From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh 9780195693232

Table of contents :
acprof-9780195693232-miscMatter-1
Title Pages
Mushirul Hasan
Title Pages
(p.i) From Pluralism to Separatism (p.iii) From Pluralism to Separatism
Title Pages
acprof-9780195693232-miscMatter-4
Dedication
Mushirul Hasan
Dedication
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-1
Introduction
Mushirul Hasan
Introduction
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
I
The Rural in the Urban: Situating a District
Introduction
Introduction
II
Qasba in History
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
III
The Synthesis
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
IV
Pluralism at Work
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
V
The Qasbas Come Alive
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
VI
The Other Face of Qasbati Living
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
VII
Introduction
The Legacies
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Notes:
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-2
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Mushirul Hasan
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
I
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
II
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
III
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
IV
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
V
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Notes:
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-3
A Family Saga
Mushirul Hasan
A Family Saga
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
I
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
II
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
III
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
(p.102) IV
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
Notes:
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
A Family Saga
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-4
In Allah’s Own Country
Mushirul Hasan
In Allah’s Own Country
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
I
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
(p.134) II
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
III
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
IV
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
V
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
Notes:
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
In Allah’s Own Country
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-5
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Mushirul Hasan
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
I
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
II
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
III
IV
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Notes:
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-6
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Mushirul Hasan
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
(p.213) I
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
II
On River Gomti’s Bank
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
III
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Notes:
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-7
In the Shadow of Partition
Mushirul Hasan
In the Shadow of Partition
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
I
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
(p.260) II
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
III
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
(p.273) IV
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
Notes:
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
In the Shadow of Partition
acprof-9780195693232-chapter-8
Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune
Mushirul Hasan
Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune
Mushirul Hasan
Abstract and Keywords
Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune
Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune
Notes:
acprof-9780195693232-appendix-1
(p.282) Appendix
Mushirul Hasan
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
(p.282) Appendix
acprof-9780195693232-bibliography-1
(p.295) Bibliography
Mushirul Hasan
(p.295) Bibliography
Private Papers
(p.295) Bibliography
Unpublished Government Records
(p.296) Official Reports
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
Published Speeches, Writings, and Correspondences
(p.295) Bibliography
Bibliographies, Glossary, and Dictionaries
Newspapers and Journals [English]
Journals [Urdu]
(p.295) Bibliography
Dissertations/Theses
Books/Articles [English]
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
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(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
Books and Articles [Urdu]
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
(p.295) Bibliography
acprof-9780195693232-miscMatter-7
(p.314) Glossary
Mushirul Hasan
(p.314) Glossary
(p.314) Glossary
(p.314) Glossary
(p.314) Glossary
(p.314) Glossary
(p.314) Glossary
(p.314) Glossary
(p.314) Glossary
acprof-9780195693232-indexList-1
(p.319) Index of Place Names
Mushirul Hasan
(p.319) Index of Place Names
(p.319) Index of Place Names
(p.319) Index of Place Names
(p.319) Index of Place Names
(p.319) Index of Place Names
acprof-9780195693232-indexList-2
(p.323) General Index
Mushirul Hasan
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index
(p.323) General Index

Citation preview

Title Pages

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i) From Pluralism to Separatism (p.iii) From Pluralism to Separatism (p.ii)

(p.iv) YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France  Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland

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Title Pages Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India By Oxford University Press, New Delhi © Oxford University Press, 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 Oxford India Paperbacks 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 13: 978-0-19-569323-2 ISBN 10: 0-19-569323-X Typeset in Adobe Garamond, 11/13 By Eleven Arts, Keshav Puram, Delhi 110 035 Printed in India at Pauls Press, New Delhi 110 020 Published Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001

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Dedication

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

Dedication (p.v) To my father Professor Mohibbul Hasan, a quintessential qasbati scholar (p.vi)

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Introduction

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

Introduction Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords This book explores the history of the Kidwais, a small but well-known family in Awadh who lived in a little village called Masauli and its neighbouring areas in Bara Banki district in the United Provinces. It focuses on the pluralism and multiculturalism that defined the family’s public and private lives, as well as the nature and strength of the social ties that have united them and the social effects of these ties. The book situates Wilayat Ali Kidwai (1885–1918) and his family in the qasbas, where literature, music, and poetry flourished and the fusion of cultures took place. It also examines the communal aspect of qasba life, together with its manifestations in religion, fairs, rituals and festivities, intercommunity relations, and the routines of daily life. Finally, it explains the impact of popular culture on assimilative thought and liberal convictions, focusing on ‘composite culture’ and ‘pluralism’. Keywords:   Kidwais, Bara Banki district, composite culture, pluralism, Wilayat Ali Kidwai, qasbas, United Provinces, Masauli, Awadh, social ties

What is surprising [here] is not that the history of the [French] Revolution, like most histories, involves intellectual presuppositions. There is no such thing as ‘innocent’ historical interpretation, and written history is itself located in history, indeed is history, the product of an inherently unstable relationship between the present and the past, a merging of the particular mind with the vast field of its potential topics of study in the past. But if all history implies a choice, a preference within the range of what might be studied, it does not follow that such a choice always involves a preconceived opinion about the subject chosen. For that to happen, or to Page 1 of 51

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Introduction be assumed, the subject must arouse in the historian and his public a capacity for identifying with political or religious passions that have survived the passing of time [emphasis added]. Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1981). If I had had the good sense, I would not have embarked on this journey. Writing this monograph risked frustration simply because a study of this nature is not yet the mainstay of historical writings in South Asia. One can trace one’s ancestors, find family trees, and locate manuals for family historians—all under one roof at the Public Record Office in London. Such resources provide an impetus to the writing of family histories (p.2) in the West. The same sources, plentifully available in the archives, libraries, and private collections in South Asia, have scarcely been utilized.1 Though some family histories have been written in India,2 major interest in them will develop only by modifying the history curricula in light of the comment that ‘without social history, economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible’.3 Biographies of prominent political and business families exist, yet their lives, besides being viewed as an integrated and cohesive whole over time and space, are rarely situated in relation to the changing social and cultural landscape.4 It is therefore difficult to trace their responses to multiple social and cultural streams, their social linkages, their cultural constructs, and their engagement with the wider world of politics, business, and the professions. Ideally, one would like to enter the world of the family, weave the fabric of each passing age, and see how it affected each individual and (p.3) group. As G.M. Trevelyan (b. 1876) pointed out decades ago, one would like to know more, in some respects, than the dwellers in the past themselves knew about the conditions that enveloped and controlled their lives.5 Edward Said (1935–2003) pointed out how, in the global panorama of cultures, not all peoples were endowed with an equal right to narration and representation. In our own time, post-modernist narratives on South Asia have overshadowed the histories of secular nationalism, while its ideals have been obscured or distorted by majoritarian perspectives. What struck me while writing the biography of Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari (1880–1936) over a decade ago was how liberal ideologies among Muslims scarcely figure in nationalist writings,6 and how their inputs into the making of a secular polity have vanished into the mists of history. That history deserves a new telling, for it has not been invoked in the broader debate over identity issues, and over the birth, rise, and decline of Indian nationalism.

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Introduction Doubtless, the Congress Muslims themselves remained divided over the nature of their collective identity and the role they should play as an organized political group. Their weaknesses and shortcomings should not be evaded or ignored, but should rather be identified and situated in a wider comparative framework. It remains to be seen whether this exercise will ever take place, and whether the outcome will be greater acceptance and inclusion, in history textbooks, of the existence of secular ideologies amongst Muslims. This notwithstanding, I pierce these mists to recapitulate, in the words of Fernand Braudel, a history of the brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations in the life of the Kidwais (Qidwais), a small but well known family in Awadh. They lived in the little village of Masauli and its neighbouring areas in Bara Banki district in the United Provinces (hereafter UP),7 notably Gadia (p.4) (they had migrated from Rasauli in the latter half of the nineteenth century), Baragaon, Bhayara, Rasauli, Juggaur, Faizabad, Unao, Rae Bareli, and Hardoi. Without cloistering themselves from the outside world to which, on the contrary, they were often wide open, they developed links with the Sheikhs in Sitapur district: Mahmudabad, Bilehra, Bhatwamau, Jahangirabad, Gopamau, and Mahewa. They forged matrimonial ties with the Sheikhs in Bijnor as well as with the Saiyyids in Bansa, two and a half miles from the Baragaon crossing on the Gonda road and twenty-eight miles from Lucknow. A substantial number of Muslims in the Mughal service class belonged to these qasbas. Yet, the family historian points out, an ‘innumerable number of Kidwais clan [sic] have been lost in history, and considerable numbers, who are not Kidwais, got themselves known as Kidwais’.8 I write on the Masauli Kidwais not to validate the view that history is the essence of innumerable biographies, but because of the contribution of those whose lives I study to highlight the pluralism which is the defining principle of their public and private lives. The Masauli Kidwais are shown here in action in different spheres of activity. Moreover, I explore the nature and strength of the social ties that have united them, not only in the direct line of descent but also with collateral branches, and examine the social effects of these ties. This exploration is linked with the manner in which the Masauli Kidwais were connected with the village, the province, and the nation as a consequence of political and administrative mutations, and personal initiative and enterprise. With the aim of writing a social-family history, my first objective is to situate Wilayat Ali Kidwai (1885–1918) and his family in the qasbas, the chief arena of cultural and social activities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is where life was ‘lived’. This is where poetry, literature, and music flourished, and the fusion of cultures took place.9 (p.5) My second objective is to scrutinize the communal aspect of qasba life, together with its manifestations in rituals, in religion, in fairs, melas and festivities, in inter-community relations, and in the routines of daily life. In so doing, one engages with the everyday in the specific setting of the qasbas. A third object is to emphasize how popular Page 3 of 51

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Introduction culture formed an important background to and produced a favourable environment for the steady but often contested emergence of assimilative thought and liberal convictions. I deal with the particular and the specific, rather than with the generalities of ‘composite culture’ and ‘pluralism’. My fourth and final objective is to recover an important fragment of Awadh’s historical past, a past gradually fading into oblivion. Before sketching in full the outlines of my argument, however, let us situate the Bara Banki district and its people in a regional context, and lay bare the contours of qasba living.

I The Rural in the Urban: Situating a District Sarsari is jahaan se guzre Warna har jahan-e deegar tha Casually did you pass through life? Every place did, otherwise, have a life of its own.

[Mir Taqi Mir: 1733–1814] This book also constitutes a social history of a ‘locality’ in Awadh. And because recent histories of the localities are still, for the most part, unwritten, I invoke a fragment of Bara Banki’s past, primarily for those who share my fascination with the subtleties of its culture and literary life. Bara Banki, ‘a well wooded richly cultivated plain, greatly interspersed with villages and hamlets’,10 was a place of great antiquity.11 It formed a (p.6) centre from which seven other districts radiated (Table 1). It comprised four tahsils:12 Nawabganj,13 Fatehpur, founded either in 1321 or 1444; Ramsanehighat, the largest tahsil of the four that made up the district of Bara Banki; and Haidergarh, founded in 1787 by a senior official of Asaf-ud-Daula (r. 1775–97), the Awadh Nawab. Sometimes revenue surveys, first begun in 1862, led to the demarcation and adjustment of territorial boundaries in the pargana and tahsil limits.14 A map of 1863 delineates the boundaries for the four tahsils— Rudauli, a qasba known far and wide with the epithet ‘genteel’ (Sharif) attached to it, Dariabad, Nawabganj, and Ramnagar—and the pargana in each tahsil. The same map indicates the villages transferred from one pargana to another.15 The Bara Banki district had 2,068 villages and 3,170 mahals (which denoted the individuality of estates held under a separate revenue arrangement) covering an area of 1,757 sq. miles. At the close of the regular settlement in 1870, it was enlarged to the extent of one-third by adding several parganas from Dewa, Kursi, Bhatauli, Siddhaur, Haidergarh, and Subeha.16 On the right bank of the Ghagra river—the district’s northeastern boundary—lay Rudauli, Dariabad (Daryabad), Bhado Sarai, Ramnagar and Bhitauli parganas, held by the Maharaja of Kapurthala in permanent settlement, together with some villages in

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Introduction the Muhammadpur pargana. (p.7) The Gomti, separating the Haidergarh and Subeha parganas from the rest, flowed through the south of the district. Though horse-drawn carriages and their variants remained the chief mode of travel for the well-off sections, most places were linked in new ways by the changes in transportation, bridges, and the 122 miles of metalled roads in the 1870s. Feeder roads, the expanding railway network, and the nine railway stations boosted trade, commerce, agriculture, and enabled contact between people who had not previously had any. This inevitably expanded their circle of identification beyond the bounds of the qasba. The broad gauge railway between Lucknow and Faizabad cities opened in 1872; it ran through two-thirds of the district. The meter gauge line from Lucknow to Gonda and Gorakhpur started in 1898. In short, situated between Lucknow and Faizabad and traversed by two railways, Bara Banki enjoyed exceptional advantages with regard to commercialization and markets. To some extent, the district as a whole was now exposed to new ways of life and new ideas that would in time fracture traditional relationships and impinge on the lives of numerous families. The number of taluqdari estates in 1871 was forty-three (Table 2), the largest in any other district in UP. Of them, Muslims held twenty-three,17 the most important being the Rajas of Mahmudabad, Jahangirabad, Bilehra, Gadia, and Satrikh.18 The total number of villages held by each taluqdar, (p.8) either in whole or in part, was 1,158. At the time of the 1899 settlement report, there were fifty-nine taluqdari estates, together comprising nearly half the area. Small proprietors were also numerous. Coparcenary bodies held one-third of the district, while, in addition, eight per cent was sub-settled. With some notable exceptions, the taluqdars were not very prosperous, prompting the Court of Wards to perform a rescue operation.19 The small Muslim and Thakur coparcenary bodies remained mostly indebted, becoming increasingly impoverished owing to the subdivision of land.20 While the principal holders of the zamindari tenures were Saiyyids, Sheikhzadas, Brahmans, and Thakurs, the Kurmis held the majority of pattidaris, and the Thakurs were, as pukhtidars, holders of sub-settlements. Dominant in the Ramnagar, Haraha, and Surajpur estates,21 their lives proceeded slowly, at a pace set by the reins of caste traditions. In 1882, the enumerators’ schedule contained, for the first time, a column for the entry of religion. It was then discovered that the Muslims in Awadh amounted to 12.59 per cent of the population. Of these, 97 per cent were Sunnis. The Shias were concentrated mainly in the Allahabad and Lucknow divisions;22 yet, ‘the Shia religion is the more fashionable, and more richly endowed … and the ex-royal family and the greater part of the higher classes among the Muhammadan community (p.9) belong to it’.23 In the late nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of the Saiyyids (many of them Shias) lived

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Introduction in the Lucknow district, another 12 per cent in Faizabad. Bara Banki, too, had Saiyyids living in the Nawabganj tahsil, and in Haidergarh.24 Out of Bara Banki district’s total population in 1869 (see Table 3 for parganawise population by religion and occupation), there were 748,061 Hindus to 127, 315 Muslims; the former 85.4 per cent, the latter only 14.5 per cent. Bara Banki, thus, had the largest percentage of Muslims, next to Lucknow.25 At the 1901 Census, Muslims numbered 16.91 per cent, a very high proportion indeed, exceeded only by Lucknow and Bahraich. Yet, ‘although Hindus predominate (including various Rajput clans) to a very large extent, it is perhaps a matter for surprise that the Musalmans are not even more numerous, when we consider how much of the land is, and for many years has been, in the hands of great Muhammadan landlords’.26

II Qasba in History

In his preface to the Urdu translation of Maasir al-Ikram, a cultural and literary history of Bilgram, Maulvi Abdul Haq (1870–1961), the leading Urdu scholar, underlined the uniqueness of the qasbas in terms of their culture, their high moral order, and their inhabitant’s uncomplicated lifestyle. He also contrasted them with the chicanery, hypocrisy, and competitive spirit afflicting urban centres. He hoped that historians would emulate the author of the work, Mir Ghulam Ali Azad Bilgrami (1705–85), and write about places like Panipat, Budaun, Khairabad (in Akbar’s time the headquarters of a sarkar in the province of Awadh), Amethi, Mohan, and Sirhind.27 (p.10) Although clusters around centres of Muslim power developed in different areas,28 it is difficult to say when the word qasba occurs first in IndoPersian texts. In a document dated 1495, the local Lodi governor instructs ‘the officials of qasba Bindard (?) in the khitta (district) of Sambhal’ with regard to the land in a village Andmur (?), which lay within the bounds of that qasba. Here qasba could have meant both a township and the subdistrict under it. Again, a farman of Babur (1483–1530) mentions Qazi Husain, judge of the luminous Sharia of ‘the qasba of Mathura’. A farman of the same year, that is, 1527, concerns a land grant in ‘village Auhadpur, belonging to the tappa (sub-division) of the headquarters (haveli) under the qasba of Fatehpur Sandi’. Fatehpur Sandi, near Bilgram, was the pargana headquarters. The sense of qasba is, again, that of township and subdistrict. Professor Irfan Habib and Professor Shireen Moosvi add: ‘Later in the sixteenth century the use of the word pargana for the district and qasba for a township becomes distinct and separate, though the word pargana too appears in Persian texts as early as fourteenth century.’ Thus, Akbar’s Regent, Bairam Khan’s order of 1558–59 concerns a grant of land in the environs (suwad) of qasba Payag (Prayag) and village Basri within the said pargana. In fact, the use of the word qasba for township in the historical texts of Page 6 of 51

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Introduction Akbar’s reign (1556–1605) is quite general. Abdul Qadir Budauni, author of Muntakhabu’t Tawarikh, refers to ‘the qasba of Indri, under Karnal’, from where Akbar summoned Sheikh Abdu’n Nabi to become his Chief Sadr in 1562–64. Similarly, he refers in Nijatu’r Rashid (1591) to the qasba of Tulkamba (near Multan). In Tabaqat-e Akbari written in 1592, Nizamuddin Ahmad, the author, records that Akbar’s empire contained 120 big cities and 3,200 qasbas, each of the latter having under it from a hundred to a thousand villages. (p.11) Here the primary sense of qasba is township, but the earlier sense of a qasba being the seat of a subdistrict (pargana) is still implied.29 The term ‘qasba’ has no English equivalent. The Ghiyasul Lughat, a Persian dictionary compiled by Ghiyasuddin at Rampur in 1826–27, defines ‘qasaba’ (a spelling also adopted in the Persian-English dictionary by F. Steingass) as ‘small town, or large village; also reed, and everything [tubular] like a reed, such as the breathing tube’. Citing three dictionaries, one of them being the Farhang-e Rashidi compiled by Abdur Rashid of Tatta (Sind) in 1653–54, he admonishes that to speak and pronounce the word as ‘qasba’ is wrong.30 Ali Akbar Dehkhuda’s Lughat-nama, published in Tehran, uses Ghiyasul Lughat’s spelling, defining qasba as ‘a place bigger than a village and smaller than a city’. It refers to a ‘qasaba’ forming part of a division in Tehran’s township.31 Wilson’s glossary fixed the limits of a qasba as ‘a small town or large village, the chief or market-town of a district’; Steingass’s dictionary defined a ‘qasaba’ as ‘a large village, a small town well established; a township’.32 The settlement reports of the 1860s and 70s make frequent references to qasbas.33 In his report of Rae Bareli, Major Macandrew observed that ‘there are no towns in the district unless Roy Bareilly be termed one; but I think the rank of “Kusbah” is as much as could be assigned to it’. He described ‘Kasbah’ as ‘something between a village and a town’.34 A judgement relating to rights in ‘Kasbah’ Amethi observed the following: It would take a great deal of clear proof to convince this court that the zemindari title of any one individual or family to the lands of a metropolis kasbah was ever acknowledged. A kasbah is a Muslim settlement in a defensible military position, generally in the site of an ancient Hindu headquarters town or port, where, for (p.12) mutual protection, the Mussulmans who had over-run and seized the proprietary rights of the surrounding villages resided, where the foujdar and his troops, the parganah kanungo and chaudhuri, the m’afti, the kazi, and high dignitaries lived, and as must be the case, where the wealth and power of the Moslem sect was collected in one spot, a large settlement of Syuds, mosques, dargas, & C., sprung up. As a rule there was but little land attached, and that was chiefly planted with fruit groves and held free of rent, whilst each Page 7 of 51

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Introduction man really had a freehold of the yard, i.e. of his house and the land occupied by his servants and followers and so the assertion became fact that each man of note was a zemindar of his holding.35 F.E.A. Chamier, who completed his first regular settlement of the Bara Banki district on 1 March 1870, added: Without doubt many will be found to be owners of land within the village site who do not possess an orchard or a biswa of land outside it, but the reverse of this would only be found where the owner of the grove or cultivated land has subsequently obtained a footing in the kasbah by mortgage or purchase.36 Thus Amroha, described by Ibn Battuta (1304–78), the fourteenth-century Moorish geographer and historian, as ‘a small and beautiful city’,37 boasts the ruins of a fort constructed during Shah Jahan’s reign (1628–58). Its biographers take pride in the mosques, the madaris, the Idgah (place where the community gathers for the Id prayers) constructed in 1764, and the dargahs of Saiyyid Sharfuddin Shah Vilayat, Mirza Qazi Saiyyid Abdul Latif, and Sheikh Abdul Majid.38 Bilgram, a pargana in the sarkar of Kanauj during the Mughal rule, also attained eminence for the same reasons.39 One of its foremost Sufis, Sheikh Abdul Majid, indulged in ecstatic exercises, sang songs in Hindi, and fell into trances. But, added (p.13) the contemporary historian of Akbar, ‘he is now past all this’.40 Gopamau, a pargana in the Khairabad sarkar under the Mughals, had a long list of learned men. Qazi Mubarak, the disciple of Sheikh Nizamuddin of Amethi, was one of them. Many settled in Gopamau to study under him.41 Finally, Rudauli, a qasba at a distance of about 38 miles from Bara Banki, was the home of prominent Sufis, notably Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Haq (d. 1434), or Makhdoom Saheb. As is the case with malfuzat (utterances of Sufis) literature, a number of stories, some apocryphal, are associated with him.42 Abdul Quddus Gangohi (1456–1537), a Sufi of the Sabiri order, asked Babur to exempt the ulama, the imams, and the weak from ushr (land tax).43 The Delhi Sultans, the Mughals, and their successors paid heed to such pleas. Consequently, madad-e maash (literally: aid for subsistence) holdings in Awadh stretched over more than two to three bighas,44 while the grantee’s influence and power extended to two or three parganas.45 Revenue-free holdings were also substantial in other areas, and encompassed the trustees of the Sufi shrines.46 The Sajjada-nashin at the Khanqah-e Karimia Salon in Rae Bareli district possessed fifty-two villages either in maafi (revenue-free) or zamindari rights. Besides being endowed with ‘spiritual prowess’ and ‘hidden mystic qualities’, they specialized in the ‘copied’ subjects, Koran and hadis (manqulat) as well as the subjects which are the products of man’s reasoning (maqulat). Some other grantees, on (p.14) the other hand, defied imperial orders by retaining the land granted to them from one generation to another. They Page 8 of 51

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Introduction acquired zamindari rights and, as in the case of Muhammad Ahmad in Bahraich in the late seventeenth century, sold and leased out their lands.47 This tendency intensified during the eighteenth century.48 When the government controlled the countryside firmly, the political role of the Sufi leader was more limited than it had been, but where such control was weak or lacking, he could still head a dissident movement.49 The historian C.A. Bayly has enlarged our understanding of the history of towns, giving it a perspective it earlier lacked.50 Other historians examine how the cityand town-based merchants operated in the qasbas through local shopkeepers or their own agents, how artisans and cultivators disposed of their produce at established qasbas and periodic markets, and how movement of some artisans from individual villages to such places began from the early nineteenth century. Here they used imported iron to make tips for ploughs and parts of sugarcane presses and carts. Here, too, raw sugar, grain, piece goods, and other village produce from surrounding communities were sold to local shopkeepers and agents of moneylenders. The qasba merchants frequently functioned as moneylenders for the ilaqa as well.51 The following three separate but closely interrelated points deserve consideration. First, ashraf (the gentry, or ‘high-born’ families)—soldiers, administrators, scholars, theologians, and Sufis—lived in qasbas not as socially unified communities, though often bound together by tight marriage partnerships, but as aggregates of sub-communities. The steep social hierarchy came to be ever more dominated by a landed aristocracy endowed with feudal powers, while at the bottom masses of peasants struggled wretchedly close to the limits of physical survival. Indeed, qasba (p.15) society comprised not only the leisured classes, but also the ajlaf (the low-born). They included peasants, landless labourers, dhuniyas or cotton-cleaners, julahas or weavers, ghosis or milkmen, kunjras or greengrocers, manihars or glass bangle makers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, traditional singers at various festivities,52 hajjams or barbers,53 kasais or butchers, darzis or tailors, rangrezes or dyers.54 Descendants of lowcaste Hindus who had embraced Islam, they lived at the physical and cultural margins of the ashraf they served. However, this study does not purport to examine their role or analyze their economic and social standing in qasba society. Rather, it is a case-based analysis of those who controlled the levers of power and authority in the rural hinterland.55 The taluqdars and their dependants constituted the ‘rulers’: they owned roughly two-thirds of the land. Their pre-eminence, largely a product of the colonial ruler’s tenurial arrangements, started with the award of taluqdari sanads in 1859 by the governor-general, Canning (1811–79). Law courts and district boards fortified their position.56 Though economic condition varied, the very well-to-do wielded power and authority in the locality. Often, they called to their

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Introduction aid a promise given by the government in 1866 that their tenants would not be given occupancy rights. Second, unlike the tahsil or pargana, the qasba was less of ‘a geographical (p. 16) expression’ and more of a cultural and religious unit with a clear IndoPersian identity—one with widely shared and recognized cultural traits and patterned behaviour.57 Even without a rigid administrative division, the qasba people pointedly mentioned the sharp divide between them and their watan (homeland) on the one hand, and the city and its inhabitants on the other. They found city life drab and individualistic compared to the espirit de corps and romance of the qasba. Taking pride in being quicker in mind and more literate, writers of tazkiras or local histories emphasized the qasbas’ high culture, and their cultural and social homogeneity that led to the flowering of architecture, music, poetry, and learning.58 In their mental construct qasba is something more: the nursery of ideas and social forces, the seeds of which were doubtless sown much earlier.59 It conveyed, as does Amir Ahmad Alvi Kakorvi’s travelogue, the sense of one’s real watan or homeland, the attachment to it heightened by travelling to even a sacred but distant place like Mecca or Medina.60 Others mourned their bad fortune when individual or family circumstances forced them to leave the cradle of their birth. This was true of the learned men of Bilgram, who attached ‘Bilgram’ to their name to indicate their close and irrevocable bonding with their qasba. Wherever they settled, they emphasized their ‘Bilgrami’ identity, and kept alive their qasba’s traditions in everyday life. They ate their traditional food—qorma (a mutton dish), mash ki khitchri (a combination of lentils and rice), and rasawal (a sweet dish cooked with rice and sugarcane juice), and popularized their qasba’s cuisine.61 As part of exaltating the qasba, city life in general came to be vilified. Importantly, the Farangi Mahalis (those belonging to the once-renowned theological seminary), though Lucknow-based for generations, rarely claimed to be Lakhnavis. With Sihalwi (in Bara Banki district), the qasba, (p.17) firmly embedded in their mental universe, they extolled its values, social mores, and traditions.62 Their loyalty found expression in many forms. Not the least eloquent was that they would even take their dead from Lucknow and bury them in the quietness of the qasba graveyard. The city dwellers poured scorn on the qasbati identity, equating it with rusticity and boorishness. But for the qasba historian or poet the qasbati identity conveyed special meanings. It reflected an awareness of the cultural uniqueness of a specifically local domain, though it centred on the relationship of dependence on and loyalty to the authority in Delhi, Faizabad (which was the capital of the Awadh Nawabs for a while), or Lucknow. Here and there there were a few champions of city life, speaking in the spirit of Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), the Lucknow-based novelist, journalist, and essayist but these were isolated voices. The qasba ethos prevailed as a vibrant cultural symbol and Page 10 of 51

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Introduction its protagonists succeeded in identifying its rural, pioneering worldview with a cultural renaissance. That is why any history of the qasba should, up to a point, set its ethos in a distinctly cultural context.63 In a sense, this is my case for picking out the entire ‘seamless web of history’ that qasba ethos represented through the lives of certain individuals, to place them under a microscope, and to write about them in a way comprehensible to both the specialist and general reader. The last point is the essence of our argument. The Mughal empire’s decline made some qasbas the involuntary heirs of the once-powerful Indo-Persian culture, whose gifts they were to pass on in one direction or another. This is contrary to the oft-repeated colonial representation of them as centres of ‘gang robbery’ and other crimes, or as colonial outposts, or dark backwaters. Indeed, the qasbas were not only not insulated from knowledge but had close links with the more dynamic sectors of society in the sprawling urban centres. The historian David Lelyveld has shown that 54 per cent of the students in M.A.O. College between 1875 and 1895 came from places ‘distinctly rural, old fortresses now torn down or small market centres’. (p.18) Barbara Metcalf discusses the networks that tied members of important religious families of the qasbas of the upper Doab, including Deoband, Kandhlah, Nanautah, and Gangoh, described by the settlement officer as ‘a hot bed of Wahabeeism [Wahhabis]’,64 and Thana Bhawan, the site of a revolt during September 1857. She points to Delhi’s ulama leaving their beloved city thereafter in favour of the qasbas in which many of them had their roots. Deoband, Saharanpur, Kandhlah, Gangoh, and Bareilly were the places they chose.65 The city came to be seen as an oasis in a wilderness and the city wall as the bulwark of culture against the surrounding barbarism; nevertheless, rajas and taluqdars, Sufis, theologians, poets, writers, and administrators thronged to the qasbas to recreate a world in their own image. Nourished by a fertile popular imagination and forging a link with the wider world, they formulated ideas that the urban middle classes, with their literacy and intellectualism, sometimes made their own. This was especially so when members of the declining landed gentry began moving out of places seeking better opportunities. Emigration of this kind was quite common. One man left the qasba and sent home, or came home with, considerable riches; another followed his example, and yet another. The Bilgram Saiyyids ventured as far as the village Koath in Shahabad district, Bihar, taking advantage of the goodwill enjoyed by their ancestor Saiyyid Nurul Husain Bilgrami. The Saiyyid, having sided with the British after the battle of Buxar in 1764, received land with annual revenue amounting to two lakhs. In 1915, the lieutenant governor of Bihar and Orissa described the Bilgramis of Koath as ‘the most influential members in the locality, well educated and holding some public functions and appointments under Government’.66 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other qualified men secured Page 11 of 51

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Introduction employment in Rampur, Bhopal, Jaora in the Malwa Agency of Central India, Hyderabad, and Baroda. Saiyyid Hosain Bilgrami (1844–1926) entered Salar Jung’s service in 1873, (p.19) and then served as private secretary to the Nizam himself. The gifts of his younger brother Saiyyid Ali Bilgrami (d. 1911) were more varied. Besides his work at Hyderabad as Collector and then Secretary in the department of public works, mines and railways, his proficiency in Sanskrit was testified to by his appointment as an examiner in Sanskrit by the Madras University. In England, the University of Cambridge elected him a Reader in Marathi. He returned to India in 1909 and, after staying in Hyderabad for some time, he settled in Hardoi. The father of Munshi Sajjad Husain (1856–1915), the Kakori-born and Canning College-educated editor of Awadh Punch, retired as chief justice in Hyderabad. Mohamed Ali (1878–1931) entered the service of Gaekwar Sayaji Rao (1875– 1936) in 1909, who regarded him as someone on whose shoulders he could place the burden of administrative work—the man who got papers drawn up, orders sent out, correspondence carried on, and records kept. Mohamed Ali’s friend Saiyyid Mahfuz Ali (1870–1943) went to Khairpur, Sind, as assistant judge. Many compatriots of Prince Hamidullah Khan (1894–1960) at Aligarh ended up serving the Bhopal State. In the words of one of his admirers, ‘his habits and his ideas of social equality … were in every respect those of a common man.’67

