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November 23, 2003
The well-trodden path
What did Aligarh train its students to do with their lives after they left college? David Lelyveld explains
Sending students into the outside world was the business of Aligarh College. Plans broached by Sayyid Mahmud in 1873 and T. W. Arnold in 1889 for creating a community of scholars were ignored and sometimes explicitly rejected. A major impetus for founding the college was the changing criteria for government employment and professional occupations, and this surely had much to do with the college’s success in recruiting students. It is true that Sayyid Ahmad and the young men of Cambridge who taught at Aligarh might sometimes denigrate the standard route of English education in India — the route to law and government service, as opposed to entrepreneurship or voluntary public service to the qaum — but they were not prepared to scrap the university curriculum and degrees required for admission to that well-trodden path.
Forays in some other direction — a preparation class for the engineering school at Roorkee, horsemanship, and “drill” to enhance martial aspirations associated with being Muslim — all came to nothing. On the contrary, government employment was an explicit inducement for students to live according to the college ethos and win the approval of their teachers; it was also part of the rationale for the Brotherhood’s effort to extend student solidarity beyond the college years.
The routes to an occupational career for former students of the college ranged from personal patronage in the princely states to popular political agitation in the context of newly developing institutions of representative government. But a majority of former Aligarh students for whom there is information became employees of the British government, and the next largest category were lawyers practising before British courts.
As in the princely states, there was scope in the British government for personal patronage: one was qualified by nomination for admission to certain examinations, provided one had the requisite educational credentials. District collectors and, in some cases, college principals did the nominating. And there were some posts recruited by simple appointment. Formal bureaucratic rules probably constricted the influence of personal connections much more than in the princely states, but there was great continuity from the kacahri milieu of the previous generation despite the alteration in educational qualifications and relative elaboration of government structures.
The question is, was it different to be a tehsildar, sarishtadar, or vakil after being a student at Aligarh and in a world of changing political institutions and ideologies?
If there was a difference, it was probably not so much in the administrative role as in the other aspects of people’s lives. British regulations forbade membership by government servants in explicitly political organizations, and it was more difficult than in Sayyid Ahmad’s day to lead an independent public life while holding a government job.
Posts like High Court Judge and Deputy Collector were extremely tempting, and Sayyid Ahmad had done his share of launching favoured students, such as his nephew Sayyid Muhammad Ali, on prestigious careers; but it was only by resignation or retirement that they had an opportunity.to be of much service to the Aligarh cause. Akbar Allahabadi’s comment on the later careers of Aligarh’s graduates was that all the brave talk about future leaders yielded very little of importance:
What words of mine can tell the deeds of men like these, our nation’s pride?
They got their BA, took employment, drew their pensions, and then died.
In 1914 Tufail Ahmad published a two-volume Urdu Directory of former school and college students of Aligarh. The project was an old one; nineteen years earlier he had compiled a similar, though much less thorough version. The 1895 directory limited itself to individuals who had been students for a substantial period of time. The 1914 version attempted to include all former students, even those who had been registered for a single day.
From the old registration books, Tufail Ahmad managed to gather 5,924 names, of whom 1,070 were current students as of 1911. But the effort to track down information on residence, occupation, and activities for former students yielded disappointing results. Confining the analysis to students who entered college level classes between 1877 and 1900, one discovers 924 names, but information on later careers for only 592...
Two-thirds of the former students for whom there is information were government employees, 334 for the British and 64 for princely states. Government employment, however, embraced a multitude of occupational activities and a good many differences as to recruitment, status, tenure, and renumeration. Among those with professional qualifications, 6 of the 7 doctors and all 10 engineers were government servants; of the 144 lawyers, 34 were either judges or government leaders; and 31 of the 48 teachers worked in government schools. A large number achieved high posts in land revenue administration, ranging from naib-tehsildar to Deputy Collector; except in princely states, the highest posts were the preserve of British members of the Indian Civil Service. Only two Aligarh alumni held posts comparable to the ICS; one was a judge of the Allahabad High Court, and the other a member of the Statutory Civil Service, a joint Magistrate... With the possible exception of one lieutenant surgeon in the army, Aligarh education failed to deliver much in the way of “glittering uniforms”.
Sayyid Ahmad fully understood the challenge of this competing concept of Indian society, but Aligarh was hardly in a position to control the flow of events in India as a whole. The ideal of a cosmopolitan empire rapidly lost ground in Britain as well as in India: too many people saw it as a disguise for exploitation. What then were the former students of Aligarh to make of the idea so powerfully inculcated in them that being Muslim entailed a special relationship to the political order?
The concepts of Muslims as a qaum justified such aspirations in terms of inherited culture and even biology: Muslims had peculiar moral attributes that made them a ruling people. The concept of Muslims as an ummah, the community of believers, entitled Muslims to rule because they had accepted God’s revelations. Neither view was compatible with the idea of a nation-state, particularly in a society where Muslims were a relatively small and powerless minority. If India were to be thought of as a whole, a political identity conceived in terms of Muslims as a ruling class would eventually lead to exclusion and even oppression.
Against this there could be several lines of defence: to reach out beyond India to the international community of Islam in the hopes of creating a new world empire; to lie low and quietly hope to convert the people of India to the acceptance of God’s word; or in some way, as part of an Indian confederation or independent of India altogether, to create a separate territorial entity just for Muslims.
Otherwise Muslims would have to accept a political role that claimed something less than dominance, or even redefine their Muslim identity so as to divorce it from the realm of politics.
Ever since Sayyid Ahmad started his movement to found a special educational establishment for Indian Muslims, Aligarh has summoned up in both friend and foe an image of Muslim participation — as Muslims — in India’s new political institutions. A large part of Aligarh’s significance, its meaning, lies in this image and in the imaginations of those who created it, quite aside from any assessment of how influential they were in the society at large.
But even such a cultural account must go beyond the realm of pure ideas into an examination of social experience, the experience of Aligarh’s founders and first students, for example, in order to understand how being Muslim could be so salient as a political identity.
It was conceivable, of course, that “the lines of cleavage”, as Muhammad Ali called them, could have been construed on some other basis than those that were posited on the category “Muslim”. In the twentieth century, Indian nationalists called, on the one hand, for a political identity based on a sense of Indian nationality, and, on the other, for a social system built on competing class interests. There were efforts to project some of the features of sharif culture on to a “national culture of India”, a democratic extension of the cosmopolitan Mughal heritage.
Similarly, it was possible to interpret the kacahri milieu in terms of class consciousness. Aligarh students were sufficiently homogeneous from the point of view of class analysis; their economic motivations were not particularly disguised.
Did loyalty to “the Muslim community” inhibit the consolidation of class awareness? Or did it stimulate the ability to transcend narrow interests in the direction of more universal sympathies? No simple answer is ready to hand, for different people acted together or in opposition according to a complicated variety of motivations, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes conflicting.
Despite the wishes of Sayyid Ahmad, Aligarh students did not represent a united phalanx, and the tensions among them reveal inconsistencies at the heart of the Aligarh movement. For some, recalling the conflicts of old Union debates, identity as Muslims stood in opposition to ideas of sharafat and impelled them to a solicitude for the vast multitude of Muslims, who were in fact poor peasants and artisans — and women.
The belief that political power was their destiny encouraged some to join forces with the nationalist movement against British rule, and later Aligarh generations were to include notable advocates of Indian socialism. Jawaharlal Nehru said of Aligarh College that “a feudal spirit reigned over it, and the goal of the average student was government service”. Others portrayed Aligarh’s first generation as a rising bourgeoisie. Such interpretations indicate, at least, the transitional role of Aligarh’s students, the complexity and conflict of motivations that their experience embodied.
Meanwhile, being Muslim continued to be crucially important in the formation of political loyalties. Not all Muslim “separatism” was Aligarh’s doing. Much of it was a response to how the British government defined political constituencies in India. A good deal was defence against anti-Muslim actions on the part of various political and religious groups. Even among Muslims, there were many important sources of leadership outside of Aligarh. Nevertheless, Aligarh was frequently the focus of efforts to formulate a new Muslim political consciousness. Nehru complained that the college failed to inspire its students with the kind of intellectual struggle that forces people to break out of the mold of past categories of thought, to develop new sensibilities and different social loyalties. For a nationalist and a socialist, the ideology that Aligarh stood for served only to frustrate a multitude of glorious aspirations.
For many, religious Muslims as well as Indian nationalists, Muslim identity as construed at Aligarh seemed shallow: by oversimplifying the compatibility of this identity with the institutions of a large scale, plural society, the founders and alumni of the college failed to discover the basis of a new social order or the full inspiration of an ancient ideal.
What they did discover, however, was something of immense emotional power, a reaffirmation in a world of changing circumstances of the bond between religious and family feelings as a basis for political solidarity. In the face of colonial domination and new institutions of social competition, such solidarity could inspire considerable devotion as an end in itself.
Excerpted with permission from
Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India
By David Lelyveld
Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Available with Oxford University Press, Plot # 38, Sector 15, Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi
Tel: 111-693-673
Email: ouppak@theoffice.net
Website: www.oup.com.pk
ISBN 0-19-566667-4
380pp. Rs524
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