Category: History, Culture, Architecture

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

Irfan Habib and the Problem of Recovering Koil

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

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

Before Atif Syed: Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui

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

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

From Kol or Koil to Aligarh

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

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

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

The Mughal Landscape and an Unexpected Link with the Taj Mahal

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

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

An Eighteenth-Century Crossroads

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

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

The Physical City as Historical Evidence

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

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

Sir Syed, Beck and the Making of Modern Aligarh

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

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

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

What the Book Does Not Attempt

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

Russia, 1917: A Revolution Born of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China, 1949: Revolution Moves East

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolution, Emancipation and Their Contradictions

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

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

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

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

The Revolutions, the Colonial World and India

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

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

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

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

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

Two Revolutions, Two Paths

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

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

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

Their Place in the Making of the Modern World

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

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

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

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

October and the Memory of Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ishwar Allah tero nām

Sab ko sanmati de Bhagwān

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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