Partition's First Generation

Space, Place, and Identity in Muslim South Asia

Amber H. Abbas

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780755635412
• eBook ISBN: 9781350142671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College (MAO), that became the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 1920 drew the Muslim elite into its orbit and was a key site of a distinctively Muslim nationalism. Located in New Dehli, the historic centre of Muslim rule, it was home to many leading intellectuals and reformers in the years leading up to Indian independence. During partition it was a hub of pro-Pakistan activism. The graduates who came of age during the anti-colonial struggle in India settled throughout the subcontinent after the Partition. They carried with them the particular experiences, values and histories that had defined their lives as Aligarh students in a self-consciously Muslim environment, surrounded by a non-Muslim majority. This new archive of oral history narratives from seventy former AMU students reveals histories of partition as yet unheard. In contrast to existing studies, these stories lead across the boundaries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Partition in AMU is not defined by international borders and migrations but by alienation from the safety of familiar places. The book reframes Partition to draw attention to the ways individuals experienced ongoing changes associated with "partitioning"-the process through which familiar spaces and places became strange and sometimes threatening-and they highlight specific, never-before-studied sites of disturbance distant from the borders.

1

Defining the Aligarh Muslim University

From portraits in nearly every room at AMU, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) gazes down on the institution that he founded, and his presence sometimes feels as material as that of its current administrators. Though long dead, his reputation as a thinker and a reformer has persisted, and is nearly unassailable in the minds of those associated with AMU. He represents a legacy of Muslim empowerment, and whatever difficulties the Muslim community may have faced are attributed to a failure to uphold the ideals he proclaimed. Sir Sayyid’s idea for the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (MAO), founded in 1875 (that became AMU in 1920), was to groom a generation of Muslims who “would be in a position to do good to their country”¹ through attention to “knowledge, skills and values necessary to qualify them for public leadership.”² The college was to be a residential environment where students lived together as brothers and learned to interact and organize themselves in preparation for their lives beyond the confines of the campus. Sir Sayyid’s gaze is an ever-present reminder of AMU’s ideal Muslim: faithful, educated, generous, masculine, and cosmopolitan.

Former student and retired professor of English Asloob Ahmad Ansari told me, “I think he was the greatest benefactor of the Muslims in the last several years, or centuries I should say.”³ Ansari’s memory instinctively drew Sir Sayyid into the present, for the passage of time has not diminished his importance. In Ansari’s memory, the period of Sir Sayyid’s leadership and the values he represented were not distant in time, but occurred “in the last several years.” This contemporaneity fortifies the link between AMU now and AMU then; it is the thread through which the traditions of the past remain relevant for Aligs in the present. University students, faculty, and administrators are constantly measured against the ideals of Sir Sayyid’s vision. Alumni—known as “Aligarh Old Boys,” even if they are women—throughout the world seek to sustain his legacy through their financial and ideological support of AMU, and through creating new institutions that mimic its values.⁴ Branches of the Old Boys’ Association exist anywhere there is a presence of Aligs worldwide, though they are only loosely connected to one another. Zakir Ali Khan, who was general secretary of the Aligarh Old Boys’ Association-Pakistan from 1960 until his death in 2012, explained to me that the goals of the association were “exactly what Sir Sayyid has taught us: to establish educational institutions, to impart education, to make education available to those who cannot afford to pay.”⁵ The Association in Pakistan founded the Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology and the Association in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has purchased land for a similar, though otherwise unrelated, project. The world over, Aligarh Old Boys gather to celebrate Sir Sayyid Day, on the founder’s birthday, October 17, with food, fellowship, and recitations of poetry. Sir Sayyid’s symbolic presence unifies Aligs across time and space, and is a benevolent but constant force in the lives of students, administrators, alumni, and “well-wishers” of the university.⁶

