Category: History, Culture, Architecture

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The historiography of women and gender in South Asia has undergone profound transformations over the past four decades. Early scholarship sought primarily to recover women who had been marginalized or overlooked in conventional historical narratives. More recent work has shifted towards interrogating the very categories through which femininity, masculinity and sexuality have been historically imagined. Making the ‘Woman’: Discourses of Gender in 18th–19th-Century India, edited by Sutapa Dutta and Shivangini Tandon, belongs firmly to this latter tradition. Rather than merely asking how women participated in history, the volume asks how the category of “woman” itself was historically produced through competing political, literary, social and cultural discourses. It is an ambitious undertaking that opens several important avenues of inquiry, even if it does not always fully realize all of its theoretical promises.

The editors provide an extensive introduction that serves as the intellectual backbone of the collection. Drawing upon contemporary feminist theorists including Judith Butler, Natalie Stoljar, Nancy Chodorow and Sally Haslanger, they reject essentialist understandings of womanhood and instead argue that “woman” is a historically contingent category shaped by intersecting structures of caste, class, religion, language, region and political authority. Their objective is not simply to write women back into history but to investigate the historical processes through which particular notions of femininity came to acquire legitimacy and normative force. This is an important and welcome intervention, particularly in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century India, where discussions of gender have often remained confined within the familiar framework of colonial social reform and its nationalist responses. However, it is worth noting that the editors have not contributed individual essays to the collection themselves, confining their scholarly engagement to the introductory framework. While this is not unusual in edited volumes, the absence of their own case studies means that readers must look to the contributors for the empirical instantiation of the theoretical perspectives laid out in the introduction.

One of the major strengths of the volume is its chronological perspective. The editors resist the temptation to treat colonialism as the sole catalyst for changes in gender relations. Instead, they argue compellingly that many of these transformations had their origins in the late Mughal and regional polities of the eighteenth century. This longer historical perspective enables the contributors to situate colonial modernity within earlier processes of political, cultural and intellectual change. Such an approach represents a useful corrective to narratives that privilege colonial intervention at the expense of indigenous historical developments and pre-colonial trajectories of transformation.

The volume is organized into four thematic sections dealing with the public and private worlds, normative constructions of gender, marginalised identities and narratives of femininity. The range of subjects is impressive. Essays discuss Kashmiri hafizas, the Awadhi zenana, Mughal masculinity, Dalit counter-histories, tribal identities, goddess iconography, tawa’ifs, eunuchs, Tamil literary traditions, Bengali ritual songs and Assamese women’s writing. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of gendered experiences across the subcontinent and successfully undermine any notion of a singular or universal Indian womanhood. This diversity is not merely additive but fundamentally challenges the conceptual frameworks through which South Asian gender history has often been narrated.

Several contributions are particularly noteworthy. Tara Sami Dutt’s study of Wajid Ali Shah’s Ishqnama effectively challenges the long-standing assumption that the zenana was merely a secluded domestic space, demonstrating instead its political and cultural significance within the Awadhi court as a site of artistic patronage, intellectual exchange and political negotiation. Riya Gupta’s examination of the Mirzanama offers a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on masculinity by showing that elite Mughal masculinity was itself a carefully cultivated social performance rooted in prescribed conduct manuals rather than a natural or stable identity. Lubna Irfan’s chapter on eunuchs similarly stands out for bringing architectural and spatial history into conversation with gender studies, thereby broadening the evidentiary base beyond textual sources and illuminating how built environments both reflected and constituted gendered hierarchies. These essays exemplify the interdisciplinary possibilities that the volume seeks to promote and suggest productive directions for future research.

Another commendable feature is the geographical breadth of the collection. Too often studies of gender in colonial India gravitate towards Bengal, with occasional forays into Maharashtra or the Punjab. Here, the inclusion of material from Kashmir, Awadh, Delhi, western India, Assam and Tamil Nadu significantly broadens the discussion and reminds readers that gender was negotiated differently across regional contexts, each with its own literary traditions, political structures and social formations. The volume also makes effective use of diverse source materials including paintings, literary texts, songs, manuscripts, colonial records and visual culture. Such methodological plurality enriches the historical narrative and reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of gender studies, though it also raises questions about how these different genres of sources relate to one another.

Farhat Hasan’s foreword deserves particular mention. It is much more than a conventional prefatory note. By situating the volume within wider debates on early modern South Asian modernity, multilingual literary cultures, household politics and the relationship between textuality and gender, the foreword provides an elegant historiographical framework that complements and occasionally even extends the arguments developed in the chapters themselves. Hasan’s insistence on the need to historicise gender categories without assuming their universality sets the tone for the collection and offers a concise statement of the volume’s intellectual commitments.

Yet the collection is not without its limitations. The first concerns the relationship between theory and practice. The introduction presents a sophisticated theoretical critique of essentialist notions of womanhood and promises a sustained interrogation of the category of gender itself. However, not all the subsequent chapters engage with these conceptual concerns to the same degree. While some contributors critically interrogate categories such as gender, agency and identity, others employ these terms rather conventionally without fully exploring their historical contingency. Consequently, there is occasionally a discernible gap between the theoretical ambitions announced in the introduction and the empirical analyses offered by individual essays. A more sustained dialogue between conceptual frameworks and case studies would have strengthened the collection’s overall coherence.

The quality of the contributions is also uneven. Some chapters make substantial historiographical interventions and engage critically with both primary sources and existing scholarship, advancing novel arguments that reshape our understanding of specific contexts. Others remain closer to descriptive case studies that, while informative, do not fully exploit their analytical potential. This unevenness is perhaps inevitable in any edited collection, yet the volume sometimes resembles conference proceedings rather than a sustained collective intellectual project. Greater editorial cross-referencing between chapters, or a concluding essay drawing together their wider implications and identifying shared themes, would have enhanced the coherence of the collection and helped readers navigate its diverse offerings.

A more substantive criticism concerns the nature of the archive upon which the volume rests. Although the editors repeatedly emphasise recovering women’s agency and exploring marginalised voices, much of the evidence is drawn from elite literary, artistic and courtly sources. Consequently, the women who emerge most vividly are dancers, courtesans, royal women, literary figures and members of educated elites. The experiences of peasant women, artisans, labouring women and those inhabiting more ordinary social worlds remain largely absent from the analysis. This undoubtedly reflects the limitations of surviving sources and the archival biases that privilege elite and textual materials, but the implications of these archival silences could have been explored more explicitly. A more sustained reflection on what cannot be known, and on the methodological strategies available for approaching subaltern gendered experiences, would have added depth to the volume’s critical project.

Closely related to this is the volume’s overwhelming emphasis on discourse and representation. Most contributors are concerned with how women were imagined, depicted and represented across various textual and visual genres rather than how they actually negotiated economic, legal or institutional structures in their daily lives. Questions of property, inheritance, labour, taxation, commercial activity, education and legal rights receive comparatively limited attention. Yet these were precisely the arenas in which gender relations were materially constituted and contested. A closer engagement with social and economic history would have provided a stronger balance between representation and lived experience, and would have grounded the discursive analysis in the material conditions that shaped women’s lives.

From the perspective of Mughal historiography, another omission is noteworthy. The collection convincingly argues that domestic spaces were deeply political and that the boundaries between public and private were porous and contested. However, relatively little attention is devoted to the institutional dimensions of gender within the machinery of the Mughal state and its successor polities. Recent scholarship has increasingly demonstrated the importance of women, eunuchs and members of the imperial household in diplomacy, patronage, commerce and administration. These broader political implications remain only partially explored here. As a result, the discussion occasionally risks replacing one binary, namely public versus private, with another that continues to privilege representation over institutional practice.

The treatment of colonial modernity also offers less that is genuinely new than the discussions of the eighteenth century. The volume revisits familiar debates concerning social reform, domesticity and nationalist constructions of womanhood that have already been extensively analysed by scholars such as Lata Mani, Tanika Sarkar, Mrinalini Sinha and Partha Chatterjee. While these discussions are competently synthesised and provide useful overviews, the collection’s most original contributions lie elsewhere, particularly in its exploration of the late Mughal and regional worlds where different configurations of gender were in play. A sharper focus on these less familiar terrains would have distinguished the volume more clearly from existing scholarship.

This points to a broader chronological limitation. Although Farhat Hasan’s foreword invokes the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, situating the volume within a longer history of early modern gender relations, the essays themselves confine their analysis to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The classical Mughal centuries, the period of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, remain largely unexamined here. This chronological boundary is not a flaw in itself, as the volume is explicitly framed around the later period. Yet the foreword’s invocation of an earlier era creates certain expectations that the essays do not fulfil. The reader is left with a sense that the history of gender in the Mughal world is only partially told, and that a companion volume addressing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would be a necessary complement to this collection. The present volume thus opens a door but leaves the earlier period, with its own distinctive configurations of gender, power and cultural production, awaiting a similarly sustained treatment.

Despite these reservations, Making the ‘Woman’ remains a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on gender in South Asian history. Its greatest achievement lies in demonstrating that gender identities in eighteenth and nineteenth century India cannot be understood through static categories or simple binaries. Instead, they were continually negotiated across multiple linguistic, political, cultural and regional contexts, shaped by both pre-colonial trajectories and colonial interventions. The volume successfully broadens both the geographical and methodological horizons of gender history and encourages historians to move beyond narrowly colonial or nationalist frameworks in their analyses.

The collection also raises important questions that future scholarship might address more fully. How did gender intersect with caste in the production of social identities beyond the elite spheres represented here? What were the economic dimensions of gender that shaped women’s lives in more ordinary circumstances? How did regional literary traditions produce different gender norms and subjectivities? And how did women themselves respond to, appropriate or resist the various discourses that sought to define them? The volume opens these questions without fully answering them, which is perhaps a measure of its generative potential rather than a failing. Moreover, the chronological gap between the foreword’s framing and the essays’ focus invites further inquiry into the classical Mughal centuries, suggesting an agenda for future research that the volume implicitly establishes.

Ultimately, this is a stimulating and thought-provoking collection. It is stronger in posing questions than in providing definitive answers, and stronger in cultural analysis than in social or institutional history. Nevertheless, these are limitations of emphasis rather than of scholarship. The editors have assembled an impressive group of contributors who collectively challenge readers to rethink familiar assumptions about women, gender and power in South Asian history. The volume will be read with profit by historians of early modern and colonial India, as well as by scholars of gender studies, literary history and cultural history. It deserves a place in the continuing conversation on how gender was imagined, contested and lived in the complex world of eighteenth and nineteenth century India, while also pointing towards the need for a complementary study that would extend this analysis back into the classical Mughal centuries.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Few books capture the moral energy, intellectual seriousness and emotional texture of a social movement as compellingly as David Halberstam’s The Children. Although widely recognised as one of America’s greatest journalists, Halberstam was also a historian of remarkable sensitivity. In this monumental work he reconstructs, with extraordinary narrative power and meticulous research, the story of the young men and women whose courage transformed the American Civil Rights Movement from an ideal into a political force capable of reshaping a nation. More than two decades after its publication, The Children remains one of the finest studies of student activism and democratic resistance in modern historical writing.

Unlike many histories of the Civil Rights Movement that revolve around Martin Luther King Jr. and the major legislative victories of the 1960s, Halberstam deliberately shifts attention away from the celebrated leaders towards the largely unknown students who became the movement’s driving force. His central argument is deceptively simple. Great historical transformations are not achieved by extraordinary individuals alone but by ordinary young people who discover within themselves an extraordinary capacity for courage, discipline and sacrifice.

The opening pages immediately establish this theme through the unforgettable figure of Diane Nash. Halberstam dismantles the popular myth of the fearless revolutionary. Nash is portrayed not as someone devoid of fear but as someone who experienced fear more intensely than almost anyone around her. Before every demonstration she trembled with anxiety, sat through university lectures unable to concentrate, and wondered whether she possessed the strength to continue. Yet every day she chose to return to the streets. It is precisely this distinction between fearlessness and courage that gives the narrative its enduring moral force. Courage, Halberstam suggests, is not the absence of fear but the determination to overcome it.

The psychological depth with which he reconstructs these experiences is one of the book’s greatest achievements. He does not merely chronicle demonstrations and arrests. Instead, he recreates the inner lives of those who participated in them, showing the doubts, friendships, rivalries, hopes and fears that accompanied every act of resistance. The result is history written with the sensitivity of a great novelist while remaining firmly anchored in documentary evidence and extensive interviews.

Equally impressive is the author’s insistence that the Civil Rights Movement was fundamentally a movement of students. The young activists who gathered in Nashville came from different regions, social backgrounds and educational institutions. Many hardly knew one another when they first met. Yet through shared commitment they forged a new political identity that transcended these differences. Halberstam beautifully captures how they gradually ceased thinking of themselves primarily as students of Fisk University, Tennessee A&I, Meharry Medical College or American Baptist Seminary. They became, above all else, the “sit-in kids”, bound together by a common moral purpose.

This transformation lies at the heart of the book. Halberstam demonstrates that political commitment itself creates community. Friendships formed in struggle often become stronger than those inherited through family, class or region. Many of these relationships endured throughout life. Some participants later entered politics, others academia, medicine and public service. A few became nationally known figures, while others quietly returned to ordinary lives. Yet all remained united by the knowledge that, for one defining moment in history, they had stood together in defence of justice.

One of the most fascinating dimensions of The Children is its treatment of nonviolence, not merely as a political tactic but as a disciplined ethical philosophy. Here Halberstam introduces Jim Lawson, whose years in India studying Gandhian methods profoundly shaped the direction of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Lawson’s return from India and his meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. at Oberlin constitute one of the pivotal episodes in the narrative. Halberstam demonstrates that the movement’s commitment to nonviolence was not spontaneous. It emerged from sustained intellectual engagement with Gandhi’s philosophy and its adaptation to the American context.

These chapters possess particular significance for Indian readers. They remind us that Gandhian ideas did not remain confined to India’s struggle against colonialism. They travelled across continents and became one of the intellectual foundations of the American Civil Rights Movement. Lawson’s years in Nagpur studying nonviolence and King’s recognition that Lawson possessed precisely the experience the movement required underscore the global influence of Indian anti-colonial thought.

Halberstam’s narrative method deserves particular appreciation. Although trained as a journalist, he writes with the patience of a historian. The book rests upon years of interviews, archival research and contemporary documentation. Yet he never allows the weight of scholarship to overwhelm the narrative. Conversations flow naturally, personalities emerge vividly, and historical events unfold with remarkable immediacy. Readers are made to feel the uncertainty of the moment. Unlike retrospective histories that impose inevitability upon the past, The Children restores contingency. The participants themselves never knew whether they would succeed. They simply believed that remaining silent was no longer morally possible.

The portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. is equally nuanced. King remains central to the movement, but Halberstam resists reducing history to the biography of one great man. Instead, King appears within a wider network of organisers, ministers, students and local leaders whose collective efforts sustained the movement. Leadership is shown to be collaborative rather than solitary, moral rather than hierarchical.

As a work of history, The Children also exemplifies the best traditions of oral history. Halberstam demonstrates how individual memory, when critically examined and woven together with documentary evidence, can illuminate dimensions of the past inaccessible through official archives alone. The emotional landscape of history, its fears, aspirations and everyday acts of courage, emerges with unusual clarity.

No work of this scale, in my opinion, is without limitations. Halberstam’s admiration for his subjects is evident throughout, and at times his narrative becomes almost hagiographical. Readers looking for sustained analysis of internal ideological disagreements within the Civil Rights Movement, questions of gender politics, class divisions or later historiographical debates may find these issues less fully explored than in more recent scholarship. Likewise, broader structural analyses of race, capitalism and state power occasionally recede behind the vividness of individual lives.

These, however, are relatively minor reservations. The achievement of the book lies elsewhere. Halberstam succeeds in reminding us that democracy survives only when ordinary citizens refuse to surrender their moral agency. His history restores dignity to those whose names rarely appear in textbooks but whose courage made history possible.

For readers in contemporary India, The Children possesses a relevance that extends far beyond the history of the United States. At a time when the country witnessed a massive resurgence of student participation in public life, with young people increasingly raising their voices against what they perceive as injustice, discrimination and the erosion of democratic rights, Halberstam’s work acquires a renewed urgency. Whatever one’s political position, it is difficult to ignore the symbolic significance of young citizens reclaiming the public sphere and insisting that they, too, possess a stake in the future of the republic. The book reminds us that transformative social movements rarely begin in the corridors of power. They begin in classrooms, university campuses, churches, community halls and on the streets, where young people discover that silence is itself a political choice.

The students of Nashville possessed neither wealth nor institutional authority. They confronted entrenched systems of power armed only with moral conviction, careful organisation and the willingness to bear personal costs for a larger public good. Their example speaks powerfully across generations. It reminds us that youth is not merely an age but a historical force. The awakening of young minds has repeatedly altered the course of history, whether in the struggle against colonialism, in the Civil Rights Movement in America, or in countless democratic movements across the world.

It is in this context that The Children becomes much more than a history of the American South. It becomes a meditation on the enduring relationship between youth and democracy, between moral courage and political transformation. Just as those young men and women changed the direction of American history in the 1960s, the youth of India today possess the capacity to shape the moral and political future of their own country.

I remain grateful to Mr Masoodul Hasan, former Chief Bureau, Hindustan Times, Lucknow, who drew my attention to this remarkable volume at precisely such a historical moment. His recommendation proved both timely and invaluable. Reading Halberstam today is not simply an exercise in understanding another country’s past. It is an invitation to reflect upon our own present. The lesson of The Children is ultimately timeless: history belongs not only to rulers and governments, but also to those young men and women who, despite fear, find the courage to stand for justice.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Let’s be honest about what just happened. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister wasn’t some gracious political gesture. It was a surrender. A government that had spent years brushing aside student grievances finally found itself cornered by the very people it had ignored. And that is what makes this moment historic. Not the fall of one minister, but the rise of thousands of young Indians who refused to be treated as statistics.

This was never really about the Cockroach Janata Party. The CJP provided a name and a structure, sure. But the heart and sinew of this movement belonged to the students who flooded the streets, who slept on pavements, who travelled for days on crowded trains just to add their voice to the chorus. They were not symbols. They were not props. They were the real deal.

The anger that propelled them was entirely justified. Leaked papers. Botched exams. A system so riddled with incompetence that merit became a joke. Young people who had studied for years, who had sacrificed sleep and sanity, who had pinned their entire futures on fair assessment – they were being cheated. And not quietly. Not politely. They were done with being patient. They were done with being fobbed off by bureaucrats and ministers who had never known what it felt like to have their dreams hinge on a single mark sheet.

So they gathered. First in small clusters, then in growing crowds, and finally in a roar that could not be ignored. They organised through WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram – the very platforms that establishment politicians dismiss as frivolous. They built networks that transcended cities, states, and languages. They turned a scattered cry of frustration into a unified, unstoppable demand for accountability.

And here is the part that really rattled the powers that be: they did it with discipline. No riots. No vandalism. Just a quiet, stubborn refusal to go away. That discipline was their superpower. It stripped the government of every excuse. They couldn’t be painted as goondas. They couldn’t be dismissed as anti-nationals. They were just students – angry, articulate, and absolutely right.

Now let’s address the elephant in the room. There were whispers from the very beginning – and not just from cynics – that the CJP, along with figures like Wangchuk and Dipke, might have been playing a different game altogether. Some suspected they wanted to act as a cushion for the government. The theory went like this: give the students a platform, let them blow off steam, absorb the criticism, take the heat out of the protests, and then quietly negotiate a face-saving exit for the minister. In other words, provide a release valve so the real pressure never reached the boiler.

We don’t know the truth of that thinking. Maybe it was fair. Maybe it was paranoia. Maybe the CJP and its prominent faces genuinely believed in the cause. But here is what we do know: whatever cushion they might have intended to create, the students blew right through it.

The young participants were not interested in being managed. They were not interested in backroom deals that would let the government off the hook. They were not there to be a photo opportunity or a talking shop. They kept the pressure on. They refused to be pacified by vague promises. They refused to disperse when asked. They kept the streets alive, the conversation loud, and the government uncomfortable.

And that is where the real story lies. The students became the Achilles heel of this government. Think about that for a moment. The farmers, with all their numbers and moral authority, could not bring this administration to its knees. They marched, they sat, they endured brutal police action, and still the government held firm. Political parties, with all their resources and machinery, could not land a decisive blow. They debated, they criticised, they formed alliances, and still the government remained unshaken.

