The distinction is crucial.
Zaidi was not saying that because educated Muslims had become fewer, an unqualified nephew should be appointed. He was saying that the existence of relatives in the University had a social explanation quite apart from recruitment favouritism. On that limited but important point, his defence was perfectly reasonable. Indeed, with hindsight, one might say that Zaidi understood the sociology of post-Partition Aligarh better than those who found his explanation amusing.
Were These People Undeserving?
There is an even more fundamental difficulty with treating the annexure as evidence of nepotism. Each and every person named must ultimately be judged on his or her own academic or professional qualifications. Where are the obvious incompetents? Where are the people who possessed no qualifications for the positions they occupied? Where are the academic nonentities imposed upon unwilling departments solely because they were somebody’s son, daughter, nephew, cousin, husband or wife?
The names themselves make such an argument difficult to sustain. Irfan Habib became one of the foremost historians of medieval India. Nurul Hasan became a distinguished historian, academic institution-builder and public figure. Moonis Raza emerged as an important geographer and subsequently played a major role in the development of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Zahoor Qasim became one of India’s leading marine scientists and a pioneer of the country’s Antarctic programme. Moonis Raza rose to academic excellence to be known through out the world. Shahid Mehdi had a distinguished academic and administrative career. Others named in the annexure similarly made substantial contributions in their respective fields. The Department of English owes a lot to Zahida Zaidi, as does Department of Education to her sister Sajida. Obaid SS and Siddiquis all emerged as stars of not only Aligarh but the entire academic world. Take any name in the list and check their credentials. They were all scholars in their own right.
This does not mean that later achievement automatically proves the regularity of an earlier appointment. A talented individual can still benefit from influence. Merit and patronage are not mutually exclusive. But the opposite proposition is equally important. Kinship cannot retrospectively extinguish merit. One cannot reduce Irfan Habib to somebody’s husband, Nurul Hasan to somebody’s cousin, Moonis Raza to somebody’s relation or Zahoor Qasim to somebody’s brother-in-law and imagine that their professional identities have thereby been explained. They were scholars and professionals in their own right. AMU did not merely employ them. It gained from their association.
Where Are the People Who Lost?
This brings us to the question that should dominate any serious discussion of the Chatterji annexure. At whose expense were these people appointed? If nepotism occurred, somebody must have suffered from it. Who?
If Irfan Habib was favoured, who was the historian who should have been appointed instead? If Nurul Hasan obtained a position through connections, who was the superior candidate who lost? If Moonis Raza was preferred because of a relationship, who was the better geographer excluded from consideration? If Zahoor Qasim benefited from kinship, where is the scientist whose stronger claim was sacrificed? Were these unsuccessful candidates more qualified? Were they equally qualified? Were they less qualified? Did they even apply?
These questions cannot be avoided because they constitute the difference between an allegation and proof. For each supposedly nepotistic appointment one needs the advertisement, the applicants, the shortlist, the qualifications, the Selection Committee, the outside experts, the rankings and the final decision. One needs to know whether the related official participated in the process. One needs to know whether qualifications were relaxed, whether a post was tailored to fit a particular candidate, whether a recommendation was altered or whether someone ranked lower was appointed over someone ranked higher. Then we would have a case. Without this evidence, we have a relationship.
It would be irresponsible to accuse anyone of mala fides merely because he or she cites the Chatterji Report. But if the report is being deployed to construct a general indictment of AMU, questions about intention become legitimate. If the intention is not mala fide, there is a straightforward answer. Open everything.
Being a Relative Was Not a Crime
There is also a principle of fairness involved which should not be obscured by the emotive power of the word nepotism. Being related to somebody already employed at a university is not a disqualification. A professor’s daughter may be mediocre, but she may also be outstanding. A Vice-Chancellor’s nephew may be unsuitable, but he may also be the strongest candidate. Two brothers may independently be excellent scholars. A husband and wife may both possess impeccable academic qualifications. A son may be a better scholar than his father.
The proper principle is therefore neither favour nor exclusion. A relative should receive no advantage because of kinship, but neither should a deserving candidate suffer a disadvantage because of it. If a professor’s son is the best candidate and is selected by a genuinely independent committee from which the professor has completely withdrawn, there is nothing inherently corrupt about the appointment. If an unrelated but mediocre candidate is appointed because he belongs to the dominant academic faction, the absence of blood relationship does not make the appointment honest. The real subject is power, not genealogy.
Genuine Irregularities Must Still Be Confronted
None of this should become an apologia for everything that happened at AMU. There were genuine administrative and recruitment controversies, and where the Chatterji Committee investigated actual procedures rather than family relationships, its work becomes much more significant.
The Satish Chandra case illustrates the difference. Here one had an actual candidate, an actual Selection Committee, an actual recommendation and subsequent intervention. Questions could therefore be asked about who intervened, why the recommendation was frustrated and what institutional interests were involved. That is evidence about the operation of academic power. It is methodologically far more valuable than discovering that two University employees were cousins.
The point is not that nepotism never existed at Aligarh. Such a claim would be impossible to defend and historically unnecessary. The point is that nepotism must be proved case by case. Genuine irregularities do not magically convert weak evidence in unrelated cases into strong evidence.
Nepotism, Is Not the Same as Inbreeding
The Committee’s concern about inbreeding deserves separate treatment because academic inbreeding is a real institutional danger. It is, however, not synonymous with nepotism. A university can be thoroughly inbred without employing a single pair of relatives. Professor A trains Student B. B becomes a lecturer. B supervises C. C joins the department and eventually supervises D. After several decades the department is populated by successive generations trained within the same intellectual lineage. They may share methods, assumptions, loyalties, prejudices, academic friendships and institutional enemies. Nobody needs to marry anybody. The result can still be intellectually suffocating.
AMU has not always been successful in preventing this kind of internal reproduction. Nor is it alone among Indian universities in suffering from it. An internal candidate enters a Selection Committee with an invisible advantage. The outsider carries a CV; the insider carries a history. His teachers know him, his supervisor knows him, his colleagues know him, his strengths are familiar, his weaknesses are familiar and therefore often forgiven, and his institutional loyalties are understood. None of this needs to appear in the minutes.
That is why universities need intellectual migration. Departments require people trained elsewhere who bring different questions, methods and intellectual cultures. Excessive internal recruitment deserves criticism precisely because it can narrow the intellectual horizons of an institution. But that is an argument about academic ecology. It is not an argument about cousins.
The Remarkable Achievement Was That AMU Survived
There is another side of the story which disappears completely if we read the years after 1947 merely as a prehistory of nepotism. AMU survived. That was no small achievement. It lost teachers, students and administrators. Its social constituency was disrupted. Its political position in independent India was uncertain. The wider Muslim intelligentsia from which it recruited had been severely depleted. Yet departments continued, classes continued, appointments were made, students were taught and the University gradually rebuilt itself.
Irfan Habib’s memories are particularly moving in this respect. Teachers disappeared, but another teacher would somehow take the class. Academic life was not allowed simply to collapse. The generation which remained therefore deserves to be judged not only by whom it married but also by what it preserved. That is the context in which Zaidi’s defence should be read.
Why 1960, and Why Now?
There is, however, another question which becomes unavoidable when this material is resurrected in 2026. Why this report? Why now? Historical documents do not emerge from archives by themselves. Someone selects them. Someone decides which pages to reproduce. Someone chooses which passages to circulate and which to leave unread. Someone gives an old document a new political or institutional meaning.
There is nothing objectionable about revisiting the Chatterji Committee. On the contrary, AMU should examine its history honestly, including its failures. If the Committee uncovered financial irregularities, let them be discussed. If it identified improper appointments, let those cases be reconstructed. If it warned against institutional inbreeding, let us consider whether that warning remains relevant. But why make the genealogical annexure the centrepiece? Why relationships rather than qualifications? Why marriages rather than Selection Committee minutes? Why no rejected candidates? Why no comparison? Why no Partition? And, above all, why leap back sixty-six years when there were later enquiries into AMU appointments which are much closer to our own time?
What About Mathew and Jafri?
The Chatterji Committee was not the last enquiry to raise questions about recruitment and appointments at AMU. There were later investigations, including the Mathew enquiry and the Jafri Commission. These belong to periods considerably nearer to the present and, more importantly, dealt with allegations concerning actual recruitment processes. The contrast is important.
The Mathew enquiry dealt with alleged irregularities in faculty appointments in departments including History, Geography and Political Science. Contemporary discussion of the report spoke of violations in recruitment and subsequently complained that little action had followed its findings. The enquiry belonged to the late twentieth century and its findings were discussed publicly years later.
The Jafri material raises still more direct questions about appointments. Here the issue was not simply that one candidate happened to be somebody’s cousin. There were cases involving the fate of actual candidates and, most disturbingly, instances where candidates who had been rejected nevertheless came to be appointed. That is an entirely different category of evidence. If a duly constituted process rejects a candidate and that candidate nevertheless subsequently obtains the appointment, we have something concrete to investigate. Who reversed or circumvented the decision? Under what authority? Was a fresh process undertaken? Was a rule invoked legitimately or manipulated? Who intervened? Who benefited? Who was denied the position? These questions take us directly into the anatomy of institutional power. No family tree is required.
Why Chatterji and Not Mathew? Why Not Jafri?
This is where the contemporary selectivity becomes uncomfortable. If the purpose of resurrecting old enquiry reports is genuinely to expose irregular appointments, why should Chatterji enjoy such privileged attention while Mathew and Jafri recede from view? Why 1960 rather than the 1990s or later? Why Zaidi rather than later Vice-Chancellors and administrations? Why Irfan Habib’s marriage rather than the appointment of a candidate who had actually been rejected? Why a cousin rather than a Selection Committee decision that was circumvented? Why genealogy when later records may provide evidence of actual administrative intervention?
The more recent the enquiry, one would ordinarily suppose, the greater its relevance to the present condition of the institution. The academic labour market was also vastly different by then. The extraordinary depletion of educated Muslim professionals caused by Partition could no longer provide anything approaching the same historical context. India’s universities had expanded enormously, the number of qualified candidates had increased and academic mobility had widened. If irregular appointments continued under those conditions, they are in some respects more troubling than the dense family networks of 1960. Yet somehow the distant report is safer to discuss.
The Further Back We Travel, the Safer Our Indignation Becomes
Perhaps that is not accidental. The people of 1960 are largely beyond the reach of contemporary institutional politics. Many are dead. Others disappeared from active university life decades ago. Colonel Zaidi cannot answer. A. Aleem cannot protest. Abid Husain cannot demand that his record be examined alongside the insinuation. Their reputations can be dissected without seriously disturbing present structures of power.
Later enquiries are another matter. They involve people nearer to our own time. Some may still be living. Their colleagues are living. Their students are living. Their protégés may occupy positions. Their academic networks may survive. Their beneficiaries may have risen in the institution. Reopening those files might do something much more consequential than provoke an amusing discussion about whom somebody married in 1955. It might ruffle contemporary feathers. That possibility cannot simply be dismissed.
One need not accuse any particular person of suppressing inconvenient history. But one is perfectly entitled to ask why some episodes of institutional wrongdoing are repeatedly remembered while others fade conveniently from view. Institutions, like individuals, can cultivate selective memories. Sometimes the safest scandal is the oldest scandal.
If the Intention Is Not Mala Fide, Comparison Should Be Welcomed
Read Chatterji. Read Mathew. Read Jafri. Examine every enquiry into recruitment and appointments. Compare their evidence. Identify the candidates. Reconstruct the Selection Committees. Examine qualifications. Identify irregular interventions. Determine who was rejected and who was appointed. Ask whether rules were bent and by whom. And compare AMU with other Indian universities.
How many interconnected academic families existed at Banaras Hindu University in 1960? What was the position at Allahabad, Lucknow, Delhi, Calcutta, Punjab or Osmania? How many professors’ children entered academic life? How frequently did academics marry academics? How extensively did universities recruit their own students? What role did caste, region, family and intellectual patronage play? One cannot identify an abnormality without establishing the normal pattern against which it is being measured. If only Muslim families at Aligarh are placed under the genealogical microscope, the exercise becomes methodologically suspect.
If the Concern Is 2026, Investigate 2026
There is an even simpler proposition. If nepotism at AMU today is the concern, investigate AMU today. How many current appointments have gone to internal candidates? How many outsiders have been selected? How many advertisements appear suspiciously tailored? How many temporary appointments have become pathways to permanent employment? How many close relatives work within the same institutional networks? How often are conflicts of interest declared? How often do related decision-makers recuse themselves? How independent are outside experts? How many excellent scholars have left because they believed the institutional odds were stacked against them?
These are uncomfortable questions. They should be. Universities improve only when uncomfortable questions can be asked. But one cannot substitute the relatives of 1960 for the recruitment files of 2026. There is something intellectually evasive about prosecuting the dead when the living institution is available for examination.
Follow Power, Not Blood
The deeper lesson is that some of the most damaging forms of academic patronage have nothing to do with biological kinship. There are factional relatives. There are ideological relatives. There are administrative relatives. There are teacher-disciple networks whose loyalty exceeds that found in many families. A mediocre candidate appointed because he belongs to the dominant faction is no less a beneficiary of patronage because he shares no surname with his patron. A brilliant daughter appointed by an independent Selection Committee does not become undeserving because her father happens to be a professor.
The historian interested in corruption must therefore follow power rather than blood. Who could influence the appointment? Who did influence it? Who benefited? Who lost? Those are the questions that matter.
A Family Tree Is Not a Verdict
The rhetorical power of the Chatterji annexure lies precisely in its simplicity. Take a scholar, remove his qualifications, publications and achievements, and write beside his name “related to”. Repeat the process twenty times and the reader no longer sees academics. He sees a clan. Irfan Habib becomes somebody’s husband. Nurul Hasan becomes somebody’s cousin. Moonis Raza becomes another relation. Zahoor Qasim becomes a brother-in-law. The individual disappears into genealogy.
It is an extraordinarily effective form of insinuation because nobody needs to identify an unqualified appointment. Nobody needs to produce the superior candidate who was rejected. Nobody needs to prove interference. The lines joining the names create the suspicion. A historian should resist precisely this kind of reasoning. Kinship is not guilt. Association is not evidence. Opportunity for influence is not proof that influence was exercised. And later academic distinction cannot be erased merely by drawing a family tree.
The Question That Remains Unanswered
The Chatterji Committee was entitled to investigate AMU. Where it found financial irregularities, they deserved exposure. Where appointment procedures were violated, they deserved condemnation. Where factional intervention frustrated academic judgement, it should be acknowledged. Where excessive internal recruitment encouraged intellectual inbreeding, the criticism remains worth considering. But the famous family list proves much less than is sometimes claimed for it.
The decisive question remains unanswered: at whose expense were these people appointed? Who was better qualified? Who was equally qualified but unfairly rejected? Who was pushed aside? Who was the victim? If those candidates can be identified and the records demonstrate that relatives were improperly preferred, then let us call it nepotism without hesitation. But if the people named were qualified, if no superior candidate can be shown to have been displaced, if some relationships arose only after appointment, and if the University subsequently benefited substantially from the academic and professional contributions of those concerned, then the genealogy cannot carry the burden of accusation placed upon it.
Being somebody’s relative was not a crime. The crime, if any, would have been sacrificing merit to relationship. That sacrifice must be demonstrated.
The Politics of Selective Memory
There are ultimately two historical questions before us. One concerns what happened at AMU in 1960. The other concerns why one particular part of what happened in 1960 is being resurrected in 2026.
The first requires us to understand an institution only thirteen years removed from Partition, struggling to replenish itself while the Muslim intelligentsia of India had been drastically depleted by migration. It requires us to take seriously the memories of Irfan Habib, M. Athar Ali and others who watched teachers, students and families disappear from Aligarh. It requires us to read Zaidi’s defence not as a joke but as testimony from a society trying to reconstruct itself after an extraordinary rupture.
The second requires us to examine our own selectivity. If we invoke Chatterji, why not Mathew? If Mathew, why not Jafri? If we are interested in irregular appointments, why not begin with cases in which actual selection decisions were allegedly circumvented? If we are interested in nepotism today, why not investigate today’s appointments? If we are interested in the history of Indian university patronage, why not compare Aligarh with other universities? And if some reports are remembered while others are allowed quietly to disappear because their findings might inconvenience people nearer to the present, then the problem is no longer simply nepotism. It is selective memory.
AMU should never be protected from its history. No serious historian would ask for that. Every genuine irregularity should be acknowledged, every improper appointment criticised and every abuse of academic power exposed. But history must not be turned into a charge-sheet by insinuation, nor should one safely prosecute the distant dead while tiptoeing around the more recent past.
Let us therefore open the files. All of them. Let us examine Chatterji, Mathew and Jafri with the same standards and the same severity. Let us ask who was qualified, who was rejected, who intervened, who benefited and who suffered. Let us distinguish merit from relationshipism from inbreeding, evidence from association and historical explanation from institutional apologetics. Then, perhaps, we shall discover something far more interesting than a family tree. We may discover how power actually operated at Aligarh, how it changed over time, and why some episodes are so eagerly remembered while others are so conveniently forgotten. Only then can the past become an instrument of institutional self-criticism rather than a weapon of selective accusation.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 