Through an exploration of AMU’s founding, this chapter argues that the identity that draws AMU students together was a distinct product of the late nineteenth-century colonial experience. It was heavily influenced by the personality, priorities, and symbolic valence of Sir Sayyid himself. From its earliest days, environment of the university instilled in young Muslim students a sense of solidarity backed by a late Victorian, and distinctly Muslim, masculine identity.⁷ The enclosed environment of the MAO College proved to be fertile ground for cultivating Sir Sayyid’s ideas of Muslim manhood, as the residential institution trained boys for public life.⁸ The values on which the institution was founded combined the priorities of British schools and universities, especially Cambridge and Oxford, with those of elite Muslim households like the one in which Sir Sayyid grew up. The outcome was the creation of a set of norms of comportment and hospitality, erudition, and faithfulness that came to represent the Aligarh ideal, but codified the particular expectations of the late Victorian colonial experience. To Aligs, these values appeared timeless, and continued to represent the ideal values of the institution throughout the period under study here (1935–50). The residential campus environment bred an elite masculinity and cultivated men who would be prepared to represent Muslims as a body in the British colonial establishment.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the formalization of British power and the influence of technologies of enumeration, like the census, caused religious communities to identify themselves politically in ways they never had before. The census served to mask the internal diversity of encompassing categories like “Muslim” and “Hindu,” which aligned with British sensibilities about “great faiths” of the world (led, of course, by Christianity).⁹ Sir Sayyid’s quest to develop an Indian Muslim identity was part of a mission to develop and advance Muslim interests by resisting the certain political marginalization of a demographic minority. His goal was to resist the outcome that the 1873 census suggested: that Indian Muslims would be a permanent minority in the subcontinent and thus alienated from power. Rather, he sought to associate Muslims with the ruling establishment. To enjoin Muslims to his agenda, Sir Sayyid invoked the history of Muslim power in the subcontinent, but mobilized a narrative of decline that urged Muslims to work together to restore the social status they enjoyed before the British took power. Over a long period of time, from the 1860s to the 1930s, just such a narrative was used again and again to rally Muslims to the institution’s causes and to rally the institution to the causes of India’s Muslims.

The institution’s identity was closely associated with the norms of the North Indian service elite, Sir Sayyid’s own community. Despite compelling evidence to the contrary—that is, that the student body was always complex and heterogeneous—the residential model facilitated a narrative of similarity and solidarity that has remained sacred to Aligs, who have sought to protect it and therefore to protect the founder’s legacy. The residential environment defined an enclosed campus in which young men, removed from their family homes, shared the experience of training for public life. While Sir Sayyid’s vision was bound to the contours of the colonial establishment, by the 1930s, when the anti-colonial movement was well underway, AMU’s priority of Muslim unity became a cornerstone of Muslim political empowerment. By 1940, the All-India Muslim League focused on Muslim solidarity in its demand for independent statehood on the principle that Muslims constituted a unique nation within India. AMU students were key actors in generating enthusiasm for a Muslim homeland called “Pakistan”—thus inextricably linking the worlds of education and politics at AMU.

The Founder’s Context

Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan emerged as a prominent reformer in the late nineteenth century. He was a mid-level colonial officer, serving in Bijnor, who gained recognition for his loyalty during and after the uprising against British power in 1857. The events of the 1857 rising—that culminated with the British exile of the last of the Mughal emperors to Burma—highlighted for Sayyid Ahmad the vulnerability of the Muslim position. He set about trying to rehabilitate Muslims who, as a whole, he felt were in a state of decline. In his view, the mighty ruling class that had yielded formidable kings and dominated the subcontinent in part or in whole since the early thirteenth century had descended into a low ebb in its civilizational history because of complacency and declining attention to the principles of respectable or ashraf culture. Sir Sayyid’s efforts relied on this perception of decay, of “relative deprivation” that became essential to the identity students took on at AMU.¹⁰

The perception of deprivation spurred a shoring up of elite Muslim values in the period after the 1857 Revolt, and Sir Sayyid used it to generate support for his reformist religious and educational ideas. This consolidation fed a homogenizing narrative that privileged the Muslim elite of North India as the hereditary leaders of Indian Muslims, but risked excluding others who did not fit into this narrow identity. There are aspects of Sir Sayyid’s perspective that scholars have been willing to ascribe to “his time and place,” including his conservative ideas on educating women outside the home.¹¹ Less examined, however, has been the influence of this elite narrative of unity on the attitude of exceptionalism that developed within AMU. Sir Sayyid’s ideals have been seen as progressive within the AMU community, and indeed he resisted the prevailing anxieties of his time, particularly with regard to Muslim reluctance to pursue Western education. Still, they were in part determined by his unwavering loyalty to British power and the fear that any hint of disloyalty would lead to the permanent marginalization of Muslims in India. These two narratives were interwoven in the institutional environment of AMU, where it has become difficult to separate the value of his educational mission and the dangers of his political prejudices.

Sayyid Ahmad Khan was in many ways well-suited to his role as a culture broker between the Muslim service gentry and the growing British colonial establishment. In the late nineteenth century, both classes were coming to terms with shifting realities of power.¹² He enjoyed the high status of the Delhi ashraf—those families who claimed heritage outside the subcontinent and who were considered respectable—and his family had a long association with both the Mughal court and the British bureaucracy.

Sayyid Ahmad was raised in the home of his maternal grandfather and had been trained in the subjects of a traditional Indian Muslim education; he knew Persian, Urdu, and Arabic. His grandfather, Khwaja Fariduddin Ahmad, had been vazir (prime minister) in the court of the Mughal emperor, Akbar Shah II (r. 1806–37), and also served as a British-appointed envoy to Persia and as its agent in Burma.¹³ In addition, Khwaja Fariduddin was a pious Muslim, devoted to Shah Ghulam Ali, a pir (saint) of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. Sayyid Ahmad later credited both his mother and his maternal grandfather with shaping his cosmopolitan sensibilities. Though he was a prominent follower of the Muslim reformer Shah Wali Ullah, he participated in a variety of religious festivals and commemorations, including that of Holi, the Hindu festival of color.¹⁴ This distinctly Indian upbringing, characterized by overlapping cultural and religious experiences, prepared him for his critical role in guiding his contemporaries through a process of adaptation to their altered circumstances after 1857 as the British heaped blame for the uprising on the Muslims, India’s former ruling class.

What has traditionally been called the “Mutiny” of 1857 plays a pivotal role in most histories of AMU. In the collective memory, this history tells of the devastation of Muslims and their communities—especially of Delhi and Lucknow—of the erosion of Muslim social status, the usurpation of land and the alienation of landholders.¹⁵ For Indians, and for Muslims in particular, the uprising of 1857 has taken on the valence of a national trauma, because it permanently disrupted the institutions of Muslim power, represented by the moribund Mughal imperium based in Delhi.¹⁶ Disruptions to everyday life, such as 1857 (and later, partition), become, in the collective memory, moments of coherence for a moral community and provide “a close link between self-identity and national identity.”¹⁷ For the Muslim elite, 1857 provided the impetus for the formation of a concept of a unified Muslim identity closely linked to the intellectual leadership of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, and embodied in the institution he founded in Aligarh.

The 1857 Revolt was an uprising of Hindu and Muslim soldiers who feared that the British were trying to “take away their caste and convert them forcibly to Christianity.”¹⁸ Discontent over wages and the expansion of British power into daily life had been spreading in the armies of the East India Company for decades, but the trigger for the revolt was a rumor that cartridges for the new Enfield rifle were greased with a combination of beef and pork fat that, if ingested, would strip one of caste.¹⁹ Since the soldier had to pull the cartridge from its case using his teeth, he would certainly ingest the grease and it would pollute, and thus destroy, his caste.²⁰ Thus alienated from his community, a man would be vulnerable to forced conversion to Christianity. This controversy erupted at a time of increasing suspicion of the British in the East Indian Company Bengal Army, and the uprising quickly spread from Meerut across North India.²¹ In the end, however, the mutineers—who had installed the ailing Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their leader—were subdued and the British regained control.²² Many Indians and Pakistanis imagine it as a foundational event in a narrative of anti-colonial resistance by remembering the event today as “the First War of Independence.” This reframing was first suggested by V. D. Savarkar in his 1909 publication, The Indian War of Independence of 1857, in which he advanced a triumphal narrative of resistance that de-emphasized the cartridge controversy (among others) as a mere catalyst that roused the “real spirit of the Revolution”: love of religion and love of country.²³ It is not at all clear that the mutineers had a consolidated objective as Savarkar implies. Furthermore, it is critical to remember that the Indians lost this First War of Independence. As a starting point for a history of solidarity, it is a foreboding one.²⁴ Considering Savarkar’s own efforts to foreground Hinduness in Indian identity, it is ironic that Muslims, even in today’s India and Pakistan, have adopted his framework. However, it is not the actual uprising of 1857 that marks the beginning of the period of Muslim regeneration. In the AMU version—in contrast to the Indian nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Defining the Aligarh Muslim University
• 2 Self-Realization and the Nation: AMU Student Activism
• 3 Pushing the Boundaries: Partitioning and Aligarh Muslim University
• 4 The Muslim Question in India after Partition
• 5 Muslimness and Pakistan
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: The Babri Masjid, AMU, and Indian Muslims
• Appendix of All Interviews—Alphabetical by Narrator
• Notes
• Interviews Cited
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright