Aligarh’s First Generation

Title: Aligarh’s First Generation – Muslim Solidarity in British India

Author: David Lelyveld

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003 (First published 1978)

ISBN: 9780195666670

Pages: 380

 

The nineteenth century was a period of total transition for the Muslim community in India from the conquering masters of the subcontinent to the effete subjects of a foreign colonial power opposed to them in morals and religion. The 1857 Rebellion sought to reinstate the power patterns prevailing at the arrival of Europeans, but they were well past the period of redemption. The rebellion’s collapse sounded the death knell of Islamic imperialism in India that began with Muhammad bin Qasim’s invasion of Sindh in 712 CE. The ulema, as a response to the end of their world, relapsed to revivalist fantasies, but Muslim intellectuals recognised the need to acquire English education and to share power with the British so as to keep the Hindu masses under effective check. Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817 – 1898) established the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh for this purpose in 1875 which then grew into the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University of today. He asserted that the Muslims were a former ruling class now fallen on evil ways and to recover their rightful position they had to cultivate new areas of knowledge, skill and solidarity among themselves. This was expected to germinate in them a new level of consolidation as a qaum (nation or community). This book studies the Aligarh College during its first 25 years when it was under the leadership of Sayyid Ahmed Khan and an English principal Theodore Beck. The students of this period represent the first generation of English-educated Muslims in north India. David Lelyveld is a professor of history at William Paterson University in New Jersey, USA.

 

Lelyveld sets the stage for Aligarh’s establishment by lucidly narrating the social situation. The Mughal nobility was dominated by Muslims with their numerical proportion reaching up to eighty per cent. The administration and judiciary functioned using the Persian language and Muslims considered themselves as the ruling class. Rise of Marathas and then the British did not change matters at the lower level. Muslim officials continued to function till 1837 when Persian was dropped and English took its place. Muslims then began to use Urdu as an alternative as it showed closer fidelity to the locally spoken tongues than Persian. This coincided with a change in British attitudes. Post-1857, British administrators abandoned the idea of society as an aggregation of individuals and accepted as axiomatic the idea that India was composed of separate collectivities. The 1881 census brought forth some peculiar conclusions on Muslim society apart from estimating its numerical strength at a fifth of the population. Denzil Ibbetson, director of the Punjab census, observed two different social structures existing in the east and west of Lahore. In the west, even the Hindus were very loose about rules of endogamy and caste identification while in the east, a Muslim Rajput, Gujjar or Jat was no different from his Hindu counterpart as to social customs, rules of marriage and inheritance. Many Muslims retained Brahmin priests and the author claims that there were even Muslim Brahmins. A Muslim Jat in Delhi was more rigid in caste rules of purity and matrimony than a Hindu Jat in the northwest. He concluded that the difference was national rather than religious (p.15-6). Still, within half a century of this important observation, India was partitioned into two religion-based nations.

 

The reason why Muslims felt the compelling need to learn English is very clearly explained. Several Muslims had created a model of success in government service for most of the nineteenth century. After a maktab (school) education involving mostly religious subjects and training in Persian, they entered into an informal apprenticeship in some government office, usually with a relative or on his recommendation. They then established personal ties with Indians and Englishmen higher up in the hierarchy and entered the permanent rolls. In the Punjab, it was possible to start a career in the army as well before 1857. People with no knowledge of English could thus occupy positions in government. Sayyid Ahmed himself belonged to this genre. By the middle of the century, instead of personal patronage, government jobs began to be filled by competitive examinations with the Indian Civil Service exams in 1856. Muslims who wanted official employment then faced a crisis as the Bengali Hindus who were already familiar with the English language stood a good chance to undercut them. The widespread British antagonism to Muslims as the authors of the 1857 revolt, popular Indian dissatisfaction against officials with Persian background, the encouragement of English educational prerequisites for employment and the organized campaign to recognise Hindi as the language of the courts convinced Muslim intellectuals that change was imperative. In his analysis of 1857, Sayyid Ahmed argued that justice and security for all could be assured only under the strong and neutral British rule. In Moradabad, he even organized a public subscription for charity and illuminations in honour of the reestablishment of British rule after crushing the rebellion.

 

Contrary to the picture painted by some sources, Sayyid Ahmed was not an Islamist. In Muslim eyes, British rule in India had little claim to legitimacy once the East India Company had cast off subordination to the Mughal emperor. Sayyid Ahmed’s family objected when he left to serve the British in 1838. In 1857, some of his relatives died in the rebellion as martyrs, but he steadfastly stood by the British. Even though devout in his religious belief, he wanted to transform the Muslim community to live better lives as per modernity’s norms. Though he could not handle English well, he exhorted the students to learn and master it. Sayyid Ahmed found the ornamentation in Urdu burdensome and found it impossible to write in Urdu without exaggeration and to separate metaphor from concrete reality. He reminded the Muslims that ‘as long as the community does not, by means of English education, become familiar with the exactness of thought and unlearn the looseness of expression, their language cannot be the means of high moral and mental training’ (p.207). Sami Ullah, one of the co-founders of Aligarh, was very pious and served as a counterweight to Sayyid Ahmed’s unorthodoxy in the case of recruitment of students and overseeing their stay in boarding houses attached to the college. This allayed the concerns of many conservative parents.

 

Though the Aligarh college advertised itself as a Muhammadan institution, it did not close its doors to Hindus. There were a number of Hindu students, mostly from the Aligarh locale, engaged as day scholars. The college’s curriculum was not religious, but the same as government-run universities as it was affiliated first to Calcutta and then to Allahabad. The managing committee was responsible as an executive body for the internal management of the college and boarding houses. Of the 25 members in the committee, six were Hindus in the early years. However, this feeling of accommodation did not tally with the religious zeal of the students and teachers. The college cricket team used to stop the match for prayers in between. Once, a student beat a Hindu professor with a shoe in the class room. He was summarily expelled, but then quietly reinstated (p.264).

 

A notable trait in Sayyid Ahmed’s character is his strong dislike for democracy and for sharing power with the Hindus. He drew his cultural breath from Mughal roots and conceived India as a combination of unequal and mutually antagonistic ancestral groups brought to peace only within the authoritarian framework of British rule. He favoured representation by appointment and ruled out democracy as unpractical. He opposed recruitment through competitive exams since he feared it would lead to ‘domination by inferior breeds of men’. Latching on to the idea of Muslim superiority as the former ruling class, he advocated for representation in government be determined by social position through ancestry and not by ability. He dreaded the possibility of living under Hindu rule. In a sense, the Muslims feared that the majority would do to them what they had been doing to the majority when in power! Sayyid Ahmed wanted equal weightage for Muslims just in case elections became unavoidable. In such a scenario, he proposed the expulsion of lower-caste Hindus from the electoral roll so that Muslims could then match the remaining upper-caste Hindus in numerical strength nearly on a one-to-one basis (p.312).

 

This book calmly describes the actions and events that led to the establishment of the college and how it overcame teething troubles. This is done without even a hint of criticism. This also means that the author has channeled the material he collected from reference sources without any value addition. This is cent per cent perspiration and no inspiration. Lelyveld has captured the rise of nationalism in India and how the Muslim intellectuals opposed and tried to derail it. The two-nation theory had its seed sown in the lecture halls of Aligarh, but the author fails to make this connection to the future. On the other hand, the book is written with good scholastic vigour. The author being American with probably no familiarity with the game of Cricket makes an amusing effort to describe how it was played on the field (p.158-9).

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star