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Review: Situating Sayyid Ahmad

Khan in the Turmoil of His Times


A new book helps us understand the political and theological ferment in
late 19th century India which left its imprint on the life and work of the
educationist who founded Aligarh Muslim University.

Sayyid Ahmad Khan

Hamid Ansari

BOOKS
24/MAR/2019

Institutions of higher learning the world over express gratitude to their


founders and benefactors, each in ways that are inextricably linked to its
origin and history. Sometimes this gratitude is expressed in writings that
are targeted to, and lapped up by, alumni; but some of these can also
have wider relevance. The Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad
Khan, edited by Yasmin Saikia and M. Raisur Rahman, falls in the latter
category. The reason can be traced in aspects of modern history of the
Indian Sub-Continent, the spread of modern education, and its impact on
the Muslim communities.

Present-day India and generations of alumni testify in gratitude to Sayyid


Ahmad Khan’s work. The AMU fraternity today is truly global; its bonds
of affinity are reaffirmed year by year. Yet, many are not aware of the
lesser known but equally fascinating aspects of Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s
persona. A glimpse of these is given in the chapters in this volume on his
views on religion and science and on Delhi’s monuments; they would be
of use to many readers.

Yasmin Saikia and M. Raisur Rahman (eds), The Cambridge Companion To Sayyid
Ahmad Khan. (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

1857 is etched in our memory as the year of the First War of Indian
Independence. That heroic struggle failed and the British dominance over
the subcontinent was formalised. Fewer people associate 1857 with a
decision of the British governor-general, on a recommendation made a
few years earlier by Sir Charles Wood, to formally introduce English
education in areas under its control. Its purpose was professedly altruistic
and unabashedly selfish: ‘to increase moral character in the Indian’s
mind and thus supply the company with civil servants who can be trusted
upon.’

The January 1857 decision led to the establishment of universities, on the


model of the University of London, at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.
Others followed some years later – Punjab in 1892 and Allahabad in
1887. Alongside and with the emergence of a class of Indians who
acquired modern education and saw its benefits in gainful employment,
colleges for modern education were established as adjuncts to social
reform movements in different communities. In this process, the Muslims
lagged behind, with all its attendant consequences.

This awareness of educational backwardness, in the wake of the harsh


treatment meted out to Muslims by the British administration following
the events of 1857, propelled Sayyid Ahmad Khan to focus on modern
education. A first step was the establishment in 1866 of a Scientific
Society to make available to his audience translations of some writings
on modern science.

After his visit to England in 1869, he started a journal, Tahzib ul


Akhlaq, to persuade Muslims to come out of the medieval groove and
imbibe new education. This was followed by the establishment of MAO
College in 1877 based, as he put it, ‘on the combined wishes and united
efforts of a whole community’ and ‘on the principles of toleration and
progress.’ He emphasised the critical importance of higher education and
asserted that ‘as long as in our community such people are not produced,
we will remain low (zalil), we will remain below others, and we will not
attain such honour as our heart wishes to attain.’

MAO College became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. It is


mentioned in the Union List of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution
of India as among the ‘institutions of national importance.’ Many of its
departments of studies have attained excellence, so have many eminent
scholars. It has a credible record in extra-curricular activities. Non-
conformists too have graced the campus from time to time; frowned upon
but not in university hostels.

The editors of this volume have done well to include essays on different
aspects of the socio-economic and intellectual challenges that confronted
Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The situational task did not admit of delay. He had
an acute perception that his community was out of step with the times
politically (in relation to the new rulers of the land) and economically
(lacking requisite qualifications for the job market). Underlying both was
an approach to tradition and religious dogma and the need, in his view, to
segregate the essential from the non-essential to enable the community to
develop a constructive view on modernity. He concluded that neither
could be neglected. His theological views and the resulting gap between
tradition and modernity, however, were totally out of step with orthodox
opinion in his own community. It was therefore made to take a backseat
to job-oriented education and, to use David Lelyveld’s words, ‘pay due
respect to the received pieties.’

The college he founded refrained from teaching and publishing his views
and elicited from a generation later the historian Mohammad Mujeeb’s
harsh judgment that ‘the higher values were discarded for the lower’ and
‘exchanged for the infinite spaces of religious and moral obligation; the
reconstruction of the social and economic life of a whole community
were sacrificed to secure recruitment in the lower grades of government
service for the sons of a few hundred Muslim families.’

Could he have done differently in the politico-theological turmoil of his


times? The record of later Muslim reformers in India and elsewhere does
not seem to suggest so.

Sayyid Ahmad Khan adjusted to the imperatives of his times and


prioritised. The college (and the university that followed) consciously
defined its reach in its initial stages and acquired an elite mindset. The
community was taken to mean the upper crust, the so-called ashraf. The
same was his approach to women’s education, as expressed in his 1882
testimony before the Indian Education Commission. The lingering
impact of the latter, despite phenomenal changes since, lingers to this day
and is borne out by data on education, workforce participation and social
mobility.

Neither the college nor its founder lived in isolation from other
happenings in colonial India. The impulses then being generated sought
answers; Sayyid Ahmad responded in terms of his priorities. A later
generation would read meanings into this, and seek to mould political
opinion around it. Neither do justice to the founder and his single-minded
purpose.

What remains undone, or inadequately done, is Sayyid Ahmad’s


unfinished agenda of Islamic modernity, to think what Mohammad
Arkoun termed the ‘un-thought and the unthinkable’ and to re-visualise
in the 21st century his wider challenge of modernity premised on
toleration and progress. These are important ingredients in our approach
to accommodation of diversity in India’s societal make up; they also
present a relevant model for a globalising world. Challenges do remain;
but these have to be faced not in insularity but in greater involvement.

Hamid Ansari was vice president of India.

Join The Discussion

CASTE

Interview | 'But You Don’t Look like


a Dalit': Yashica Dutt on 'Coming
Out as Dalit'
The author talks about her memoir, shedding her secret, and how a wave of
Dalit assertion in art, music and culture could change the game for a new
generation.
Yashicha Dutt. Credit: Calvin Tso Admerasia
Mahtab Alam
465
interactions

BOOKS

CASTE
24/MAR/2019
In the wake of Rohith Vemula’s suicide, New-York based
journalist Yashica Dutt decided to reveal what she had hidden for years –
her whole life – the fact that she is Dalit. Ever since her ‘coming out’ as
a Dalit, she has faced varying reactions, the most common being, ‘Oh,
but you don’t look like a Dalit’.

Dutt has now written a memoir about growing up in a Dalit family, and
the compulsions of hiding her caste while others flaunted theirs for social
capital. Her book, Coming Out As Dalit is not just her personal story, but
a commentary on the experience of being a Dalit in today’s India.

Excerpts from the interview:

Your memoir is not just your story, but also a commentary on what
has been happening to Dalits at large. Was this meant to give it
context or was it, to use your own phrase, to avoid ‘the danger of the
single narrative’?

Including the stories of other Dalits, but doing that with data, facts and
research, was a deliberate choice. I’ve been a journalist all my life. So
the idea of just writing my own story was odd for me. I never wanted this
book to just be about my world.

In many ways, for me, this book is the natural extension of my


Tumblr, Documents of Dalit Discrimination. I started that to challenge the
mainstream narrative of Dalits, and I wanted to continue that challenge
with the book. But I also didn’t want to simply ‘scream into the void’. I
wanted to do it so undeniably (with the facts and research) so the
arguments couldn’t be ignored.

After coming out as Dalit, you’ve received comments like, “Oh, but
you don’t look like a Dalit”. How did that feel?

That was the most common response. It was also one of the reasons I was
excited to see how people would react. The truth is that I don’t ‘look like
a Dalit’ – the kind of Dalit we are used to seeing in media, cinema, pop-
culture (when we see them at all). But that doesn’t change the fact that
Dalits – around all 250 million of us – don’t look the same.

Also Read: Review: ‘Landless’ Disrupts the Popular Understanding of


Caste and Land Relations

Not all of us live in rural areas, just like not all of us live in the cities. I
can look, present, react, respond in any way I want and none of those
things make me (or anyone else) any less of a Dalit or my Dalitness any
less valid. This is the real danger of the single narrative. It perpetuates
this false idea that Dalits only have to be a certain type of person, i.e.
possibly uneducated or unable to speak English, possibly rural and
possibly at the receiving end of horrible discrimination and violence.
That in order to, somewhat, justify affirmative action or reservations, we
need to look downtrodden. Only then will society agree to acknowledge
the thousands of years of systemic injustice that’s been inflicted on us.

In order to, somewhat, justify affirmative action or reservations, we need


to look downtrodden.

Also, by not looking ‘Dalit’ as the mainstream view demands, I openly


affront ideas of vanity and how it’s only reserved for only ‘upper’ caste
people. There are many examples where Dalits are punished for showing
off wealth, vanity or confidence – the most recent being when a young
Dalit man was beaten up for growing a moustache. So, among the
reasons that I was described as non-Dalit was also because I challenged
that idea of Dalits not speaking in English, not being urban, not being
confident almost directly.

How does class enter the picture? How do you see the
intersectionality of caste, class and gender, especially in the Indian
context?

Class is extremely crucial when discussing caste. Dalits, and Dalit


women in particular, who are at the bottom end of the intersection of
caste and class are amongst the most vulnerable and susceptible to
discrimination and abuse.
As I’ve discussed in one of my chapters, Dalit women who clean
bathrooms (dry ones being the most offensive) or carry human excrement
in loosely knit bamboo baskets on their heads do so because often they
have no other choice. Those who work in fields or as day-labourers are
often subjected to sexual harassment because of both their class and caste
– based on the appalling idea that Dalit women are somehow sexually
available and, in a sense, ‘upper’ caste men have some sort of right to
assault them. But it is also their class that makes them more vulnerable to
that exploitation, leaving them no choice but to return to the same
workplace where they face that assault.

Yashica Dutt
Coming Out As Dalit: A Memoir
Aleph Book Company

Even in Rohith Vemula’s story, his class was among the biggest
deterrents along with his caste. Because of their class position, Radhika
Vemula had to take up multiple odd jobs to put her children through
school and college. Rohith also had many such jobs to support himself.
Hyderabad University was aware of his situation and still wielded their
power over his fellowship money to stop him from questioning their
policies.

Even in death, his fellowship money, which was his only source of
income and which he had also not received for several months at the
time, was among his biggest concerns (something he mentioned in his
last letter). Our lower class leaves us defenceless against discrimination.
Escaping that does not stop the discrimination, but it does give us the
ways and means to navigate that more easily. Which is why the
affirmative action policy of reservation is still so critical for Dalits. It is
one of the few lifelines that help us transcend class, and escape the
heinous conditions of our caste-based professions.

How difficult was it to write about the domestic violence your mother
experienced? Why was it important for you to write about it?

It has been one of the largest, most present realities of my existence since
I was a child. Along with a keen understanding of my caste, I also grew
up extremely aware of the vulnerability of my mother, whom I always
considered to be an exceptionally strong person. The contradiction that
someone like that could still be treated this way, and be helpless about it,
shaped how I understood the world around me.

It also made aware that often choice cannot surpass our circumstances,
especially if those circumstances belong to a Dalit woman with three
children and a family who doesn’t necessarily share her ambition for her
daughters.

As a result, I grew up wanting and learning to push back against her kind
of helplessness. I also learned to be fiercely protective of her. The fact
that she endured what she did just to send her two daughters to good
schools and give them a life that was in no way lesser than her son’s has
been the driving force behind most of my decisions.

It certainly wasn’t easy to write about it, especially because I had to keep
revisiting that trauma with each edit and every rewrite (there were four).
But I had to do it because my mother and her unwillingness to
compromise with my education and freedoms allowed me to become the
person who could grow up and write this book. Also, as I was discarding
my shame around caste and even my lower class, I also gained pride in
my mother’s struggle, in her resilience and grit and her endless resolve to
somehow never give up.

Also Read: To Be or Not to Be a ‘Dalit’?

I also wanted to make a larger point about patriarchy and misogyny and
how it didn’t magically disappear just because we were Dalit. Especially
in Rajasthan, which has among the worst records of killing female
foetuses, patriarchal attitudes can be especially noxious and my mother
was all the worse for it.

A lot of the physical violence she endured was as a result of her failing to
fall in line, her refusal to mutely agree to the decisions of the men in her
family and her demands for equality for her daughters. I was writing a
book about how Dalit lives look in hiding and the violence my mother
faced was a dark reality that lurked in those same shadows.

While writing about open caste discrimination in vernacular media,


you write that “even English newsrooms which, from my experience,
stick to a ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy, are no less of a minefield for
a Dalit journalist.” Was this drawn from a specific experience?

I didn’t come out as Dalit until I moved to New York. I never covered
politics or took an interest in writing anything political when I was
working in Delhi because I was worried that I might write a story or
express an opinion that might reveal my caste. While I didn’t experience
this personally, but several reports I read (and have cited in the book)
discuss the discomfort of Dalit journalists with their ‘upper’ caste peers
in newsrooms ganging up against reservation, whether in journalism
institutes like IIMC or ACJ or other universities and colleges.

Those who were open about their caste talked about being pigeonholed to
the ‘caste beat’ and the lack of opportunities for them to rise through the
editorial ranks. Which makes sense, since we don’t know of many (any)
Dalit senior editors or editor-in-chiefs so far. Too many ‘caste
stories’ get them branded as rebels who are difficult to manage. But even
though caste might not an open question in English newsrooms, like with
me, caste is still being consistently evaluated.

Give us your take on the new wave of Dalit assertion, especially by


young people —in the field of politics, media, cinema, literature and
music?

When I grew up as a Dalit child hiding my caste, there was nothing


around that signalled that people like me existed. We had prominent
political figures and Ambedkar of course, but mainstream discourse or
pop-culture only validated ‘upper’ caste images.

Also Read: So the Term ‘Dalit’ Can’t Be Used But ‘Brahmin’ and 6,000
Other Caste Names Can

I find it hard to recall a single instance where someone claimed pride in


being Dalit. Which is why when I saw Dalit pop star Ginni Mahi flexing
her arms to the camera while calling herself a ‘Danger Chamar’ in the
YouTube video of her wildly famous hit, it was so radically game-
changing. Even though I watched it sometime in 2016, by which time I
had declared my Dalit identity to the world, that one act of reclaiming
self-worth in the word ‘Chamar’ was so profoundly empowering. And
that was just one video.

Now, we have so many bright, wonderful and inspiring examples of Dalit


pride that it has – in my opinion – somewhat shifted the popular
discourse on Dalits. I was recently asked if the Dalit identity has
suddenly become ‘cool’. The fact that that is even a question indicates
the small but significant change that’s happened since Dalits began
openly asserting themselves, without any shame, guilt or self-pity. We
now have Dalit directors, actors, musicians and academics who are
claiming their rightful place in the country’s history and culture.
And they are doing so while challenging our notions of what it means to
be, act and look like a Dalit. I can only imagine how hugely empowering
it must for Dalit children who are growing up watching these images of
Dalit assertion, pride and self-worth. And that it gives them hope
knowing people like us, like them, exist.

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