III The Synthesis

Even though the more enterprising and talented chose to work outside the qasba in order to earn a livelihood and scale the social ladder, life could be lived away from the city, and the smaller the size of the habitat, the fuller the life. Though the educated stratum sometimes missed the hustle and bustle of urban life, they drew upon the widest choice of diverse traditions available in the immediate environs itself. These traditions, including Indar Sabha, or the assembly of Indra, the King of Fairies, and the theatrical representations of Krishna’s dance,68 were a central (p.20) element of popular entertainment. Saiyyid Agha Hasan ‘Amanat’ (1815/16–1858/59) had written the play in 1851–52: it was staged in Lucknow two years later. Indar Sabha was the first Urdu play to be performed in several Indian cities and the Awadh villages, the first to be published and reprinted in Urdu and reproduced in Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi scripts, and the first to be translated into German. In the twentieth century, songs from the Indar Sabha were among the first wax recordings made; several successful screen versions are known. The Indar Sabha is thus both a landmark in the canon of library history, and a foundational monument in the evolution of popular culture in South Asia.69 A receptive audience gathered at the venues in Rudauli, Sandila, and Dariabad to watch the theatrical spectacle.70 Maulvi Saiyyid Mazhar Ali’s diary refers to Indar Sabha being staged at the Taqi Miyan locality in Sandila, at Mir Abul Page 12 of 51

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Introduction Hasan’s wedding, and at Munshi Fazal Husain’s residence.71 Mushairas, too, generated enthusiasm, with the poet seeking inspiration from an audience that applauded and encouraged. In fact, they were the most common form of intellectual entertainment available in urban and semi-urban settings. In the absence of very many literary magazines, they enabled poets to disseminate their poetry, and to engage in intellectual and social intercourse.72 They, too, had a necessary association with popular (p.21) culture. Except for the ghazal, other genres in Urdu poetry employed local flora and fauna and other such details of descriptive reality. Nazir Akbarabadi (1739–1830) used—and other poets followed in his footsteps—the people’s idiom to express simple, natural sentiments.73 Clearly, popular, as opposed to scriptural Islam, influenced qasba life. This was expressed in milads (celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday), Muharram observances, the urs (the death anniversary of a saint), and fatiha (literally, ‘the opening’, the first chapter of the Koran). Even though politicians, religious reformers, and imperial administrators developed and broadcast a discourse centred on Islam as a universal faith rather than Islam practised in numberless congregations, religious beliefs in qasbas were diverse and sometimes even contrary to the fundamental texts of Islam. Indeed, a large part of the educated élite did not necessarily live within the bounds of the Sharia. Criminal and civil cases were, at any rate, decided according to British codes and procedures; the authority of the Sharia, and of the judges who dispensed it, was confined to matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Religious texts were constantly open to reinterpretation in different historical situations; hence the protracted controversies over religious endowments,74 and the sharp and strong clash of opposite views between the Deobandis and the Barelwis, among the Sufi orders, and between the Shias and Sunnis.75 The Prophet of Islam had recognized no social distinction among the believers, save that based on ‘piety’ and being ‘god-fearing’, but regional, social, and economic divisions rent the Muslim communities, with profound differences between city dwellers and villages. Bemoaning such divisions, the biographer of Nawab Nasiruddin Haider, (p.22) the Awadh ruler (1827–37), remarked: ‘Has not Allah himself declared “Men are the enemies of each other?”’ Equally striking were the bitter altercations over offerings (nazar) received from the devotees at Sufi shrines, and over succession (sajjada-nashini). At the shrine in Satrikh where the mujawirs or attendants, enjoyed 54 kuccha bighas free of revenue, there was generally a troublesome civil suit once a year over the distribution of offerings of Rs 150 to 200.76 In the early 1880s, Abdul Haq’s shrine in Rudauli was embroiled in a major row following the death of Shah Talib Ahmad, the sajjada-nashin, on 19 April 1883. The claimants were Raz Ahmad, grandson of the Shah, then eighteen years old, and Maqbul Ahmad (b. 1830), the Shah’s nephew. Contesting on the plea that ‘he [Maqbul] never laid out a pice Page 13 of 51

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Introduction towards the funeral expenses [of the Shah]’, Raz Ahmad petitioned that ‘the daily lighting of the dargah is, and has been, at the expense of your memorialist’.77 Lucknow’s commissioner upheld Raz Ahmad’s claim. Based on a uniquely ‘postmodernist’ blend of preconceptions and romantic veneration, the tendency among some scholars is to exalt the status of the shrines and the sajjada-nashin’s authority, maintaining the internal cohesion and continuity of the faithful. The inheritors of the Sufi legacy pretended, and perhaps some of them even believed, that they were the authoritative interlocutors of the Koranic message, the Sharia, and the Prophet’s traditions. But, of course, that was not the whole truth: the ideals of faith affected their conduct in some ways and not in others. Devotees may have known that the state of their pir’s morals fell short of the ideals of Sharia, and attributed their internal feuds—of which they disapproved—to watered-down spirituality and as impediments to spiritual unity. Social satirists, too, commented on the none-toopious life and attitudes of the Sufis, how charlatans and eccentrics, intoxicated by a collective delusion, found a safe refuge in khanqahs, and how the religious intelligentsia ‘humbly’ petitioned the government for the safeguarding of their rights and privileges. Invariably, piety was on its knees not before Allah or his Prophet but before Queen Victoria’s representatives. Here in Rudauli, as also at other centres of devotion, politics shaped Islam quite as much as Islam shaped politics. (p.23) It is hard to endorse the Orientalist view concerning Muslim city and Muslim town planning, according to which Islam conditions any phenomenon arising in the civilization of a Muslim country.78 I argue, nonetheless, that in order to delineate the contours of qasba life, it may be worth our while to keep in mind the Indo-Islamic dimensions.79 Just as Christianity played a fundamental part in developing the associational make-up of city life in Europe,80 so did Islam in the shaping of qasba ethos,81 stamping it with an individual impress that endured over an extended period, and created a shared common culture, a common order of life, and a common disposition of mind. Azad Bilgrami, who has left us with an important body of historical work, wrote that in Awadh and in the province of Allahabad there were, at every five or, at most, ten miles, settlements of high-ranking Muslim families who built mosques, schools, and seminaries. While students travelled from one place to another to pursue their studies, quite a few teachers from Lucknow and Bilgram, aided by such families, taught at the madaris in the Deccan.82 Abul Fazl (1551–1602), the court historian of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), described Bilgram as ‘a small town the air of which is healthy and its inhabitants are generally distinguished for their quick wit and their love of singing’.83 Aurangzeb (1658–1707) likened its Saiyyids to the wood used in the Masjid al-haram, which could neither be sold

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Introduction nor (p.24) used as fuel. His predecessor, Shah Jahan, used to say, ‘the eastern areas are the Shiraz of my empire’.84

IV Pluralism at Work

If Islam cemented the qasba structure, pluralism and syncretism were the bricks with which it was built. The self-image of a persecuted Muslim community and the consequent crystallization of an Islamic identity, the theme of a study by Sandria B. Freitag,85 were a latter-day construct. They were, moreover, the outcome of or related to the introduction and growth of representative institutions in urban centres, and did not impinge, at least until the 1920s, on the lives of the qasba people. In fact, Chris Bayly describes the rural and urban relations of Hindus and Muslims as a mirror image: Muslim landholders hired Hindu peasant labour on their land, whereas merchants and traders employed Muslim craftsmen. Neither society excluded altogether locally resident members of the minority faith and culture.86 Strident expressions of religious orthodoxies in the qasbas were minimal, not because religious stridency was replaced by ‘secularism’ but because formal religious structures were, in some cases, supplanted by local ties and networks that sustained quasi-legal institutions to settle disputes, exchange information, and share risks. One result of all this was the mutual interpenetrating of Sufi ethics and the Hindu way of life in village and qasba-based khanqahs rather than in large urban centres where Hindus and Muslims tended to lead more selfcentred, if not exclusive, lives.87 Coexistence, although at times marred by external interventions, became (p.25) the rule in qasba society. Quite remarkably for the times, Abdul Wahid (1510–1618) of Bilgram sought to reconcile Vaishnav symbols as well as the terms and ideas used in Hindu devotional songs with orthodox Muslim beliefs.88 Similar initiatives came to light in subsequent centuries. In the qasbas, more than in the urban centres, Hindus flocked in large numbers to the shrines on the day appointed to commemorate them, as well as on Thursday evenings. Though threatened by the emerging Hindu and Muslim revitalization campaigns in the 1860s and 70s,89 these assimilationist or pluralist forms of Islam were vividly expressed in the observance of religious festivals and other forms of social interaction. In Sandila, Maulvi Saiyyid Mazhar Ali celebrated Holi, Diwali, and Ram Lila with his best friends—Kunwar Durga Prasad (1846–1920), Kunwar Narinder Bahadur (d. 1905), Lalta Prasad, and Lachman Prasad. His diary, covering the period from 21 January 1867 to 24 December 1911, paints local society as a colourful kaleidoscope of cultural fusion and composite living.90 Saiyyid Ahmad Husain (d. 1933) held estates in Motikpur and Nirauli, and entrusted to Ram Prasad the responsibility of

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Introduction distributing langar (free food) during Muharram. Ram Prasad himself solemnly observed Muharram.91 The civil servant William Crooke (1869–96) refers to the orthodox Hindu castes worshipping the quintets of the Panch Pir, or famous local saints like Shah Madar (d. 1050) or Sakhi Sarwar.92 In the 1891 Census, 2,333,643, or 5.78 per cent of the total population, returned themselves as worshippers of Muslim saints in the North-Western Provinces and Awadh alone.93 Meer Hasan Ali, the British lady, reported from Lucknow in the 1830s, ‘Hindoos, even, on approaching the shrine, bow their heads with much solemn gravity;—I often fancied they mistook the Tazia for a (p.26) Bootkhanah (the house of an idol)’.94 Three decades later H.C. Irwin (1869–96), who retired as district judge, noted the presence of Hindus in Muharram processions, mentioned Muslim landlords contributing to the expenses of Hindu festivals, and described mutual tolerance as ‘one of the pleasantest features in the social aspects of the province’.95 Likewise, Charles Alfred Elliott (c.1856–93), who served in Unao, recorded: There is, indeed, a strong tendency among the followers of the Prophet to assimilate in all externals with their Hindu neighbours. In the matter of diet they are as scrupulous as any Brahmin. The dhoti is commonly worn by them, and the formula of Ram, Ram their ordinary mode of salutation. In short, the law which ordains that the greater body shall attract the less, or was till lately, is as full operation in Unao as it was in Eastern Bengal before the great neo-puritan revival which is stirring Islam to its depths had placed an impassable gulf between the professions of the rival creeds.96 Other details illustrate Muslim religious orientations being as diverse as the forms of organization. Elliott remarks that in matters of eating and drinking ‘they [the Rajput converts] are as particular about their caste as any Brahmin … . Almost all keep a pundit to fix the auspicious moment of commencing any enterprise, or foretell the nature of its result, and they believe firmly in his predictions’. According to Patrick Carnegy, commissioner of Faizabad and Rae Bareli (1861–74), ‘between the Khanzadas [converts] and Hindus almost no distinction can be drawn further than the former say their prayers in a mosque and cut their coats to open from the right. The Khanzadas refuse to eat beef; they plaster their fireplaces before cooking, and very generally use brazen vessels’.97 ‘Of bigoted Mussalman’, Bara Banki’s settlement officer conceded, ‘I have little personal knowledge; these men either stay at their own houses or keep their bigotry to themselves if in government service’.98 This simple observation says a lot about Awadh’s qasba life in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Introduction A devout Muslim told Meer Hasan Ali about the strong similarities (p.27) between his community and the Hindu population: ‘the out-of-door celebrations of marriage festivals, for instance, which are so nearly resembling each other, in the same classes of society, that scarcely any difference can be discovered by the common observer’.99 More than a century later, a leading scholar at Lucknow’s Nadwat al-ulama opined that the social life of India’s Muslims did not present any marked difference from the cultural norms and pattern around them. Distinctive features, customs, and manners, too, like those of their local compatriots, marked their culture.100 In other words, besides differences and distinctions there were also relationships and interactions. One of the underlying themes of this book is to argue that those relationships and interactions can, and to some extent should, be studied, because they tend to be so remarkable and influential in their own right. Today, the history of Islam in South Asia—the writing of which has always been peculiarly susceptible to the climate of current politics—demands a serious intellectual reassessment. The historian Aziz Ahmad (1913–78) refers to ‘the alternating and simultaneous processes of mutual attraction and repulsion’ in medieval Indian society.101 Steering clear of such generalizations, I suggest that the qasbas predisposed ashraf or families comprising the gentry to the rational and ethical dimensions of Islam, to the virtues of charity,102 tolerance, generosity, good-neighbourly conduct, and to those elements of piety that go into the making of the Perfect Man or Insan-e kamil. Without denying the existence of negative critiques or the wide gap between ideals and reality, I draw attention to one Weltanschauung of significance, the rationalist and humanist construction of Islam. To be educated in the second half of the nineteenth century meant to be steeped in those values, and promised dignity and advancement in life. Hence the comment that, presumably, alludes to such people, especially the aspiring intellectuals: ‘the Mussalmans of Oudh cannot, as a body, be accused of bigotry or intolerance’.103 This is corroborated by Meer Hasan Ali’s experience, in Lucknow, of being received without prejudice, and allowed to observe (p.28) her European habits and Christian faith.104 Some, if not all, the men who figure in her narrative thus became typical carriers of moral and ethical piety or akhuwat, in the qasbas. Hence the authors of nineteenth and twentieth-century tazkiras prided themselves on being the élite gazing self-consciously into the mirror of history, or historical fantasy. It is in order to illustrate the foregoing on a broad canvas that I draw upon the figure of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai (1894–1954). An observant Muslim, Rafi fasted during Ramadan and performed the taravi prayer after the evening meal. Attracted to the Islamic teachings of self-denial and self-abnegation, he did not wear religion on his sleeve. Indeed, he shared his father’s and uncle’s aversion to religious orthodoxies. Rafi’s father Imtiaz Ali was known as Lala-Mian, a Page 17 of 51

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Introduction combination of two prefixes denoting respect, one of Hindus and the other of Muslims.105 He and his brother, Wilayat Ali, envisioned the world around them as fractured. Yet, as opposed to a restrictive and exclusionary vision, it was their region’s pluricultural character and its traditions of tolerance that mattered to them. They spoke the secular language, whatever their private religious belief. Rafi saw the disjunction between the punctilious adherence to rules, and the sobriety and commitment to religion on the one hand, and the emotionalism and irrationality of political Islam and Hinduism on the other. Indeed, he regarded religiously inspired nationalism as a threat to national unity. Though a target for the slings and arrows of Hindu and Muslim ideologues, religious consideration did not narrow his inclusive conception of citizenship. The breath of communal feeling, commented Sampurnanand (1891–1969), his fellow-prisoner in the Bareilly Central Prison (1942) and later UP’s chief minister (1955–60), did not touch him.106 Though resentful of such classifications, there was about his qualities, whether viewed individually or collectively, something typically Muslim. ‘It is one of the hallmarks of genuine culture’, explained Muhammad Mujeeb (1902–85), the historian of South Asian Islam who knew him well from Lucknow, ‘that it seeks the guise of what is purely human’.107 (p.29) I also draw upon a few lesser-known representatives of the Kidwai clan, notably Mushir Hosain Kidwai (1878–1937), the taluqdar of Gadia, Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai (1901–53) of Baragaon, and Begum Anis Kidwai (1906–82) of Masauli.108 In their devotion and selfless service during the Partition violence in Delhi, for which they endeared themselves to their contemporaries, Shafiqur Rahman and Anis Kidwai mirrored the values associated with qasbati living. They dreamed of spreading love, compassion, and peace throughout the country. As for Mushir Hosain Kidwai, Fazl-e Husain (1877–1936), the Punjab leader, had this to say: Kidwai is an awfully nice man, a very genuine man; and however emotional he may be and however anxious to get on, I am pretty confident that his desire to serve Islam is greater than his desire to serve himself. In fact, I have a great deal of regard for him …109 If this book makes the reader aware that there were such people living in qasbas, and they were among the most cultured and refined, it will have served its turn. Its basic traits are the recovery of the lives of certain individuals and groups in Awadh, and returning to themes that play a crucial role in all discourses concerned with politics, society, religion, culture, and family.

V The Qasbas Come Alive Pandit ko bhi salam hai aur maulvi ko bhi Mazhab na chahiye mujhe imaan chahiye. Away with pandits and with maulvis too Page 18 of 51

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Introduction I do not want sects, I want faith.

[Akbar Allahabadi: 1846–1921] (p.30) Scholars writing on India’s intellectual history often ignore the discourses existing outside the bhadralok in Bengal or the Chitpavan Brahmans in western India. Of course, relatively speaking, and by comparison with these regions, the debates in qasba did not have the same impact. Yet, despite the limited arena, it is worth recovering some of those discussions. They cover the conflict of the generations, the impact of ‘modernity’ on what was construed as a ‘traditional’ society, the relationship between Islam and the West, and the effects of western ways of life and values. Moreover, the debates were conducted by different sections of society, including the theologians and the western-educated. While the two groups are presumed to be absolutely and irreconcilably opposed, the noteworthy fact is that they also shared a great deal. This is not to suggest that their differences were suddenly overcome in some historic moment, but that the disabling binary oppositions were weakened by the rapid turn of events during the second half of the nineteenth century. Various organizations in the 1860s, notably the Jalsa-e tehzib in Lucknow, held discussions and lectures, maintained a library, and published a monthly paper. Among the subjects its 120 members discussed was women’s education; in the list of lectures, one is on eclipses, several on women’s education, one on Sanskrit literature, and one on the administration of John Lawrence, Viceroy of India (1863–69).110 Though some of these issues were being vigorously debated at the national level, they were quite often dissolved into localized debates with a strong local flavour. Dotted on Awadh’s landscape, qasba-based local bodies offered an opportunity for a more participatory and dialogic role for the literati in public life, in which critical rigour and intense debates proved to be mutually informing and enriching.111 In addition, poets and writers expressed their analysis and criticism of society, and depicted the poverty and oppression of the poor in village, qasba, and city. Against the background of extreme social and cultural diversity, they served as vital channels of cultural communication. In the corpus of literature are the critiques of religion as a factor that (p.31) contributed to fanaticism and violence, and the hazards of introducing the religious element in public life. The stress is therefore on a tolerant world-view, on cultural diversity, and on religious plurality as the reference point for harmonious living. Sliding into a world of new issues and diverted to new preoccupations, several authors bemoan the hold of obsolete ideas, the prevalence of superstitious practices, and the lack of education among Muslims. Often, they quote two hadis (Prophet’s traditions), of which one makes it the bounden duty of every Muslim to seek knowledge, while the other is the widelyPage 19 of 51

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Introduction quoted counsel of perfection which bids man ‘seek knowledge, even if it be in China’. Muhammad Abdul Haq goes a step further in Zubdat-ul-hikmat, which deals with philosophy, logic, physics, and metaphysics. Published in 1871 and hardly ever mentioned, this book has opened up new vistas for understanding both the Islamic and the Western scientific and philosophical traditions. Elliott, an official in the North-Western Provinces, had this to say while granting an honorarium to the author: Although the popular course of Mahomedan reading in the indigenous schools is barren of any fructifying results, yet no doubt a certain acquaintance with the Logic and Metaphysics of the Arabs is useful both to those who desire to become familiar with their modes of thought and reasoning, and also to those who study to acquire the power of communicating new learning to the Mahomedan classes in language and by lines of argument appreciated by them.112 The appalling level of illiteracy amongst Muslim women and their observance of purdah also form a part of the exposition of the duties of the true believer.113 Altaf Husain Hali (1837–1914) was not the only one who sang the rights of women in his Chup ki dad. Others, too, though drawn from different family backgrounds, with different religious and social sensibilities, were impelled to fight for their lost status. Though they could do little to effect a change in the legal status of Muslim women, they wanted them to be educated and allowed to work. Their efforts had, admittedly, not gone very deep, but they certainly facilitated the movement for the emancipation of Muslim women, to which the opening of schools and (p.32) colleges for girls by individuals and the government gave stimulus, during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Often, the protagonists of such causes resided in qasbas. For example, Maulvi Muhammad Zahiruddin lived in Bilgram and wrote Mufidun niswan, a book on female education. Having written numerous treatises on moral, social, and religious topics, he undertook to prove that the Koran and the Prophet’s traditions enjoin the education of women. His advice is that men of position and influence should lead the way, and he dwells with much force on the folly of adhering to custom when it is shown to be in direct opposition to divine precept. He follows the thread of the argument at a later stage, where the general excellence of learning is set forth, and the notion of harm being caused by the extension of its benefits is rejected. In October 1869, the Director of Public Instruction in the North-Western Provinces commended the book, pointing out that ‘Mr. J.S. Mill might be proud to welcome him as a fellow champion in the cause which he is understood to advocate in England’.114 He added that the book differed not only with the treatment of the question of female education by Maulvi Nazir Ahmad (1836– 1912), the Delhi-based author, but would indeed be ‘a weapon of debate’ in the Page 20 of 51

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Introduction hands of women.115 The lieutenant governor was not convinced, arguing that the theological turn of the arguments disentitled the book for reward. Yet, fortune smiled on Muhammad Zahiruddin two years later when he published Fawaidun Nisa, described as ‘simpler and less tedious, though equally forcible in the main’.116 Having rejected his earlier work, the government certified that: There is nothing either in the religious or moral treatment of the subject, that would render the work unsuitable for purchase by Government to distribute as prizes in schools, 50 copies may be taken for that purpose, if published at a reasonable rate.117 Similar works on women’s education appeared in the qasbas. Saiyyid Muhammad Baqar, Ahrauli’s rais (landlord or rich person; plural, raosa) married into Rudauli’s Saiyyid family, proclaimed a gospel of girl’s (p.33) education.118 Abdul Halim Sharar critiqued purdah in his newspaper Parda-e Ismat. Sajjad Hyder Yildirim (1880–1943), an Aligarh graduate, vindicated the new gospel in his articles published in 1899.119 The influence of English and Turkish writings can be seen in the works of both Sharar and Yildirim and in that of a group in the next generation. Finally, the example of Choudhry Muhammad Ali (1882– 1959) of Rudauli, one of the influential men in the Bara Banki district, swayed the attitude of his more conservative fellow-taluqdars towards girl’s education and purdah.120 Idealistic commitment to the values of liberty, equality, and reason was sometimes strongest amongst young men, and yet insidious doubts crept in to undermine faith at home. The early writings of Abdur Rahman Bijnori (1885– 1918), Abdul Majid Dariabadi (1892–1977), Yas Yagana (1884–1956), and Niyaz Fatehpuri (1884–1966) illustrate this.121 Abdul Majid read Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who influenced contemporary philosophy, psychology, and ethics throughout Europe, America, India, and Japan. Majid also admired John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and the novelist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), and, for nearly a decade, remained an agnostic. According to his own testimony: After my matriculation, I read English books with great interest. In fact I became a disciple of Spencer, John Stuart Mill and Huxley. Instead of fortifying my Islamic faith, I came under the influence of agnostic and atheistic ideas. This phase of my life—wasted in retrospect—lasted for a decade, i.e. from the age of seventeen to twenty-seven. These entire years of agnosticism (la-adariyat) governed my life.122 The decisive change in Majid’s worldview began with his reading of the great thirteenth-century mystic Persian poet Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207–73), and the Urdu poet, Akbar Allahabadi. He was equally moved by the Prophet’s biography written by Shibli Numani (1857–1914), and the commentary or tafsir (the science of Koranic exegesis), and the English translation of the Koran by Page 21 of 51

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Introduction Muhammad Ali of Lahore, published in London (p.34) in 1918. Islam soon became a driving force in his life, and he began to seek guidance from the Deoband scholar, Ashraf Ali Thanwi (1863–1943). What is more to the point is that from the early 1930s onwards, qasbati men and women were so often the torchbearers of individual freedom and the proponents of socialist and communist beliefs.123 Intelligent, creative, and cultured, amongst them were intellectuals and self-made scholars and writers. The unifying principle of their thought was not Islam so much as the collective identity of the Indian nation. Consequently, their politics was acted out on the socio-economic, as well as the political, terrain. For them being Muslim was hardly a central identity; indeed, they regarded the Islamist identity fraught with contradictions about the meanings inherent in its symbols and the practice of the values it espoused. For them, religion was a private affair, and Islam an inherited culture rather than a rule of life. Muslim parents, stated Ghulam-us Saqlain (1870–1915), Aligarh’s bright jewel, preferred giving ‘their hopefuls a purely mundane instruction that it may fit them to earn their roti (literally: bread) honourably or rise to be dipti sahibs, balister [barrister] sahibs or even babu sahibs.’124 Reflecting on his college days, Mohamed Ali observed in his unfinished autobiography: Our communal consciousness was … far more secular than religious, and although we considered Islam to be the final message for mankind and the only true faith, … we were shamefully ignorant of the details of its teachings and of its world-wide and centuries-old history. When this was the case in the most notable and admittedly premier educational institution of Musalmans in India, I shudder to contemplate the condition of our coreligionists studying in missionary and government schools and colleges where year in and year out the name of Islam was never so much as mentioned.125 Mohamed Ali’s ‘communal consciousness’, secular or not, can be a theme of a separate discussion. What is difficult to ascertain, and that is the reason for citing Ghulam-us Saqlain and Mohamed Ali, is whether (p.35) sharif upbringing per se, with its emphasis on acquiring knowledge and observing a degree of austerity, ingrained in the ‘Muslim socialists’ universal humanist values.126 The examples at hand suggest that it did, though there were two persons who did not represent the norm in their class as a whole. One of them was Mushir Hosain Kidwai. For him Islam was a living faith, though he tended to interpret it in a new way. He believed that Bolshevism’s principal aims were highly humanitarian and, consequently, similar to those of Islam. To him, socialism meant ‘an organized, continuous and harmonious cooperation of individuals with a view to securing universal well-being and general prosperity’.127 It was the new revelation young idealists could invoke to exorcize communal rancours, by uniting the majority from all communities in a struggle against their common Page 22 of 51

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Introduction poverty, and to make independence a blessing to the poor as well as to the élite.128 It was their fervour that helped to widen the gap between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. Islam was an article of faith with Saiyyid Fazlul Hasan ‘Hasrat’ (1878–1951), the Urdu poet, journalist, and politician from Mohan.129 This did not come in the way of his joining the reformists of the Aligarh school, and interpreting their thought in the direction of separating the spheres of religion and social life. His reasoning led him to political radicalism, and to a closer affinity with the burgeoning peasant and working class consciousness. He, therefore, emphasized that no struggle against exploitation and oppression can overlook the contribution of Karl Marx (1878–83) and the Marxists, and the values foregrounded by communism in a form that has not been (p.36) surpassed. In 1925, or perhaps sometime between April and June 1926, he chaired the reception committee of the first communist conference held in Kanpur. ‘Judged from any standpoint’, he announced, ‘communism is the final and the best form of politics’.130 Later in life, Hasrat Mohani won the Stalin Prize, went to the Soviet Union, met Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) about twelve days before his death, and praised what he saw. A man of simple habits, he led an abstemious life in his hometown, shunned publicity, and eschewed office. Quite a few radical Saiyyid families were initially drawn to Lucknow and Faizabad owing to the privileges, patronage, and charities received from Awadh’s Shia Nawabs. But they chose to live mostly in qasbas. Part of the landholding class, they fostered a literate culture among the Muslim gentry, and, by sending their children to the imperial court as civil servants and religious dignitaries, maintained links with cosmopolitan culture.131 They were a mixed bag. Though some Sunni families, the Rajas of Mahmudabad and of Bhatwamau included,132 became Shias during the rule of the Awadh dynasty, the lines of cleavage were not so sharply drawn. The Sheikhs of Gadia and other middling or large landholding families, though Sunnis, commemorated Husain’s martyrdom. ‘For Muslims the best example is that of Hosain [Imam Husain], for Hindus that of Arjun’,133 stated Mushir Hosain Kidwai. Hasrat Mohani paid homage at Husain’s mausoleum in Karbala. Basra-o-Baghdad se ta Kazmain; Ho ke chala soo-e mazar-e Husain Khubi-e qismat jo hui rehnuma Banda-e Maula-e Najaf bhi bana. From Basra and Baghdad to Kazmain; Then came the tomb of Imam Husain And as good fortune guided me, I became one of the slaves of the Maula of Najaf [Hazrat Ali].

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Introduction Though Shia-Sunni munazirah (public debates) were commonplace (p.37) in nineteenth-century Awadh, as also in Delhi,134 they were mainly confined to theologians debating the Sharia’s finer aspects and the contentious issue of who should have succeeded the Prophet as Khalifa. ‘Although religious disputes may appeal to some people’, commented Abdul Halim Sharar in one of his articles, ‘it is, to my mind, completely pointless and there is more harm than good in it’.135 Shia writers and publicists claim an automatic progression from their creed to liberalism or socialism. They point to their community’s resilience in facing the implacable hostility of the Sunni establishment, and argue that ‘the more richly endowed Shia doctrines’ countered ignorance and backwardness, and fostered sectarian harmony and communal understanding.136 This is how they explain the strong Shia presence in the Progressive Writers’ Movement.137 Biographically speaking, all of the Shia literati began as radicals and were enlightened in every sense of the term. Yet, the stridently sectarian claims are untenable for the simple reason that among the ‘inherent’ Shia beliefs were those derived from a variety of sources and not just from their own cultural norms. The Karbala paradigm itself communicated profound existential truths not only to the Shias but also to the Sunnis and Hindus. They all commemorated Muharram with equal solemnity.138 Consequently, it became the ceremonial centre of Awadh’s religious calendar, and recitations of the heart-rending story of Husain, processions that included public flagellation, sermons, and recitations of dirges (marsiyas), (p.38) marked a period of mourning and atonement for Hindus, and Muslims alike.139 For each of these groups Imam Husain, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is the leader of the lovers, the free cypress from the Garden of the Prophet: the meaning of the great offering mentioned in one of the Koranic verses; the building of the confession of faith. A model of the Perfect Man (Insan-e kamil), an idea developed by Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), he becomes a martyr in his strife for God’s unity against the rulers of a dark, sinful world. Just as Christ sacrificed himself on the altar of the cross to redeem humanity, so did Husain on the plains of Karbala to purge the Muslim community of sins. As an embodiment of piety, courage, and self-sacrifice, he preferred to die rather than compromise with the bloody-minded Umayyad ruler. In this way, he rejuvenated not only Islam but rescued it from extinction. The phenomenon of redemption through the suffering and passion of a divine hero or holy martyr aroused the sympathies of people oppressed by colonial rule. Thus during the 1857 Rebellion, some Muslim notables in Awadh depicted the encroaching British as the evil Yezid, Husain’s tormentor. Dissenters like them kept alive the experiential, anti-intellectual, and anti-establishment religious spirit. To the labour-class devotees, the tax collectors and police of the pre- and post-colonial governments themselves may have occasionally been seen as the Page 24 of 51

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Introduction real Yezid.140 Against the background of colonial rule’s disruptive and divisive impact, the jari songs (a kind of dirge) in Bengal141 and the dahe in UP emphasized inter-religious harmony. This made Muharram rites transcommunal.142 The Shia creed contributed to the spread of trans-communitarian (p.39) public rituals among artisans and labourers. So did the incorporation of its cult figures by the Madariya, the largest of the mass orders, and, finally, the projection of Husain and his brother, Abbas, as the counterpart of Rama or Krishna. In the rural hinterland, in particular, some special qualities of the Hindu deities were attributed to them.143 The eighteenth-century thinker Shah Waliullah (1703–62) regarded the panja (the five-pointed symbol of the Panjatan, i.e. Muhammad, Ali, Fatima, Hasan, and Husain) and the alam (standard), taken out in processions, as of Hindu origin. According to him, commemorating Ali and Fatima’s marriage on the twelfth of Rajab replicated the Hindu celebration of Krishna and Radha’s marriage.144 Thanks to the Faizabad-born poet, Mir Babar Ali Anis (1802–75), such symbols and themes were depicted through specific Hindu similes and metaphors, both in urban areas and in the rural hinterland. No wonder then that ‘the little people’ of Awadh, often oblivious to attempts to demarcate the confessional boundaries between the Shia and other faiths, embraced Husain’s cult. W.H. Sleeman (1788–1856) describes an event in Shahbad where Subsukh Rai (Subsookh Rae) held many Pathan families in debt. In November 1852, with the onset of Muharram, the men to whom he had refused further loans attacked his home, destroyed property, and built a small miniature mosque at the door. ‘The little mock mosque,’ Sleeman noted, ‘stands as a monument of the insolence of the Mahomedan population, and the weakness and apathy of the Oude government.’145 Another noteworthy point relates to the cultural intermediaries such as the reciters of elegiac poetry, who helped to create a Shia-tinged culture in qasbas. Here, especially among the ashraf as well as the popular classes, (p.40) religious communal identity was still weak, or at least not exclusivist in tone. Yet for Shia writers, poets, and publicists, more than their Sunni counterparts, Husain’s martyrdom has consistently been a much more powerful, enduring, and evocative symbol of resistance to tyranny.146 What happened at the bank of the Euphrates in Karbala (AD 680), recalls the Balrampur-born poet, Ali Sardar Jafri, symbolized not only martyrdom, but also social justice.147 For Sunnis, Husain’s martyrdom calls for celebration, because a martyr lives forever (zinda-e javed): ‘the deepest grief’s’, elucidated the scholar S. Khuda Bakhsh (1875–1931), ‘are those which avoid public exhibition or loud demonstration; the deepest feelings are those which remain almost invariably inarticulate or only half expressed’.148 For the Shias, on the other hand, Muharram occasions mourning and lamentation. They ritually recreate an Page 25 of 51

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Introduction environment that, in Clifford Geertz’s terms, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men and women by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence. Clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality make the moods and motivations uniquely realistic. Thus when Sardar Jafri came of age, he found the whole world a house of mourning.149 The seventy-two martyrs at Karbala ‘are symbols of the highest sacrifice for truth and liberty of the human conscience’. When fifteen years old, he started writing marsiyas. Later, he wrote his epic poem Karbala, along with a number of other poems with the same symbols, and acknowledged his debt to Mir Anis.150 ‘Besides the kalima (affirmation of faith)’, he stated, ‘I heard the sound of Anis first’.151 (p.41) Bazm-e jahan mein dhoom hai maatam-e Husain ki Yaar-o ye gham fiza hai shahadat Husain ki. The world echoes with the mourning of Husain’s martyrdom Friends, this martyrdom wrenches one’s heart with anguish.

VI The Other Face of Qasbati Living Dekha na ahl-e dil ne kisi din utha ke aankh Duniya guzar gai gham-e duniya liye hoi. Those having a feeling heart not once raised their eyes To see the world pass by laden with the world’s sorrow.

[Fani Budauni: 1879–1941] Regardless of the semblance of unity that serves as a screen for Urdu writers to cover up its nasty and brutish features, the qasba was not an organic unity. Its social organization, having been built up under political and economic pressure and reworked by religious influences, had its own contradictions. Consequently, it will not do to mask distinct visions or to deny the existence of tensions; indeed, deep-seated strains and anxieties afflicted qasba life. For one, social and economic disparities sharpened existing cleavages, although the rifts they led to rarely took the form of organized resistance. Second, it must be made clear that the various liberal ideas afloat did not add up to a single-minded policy that might direct the course of events. They were, at best, sporadic efforts without any coordinated action. Their political import was by and large limited to the narrow educated stratum. Indeed, the diffusion and spread of ideas from the qasbas to distant places did not flow uniformly or consistently. Part of the reason lies in the gulf separating the cities and the qasbas, two worlds bound together but quite distinct, each with its own horizons, its own ethos, and its own characteristics. In addition, ashraf groups, with their complex, parallel, and interlocking interests that were expressed via different social networks, did not themselves act in concert. They were divided by hierarchy, status, and family feuds. Two examples would suffice: An old and Page 26 of 51

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Introduction bitter feud survived the regular settlement in Bhatwamau. In Zaidpur, the provincial government intervened to bring to an end the ‘bloody feud of long standing’ (p.42) between Mir Bunyad Husain and Hakim Karim Ali. It was much the same in Saidanpur.152 Mental laziness and an extravagant lifestyle also plagued the ashraf families. They spent large sums in the marriages of their children, in religious and other festivals, and on the maintenance of personal servants and hereditary retainers. There is, for example, the story of Raja Amir Hasan of Mahmudabad (1859– 1902) coming to Lucknow and being welcomed by shohdas who, as ‘beggars’, hunted in packs, crying, begging, mimicking, shouting, and cursing all the time until they were paid. Invariably, the Raja would carry a big purse and distribute cash on both sides of his buggy ride.153 ‘The decay of the Bilgram Saiyyids’, states Nevill, author of Hardoi’s district gazetteer, ‘must rather be attributed to personal reasons, such as extravagance and mismanagement, than to any other cause’.154 He is right. Property disputes led to ceaseless litigation, while accumulating debts resulted in the loss of land. ‘They fall into balance’, Sleeman remarked, ‘incur heavy debts, and estate after estate is put up to auction, and the proprietors are reduced to poverty’.155 In Rudauli, the area transferred by sale, and mortgaged, amounted to 12,422 acres in one year. Half the transfers were owing to litigation, one-fourth to extravagance.156 In June 1869, Zainul Abidin’s estate in Gadia was placed under the Court of Wards until such time as his personal debts and the debtor of the estate were cleared off. Thereafter, he received one hundred rupees per month for maintenance, and 432 bighas of rent-free land for cultivation.157 Ousted by the summary settlement of 1859 and by the regular settlement, quite a few taluqdars and zamindars seemed ‘too ready to take the law into their hands, and if possible revenge themselves’.158 Munshi Brij Bhushan Lal, the author of Tarikh-e Dariabad, accounts for the decline of this one-time flourishing qasba to the indolence of the (p.43) safedposh, their propensity to squander wealth, their complacency, and, finally, their property disputes.159 The point is perhaps overstated. Decline had already set in after the headquarters of the district and a tahsil, located in Dariabad before and after 1857 were shifted to Nawabganj. In fact, Brij Bhushan Lal himself spelt out how, starting with the civil strife during Wajid Ali Shah’s reign, weavers, artisans, and carpenters headed for Lucknow, Delhi, Agra, Meerut, and Banaras in search of employment. Julahas, in particular, emigrated freely to the mills in Calcutta, Kanpur, and elsewhere.160 Partly as a result of diminishing economic resources, but also for other reasons, Dariabad’s fortunes plummeted. In Sandi, Sandila, Bilgram, and Pihani in Hardoi district, once the home of the sixteenth-century Hindi poet Raskhan (b. 1533)and renowned for his impassioned verses in praise of Krishna, the changes were not due to the same Page 27 of 51

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Introduction factors. Once known for fine muslin, woven fabrics, dyeing and cotton printing, pottery, woodcarving, shoe making, and manufacture of glass bangles, these places gradually lost out in competition with European goods. Pihani was once the Damascus of Awadh, famous for the strength and temper of its swords, but these became a thing of the past. Its turbans, too, no longer enjoyed the same reputation.161 Handloom weavers were, in particular, worsted in the unequal struggle with machinery. Their wages were cut so fine by competition that famine or scarcity hit them hard, since the local demand for indigenous cloth diminished. In the Sitapur district a good deal of coarse weaving in various parts was noticed, but by the beginning of the twentieth century there was nothing special to record. ‘Nobody weaves’, observed a government report, ‘jamadani (hand- woven, figured and damasked fabric) in fine Muslin’.162 Finally, Khairabad, a medieval but decaying qasba, was eclipsed by the growth of Sitapur. Besides the pressure of European competition, the changes in the trade (p.44) routes confined the bulk of trade to a few markets, which lay close to the railway. Consequently, Sandila and Sanoda, both on the railway, benefited from their large bazaars. With its Madhoganj bazaar, Bilgram had a thriving trade in grain and sugar. But certain other places were not so lucky. Pihani, once a major trade centre lying on the route from Farrukhabad to Sitapur, suffered by being at some distance from the railway. Shahabad’s trade in grain and sugar was adversely affected for the same reason.163 Creative writers, who invoked the decline of industries and manufactures in their works, found the world slipping beneath their feet. Bilgram had a great name for its learned men and poets. By the end of the nineteenth century, its glory was a thing of the past. ‘The high-born, honourable élite’, bemoans one of its key figures, ‘now exist in the genealogical trees. Names of scholars of excellence are only to be found in books, while poets have virtually vanished in thin air. Those who had the good sense populated Hyderabad, inhabited Arrah, made Khuldabad their home, and established their reputation in Egypt’.164 Gopamau and Pihani produced several famous men, but their descendants were in no position to maintain their reputation. Although for very different reasons, Saiyyid families in other qasbas of western UP were also being marginalized. Though the fate of the Barha Saiyyids of Muzaffarnagar was not shared by their counterparts elsewhere, this paramount landholding community in the eastern parganas, which had risen and fallen with the Mughal Empire, had catalogued its grievances against the transfer of land rights and the attachment of its jagirs and land. Jagir and lands were attached in, for example, Jansath. As a consequence, Jansath in the early twentieth century ‘exhibit[ed] an immense scene of ruins, and the population principally

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Introduction consist[ed] of the impoverished descendants of fallen families of former rank and splendour’.165 Certain ulama families in Awadh, who jealously guarded revenue-free lands, bequeathed to them by the Mughal emperors and regularized by the colonial authorities, did not let go of earthly opportunities. But, like (p.45) everybody else, they were no less affected by the loss of land or its subinfeudation. Although they tried curbing the alienation of land through legislation, public petitions, and individual mediations,166 the candid testimony of the former head of Nadwat al-ulama over the property feuds in his family at Rae Bareli is supported by other examples,167 and involved stakes that were at once political, social, and economic. Indeed, a great deal of such evidence is found in contemporary memoirs and correspondence. Notice, for example, the early twentieth-century account of Saiyyid Muhammad Baqar of Rudauli. His ancestor, Mir Basharat Ali, had been a petty landowner in Ahrauli under Nawabi rule. He headed for Gorakhpur to take up a judicial appointment in the British court, but got entangled in property disputes. With his fate hanging in the balance, he resigned from service in 1885 and returned to Ahrauli. Meanwhile the court case went against him. The father’s bitter experiences, coupled with the family’s economic ruin, led Baqar to comment on qasba life, its value system, and on the local élites’ degenerative lifestyle. Hence his description of Rudauli in 1901: Rudauli’s charm disappeared after the mutiny. Wise men stay away from the place. Once the place rang with music and laughter. Now, it is desolate. Loyal and endearing friends are no more. Indeed, decadence has eaten into the vitals of Rudauli’s culture to the extent that siblings seem bent upon spelling ruin for themselves. Instead of pursuing a meaningful vocation, they safeguard their false sense of honour and prestige. For fear of personal reprisal, I can barely describe their decadence and degradation in full … . Lately, I have been engaged in the people’s welfare, though I, as an impoverished Saiyyid, cannot raise any resources for their well being … . Writing and talking brings comfort to me.168 Max Weber stressed that honourable persons are expected to be above the claims of power based on mere wealth. For economically powerful persons to become honourable, they have to live a style of life commensurate with that term.169 At the beginning of the twentieth century Baqar, whose brilliant penportrait Choudhry Muhammad Ali (not to be confused (p.46) with the Khilafat leader, Mohamed Ali) wrote,170 defined the content of piety and appropriate styles of life in a qasba. He may well have established, unwittingly of course, the important connections between status groups, styles of religiosity, everyday status activities, and the qasba.

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Introduction The Legacies Ab iske baad subah hai ur subh-e-nau Majaz Hum par hai khatm shaam-e gharibaan-e Lucknow And after this there is morning, a new dawn, Majaz The twilight of Lucknow’s sorrows fades with us.

[Asrarul Haq ‘Majaz’:1911–55] Today terms like qasba or a qasbati tehzib do not convey the same meaning. By the 1930s, despite its self-conscious superiority, the qasba was already losing ground, a point poignantly made by the author of Tarikh-e Amroha in his comment on the declining fortunes of the Saiyyids and shurafa (respectable men).171 Qasbas were slowly dying, letting the remains of their glorious past crumble little by little. Poetry and music vanished, as did the other manifestations of an ordered and intelligent life. It is true that decline in some qasbas had already set in owing to indebtedness, loss of land, destruction of the handicraft and manufacturing industries, and the consequent migration of ashraf families to urban centres. Yet, the first signs of a major crisis appeared in the political upheaval caused by the formation of the Congress ministry in UP in 1937, the enactment of the UP Tenancy Act in 1939, and the Muslim League’s revival during the Second World War. The political turbulence on the eve of the transfer of power accelerated the disruption of the qasbas. Soon, most of them were profoundly split between hostile communities, and broken up into closed, inward looking units. This fragmentation condemned them to economic backwardness and political marginality. The curtain fell suddenly on the qasba lifestyle after Independence. UP’s political map was virtually redrawn, to the detriment of the qasbas, (p.47) by the Muslim exodus to Pakistan, and the influx of Hindu and Sikh refugees. The landed élites were, finally, overwhelmed by the abolition of zamindari. Once this happened, the qasbas proved unequal to their task of distributing goods and services, wealth, and even pleasure in living. Also revealed was the fragility of creative life. The shair (poet), the bhand, the qawwal, the miryasi/miryasin, the zankha (eunuch) and the tawaif (courtesan) disappeared from the qasba landscape. Today, qasba as a social and cultural entity is not only a lost idea; it has all but vanished leaving behind no substantial legacy. As Shahid Amin remarks: ‘a carefully swept imambara, a functional old kothi, periodic assemblage of aspiring local poets, even the occasional production of local lore, legends and histories are poor substitutes for the lost world of the qasbas’.172 Nostalgia and the desire to recreate the dear image and essence of qasba life drives some to revisit their ancestral home annually. That is when the crumbling havelis bustle with life, and the local communities, Hindu and Muslim, Shia and Sunni, respond Page 30 of 51

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Introduction to the cry ‘Ya-Husain, Ya-Husain’. But once the tazias—portable miniature models of Husain’s tomb—are immersed in the local karbala on Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram, the Miyan and his family begin preparing for their journey home. Content with reviving, at least for the time being, their links with rapidly-dying traditions, they drive down the dusty pathways to the metalled roads to occupy the sprawling urban spaces. Besides their footprints, they leave behind the debris of the past that cannot be resurrected. Yet, the qasba as a social and cultural entity has to be reinstated in our discourses to understand the confluence of ideas and movements at a local level, and to capture the continuum of high and low points in its histories. It is for this reason that I explore, though not without many digressions, one principal facet of qasba living—the ideology of pluralism, its strength in uniting different sections of society, and its ultimate failure in the 1940s to mediate between religious and political aspirations. I will discuss, for example, how landed groups and service families built, over more than a century, a partnership to manage their lives, as well as how they invested in strategies of collective action where mutual commitments overshadowed distinctive identities, outlooks, and communitarian pursuits. By way of illustration, I introduce Choudhry Muhammad Ali, describe (p.48) his social status, political orientation, contemporary esteem, and personal aspirations and grievances. A leading Shia taluqdar with seven villages and 17 pattis (a kind of landholding, usually part of a coparcenary tenure), he had close and intimate links with the Masauli Kidwais—all Sunnis—for over half a century. Moreover, his career illustrates how the conduct of the service and landed class in a locality raises serious doubts about the ideological certainties of a clear model that Ayesha Jalal has offered to her readers in her most recent book entitled Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (Delhi, 2001). The fact is that Muslim government servants and landlords were just a part of an élite society, and their connections with Hindus who belonged to this privileged class were far stronger than their connections with Muslims who did not.173 What I call partnerships exploded in the 1940s. That is when the weakness of secular ideologies became all too clear to that generation, and at the moment of the greatest peril, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh bodies proved more than a match for the tepid enthusiasm of the Congress’s secular wing. The Communist Party of India not only acknowledged the importance of the ‘nationalities’ question for politics, but also unequivocally embraced, for reasons that seem to have intrigued Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) and his followers,174 the principle of national self-determination. The idea was drummed into the heads of the people without their realizing its consequences for the party itself and the accentuation of the communal process at the level of the masses.

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Introduction Finally, the colonial government’s conciliatory policy towards the Muslim League bore fruit during the Second World War, and stiffened Jinnah’s resolve to achieve his Muslim homeland. When the war ended, the engine of communal politics could no longer be put into reverse.175 (p.49) In the words of the Urdu writer, Ismat Chughtai (1915–91), this is what happened: The flood of communal violence came and went with all its evils, but it left a pile of living, dead, and gasping corpses in its wake. It wasn’t only that the country was split in two—bodies and minds were also divided. Moral beliefs were tossed aside and humanity was in shreds. Government officers and clerks along with their chairs, pens and inkpots, were distributed like the spoils of war … . Those whose bodies were whole had hearts that were splintered. Families were torn apart. One brother was allotted to Hindustan, the other to Pakistan; the mother was in Hindustan, her offspring were in Pakistan; the husband was in Hindustan, his wife was in Pakistan. The bonds of relationship were in tatters, and in the end many souls remained behind in Hindustan while their bodies started off for Pakistan.176 Religious intolerance and other forms of bigotry—emblematic of divisive ideologies—were no longer contained by pluralism. At the turn of the century the anxieties Indians faced while formulating strategies for political survival reappeared with a force that could not have been anticipated. They came into sharp focus only a decade or so before the actual transfer of power. The Muslim League, the Akali Dal, and the Hindu Mahasabha rejected the once apparently unassailable pluralist paradigm, while religious fundamentalists, who were at any rate wary of the corrosive effects of secular nationalism, turned to the creation of a Hindu Rashtra or an Islamic theocracy. That is because the goals of their proponents were largely unrealizable in the late imperial system. This led to India’s bloody and brutal vivisection. As a historian of Islam pointed out, ‘a few years after the extermination camps and incendiary and atomic bombs of the Second World War seemed to have confirmed the worst condemnations Indians had levelled against materialistic modern West. Modern India, Hindu and Muslim, confronted horrors of its own making’.177 Historians visit and revisit the centre and the provinces, now states, but not the locality, to delineate Partition’s brutal story. I therefore seek to explain, in Chapter 7, how a nation’s image, free but divided, is embedded (p.50) in the history of a qasba and a district, indicate how the histories of Independence and Partition intersected, and, in the process, refute the homogenizing vision attributed to the Muslim communities in South Asia. I probe the ways in which different groups conceived of their role, responded to the dawn of freedom, and staked their claims in the democratic society to follow. To recover a sense of the issues they faced, the debates are explored without, of course, chronicling political events in detail or in chronological sequence. There is enough of the Page 32 of 51

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Introduction basic framework of events, based largely on my reading of the available works of modern historians, that makes this account intelligible to those without any previous knowledge of the period. At the beginning of this millennium the great ideological debates between the proponents of ‘secular’ and ‘Muslim’ nationalisms are waning. A sense is abroad that the Partition story, hitherto dominated by the grand narratives, needs to be told differently.178 Writers drew attention to comparisons across space and time, to powerful gender narratives,179 and to theoretical issues of import well beyond South Asia.180 Equally, their writings on the Partition’s legacy sensitize us to the different interpretations of the past and the ambiguities in which certain historical (p.51) questions are rooted.181 They reflect a growing awareness, which did not exist until quite recently, of the signification of Partition as an event and a strategic milestone in modern South Asian history. Its interpretation is therefore crucial, both for understanding nationalist and communitarian politics that preceded it and of the period—now well over five decades—of Independence and Partition which has followed. Recognizing the agency of neglected actors, I examine Partition’s impact in terms of what it meant for the Masauli Kidwais and the other Muslim families in Bara Banki and its neighbouring qasbas. My exploration draws us deep into the lives of certain individuals and classes, into their dilemmas and predicaments, and into contemporary history. My journey begins with Wilayat Ali Kidwai and the social and political ethos that fashioned his life during the first decade of the twentieth century. One of the countless young men immersed in the impassioned debates raging in his youth— some of that is being documented in this book for the first time—he wrote mostly in English under the nom de plume ‘Bambooque’. His humorous character sketches regaled readers of Comrade, New Era, and the Urdu paper Maaloomat. The sketches eminently represent the political mood of the age—active and selfconfident—and therefore have an enduring quality. Ansari, his doctor-politician friend, commented that, ‘as a humorist Bambooque was unequalled’. According to him, the sketches ‘form classics that will always keep his memory fresh and green’ (see Sec. IV, Chapter 3). Notes:

(1) Sylvia Vatuk has, however, worked extensively on several generations of a Hyderabadi family through their own history, records, and interviews. See, for example, ‘The Cultural Construction of Shared Identity: A South Indian Muslim Family History’, ed. Pnina Werbner, Person, Myth and Society in South Asian Islam, Social Analysis, 28 July 1990, pp. 114–31. (2) Shaharyar M. Khan, The Begums of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India (London, 2000); Claudia Preckel, Begums of Bhopal (New Delhi, 2000); Page 33 of 51

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Introduction Riaz-ur-Rahman Kidwai, Biographical Sketch of Kidwais of Avadh (Aligarh, 1987); B.R. Nanda, The Nehrus (New Delhi, 1979); Tariq Ali, An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi family (New York, 1985); Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Sarat & Subhas Chandra Bose (New Delhi, 1989); Francis Robinson, The Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (New Delhi, 2001). Business families are covered in Dwijendra Tripathi and Makrand Mehta (eds), Business Houses in Western India: A Study in Entrepreneurial Response 1850–1956 (New Delhi, 1990). Among Urdu works, mostly unnoticed, are: Rahim Bakhsh, Tarikh-e wastiya (Amroha, 1904); S. Mukhtar Mehdi, Rajaz Mehdi fi Tarikh Zaidi (Lucknow, 1962); Mufti Muhammad Raza Ansari, Bani-yi dars-e Nizami: Ustad ul-Hind Mulla Nizamuddin Ahmad (Lucknow, 1973); S. Saghar Hasan Rizvi Al-Taqvi, Anwar-e Qum: yaani azkar-e saadat (Karachi, 1973); S. Ali Muhammad Zaidi, Apni-yadein: Rudauli ki batein (Lucknow, 1977); Mufti Muhammad Raza Ansari, Tazkira Hazrat Saiyyid Saheb Banswi (Lucknow, 1986); Hameeda Salim, Hum saath the (New Delhi, 1999). (3) G.M. Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History (London, 1964), Vol. 1, p. 11. (4) This is attempted, though, in studying the change from close endogamy to exogamy in the Tyabji clan. Theodore P. Wright, Jr., ‘Muslim Kinship and Modernization: The Tyabji Clan of Bombay’, Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Family, Kinship and Marriage among Muslims in India (New Delhi, 1976); Atiya Habeeb Kidwai, ‘Rural-Urban Nexus: Theoretical Formulations and a Research Design for Historical Analysis’, K.L. Sharma and Dipankar Gupta (eds), Country Town Nexus (New Delhi, 1991). (5) Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History, p. 14. (6) Mushirul Hasan, A Nationalist Conscience: M.A. Ansari, the Congress and the Raj (New Delhi, 1989), and its review by Francis Robinson in Modern Asian Studies (Cambridge), 3, July 1989, p. 5. (7) For nearly twenty-one years from its annexation in February 1856, Awadh was a separate chief commissionership, but in January 1877 it was incorporated into the north-western provinces and the functions of chief commissionership were vested in the lieutenant governor. The two provinces, finally amalgamated in 1902 under a single lieutenant governorship, became known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. In 1921, the governor took over charge of the provinces. Lucknow was the prime city. Writing in 1849–50, Sleeman noted that ‘this village [Lucknow], in the course of eighty years, has grown into a city, containing nearly a million of souls.’ In the 1880s, it was the largest in British India after the three presidency towns. On Lucknow’s population, see Veena

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Introduction Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), pp. 19–20. (8) Kidwai, Biographical Sketch of Kidwais, p. 29. (9) Shibli mentioned the names of certain scholars and places like Suhali, Gopamau, Mohan, and Bilgram as centres of learning (Unhaun ne jo ilmi jawahar paida kiye aaj tamam Hindustan unke naam se goonj raha hai. Unhi mardum khaiz bastiyon me ek Bilgram bhi hai). Shibli Numani, Maqalat-e Shibli (Azamgarh, 1955), p. 112. (10) F.E.A. Chamier, Report of the Regular Settlement of the Bara Banki District (Allahabad, 1879). (11) Formerly called Jasnaul—a name derived from Jas, a Bhar chieftain, who founded it some nine hundred years before the Muslim conquest. (12) The tahsil is a modern innovation as a local division with fixed boundaries, and, as compared with the pargana, an artificial one. It was simply an arbitrary aggregation of a few parganas, the number of which varied. (13) Nawabganj was a town with a thriving trade to fall back on. Annual Report of the Administration of the Province of Oudh, 1872–73 (Lucknow, 1873), p. 133, and District Gazetteer (henceforth DG), Bara Banki, 1904, pp. 238–46. (14) The exact date of the creation of the pargana is uncertain, though C.A. Elliot, in the chronicle of Unao, indicates that Shahabuddin Ghori, the Turkish conqueror, constituted the pargana. According to Wilson’s glossary, pargana is ‘a tract of country comprising many villages, but of which several go to constitute a chakla or zila: the actual extent varies, but the distinction is permanent’. M.H. Wilson, Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms (London, 1855), p. 402. (15) Board of Revenue Records (hereafter BR), File no. 912, 1863–64, Uttar Pradesh State Archives (UPSA), Lucknow, and File no. 925, 1859, for an earlier settlement of pargana Dewa. (16) C. Hope, Final Report on the Revision of Settlement in the Bara Banki District (Allahabad, 1899), p.1. The parganas of Kursi and Dewa were transferred from the Lucknow district to Bara Banki on 9 May 1868. Consequently, the police station at Kursi was transferred to Bara Banki, and its tehsildar placed under the deputy-commissioner. File no. 188, 1868–70, BR. (17) Chamier, Report, p. 37. Probably, the best profile of taluqdars and zamindars in Awadh and their activities is provided in the three-volume study by Sheikh Siddiq Ahmad entitled Tarikh Anjuman-e Hind Awadh. Published by the Nawal Kishore Press in 1937 or 1938 (the date of publication is not mentioned in any of the volumes), they provide much statistical information that is scarcely available Page 35 of 51

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Introduction to Urdu readers. Embellished with portraits, they are recommended for constructing Awadh’s taluqdari era. (18)

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Introduction

Taluqdari

Areas in acres

Gross rental

Profits of sub-proprietors

No. of villages

Mahmudabad

28,680

80,696

1,072

104

Jahangirabad

23,750

78,300

2,530

68

Bilehra

15,838

36,658

403

3

Gadia

4,993

7,300

249

4

Satrikh

9,420

33,606

647

12

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Introduction The district officials claimed these figures to be right, though one of them pleaded that ‘the many corrections required in Oudh statistics must be made sometime and that it would be advantageous to make them soon’. File no. 32, 1872–73, BR. (19) Thus the Bilehra estate remained under its management till 11 October 1926; its Rani was married to Mahmudabad’s Raja Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan. With his land revenue assessed at Rs 1,24, 298, his property in Bara Banki district consisted of 17 villages in Nawabganj tahsil, and 71 villages in Fatehpur. On Mahmudabad and Bilehra, see Major Gen. W.H. Sleeman, Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, 1849–1850 (London, 1858), Vol. 2, p. 325. (20) L. Owen, Final Settlement Report of the Bara Banki District, 1930 (Allahabad, 1931), p. 5. (21) The acreage of the various land tenures was as follows: Tenure

Acreage

%

Taluqdari

500,942 47.34

Pathdari

362,040 34.21

Zamindari

108,871 10.29

Pukhtadari

86,332 8.6

(22) Edmund White, Report on the Census of the North-West Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad, 1882), p. 74; Sleeman, Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, pp. 219, 251; Michael H. Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British and the Mughals (New Delhi, 1987), p. 55, n.42. (23) J.C. William, Census of India, 1869, Oudh, Vol. 1, p. 76. (24) H.R. Nevill, Bara Banki: A Gazetteer (Allahabad, 1904), Vol. Xlviii, p. 80. (25) Chamier, Report, p. 37. (26) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 66. For the threat the Rajput clans posed to the Mughal imperial power in Awadh, see Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48 (New Delhi, 1986), Ch. 3. (27) Maasir al-Ikram (Hyderabad, Deccan, 1910), p. 7. For a biographical essay on the author, see Shibli Numani, ‘Maulvi Ghulam Ali Azad Bilgrami’, Al-Nadwa, April 1902, in Maqalat-e Shibli, pp. 112–28. (28) For example, in Rohilkhand, in parts of western Uttar Pradesh, and the upper Doab. Among the well known qasbas was Amroha, a prominent settlement of the Saiyyids (i.e. the Rizvis and the Zaidis), the princely State of Rampur, and Page 38 of 51

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Introduction Gulauthi in Bulandshahar district. S. Mansur Aqil, Gulauthi (Islamabad, 1998); Muhammad Ubaidullah Khan, Yadgaar-e salaf: Tarikh-e bara basti afghanan (New Delhi, 1998, 2nd edn). We also know of scores of qasbas in Bihar, which adhered to the social and cultural norms of the Urdu-speaking élite of Awadh. For a study of one such qasba, from a ‘Subaltern’ perspective, see Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Encounters and Calamities: The History of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century’, Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, 1984), pp. 231–70. (29) Courtesy: Professor Irfan Habib and Professor Shireen Moosvi. (30) I owe this information to Professor Irfan Habib and Professor Shireen Moosvi. (31) Ali Akbar Dehkhuda, Lughat-nama (Tehran, 1960), Vol. 38, p. 321. (32) Wilson, Glossary, p. 266; F. Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary (London, 1892), p. 972; and for similar meanings of ‘qasba’, see Maulvi Nurul Hasan Nayyar Kakorvi, Nurul Lughat (New Delhi, 1919, 1998 rpt), Vol. 3, p. 672; Maulvi Saiyyid Ahmad Dehalvi, Farhang-e Asafiya (New Delhi, 1974), Vol. 3, p. 386. (33) A.F. Millert, Report on the Settlement of the Land Revenue of the Sultanpur District (Lucknow, 1873). (34) Major I.F. Macandrew, Report of the Settlement of Eleven Pargunnas in the District of Roy Bareilly effected in the years 1863–1866 (Lucknow, 1867), p. 72. (35) Chamier, Report, p. 33. (36) Ibid. (37) Mahdi Husain, The Rehla of Ibn Battuta (India, Maldive Islands and Ceylon), Translation and Commentary (Baroda, 1976), p. 145. (38) Mahmud Ahmad Al-Hashmi Al-Abbasi, Tarikh-e Amroha (Delhi, 1930); S.M. Azizuddin Husain, Medieval Towns: A Case Study of Amroha and Jalali (New Delhi, 1991). The author of Tarikh-e Wastiya lists 14 dargahs. Ibn Battuta mentions his visit to Jalali, about 11 miles south-east of Aligarh (Koil), and its being ‘besieged’ by ‘some of the infidel Hindus’. Husain, Rehla, p. 153. (39) H.R. Nevill, Hardoi: A Gazetteer (Naini Tal, 1901), Vol. xii, p. 177. (40) Abdul Qadir Budauni, Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh, ed. T. Wolseley Haig (London, 1899), Vol. 3, p. 106. (41) Ibid., p. 189, and DG, Hardoi, p. 88.

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Introduction (42) Ashraf Ali Thanwi, Qasas al-akhbaar (Lahore, 1967), pp. 9–10; S. Imamuddin, Barkaat al-auliya (Delhi, n.d.), p. 38. (43) ‘To beg anything of a faqir’, he stated, ‘was unjustified and its imposition would be sheer injustice and might make the world dark.’ Moinul Haq, Islamic Thought, p. 173; Simon Digby, ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (1456–1537): The Personality and Attitudes of a Medieval Indian Sufi’, Medieval India: A Miscellany (New Delhi, 1975), Vol. 3, pp. 32–3. (44) S. Zaheer Husain Jafri, ‘Inheritance, Succession and the Customary Law in a Sufi Establishment’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 53rd Session, Warangal, 1992–93, p. 324. (45) Muzaffar Alam, ‘Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation and Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society’, S. Gopal and R. Champakalakshmi (eds), Tradition, Dissent and Ideology (New Delhi, 1996), p. 166. (46) Rafat Bilgrami, ‘Some Mughal Revenue Grants to the Family and Khanqah of Saiyyid Ashraf Jahangir’, Medieval India: A Miscellany (New Delhi, 1972), Vol. 2, pp. 298–335. (47) Jigar Muhammad, Revenue Free Land Grants in Mughal India: Awadh Region in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1658–1765 (New Delhi, 2002). (48) Alam, The Crisis of Empire, p. 111. (49) On this point, see Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London, 1991), p. 348. (50) C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 190–3. (51) Tom G. Kessinger, ‘Regional Economy (1757–1857): North India’, Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 1: 1757–1970 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 247, 249, 267–8. (52) For an evocative description of such singers, see Mirza Jafar Husain, Qadeem Lakhnau ki aakhri bahaar (New Delhi, 1998, 2nd edn). (53) There were 12,528 Nais in Biswan and Sidhauli tahsils in Sitapur district. See H.R. Nevill, Sitapur: A Gazetteer (Lucknow, 1923), Vol. 40, pp. 58–9, and W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Calcutta, 1896), Vol. 4, pp. 40–9. (54) The Census report of 1921 makes no mention of qasbas. It classifies the population as ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ and, in more detail, as living in villages, towns Page 40 of 51

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Introduction and cities of different sizes. A ‘village’ denoted the area demarcated for revenue purposes as a mauza (village). The definition of a town was more complex, and based partly on the mere aggregation of human beings, partly on the existence of regulations of a municipal character. The Census described a ‘city’ simply as a large town declared to be such by the local government. Accordingly, it listed twenty-four cities in UP. Census of India, 1921: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (Allahabad, 1923), Vol. xvi, Part 1, p. 33. (55) Bernard S. Cohn pointed out that to understand the world of the lower classes is, of necessity, to take into account those largely responsible for constructing it, namely, the rulers. ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play’, Contributions to Study and Society, 22, 4, 1980, pp. 597–625. (56) Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (California, 1979), p. 381. (57) Metternich (1773–1859), the Austrian statesman, described Italy as ‘a geographical expression’. (58) There are numerous books, but they are mostly biographical and scarcely analytical. For example, Hafiz Ahmad Ali Khan ‘Shauq’, Tazkira kamilaan-e Rampur (New Delhi, 1929, 1986 rpt). (59) For example, Rukhsana Nikhat, Saiyyid Murtaza Bilgrami Zubaidi (Lucknow, 1990). (60) Amir Ahmad Alvi Kakorvi, Safar-e saadat yani roznama-e Haj (Lucknow, 1933). (61) Hosh Bilgrami (Nawab Hosh Yar Jung Bahadur), Mushahidat (Hyderabad, 1960), p. 3, and for simliar sentiments expressed in poetry, see ‘Mirza Phoya Aligarh College Mein’ by Sajjad Hyder Yildirim, K.A. Nizami (ed.), Armughan-i Aligarh (Aligarh, 1974), p. 150. (62) Muhammad Waliul-Haq Ansari, ‘Farangi Mahal ki ilmi, adabi aur siyasi khidmaat’, Naya daur (Lucknow), February-March 1994, p. 48; Muhammad Inayatullah Ansari, Tazkira-e Ulama-e Farangi Mahali (Lucknow, n.d.). (63) Clifford Geertz delineates the people’s ethos in terms of ‘the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood’. It is, indeed, ‘the underlying attitude towards themselves and their world that life reflects’. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretations of Culture (New York, 1973), p. 126. (64) Report of the Settlement of Saharunpore (Allahabad, 1870), p. 4.

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Introduction (65) David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, N.J., 1978), p. 181; Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1800–1900 (New Delhi, 2002 rpt), pp. 73, 76, 82, 85. (66) ‘Early History of the Koath Family’. Courtesy: Professor Athar Raza Bilgrami, Department of Economics, Jamia Millia Islamia. There are references to the family in Shahbad’s district gazetteer (1906) and the Census Report (1891). (67) New Era, 21 April 1917. (68) A drama of love between Gulfam and a fairy, Saba Pari. So pleased was Wajid Ali Shah (r. 1847–56) with Krishna’s amatory dalliances that he devised a play in which he himself acted the part of Krishna with the ladies of the palace as gopis, milkmaid lovers of Krishna. Many of the art forms that developed in Lucknow under the Nawabs, such as the Kathak dance and thumri, featured narratives of Krishna as well as other Hindu legends. Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, trans. & ed. E.S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain (New Delhi, 1989), p. 64. For earlier examples of old Indian folk tales being taken up by the mystics, as also the representation of Radha and Krishna in Hindi-Urdu poetry, see Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York, 1982), p.152 and ns. 68–72. (69) Kathryn Hansen, ‘Heteroglossia in Amanat’s Indar Sabha’, Mario. Offredi (ed.), The Banyan Tree: Essays on Early Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages (New Delhi, 2000), p. 98. The information on Indar Sabha is based on the authoritative work by S. Masud Husain Rizvi, Lucknow ka awami stage: Amanat aur Indar Sabha (Lucknow, 1957). (70) Zaidi, Apni-yadein, p.128, for Rudauli. (71) 24 May 1868, 19 December 1868, 18 November 1883, Maulvi S. Mazhar Ali Sandelvi, Ek naadir roznamcha, ed. Nurul Hasan Hashmi (Patna, 1990). (72) Munibur Rahman, ‘The Mushaira’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol. 3, 1983. For a description of a mushaira in Rudauli, Sandelvi, Ek naadir roznamcha, 14 September 1873, p. 4, and for Allahabad, Leader, 26 December 1921, M.L. Zutshi (ed.), Gleanings (Allahabad, 1932), pp. 273–4, for the following description: Living in ‘an age of blatant advertisement, and seeking constantly for new thrills and shocks’, commented a reviewer, ‘all the more we need … [to be sensitive] to the magic of great poetry, to the spell of the siren chants of Ghalib and to the golden vintage of Hafiz [Shirazi] gleaming in the silver vessels of Dard’. See, also, C.M. Naim, ‘Poet-audience interaction at Urdu mushaira’, Christopher Shackle (ed.), Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell (New Delhi, 1991), pp. 167–73.

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Introduction (73) Muhammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London, 1967), p. 518; Ram Babu Saxena, A History of Urdu Literature (Allahabad, 1927), pp. 140–4. (74) Gregory C. Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge, 1985), p. 196. (75) Referring to the literature on some of these aspects, a UP government report observed: ‘Polemic publications supplied their usual quota. The differences between various Muhammadan sects, as for example between Shias and Sunnis, accounted as always for a certain number.’ Report on the Administration of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 1914–15 (Allahabad, 1916), p. 72. (76) Chamier, Report, p. 55. (77) To Alfred C. Lyal, 3 September 1885, File no. 823, 1885–86, BR. (78) For a critique of the Orientalist view, see introduction to Andre Raymond, Arab Cities in the Ottoman Period (Aldershot: Hampshire, 2002). (79) C.A. Bayly, ‘The Small Town and Islamic Gentry in North India: The Case of Kara’, K. Ballhathchet and J. Harrison (eds), The City in South Asia (London, 1980); Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (New Delhi, 1990), pp. 102–3, 126. (80) Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam (London, 1974), p. 97. (81) The following observation of Maulana Mahmud Hasan, the Deoband alim in early twentieth century, is useful: ‘In Hindustan previously knowledge was so scarce … that one could scarcely find someone to read the funeral prayers. And today knowledge is so widespread that every city, nay every qasba, indeed probably every village, has its own maulawi there.’ Quoted in Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 136. (82) Jigar Muhammad, ‘Madad-e Maash Holders, Activities and Social Contacts: Awadh Region under the Mughals, 1858–1748’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 53rd Session, Warangal, 1992–93, pp. 211–18. (83) Abul Fazl Allami, The Ain-i Akbari, trans. from the original Persian by Colonel H.S. Jarrat (1978 rpt), Vol. 2, p. 185. (84) Masir al-Ikram, p.12; S.A.H.A. Nadwi, Muslims in India (Lucknow, 1980), pp. 83–4.

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Introduction (85) ‘Ambiguous Public Arenas and Coherent Personal Practice: Kanpur Muslims, 1913–31’, Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (New Delhi, 1988). (86) Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, pp. 192–3. (87) S.A.A. Rizvi, A History of Sufism (New Delhi, 1983), Vol. 2, p. 458; for Bilgram, see Alam, ‘Assimilation from a Distance’, p. 174, and Ghulam-us Saqlain, Mujhe kuchh kehna hai apni zabaan se (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 42–5. Without portraying an idyllic picture, he reiterates the same about Panipat. (88) Alam, ‘Assimilation from a Distance’, p. 174. (89) For example, the founding of the Arya Samaj in Hardoi district and its influence in Shahabad tahsil. DG, Hardoi, p. 60. (90) 24 June 1899, Ek naadir roznamcha, p. 275. Begam Qudsia Aizaz Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament: The Memoirs of a Muslim Woman in Indian Politics (New Delhi, 2001), p. 21. (91) Mehdi, Riyaz Mehdi, p. 193. (92) William Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Province and Oudh (Calcutta, 1896), Vol. 1, p. xvi. They were probably worshipped throughout north India, but the list of five differs from place to place. Crooke tells us that there were at least five lists current in Banaras alone. (93) Census of India, 1891 (Allahabad, 1894), Vol. xvi, part I, pp. 217, 244. (94) Meer Hasan Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India: Description of their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Observances (London, 1832), Vol. 1, p. 48. (95) H.C. Irwin, The Garden of India (London, 1980), p. 38. (96) C. A.Elliott, Laborious Days: Leaves From the India Record (Calcutta, 1892), pp. 28–9. (97) John Pemble, The Raj, the Indian Mutiny, and the Kingdom of Oudh, 1801– 1859 (New Delhi, 1987), p. 143. (98) Chamier, Report, p. 51. (99) Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India, Vol. 1, p. 55. (100) S.A.H.A. Nadwi, The Musalman (Lucknow, 1977), p. 41. (101) Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islam in the Indian Environment (Oxford, 1964), p. vii. Page 44 of 51

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Introduction (102) Meer Hasan Ali, the British lady married to a Shia in Lucknow, laid stress on this point, i.e. ‘the spirit of philanthropy’. Observations on the Mussulmans of India, Vol. 1. pp. 4–6. (103) Irwin, Garden of India, p. 38. (104) Ali, Observations on the Mussulmans of India, Vol. 2, p. 424. (105) Ajit Prasad Jain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai: A Memoir of his Life and Times (Bombay, 1965), p. 122. (106) Sampurnanand, Memories and Reflections (Bombay, 1962), p. 125. Rafi was arrested on 12 May 1942 under the D.I.R. He was subsequently transferred to Naini prison. (107) Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, p. 444. (108) For Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai, see Saliha Abid Husain, Jane walon ki yad aati hai (Delhi, 1972), pp. 123–4; Yusuf Husain Khan, Yaadon ki duniya (Azamgarh, 1967), pp. 185–9; and by Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai’s son S.R. Kidwai, ‘Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai’, Salahuddin (ed.), Dilliwale (New Delhi, 1986), pp. 237–47. (109) To Muhammad Yaqub, 15 May 1930, Waheed Ahmad (ed.), Letters of Mian Fazl-e-Husain (Lahore, 1976), p. 71. (110) Report Upon the Progress of Education in the Province of Oudh, 1868 (Lucknow, 1889), p. 59. (111) Maulvi Fariduddin Rudaulvi, Mazhar Haq (Lucknow, 1897). Saiyyid Ahmad Khan described it scholarly, but refused to review it. To Maulvi Fariduddin Rudaulvi, 1 April 1897, Mushtaq Husain (ed.), Makatib-e Sir Saiyyid Ahmad Khan (Delhi, 1960), p. 247. (112) Vol. 23, 1871, pp. 129, 207, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London. (113) Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1998). (114) Ibid., p. 98b. (115) Ibid., p. 98g. (116) Second Memorandum by Director of Public Instruction, North-Western Provinces, 21 February 1871, Ibid., p. 98j, Ibid.

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Introduction (117) Reply of Government to Director of Public Instruction, 7 March 1871, Ibid., p. 98m. (118) S. Muhammad Baqar, Duniya (Lucknow, 1901), p. 11. (119) Husain (ed.), Sajjad Hyder Yildirim, pp. 54–9. (120) Irshad Husain (1886–1956) was Rudauli’s prominent Shia taluqdar. (121) For Yas Yagana, Muhammad Sadiq, Twentieth Century Urdu Literature (Karachi, 1983), pp. 119–22. (122) A.M. Dariabadi, Chand sawanih tehrirein (Lucknow, 1985), p. 48, and his exchanges with Maulana Mohamed Ali on his book Psychology of Leadership. A.M. Dariabadi Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi [henceforth NMML]. (123) For a brief survey of Muslim presence in the communist movement, see Gopal Mittal, ‘Communist Party aur Hindustani Mussalman’, and for a postPartition perspective, Zoe Ansari, ‘Communism aur Hindustani Mussalman’, Gagan (Bombay), 1975, pp. 80–7, 89–92. (124) Comrade (Calcutta), 13 April 1912. (125) Mohamed Ali, My Life: A Fragment. An Autobiographical Sketch of Maulana Mohamed Ali, ed. and annotated by Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi, 1999), p. 65. (126) On this point, see Khizar Humayun Ansari, The Emergence of Socialist Thought Among North Indian Muslims, 1917–1947 (Lahore, 1990), pp. 124–5. (127) Sheikh Mushir Hosain Kidwai, Pan-Islamism and Bolshevism (London, 1937), p. 5. He died in 1937, the year Luzac & Co. at Great Russell Street in London published the book. (128) Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Poems by Faiz, trans., with an Introduction and Notes by V.G. Kiernan (Delhi, 2000, paperback edn), p. 23. (129) Mohan tahsil formed the north-western portion of the Unao district, bounded on the north by the Lucknow and Hardoi districts; on the south by the Unao and Safipur tahsils; on the east by the tahsil Purwa; and on the west by the tahsil Safipur and the Hardoi district. Under Akbar, Unao formed a portion of the Lucknow Sarkar, the largest of five divisions into which the Awadh subah was split. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Muslims held 18.54 per cent of the land. The three leading taluqdars were Maulvi Wasiuzzaman, Chaudhuri Muhammad Azim of Sandila, and Munshi Fazal Husain, also from Sandila. See G.W. Anson, Handbook of Tahsil Mohan-Auras, District Unao (Cawnpore, n.d.). (130) Khalid Hasan Qadiri, Hasrat Mohani (New Delhi, 1995), p. 253. Page 46 of 51

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Introduction (131) Cole, Roots of North Indian Shiism, p. 75. (132) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 101, for Bhatwamau. (133) Mushir Hosain Kidwai, Swaraj: How to Obtain It (Lucknow, 1925), p. 38. (134) Avril A. Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London, 1993). (135) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 95. (136) This is the dominant strain of the chapter ‘The Shias and Modernism,’ in S.A.A. Rizvi, A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isna-Ashari Shias in India, Vol. 2 (New Delhi, 1986), p. 452. (137) Sajjad Zaheer (1905–73) organized its first conference at Lucknow in 1936. Ali Sardar Jafri (1913–2000), having aborted his father’s desire to study at the Sultan al-Madaris, a theological seminary in Lucknow, trod the revolutionary path and courted arrest in December 1940. S. Sibte Hasan (b. 1916), the writer, and Kaifi Azmi (1918–2002), the poet, who spent some time at Sultan al-Madaris, joined the communist movement and published the radical Urdu weekly Qaumi Jang from Bombay. Finally, Wamiq Jaunpuri (b. 1909) gained fame for his stirring anthem ‘Bhuka Bangal’ (Hungry Bengal), a poem on the Bengal famine of 1943. (138) Cole, Roots of North Indian Shiism, pp. 115–18; Crooke, Tribes and Castes, pp. 289–90, and the informative account of Muharram observances in the localities, in Sarfaraz (Lucknow), Muharram number, 17 March 1969. (139) Simonetta Casci details the ‘compositional elements’, both Hindu and Islamic, on the facades of the Lucknow imambaras. She also refers to the prayer sessions (majalis) fostering the integration of the élite and the formation of a ‘civic identity’ by processions that brought together rich and poor, Hindus and Muslims. Simonetta Casci, ‘Lucknow Nawabs: Architecture and Identity’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 September 2002. (140) Cole, Roots of North Indian Shiism, pp. 89, 104. (141) This is a typical example of a folk song: O the two imam brothers Hasan and Husain Are, I am told Rasul’s (i.e. the Prophet’s) grandson; They are the emblems of Paradise, the two brothers: The slave Yazid lured them away to Karbala.

