AMU and intellectual imagination

The Making of the Modern Indian Muslim: Aligarh Muslim University

Author: Mohammed Wajihuddin

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: xxvi+216

Price: Rs 390

Since its beginning in the second half of the 19th century, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has been at the centre of India’s political and social consciousness often for reasons beyond academics. First, it was part and parcel of the ways the Indian elite perceived the changing order of things after the decline of the Mughals. Coming almost half a century after Ram Mohan Roy in Bengal tried to harness the new knowledge and language of the Western powers, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, too, thought the modern knowledge could be the source of rejuvenation for north Indian society, its ruling classes and its literati.

Though historians have given us some rigorously researched works on the early years of the university and its social universe (such as David Lelyveld’s Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, 1978), a bicentenary commemoration of Sir Syed in 2017 and centenary celebration of AMU in 2020 have allowed a revisit to its past and its role in contemporary times. In this eminently readable book, full of personal anecdotes and interviews, the author has done well to present to the common reader with an insider’s perspective, yet a dispassionate one, of the university, its career and how, as he seems to argue, it has become synonymous with the political and cultural imagination of the Muslim in India. Though it would be difficult to give the university such a grand representative character, the fact remains that AMU for a large part of its existence came to be identified with the romance, adventures and aspirations of a large number of Muslims in the subcontinent.

AMU’s history can be studied in phases —1870s to 1920s, 1920s to 1947-1948, 1948-1965; 1965-1981 and from 1981 to the present. Known initially as Muslim Anglo Oriental (MAO) College, the university was set up to represent the north Indian elite, Hindu and Muslim, which had lost power to the British. As conceived by Sir Syed, the university was to help reorient their world from an antagonistic relationship to the colonial powers to a new rapprochement via modern and western education. In the process, however, the colonial bureaucracy came to play a major role in the affairs of the college, guiding its future course to an extent.  In the 1880s, Sir Syed made an exaggerated outburst against the newly founded Indian National Congress, “Bengali Babus” and the idea of democracy that they had begun to articulate. In some sense, it is here that the communal projection of the future of Muslims in a democratic India might have taken its ideational roots.

British entrenchment also began to take on a communitarian route, so that, by the 1940s the university became the intellectual centre of the Pakistan movement. This is notwithstanding the fact that the university and many of its departments had established an all- India character with no shade of communalism distorting their academic functions. This is the time when historians such as Mohammad Habib were founding a distinctly scientific understanding of Indian history and Syed Nurul Hasan would soon establish the most advanced centres of history in the country.  A 40-year-old Ganda Singh from Punjab, recently demobilised after the war, came all the way to AMU for his Masters in medieval history, suggesting that by now the university had inspired a wider intellectual imagination. Mohammad Habib organised a separate room for this burly and middle-aged sardar, who later would found the modern historiographical tradition of Punjab. There must be hundreds of such stories.

Partition, as the author discusses, dealt AMU a massive blow. Not only did a large number of scholars leave for Pakistan, the north Indian landed elite, the university’s principal patrons, also migrated, leaving AMU friendless and helpless. It was then that Jawaharlal Nehru and his comrades immediately came forward to help the university regain its stature. To signal support and succour, Nehru delivered the convocation address in 1948.

In the 1960s, however, AMU’s development was marred by several strange decisions, among them, reserving 75 per cent of seats in higher professional courses for the university’s internal students. This set off a series of bitter controversies regarding the character of the university itself, whether it was a minority institution or a national institution subject to the general rules of admission and administration. Efforts to give the university a facelift were also impeded by internal fissures and violence.

The author tries to present the AMU story in the context of the mind of Muslims in India. This approach has also allowed the powers-to-be to restrict the university from achieving its potential. The absence of internal critique, the weakest link in our institutional life, also prevents AMU from acquiring the autonomy it deserves. It is significant, therefore, that the historian Irfan Habib, one of AMU’s brightest stars since the 1950s, has also been the most trenchant critic of forces and practices that have restricted its growth. The author, also a historian, represents another such critic; he does not allow AMU the latitude of the dreamy-eyed alumnus. To the historian, AMU was from the start more or less a mere provincial university set up in a non-metropolitan region and perpetuating a mediocre academic life.

One may differ with this assessment, but the author provides all of us, through the story of AMU, the space to reflect on our own academic institutional life, which at the moment is a matter of great concern.

The reviewer is Associate Professor, Centre for Media Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU