Lessons from Aligarh

Let’s hark back 150 years, a time when Hindu and Muslim ‘sipahis’ collectively rose up against their colonial masters.

This week in India, Aligarh and Gujarat have been loosely tied in a bond of sorts, and a vast interplay of characters including Sir Syed Ahmed, Muhammed Ali Jinnah and Narendra Modi have something or the other to do with it.

Let’s hark back 150 years or so, to a time when Hindu and Muslim ‘sipahis’ collectively rose up against their colonial masters and in defence of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1857. The British pejoratively dubbed the uprising as a revolt, an insurrection, or simply the Mutiny, while newly freed India, 100 years later, in keeping with the newly nationalist fervour, described it as its first war of independence.

No matter. It’s the impact of the uprising that we’re interested in. The first among men, Sir Syed Ahmed was so affected by the end of the Mughal empire and, consequently, the end of Muslim pre-eminence at the court in Delhi, that his book, Asbab-e-baghawat-e-Hind, was at once an outcry and a search for more realistic solutions. Sir Syed realised that modern education, which inculcated in the British a practical and even strategic outlook, was missing from the curriculum of India’s Muslims. Thus was born the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College in Aligarh, patterned after Oxford and Cambridge, which, in 1920, grew into a full-fledged university, the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). The AMU’s first vice-chancellor was female.

This week in the AMU, for the first time in its hoary history, women students contested for all the posts of the AMU Students Union (AMUSU). All three lost — but not without a fight.

Asma Jawed, a research scholar in the Department of Hindi, contesting for the post of president, said: “I had expected this… if the men win, the women are not going to get any help”.

The 1857 events had, in fact, also deeply impacted a group of learned Islamic theologians. Led by Maulana Qasim Nanautawi, they decided that the end of the Mughal empire didn’t have to mean the end to the correct teaching of Hanafi Islam and the preservation of Indo-Islamic culture. The Maulana and his friends found space in a small town called Deoband, in the heart of northern India. The Darul-ul-uloom seminary was born in 1866, barely a decade before Sir Syed’s beloved college in Aligarh and hardly a 100 kilometres away.

Addressing the AMU in 1944, the redoubtable Jinnah said, “No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you… It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the house as prisoners.”

This week in India, only a few days before women contested the AMUSU elections for the first time in its 126-year-old history, the Deoband seminary elected a new head, or ‘mohtamin’, after the previous head died of old age. The new man’s name is Maulana Ghulam Mohammed Vastanavi, he hails from a village in Gujarat, he holds an MBA degree and has a Facebook page devoted to him.

Vastanavi immediately plunged himself and Deoband into controversy, saying “there was no discrimination against the minorities” in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, and that it was time “to move on,” a reference to the anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002.

Considering Deoband forbids women students from contesting elections, as they have just done in the AMU, a new ferment is, once again, afoot in India. Just like it was in 1857.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd,  2011.