But the students did what none of them could. They exposed the Modi government. Not through grand politics. Not through media campaigns. Simply by being young, stubborn, and utterly unwilling to be ignored. They laid bare the government’s vulnerability. They showed that beneath all the bluster and bravado, this administration is far more fragile than it pretends to be.

What the farmers could not achieve, what the opposition could not achieve, the students achieved with nothing more than their voices, their feet, and their refusal to back down. They did not have deep pockets. They did not have political backing. They had only their conviction that they deserved better. And that was enough.

Now let’s talk about what made these young protesters genuinely dangerous to the political establishment. Not dangerous in a violent sense, but dangerous in a way that keeps politicians awake at night. They refused to play the communal game. In an era when every election, every policy, every media debate is coloured by religion and region, these students looked at one another and saw equals. They sat together, ate together, marched together, regardless of whether they worshipped in a temple, a mosque, a church, or nowhere at all.

That was the real subversion. They tore up the divisive script that has become so comfortable for our ruling class. They reminded everyone that a student is first a student – not a Hindu voter, not a Muslim voter, not a pawn in someone else’s identity war. They reasserted a shared citizenship that has been under systematic assault for years. And they did it without grand speeches or ideological posturing. They simply lived it.

The government’s response was telling. First, they tried to ignore the protests. Then they tried to dismiss them as political mischief. Then they tried to divide the protesters along familiar communal lines. Nothing worked. Every attempt to fracture the movement backfired spectacularly because the students had already chosen solidarity over division. They had already decided that their common future mattered more than the ancient hatreds that politicians love to stoke.

So Pradhan fell. And good riddance. But this was never just about one man. It was about the government being forced to acknowledge that it is not invincible. That even a ruling party with a massive parliamentary majority cannot trample on young people with impunity. That when thousands of determined citizens refuse to look away, even the mightiest administration must blink.

What happens now? The formal protests have ended. The tents at Jantar Mantar have been folded. But anyone who thinks this is over is dangerously naive. Movements don’t evaporate just because organisers declare victory. They leave behind something far more enduring: a generation that has learned its own strength.

These students now know how to organise. They know how to communicate. They know how to sustain pressure. They know how to make themselves heard in a political system that was designed to ignore them. That knowledge cannot be unlearned. It will seep into every future campaign – unemployment, university autonomy, environmental justice, you name it. The establishment has sown the wind, and it will reap the whirlwind.

And here is the uncomfortable truth for those in power: the students are not going away. They are not returning to their dormitories to quietly finish their degrees and become obedient professionals. They have tasted collective action. They have seen their own power reflected in the panic of a government that scrambled to respond. They know now that democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a muscle that must be exercised, and they have just done a very heavy workout.

The communal agenda that has dominated Indian politics for the past decade looked resilient. It looked unshakeable. But these young protesters exposed its greatest weakness: it cannot survive genuine human connection. When students of different faiths stand shoulder to shoulder, when they share food and water and hope, the walls that politicians have spent years building start to crumble. That is not a threat the government can legislate away. That is not a problem they can solve with a reshuffle.

So let us call this what it is. The kids have just served notice. They have shown that they are no longer content to be passive recipients of policies made in distant corridors. They have shown that they are willing to take risks, endure hardship, and stand up for what is right. And they have shown that they are not interested in the tired, toxic politics of division.

The resignation of one minister is a beginning, not an end. The real battle lies ahead – over jobs, over education, over the very soul of this country. And if the government thinks it can return to business as usual, it has another think coming. The students have arrived. They have found their voice. And they are not backing down.

What the farmers could not do, what the politicians could not do, they have done. They have exposed the Modi government. They have made it susceptible. They have shown that the emperor has no clothes. And what follows next – well, that is entirely up to them.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Yesterday it was Jantar Mantar, today it is Patna, and tomorrow…. Who knows? The entire nation!

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Matthew Pierce, Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiʿism. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. ix + 257 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-73707-5.

Matthew Pierce’s Twelve Infallible Men is an ambitious and methodologically innovative study of the collective biographies of the Twelve Imams. Rather than reconstructing their historical lives or tracing the development of imamate doctrine, Pierce examines how medieval Twelver Shiʿi communities narrated the lives, sufferings and deaths of their sacred leaders, and how these narratives forged a distinct religious identity.

Pierce treats these biographies as acts of communal memory rather than repositories of historical fact. Their importance, he argues, does not depend entirely on whether every event can be verified. What matters is that successive generations found these accounts meaningful and authoritative. Through preservation, repetition and reorganisation, the stories created a shared sacred past and gave the community a vocabulary for understanding suffering, loyalty, authority and salvation.

The book draws principally on five Arabic collective biographies composed between the tenth and twelfth centuries, including works attributed to al-Masʿūdī, al-Shaykh al-Mufīd and al-Ṭabrisī. The author identifies these as forming a recognisable literary genre organised around the sequential lives of the Twelve Imams. This is one of the book’s key contributions: these texts have rarely been examined together as a corpus with its own narrative conventions, emotional logic and communal function. Pierce shifts attention from isolated traditions to the overall architecture of the biographies.

The opening chapter situates the literature within the late Abbasid period, cautioning against projecting modern Sunni-Shiʿi divisions backwards. In that fluid environment, collective biographies helped define the Twelve Imams as a closed sequence of divinely appointed guides. The end of the Lesser Occultation posed a profound problem: the Imam was alive yet inaccessible. The biographies responded by organising the past into a coherent sacred history, retrospectively establishing the unity of the Twelve and transforming their lives into a complete age of guidance.

The thematic chapters examine martyrdom, betrayal, bodies and birth narratives. Pierce shows how the biographies extended the paradigm of suffering from Imam Husain to encompass the entire line of Imams. Their deaths became variations on a story of truth rejected by worldly power. Poisoning proved an especially effective narrative device, preserving the Imam’s innocence while identifying political authority as treacherous.

The chapter on loyalty demonstrates how betrayal functions as an organising principle. The Imams are betrayed by rulers, relatives and followers, establishing moral boundaries. Readers are invited to locate themselves within the narrative: would they have recognised the Imam and remained loyal? The past becomes a continuing test of conscience.

The most innovative chapter examines vulnerability and masculine ideals. Drawing on gender studies, it shows that the Imams were presented not as disembodied abstractions but as physically beautiful, disciplined and powerful, yet vulnerable to imprisonment and poison. Their capacity to endure suffering without surrendering moral control became a high expression of sacred manhood. The inclusion of Fāṭima al-Zahrāʾ broadens the discussion, though she sometimes appears chiefly in relation to the male Imams.

The final thematic chapter examines birth narratives, which place the Imams within a cosmic genealogy extending from Adam to Muḥammad. The transmission of light through purified loins transforms genealogy into cosmology. These narratives also solved problems of recognition: in a world of rival claimants, miraculous births and precocious knowledge distinguished the true Imam.

Pierce’s theoretical framework draws from social and cultural memory studies, particularly the work of Maurice Halbwachs and Jan Assmann. This allows him to ask why communities preserved certain stories and how narrative produced belonging. However, the near suspension of historicity is occasionally problematic. Medieval authors often rested a narrative’s persuasive force precisely on the claim that it reported actual events through reliable chains of transmission. A more sustained engagement with isnād analysis might have added an important dimension.

There is also a danger in importing models from Christian hagiography too readily. Pierce is aware of this and offers caveats, but the theoretical literature sometimes shapes the reading more strongly than internal Shiʿi categories such as naṣṣ, ʿiṣma and walāya. A closer integration of these concepts would have rooted the study more firmly in the theological universe of the texts.

The chronological claims also deserve qualification. He argues that collective biographies shaped Twelver identity from the tenth century onwards, yet he occasionally extends his conclusions to “the tenth century to today”. The later transmission of these narratives through Persian, Urdu and Turkish literary cultures receives little attention. The transformation of written biography into ritual performance, popular print and vernacular poetry is acknowledged but not systematically traced. A fuller account would need to follow these stories beyond Arabic scholarly literature.

Despite these reservations, the book is a significant contribution. The author successfully directs attention towards narrative as a constitutive force in religious history. Twelver Shiʿism was not produced by doctrine and political conflict alone. It was also made through stories: stories of poisoned bodies, miraculous knowledge, abandoned leaders and faithful companions. These stories taught believers how to remember and, through remembrance, how to recognise themselves.

The prose is clear and accessible. The organisation into thematic chapters creates a coherent argument, though the selection of individual Imams as case studies sometimes gives the impression that themes belong more exclusively to particular figures than the sources warrant. The appendices are useful, and the bibliography makes the volume valuable for specialists and advanced students.

Ultimately, Twelve Infallible Men is an original and illuminating work. It encourages historians to read sacred narratives neither as straightforward chronicles nor as fanciful accretions, but as texts that actively shaped communities. Pierce has opened an important field of enquiry and demonstrated that the making of Shiʿism took place as much through the disciplined remembrance of the Imams as through formal theology, law or political allegiance.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Today’s edition of The Hindu carries an excellent lead editorial column written by Congress Parliamentary Party Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, titled “An Education System’s Collapse, Young India’s Trauma.” In the piece, she delivers a blistering critique of the government’s handling of the ongoing student protests, accusing it of responding to young people’s demands for accountability and education reform with “cowardice and wanton cruelty” rather than constructive dialogue. She argues that the protests sweeping the country are not isolated outbursts but the inevitable consequence of years of policy failures, institutional neglect, and a steady retreat from public investment in education. Her words echo what thousands of students and teachers have been saying for years: that Indian education is in the throes of a deep and dangerous crisis. What follows below is an attempt to examine the full dimensions of that crisis, from the hollowing out of universities to the erosion of critical thought, and to understand why the promise of the National Education Policy has given way to such profound disillusionment.

A Promise Unfulfilled

When the National Education Policy was announced in 2020, it was greeted with considerable optimism. It promised nothing less than a transformation of Indian education: universities would become multidisciplinary, students would enjoy greater flexibility, research would flourish, Indian institutions would compete with the world’s best, and education would finally prepare young people for the challenges of the twenty-first century. It was a vision that few could object to. Every teacher wants universities that are more open, more creative and more responsive to changing times.

The true test of any educational policy, however, lies not in the language of the document but in its consequences. Several years after the NEP began to be implemented, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the widening gap between promise and reality. Across the country, universities are grappling with shrinking resources, vacant teaching positions, weakened research, collapsing specialised courses, growing bureaucratic control and an increasing intrusion of ideology into the classroom. Institutions that once took decades to build are slowly being hollowed out. What is unfolding is not simply another round of educational reform but a profound change in the very idea of what a university is meant to be.

The Shrinking Purpose of Higher Education

Universities have never existed merely to prepare people for jobs. Their purpose has always been larger. They create new knowledge through research, transmit it through teaching, preserve the intellectual inheritance of civilisation and train citizens to think independently. Employment is undoubtedly one outcome of higher education, but it has never been its only purpose. Increasingly, however, education is being discussed almost entirely in the language of skills, employability, entrepreneurship and measurable outcomes. These are important objectives, but they cannot become the sole measure of educational success. Once universities begin to see themselves primarily as training centres for the labour market, something fundamental is lost.

It is often the humanities that suffer first. History, philosophy, literature, archaeology, sociology, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and other classical and modern disciplines find themselves under pressure because they cannot easily demonstrate immediate economic value. Yet these are precisely the subjects that teach societies to understand themselves. They preserve memory, explain social change, encourage ethical reflection and cultivate critical judgement. A country that neglects these disciplines weakens not only its universities but also its understanding of its own civilisation. The contraction of social science research funding and the erosion of full-time faculty positions have reduced many departments to mere teaching centres, stripped of their capacity for deep inquiry.

Flexibility or Fragility?

The much-celebrated flexibility introduced through multiple entry and exit options illustrates this contradiction. It is presented as empowering students by allowing them to leave with certificates or diplomas after one, two or three years. In theory, flexibility appears attractive. In practice, however, students rarely leave higher education because they desire flexibility. They leave because their families cannot afford the fees, because they must seek employment, or because social circumstances make it impossible for them to continue. Providing a certificate at the point of departure does not remove these obstacles. Instead, it risks normalising early exit. The students most likely to leave are also those who are already disadvantaged. Rather than reducing inequality, the system may well reinforce it.

The Tyranny of Paperwork

Alongside these structural changes has come a remarkable expansion of bureaucracy. Teachers increasingly find themselves spending more time filling forms, uploading information to digital portals, preparing accreditation reports and satisfying administrative requirements than reading, researching or teaching. Universities appear to believe that excellence can be measured through endless documentation. Yet scholarship does not flourish through paperwork. Research requires uninterrupted time, functioning libraries, archives, laboratories where necessary, and above all the freedom to think. Teaching requires preparation, discussion and reflection. None of these can be reduced to numerical indicators or administrative compliance. The proposed Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, intended to replace the UGC, has raised further concerns over centralisation and the uncertain future of grant disbursement to state universities.

A Research Culture in Crisis

The condition of research reflects this larger malaise. Vacancies remain unfilled for years. Young scholars move from one contractual appointment to another with little hope of permanent academic careers. Libraries struggle to acquire books and journals. Funding becomes uncertain. Scholars are encouraged to publish rapidly because quantity has become easier to measure than quality. Citation counts replace intellectual contribution. Rankings replace scholarship. Universities begin to chase metrics rather than ideas. India’s investment in research and development has stagnated at around 0.6 to 0.7 per cent of GDP, well below the global average and far behind emerging economies.

The Vanishing Disciplines

Perhaps nowhere is the crisis more visible than in the steady disappearance of specialised courses and centres of advanced study. Over generations, Indian universities built internationally respected expertise in fields such as manuscript studies, palaeography, epigraphy, numismatics, historical linguistics, archaeology, textual criticism and archival science. These disciplines cannot be learnt through a few interdisciplinary modules. They require years of rigorous training under experienced scholars. Yet many such programmes have either disappeared altogether or have been absorbed into broad multidisciplinary structures that sacrifice depth for administrative convenience.

Interdisciplinarity is valuable only when it rests upon strong disciplinary foundations. A historian must first learn history before engaging with sociology or anthropology. An archaeologist cannot work without mastering archaeological method. A scholar editing medieval Persian or Sanskrit texts requires years of linguistic training. Ironically, while official rhetoric repeatedly invokes India’s ancient and glorious civilisation, the very disciplines needed to recover and understand that civilisation are being steadily weakened.

When History Becomes Mythology

Equally disturbing is the gradual erosion of the distinction between history and mythology. Every civilisation possesses myths. They are central to cultural identity and deserve to be studied with seriousness and respect. Historians have always treated mythology as an important source for understanding belief, memory and social imagination. The difficulty begins when myth is presented as historical fact and historical method itself is portrayed as an obstacle to national pride. Textbook revisions that reduce focus on the Mughals and introduce a more glorified portrayal of certain dynasties have prompted concerns over ideological influence.

History is not a collection of comforting stories. It is a disciplined enquiry based upon evidence, chronology, source criticism and reasoned interpretation. It often produces conclusions that are complex and occasionally uncomfortable. That is precisely why it matters. Myth serves a different purpose. It expresses moral values, symbolic truths and collective memory. Confusing the two ultimately impoverishes both.

Increasingly, students encounter simplified narratives in which the past is divided neatly between heroes and villains. Centuries of social interaction, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue are compressed into stories of permanent conflict. Nuance disappears. Evidence becomes secondary to ideology. The purpose of history quietly shifts from understanding the past to legitimising the politics of the present.

Ideology Over Inquiry

This transformation is reinforced by the growing influence of educational networks associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliated organisations. Like any social organisation, they have every right to establish schools and educational institutions. The concern is not their existence but the replacement of scholarly method with ideological certainty. When education encourages predetermined conclusions rather than open enquiry, classrooms cease to be places where minds are formed and become places where opinions are manufactured.

The consequences extend well beyond the study of history. The greatest purpose of education is not to provide answers but to teach students how to ask questions. Critical thinking develops only when young people encounter conflicting evidence, weigh competing arguments and learn to defend their conclusions through reason. If questioning itself begins to appear undesirable, curiosity slowly gives way to conformity. Students may leave university with degrees, but without the intellectual confidence to challenge received wisdom.

The Danger of Manufactured Minds

This is perhaps the gravest danger confronting Indian education today. A society that teaches its young what to think instead of how to think gradually weakens its own future. Scientific discovery depends upon scepticism. Historical research depends upon doubt. Democracy depends upon informed citizens capable of questioning authority. None of these can survive if education becomes an instrument for producing obedience rather than understanding.

There is another irony that deserves attention. India’s own intellectual traditions were built upon debate. The philosophical dialogues of the Upanishads, the rigorous arguments of Buddhist scholars, the traditions of Sanskrit learning, the disputations of medieval madrasas and the vibrant exchanges that took place in the courts of rulers across the subcontinent all testify to a civilisation that valued disagreement as a means of arriving at deeper understanding. To discourage questioning today is therefore not a defence of Indian civilisation. It is a departure from one of its oldest and richest traditions.

What Universities Truly Need

At the heart of this crisis lies a more fundamental problem. Universities flourish only when they enjoy intellectual autonomy and sustained public investment. Neither can be replaced by policy announcements. Libraries require books. Laboratories require equipment. Archives require conservation. Students require scholarships. Teachers require secure careers. Research requires time. None of these can be created through bureaucratic restructuring alone. The NEP’s own ambition of raising public education spending to six per cent of GDP remains unrealised, with actual expenditure staying around 2.9 per cent.

The Student Protests: A Symptom of Collapse

The recent student protests at Jantar Mantar, which spread to cities across the country, are not isolated events. They are a direct consequence of this collapse. Students are not just angry about paper leaks. They are protesting a system that has failed them at every level. When the Delhi University administration issued advisories warning students to stay away from lawful protests, it only confirmed what many already believed: that institutions of learning have ceased to be spaces of intellectual freedom and have become instruments of control. The protests in Himachal Pradesh and Hyderabad, where students demanded the scrapping of the NEP and the resignation of the Education Minister, reflect a deep-seated frustration with an education system that promises flexibility but delivers precarity. This movement is not just about examinations. It is a refusal to accept an education that manufactures obedience rather than cultivates critical thought.

A Nation’s Future at Stake

The debate over the NEP is therefore about much more than curriculum design or administrative reform. It is about the future character of Indian society. If universities become places where specialised knowledge disappears, where history gives way to mythology, where ideology replaces scholarship and where conformity is valued above curiosity, the damage will not be confined to campuses. It will shape the quality of public life itself.

Nations are ultimately judged not by the number of policies they announce but by the quality of minds they produce. India does not need an education system that manufactures agreement. It needs one that cultivates informed scepticism, intellectual honesty and the courage to question. Those are the qualities that have sustained every great civilisation. They are also the qualities without which no democracy can long endure.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Looking back over the many twists and turns of my life, I often feel that I have made remarkably few important decisions myself. Most of them seem to have been taken for me by circumstances, by chance encounters, or by people who somehow knew what was best for me long before I did. The earlier chapters of this memoir recounted how I drifted almost accidentally from the sciences into history and how, once there, destiny blessed me with teachers whose names were already becoming legends in the profession. This instalment of the story is about what happened next. It is about the period when a student slowly ceased to be merely a student and began the long apprenticeship of becoming a historian.

As my MA examinations drew to a close in the summer of 1982, I found myself standing at a familiar crossroads. I knew I wanted to continue studying history, but I lacked the courage to approach Professor Irfan Habib and ask whether he would accept me as his research scholar. To us students he was already an institution rather than merely a teacher. His books were discussed across universities, his lectures attracted packed classrooms, and his reputation travelled much farther than the walls of Aligarh Muslim University. Walking into his room simply to ask, “Sir, will you supervise my research?” seemed almost as intimidating as requesting a private audience with one of the Mughal emperors whom he himself had spent a lifetime studying. So, as was my habit in those days, I postponed the difficult conversation.

Fortunately for me, destiny had other plans. Like most students, after finishing our last MA examination, a few of us walked straight to our teachers’ rooms, partly to boast about how well we believed we had written our papers and partly to enquire how best to prepare for the Grand Viva scheduled a few days later. Among us were my classmate and friend Reena Arya and myself. Irfan Sahib listened patiently to our confident assessments of our own brilliance, smiled in the indulgent manner only experienced teachers can manage, and then, just as we were preparing to leave, quietly said, “You two come and meet me after the Viva.” There was nothing unusual in his tone. Neither of us imagined that the course of our lives had already changed.

The Grand Viva was followed, as tradition demanded, by the annual function of the Sultania Historical Society. By the time the proceedings ended it was already around half past eight in the evening. Reena and I walked to Professor Habib’s chamber where he was waiting for us. As we entered, he pointed towards two formidable heaps of books placed on chairs in one corner of the room. They were not books in the ordinary sense. They looked more like bricks that had somehow acquired covers. “These,” he said, “are for you.” We looked at one another with the apprehension of condemned prisoners. Turning towards me, he continued with complete matter of factness. “Nadeem miyan, you will write a paper on Muqarrab Khan, the surgeon. These volumes of Letters Received contain useful material. Here is a list of Persian and English sources that you should also consult.” He then looked towards Reena. “Reena bibi, you will write on Trimetalism under the Mughals.” Before either of us had fully absorbed what had just happened, he produced two membership forms of the Indian History Congress and pushed them across the table. “Fill these up.” Neither of us protested. Neither of us even thought of protesting. By the time we left his room that evening, we had unknowingly become members of the Indian History Congress and participants in its forthcoming annual session at Kurukshetra.

Only later did it dawn upon me that I had never actually asked Professor Habib whether he would supervise my research. Some days afterwards, gathering whatever courage I could muster, I timidly made the request. He looked at me almost with surprise. In truth, the decision had already been taken. Looking back today, I realise that I never formally became Professor Habib’s student. I simply found myself working under him one evening without either of us ever announcing it. Such was his way. There were no formal interviews, no solemn declarations and certainly no speeches about academic careers. A topic was assigned, a membership form signed, a pile of impossible books handed over, and one quietly found oneself inducted into a lifetime of research.

For the next six months my life changed completely. University examinations had taught us how to remember facts. Research taught us how little we actually knew. From June until December I lived among books. European travel accounts, English factory records, Persian chronicles, collections of letters and official documents gradually replaced the prescribed reading lists to which I had become accustomed. Most of these works had fortunately been published. Unfortunately, many remained untranslated. One had first to decipher the Persian before one could even begin asking historical questions. That, however, was only the beginning.

One day, shortly after my research had formally commenced, I entered Professor Habib’s room carrying a notebook filled with carefully prepared questions. Before I could ask a single one, he pointed towards another pile of enormous Persian manuscripts lying on a side table. “Take those.” I obediently carried them away. Only afterwards did I discover what I had undertaken. They were rotograph copies of Persian manuscripts. Black pages carried white lettering interrupted by worm holes, stains and innumerable dots. Many were written in khat-e-shikasta, literally the “broken script”, whose hurried abbreviations often appeared to have been invented specifically to discourage future historians. Each page resembled an elaborate puzzle. Each sentence demanded patience. Each word had first to be deciphered before it could be understood.

Months passed in this fashion. Finally, after what I considered a heroic struggle, I returned to Professor Habib. “Sir,” I announced rather proudly, “there is nothing here on my topic.” He looked up calmly. “Keep them there.” Then he pointed towards another equally intimidating pile. “Take those.” History, I was beginning to discover, had an unusual sense of humour. For several months this curious ritual continued. I would struggle through one set of manuscripts, decipher every difficult line, prepare careful notes and then report back, only to discover that there was scarcely a sentence relevant to my assigned topic. Professor Habib would quietly listen. “Very good.” Then another mountain of manuscripts would appear. My friends had begun discussing chapter outlines and bibliographies. Some had already drafted their first chapters. I, on the other hand, seemed to have become a full time reader of manuscripts that had absolutely nothing to do with my research.

Naturally, doubts crept in. Had I chosen the wrong supervisor? Surely supervisors were expected to direct their students towards useful material. Mine appeared to be leading me with remarkable determination in precisely the opposite direction. After nearly a year and a half of this exercise, I finally entered his room almost in despair. “Sir,” I confessed, “I have gone through all these sources. There is practically nothing on my topic.” Professor Habib smiled. It was one of those smiles which every one of his students eventually came to recognise. “I knew that from the beginning,” he replied. For a few seconds I was speechless. Then, seeing the bewilderment on my face, he explained. “But now you know how to read Persian manuscripts.”

It was one of the most important lessons I have ever received. Research is not the art of collecting information. Research is the discipline of learning how to search for information, how to eliminate false trails, how to recognise silence in the sources and, above all, how to distinguish evidence from assumption. Those months, which I had regarded as wasted, turned out to be the foundation upon which everything I have written since has rested. Every manuscript I have subsequently handled, every Persian document I have translated and every historical argument I have advanced owes something to those seemingly fruitless days. At that time, however, I was convinced that all I had acquired was a permanent weakness in my eyesight.

While this apprenticeship was unfolding, another annual ritual had begun to dominate our lives. The Indian History Congress. For us it was not merely an academic conference. It was almost a pilgrimage. Preparations began months in advance but reached fever pitch during the final week before departure. The Department of History underwent a transformation that would be difficult for younger historians, brought up in the age of laptops and printers, to imagine. Every large room seemed occupied. Manual typewriters clattered away from morning until well past midnight. Typists sat surrounded by piles of handwritten drafts covered with corrections in several inks and several handwritings. Teachers moved from table to table suggesting improvements. Research scholars waited impatiently for their turn. Fresh sheets of paper appeared mysteriously while discarded drafts accumulated in alarming quantities. There was no concept of office hours. The Department simply remained awake. Tea arrived with astonishing regularity. Somebody was always making another correction. Every time Professor Habib remarked, “Only one small change,” everyone within hearing distance knew that another hour had quietly disappeared.

There was, of course, no computer. No email. No photocopiers worth the name. Certainly no Ctrl+Z. If a typist made a mistake on page twenty eight, page twenty eight had to be typed again. The machine had neither sympathy nor memory. Yet no one complained. Indeed, those hectic days remain among my happiest memories of university life. What transformed the labour into a celebration were the people. Every now and then Professor Irfan Habib or Professor Shireen Moosvi would walk in carrying a large paper bag overflowing with roasted peanuts. On another evening M. Athar Ali Sahib would appear with another equally generous supply. Iqtidar Alam Khan Sahib was no different. Tea flowed continuously. Then, late at night, someone would announce that dinner had arrived. Huge containers of steaming qorma, stacks of naan and sometimes kebabs would appear from nowhere. We all ate together. Professors, lecturers, typists, research scholars and students. Nobody maintained any distance. Nobody stood on ceremony. Looking back now, I realise that the Department resembled less an academic institution than an extraordinarily large family trying collectively to meet an impossible deadline.

Once the typing had been completed, another stage began. The typed sheets had first to be converted into stencils and then cyclostyled on manually operated duplicating machines. Khursheed Bhai would be labouring at the cyclostyling machine while Idris Bhai and Noor Ahmad would be making sets out of that material. Those unfamiliar with that ancient technology cannot imagine the labour involved. Someone had to keep turning the crank while fresh sheets emerged one by one, still damp with ink and carrying that unmistakable smell which anyone of my generation instantly associates with scholarly publications. Then came collating. Hundreds of pages had to be assembled in precisely the correct order. Finally they were stitched and bound into volumes. It was usually only a few hours before departure that the last copies emerged. Sleep, if it existed at all, became a luxury.

Among the many traditions associated with those Congresses, one was particularly distinctive. Every year the Centre of Advanced Study in History produced its own independent collection of papers. It was affectionately known as the “rebel volume”. The title was never official. It never needed to be. The volume was cyclostyled, modestly produced and manually assembled. Yet it possessed a reputation that far exceeded its appearance. Delegates at the Indian History Congress would actively seek it out. Copies disappeared almost as soon as they reached the registration desks. One sometimes had the impression that people came looking for the volume before they came looking for the sessions. The contrast with the official departmental publication was rather amusing. That handsome printed volume, produced under the authority of the Head of the Department, often travelled home unopened, becoming an additional burden in already overfilled suitcases. Our modest cyclostyled collection, by contrast, was eagerly carried away. Perhaps the greatest attraction of the “rebel volume” lay elsewhere. It was thoroughly democratic. Every contributor’s name appeared proudly on the cover itself. Distinguished professors and first year research scholars stood side by side in alphabetical equality. For a young student to discover his own name sharing the cover with historians whom he revered was an encouragement beyond measure. And it was edited by Professor Irfan Habib.

When the final bundles had been tied and labelled, the entire group involved collectively exhaled. The next stage of the adventure was about to begin. The journey itself. When everything was finally packed, all members seemed to acquire a new burst of energy. The papers were ready. The bundles had been tied. The cyclostyle ink had finally dried. Now came the journey. For us young research scholars, the Indian History Congress began not at the venue but the moment we boarded the train. One of the remarkable traditions established by Professor Irfan Habib was that there was never one set of arrangements for the teachers and another for the students. We all travelled together. Professor Irfan Habib, Professor M. Athar Ali, Professor Shireen Moosvi, Professor Iqtidar Alam Khan, the younger lecturers, research scholars and students all occupied the same reserved third class compartment. Looking back, I realise how extraordinary this was. Elsewhere it was common for senior professors to travel separately, often in greater comfort. That distinction simply did not exist in our little travelling republic.

The moment everyone boarded, Irfan Sahib assumed complete charge of the compartment. With a reservation chart in one hand and the authority of a veteran railway official, he began allotting berths. “You go there.” “You exchange with him.” “No, she should have the lower berth.” Within minutes every student had found a place. One incident from those journeys still makes me smile. A passenger from the general compartment wandered in looking rather anxious. Watching Irfan Sahib confidently assigning berths and settling passengers, he naturally concluded that this gentleman could only be the Travelling Ticket Examiner. Looking around cautiously, he quietly approached him, folded a few currency notes inside his ticket and, in a conspiratorial whisper, requested, “Sahib, if you could somehow arrange a berth…” For a brief second Irfan Sahib looked completely bewildered. Then the entire compartment burst into laughter. The poor passenger stood frozen, wondering what offence he had committed, until someone finally explained that the gentleman he had mistaken for a railway official happened to be one of the country’s foremost historians. Even years later, whenever the story resurfaced, it never failed to provoke another round of laughter.

The journey itself was unlike anything I have experienced since. Food appeared from every direction. One family had sent parathas. Another had packed pickles. Someone produced kebabs. Another opened a box of sweets. Nothing remained private for very long. Before the train had crossed the first few stations, every tiffin carrier belonged to everybody else. There were no separate groups. Teachers and students sat together, ate together and argued together. Discussions moved effortlessly from Mughal revenue administration to cricket, from Persian manuscripts to politics, from university gossip to the latest historical debates. Someone would invariably begin narrating an amusing anecdote about an earlier session of the Congress. Another would recall some unforgettable question put to a famous historian. Laughter travelled up and down the compartment as frequently as the tea vendors. By the time we reached our destination, we were no longer fellow passengers. We had become a family.

That spirit continued even after the journey ended. On reaching the Congress venue, Professor Habib would ensure that we all stayed together. He never looked for separate accommodation for himself. He shared the same hostel buildings allotted to the rest of us, lived under exactly the same conditions and remained available throughout the Congress. To us, this appeared perfectly natural then. Only much later, after attending conferences elsewhere, did I appreciate how unusual it really was. Eminent scholars generally occupied guest houses or hotels. Irfan Sahib preferred to remain amidst his students.

The Congress itself was a revelation. Until then, the great names of Indian historiography had existed for me only on the covers of books and journal articles. Suddenly they were all there. One passed them in the corridors. One listened to them over breakfast. One watched them argue in the sessions. One occasionally found oneself standing beside them while waiting for tea. For a young student who had only recently completed his MA, it was an overwhelming experience. I still remember the nervousness with which I prepared for my first presentation. No matter how often one rehearsed the paper, one remained convinced that disaster lay only a few minutes away. The real ordeal, however, began after the paper had been read. The discussion. One looked up from the lectern to find oneself facing scholars whose books had shaped the discipline itself. There sat Nurul Hasan. Nearby was J. S. Grewal. One could spot Aniruddha Ray, A. R. Kulkarni and many others whose names had until then belonged almost to another world. To receive a question from one of them was at once terrifying and exhilarating. Today, after presenting papers at the Congress for over four decades, I still experience a measure of nervousness before every presentation. But nothing has ever equalled those first few minutes in Kurukshetra. With experience comes confidence. With youth comes fear. And perhaps fear is not always a bad companion. It reminds us to remain humble before our evidence.

Looking back now, I realise that Professor Irfan Habib was doing something far greater than supervising a group of research scholars. He was creating a scholarly community. He believed that history was not learnt in isolation. It was learnt collectively. It grew through debate, disagreement, criticism and companionship. The train journeys, the shared hostel rooms, the endless conversations over tea, the sleepless nights preparing papers, even the roasted peanuts distributed with such generosity, all formed part of an education no university syllabus could ever prescribe.

Many things have changed over the last four decades. Today papers are written on computers, circulated by email and uploaded with the click of a button. Conferences are organised with remarkable efficiency. Hotels are comfortable. Trains are faster. One can revise an entire paper while travelling on a mobile phone. Yet I sometimes wonder whether, in making everything easier, we have unknowingly lost something precious. We have gained technology. We may have lost fellowship. When I think of those early years, I do not first remember my own paper. I remember the smell of fresh cyclostyle ink. I remember the clatter of manual typewriters through the night. I remember the mountains of roasted peanuts that somehow disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived. I remember the laughter in a crowded railway compartment after an unsuspecting passenger tried to bribe Professor Irfan Habib for a berth. Above all, I remember a teacher who never behaved like one of India’s greatest historians. He travelled with us, stayed with us, ate with us, argued with us and quietly taught us, by example rather than instruction, what it meant to belong to a community of scholars. Fate may have brought me to history. Professor Irfan Habib taught me how to live it.