Schimmel, As Through a Veil, p. 267.

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Introduction (142) On Muharram, see also Garcin de Tassy, Muslim Festivals in India and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. M. Waseem (New Delhi, 1977), pp. 20–3. ‘So strong is this synthesizing tendency in the subcontinent that, if we are interested in understanding Indian Shi’ism as a lived experience rather than merely a creedal formulation, then we should perhaps view it simply as one point along the continuum of South Asian religious practice’. David Pinault, Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (New York, 2001), p. 14. (143) Amit Dey, ‘The Image of the Prophet in the Bengal Countryside: 1850– 1957’, The Calcutta Journal (Department of History, University of Calcutta), Vol. xxi & xxii, 1991–2000. (144) Ahmad, Intellectual History of Islam, p. 48. In a picture attributed to the Ismailis, Ali, as the tenth Avatar of Vishnu, is shown riding the white mule (duldul), with the monkey god, Hanuman serving as his umbrella-bearer. A. Schimmel, Islam in India and Pakistan, quoted in Garcin de Tassy, Muslim Festivals in India, fn. 14, p. 27. (145) Sleeman, Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude, p. 47. (146) For evocative accounts of Muharram in Lucknow, see S. Hashim Raza, Hamari manzil: An Autobiography (Karachi, 1991), pp. 188–93; Sardar Jafri, in Shakhsiaat aur waqiat jinhon ne mujhe mutasir kya (Bombay, n.d.); Jahanara Habibullah, Remembrance of Days Past: Glimpses of a Princely State during the Raj (New Delhi, 2001), for Rampur. (147) Ansari, Emergence of Socialist Thought, p. 127, and Ali Sardar Jafri, Lakhnau ki paanch raaten (Faizabad, 1964), pp. 20–1. (148) Comrade (Calcutta), 14 January 1911. (149) Ansari, Emergence of Socialist Thought, p. 127. (150) Anil Sehgal (ed.), Ali Sardar Jafri, The Youthful Boatman of Joy (New Delhi, 2001), pp. 171, 198; and for the marsiyas of Mir Anis, see The Battle of Karbala: A Marsiya of Anis. Trans. and edited into English verse with an Introduction by David Mathews (Delhi, 2003). (151) Shakhsiaat aur waqiat, pp. 226–7. (152) Chamier, Report, p. 61. (153) Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore, 1961), p. 6. (154) DG, Hardoi, p. 97. (155) Sleeman, Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, p. 169.

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Introduction (156) Chamier, Report, p. 15. (157) F. no. 908, 1968–69, BR. (158) Report on the Police Administration in the Province of Oudh, for the year 1871 (Lucknow, 1872), p. 50. (159) Munshi Brij Bhushan Lal, Tarikh-e Dariabad (Lucknow, 1925), pp. 20–1. This point is reiterated in great detail by Al-Abbasi, Tarikh-e Amroha, pp. 341–9. (160) On such emigration, see E.A.H. Blunt, Census of India, 1911: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Report (Allahabad, 1912), Vol. 15, Part 1, p. 23, and E.H.H. Eyde, Census of India, 1921: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Report (Allahabad, 1923), Vol. 16, Part 1, p. 45. (161) DG, Hardoi, pp. 46–7. (162) A. C. Chatterjee, Notes on the Industries of the United Provinces (Allahabad, 1908), pp. 18, 21. (163) Ibid., p. 49. (164) Hosh Bilgrami (Nawab Hosh Yar Jung Bahadur), Mushahidat (Hyderabad, 1960), p. 11. (165) H.R. Nevill, Muzaffarnagar: A Gazetteer, Vol. 3 (Allahabad, 1903), pp. 196– 7; Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857, ed. C.A. Bayly (Oxford, 1986), pp. 176–7. (166) For details, see Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments. (167) S.A.H.A Nadwi, Karawaan-e zindagi (Lucknow, 1994, 2nd edn), pp. 46–8. (168) Baqar, Duniya, pp. 4–5. (169) Turner, Weber and Islam, p. 94. (170) Choudhry Muhammad Ali, ‘Mir Baqar Saheb’, Urdu adab, July-September 2001, pp. 105–16. (171) Al-Abbasi, Tarikh-e Amroha, pp. 340–1, and Hosh Bilgrami, Mushahidat, pp. 5–6. (172) Shahid Amin, ‘Post-colonial Towns Called Deoria’, Sarai Reader: 1 (Delhi, 2001), p. 48. (173) Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860–1923 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 32.

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Introduction (174) Responding to the General Secretary of the All India Muslim Student’s Federation, Jinnah wrote: ‘The Communist Party have their own aims and objects, and many of our young men do not understand what they are aiming at, and therefore it is better for you to concentrate all your energies and educate the Muslim masses and the intelligentsia as to what we stand for and what are our aims and objects’. Jinnah to Muhammad Zaman, 3 October 1944, Shamsul Hasan Collection, University of Karachi, Karachi (hereafter SHC). (175) Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1994), p. 220. (176) Ismat Chughtai, My Friend, My Enemy: Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits, trans. and introduced by Tahira Naqvi (New Delhi, 2001), p. 3. (177) Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago, 1974), Vol. 3, p. 355. (178) For example, see A. B. Hansen, Partition and Genocide: Manifestations of Violence in Punjab 1937–1947 (New Delhi, 2002); S. Shettar and Indira B. Gupta (eds), Pangs of Partition, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 2002); Sukeshi Kamra, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independnce, End of the Raj (Alberta, 2002); Ahmad Salim (ed.), Lahore 1947 (New Delhi, 2001); Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi, 2000); Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (New Delhi, 2000); D.A. Low and H. Brasted (eds), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence (New Delhi, 1998); Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 1997 rev. & enlarged edn); Alok Bhalla (ed.), Stories about the Partition of India, 3 vols. (New Delhi, 1994); Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge, 1994); Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1990). (179) Ritu Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi, 1998); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998); Nonica Datta, ‘Partition Memories: A Daughter’s Testimony’, Mushirul Hasan and Narinki Nakazato (eds), The Unfinished Agenda: Nation-Building in South Asia (New Delhi, 2001), pp. 17–48. (180) Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Islam, Communities and the Nation: Muslim Identities in South Asia and Beyond (New Delhi, 1999). (181) D.A. Low (ed.), The Political Inheritance of Pakistan (London, 1991); Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation, India’s Muslims Since Independence (London, 1997); Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The

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Introduction Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London, 2000); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition (Cambridge, 2002).

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords The men of Masauli and Baragaon used to be great storytellers, but people rarely talk about them nowadays. The family archives were destroyed when police conducted raids at the height of non-cooperation in Bara Banki district in the United Provinces. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai did not leave any account of his life. Wilayat Ali Kidwai lived during the formative years of the fight for nationalism, which intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in part due to the printed word. Wilayat Ali witnessed events in the Balkans that pushed Muslims into the mainstream of Indian nationalism. Wilayat Ali died in July 1918 due to cholera, leaving behind his twenty-eight-year-old wife and five children. Keywords:   Bara Banki district, United Provinces, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, nationalism, India, Wilayat Ali Kidwai, Muslims, Masauli, Baragaon

[The following excerpt is from the first volume of Kar-e Jahan Daraz Hai, a brilliant ‘autobiographical’ novel written by the celebrated Urdu novelist, Qurratulain Hyder (b. 1927). With their powerful imagery and allusions, these lines portray, far more effectively than official accounts, the mood of the period covered in this chapter. I am grateful to Professor M. Asaduddin for translating this excerpt.] 1914 became 1920. The fez was disgraced. One after another the lamps of the Sublime Porte went out. Those who strode the world with vanity were now in a pitiable state.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National The Cross gradually took over the Crescent. They controlled the winds, the seas, and the ships. The Sherif of Mecca ‘sold the honour of Islam’. O Lord, the imam of the Tatars and the Afghans! ‘From the Nile to Kashgar’: there wasn’t a [Imam] ‘Husain in the caravan bound for Hijaz’. Of course, Sharif Husain [1854–1931], the Sherif of Mecca, was there. He acted as an informer against Maulana Mahmud Hasan [Deobandi alim]. Some were imprisoned in Malta. A voice resounded—I am Timur’s soul, even though confined. ‘The hardy Turks were biting dust’ Its custodian disgraced the sacred Ka’aba by his shortsightedness. Of course there were Mustafa Kemal [president of Turkish Republic, 1923–38], Īsmet Īnönü [Turkish statesman and president of Turkey, 1938–50], Anwar Bey, Khalida Khanum [Halide Edib]. The Tatar youths were (p.53) zestful. India’s Muslims felt happy naming their newborn, Anwar and Jamal [Anwar Jamal Kidwai] Pasha, Kamal Pasha, Midhat [Midhat Kamil] Pasha. The Osmani troops lay in heaps on the battlefield. While we were divested of power, others administered the world. Baghdad’s Anwar Pasha reached Russia only to be martyred fighting the Bolshevik army. We’ve witnessed revolutions in Russia and Germany; anxiety rent the heart of Muslims. On the anvil was a new beginning. ‘So what if the Osmanis are faced with calamities?’ Whatever the odds, the true believer survives. Wearing a star-studded cap and a flowing gown, our Mohamed Ali Chacha [uncle], was found sitting on the steps of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. He was in the company of beggars and starving Mughal princes blowing the trumpet for the march past. On the anvil was a new beginning. The crestfallen Muslims left [hijrat to Afghanistan, the land of peace]. They faced exile and starvation. ‘It rises on one side and sets on the other …’ Many Deobandi maulvis were imbued with patriotism. They went to gaol in droves, wrapping the head with their shroud, as it were, and climbing the gallows. They fled to Kabul, Tashkent, Moscow, Berlin, and America. [They] died of starvation at many places … . Exhorted Mohamed Ali’s mother [Bi-Amma] to her son, Page 2 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National ‘Give your life to protect the Khilafat’. They died [or] were incarcerated in prison. They were exiled to distant lands. Now, they are forgotten and left to fend for themselves. In the mosques of Kishwar-e Hind, khutbas were still read out every Friday, in the names of Sultan Haideruddin and Sultan Abdul Hamid Khamis. Long live Amirul muminin, Khalifat-al muslimin, sultan al-muazzam. India’s non-Muslims confused Khilafat (derived from Khalifa) with mukhalifat [opposition to the government] and jumped on to the [Khilafat] bandwagon. Slogans like—Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai and Gandhiji ki jai’ rent the air. My self-respecting reader, the choice is yours: capitulate before the British or encounter a hard and harsh existence. You are sons of the hills. You, too, possess pride. (p.54) Yes, yes. My lord, I know you very well. Amir Habibullah Khan [c. 1872– 1919; amir of Afghanistan], brother of the late Mir Yaqub Khan … If the Afghans survive, the hills will survive. Alhukmu-lillah! Al-Mulk-u-lillah! Amir Amanullah Khan was like a storm that causes tumult in the ocean. His Majesty Jalalatul-millah-waddeen, Amirul muminin Amir Amanullah Khan’s declaration of war against Great Britain. British bombers took off like droves of locusts from the Peshawar cantonment bombing the meadows of Herat, Kabul, and Ghazni. The fourth Anglo-Afghan War. Check … mated. Neither the Afghans survived, nor the Iranian, nor the Turks. From the maps of Europe, Asia and Africa, the kingdoms of Muhammad [II] the Conqueror [1430-81; Turkish sultan who besieged and captured Constantinople in 1453] and Sulaiman-e Azam [1496–1566; Turkish sultan known as the Magnificent] disappeared. The Union Jack fluttered in Cairo, Jeddah, Damascus and Jerusalem; the Red Crescent came down. European Zionists attacked Palestinians. O young Palestinian, Geneva or London are not the places where your grievances will be redressed. ‘The Jews control Europe’s life-vein’. ‘Get lost! Don’t relate to me the tales of the Turks and Arabs’.

I Dekho mujhe jo dida-e ibrat nigah ho Meri suno jo gosh-e haqiqat nyosh hai. Look at me if your eyes can take a warning Listen to me if your ears can bear the truth. Page 3 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National [Mir Taqi Mir] Once upon a time, the men of Masauli and Baragaon were great storytellers. Nowadays, there is hardly anyone who talks about them, their families, or their journey through the pages of history. The Kidwai Sheikhs too had a great reputation for learning.1 At present, however, there is very little material available of the kind that Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie accessed to construct the history of Montaillou, now a French village close to the (p.55) border between France and Spain. The family archives were destroyed in police raids that were conducted at the height of non-cooperation in Bara Banki. Hence the lament of the family historian: ‘Certain families had their genealogical trees and something written down about their forefathers. But these have been lost with the passage of time. The present generation did not care much for such valuable material and few of the member [sic] narrated to me how these records were thrown to the mercy [sic] of white ants and got destroyed’.2 What contemporaries think of a man is relevant in judging him, but it is equally useful to know what he thought of himself. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai would not have cared what his biographer wrote of him; hence, he left behind no account of his life and no material to compile one. Even as a cabinet minister in free India, his staff acted on his verbal orders in almost every case without getting them in writing.3 He told Durga Das, the journalist, ‘I have to give decisions, not to write notes to convince myself. I read notes put up by the Secretariat, weigh issues in my mind and write orders’.4 His attachment to history, much of which he read in jail in the company of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), did not spring from a love of the past but from sensitivities about the present. Mustafa Kamil (1908–76), Midhat Kamil (1913–2000), and Anwar Jamal (1916– 96) saw much but recorded little of substance.5 The first two held administrative and ambassadorial positions; the third, and perhaps the most charismatic of the three, lived the life of a journalist, bureaucrat, and university administrator. While in government, he did not air his personal views. He expressed them only after being freed from official restraint, a phase that marked a self-conscious, energetic, and intellectually buoyant moment in his career. Of the three brothers he alone possessed an obsessive passion for the past, and, to use Francois Furet’s description (p.56) of Tocqueville (1805–59), ‘the lugubrious and sublime fanaticism of a haunter of graveyards’.6 His elder brother Midhat Kamil, popularly know as Midoo bhai, was impatient with those who recalled past events, saying that the future alone mattered. Even so, some years before his death he urged me, in his sprawling mansion at New Delhi’s Westend Colony, to write his family’s history. This book is a gesture to his memory. Anis Kidwai, their sister, wrote incisively. She published her first article in 1928 in Delhi’s feminist magazine Ismat; her first book appeared in 1947. Her unfinished autobiography Ghubar-e karawaan, a book written when she was 72 Page 4 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National years old, is of great value to students of local and family histories.7 The writer of such books is constantly faced with two problems: the need to find a new method of presentation, and the search for topics that have not already been written about. Anis Kidwai found the answer to both these problems and wrote a sensitive chronicle of an age when qasba ways were being changed by influences from within and without. An experienced researcher will be able to extract a huge amount of material for detailed comment. In 1949, Anis Kidwai wrote Azadi ki chhaon mein (In the Shadow of Freedom), a fruit of personal experience. Spurned by publishers, who were reluctant to publish her candid testimony on India’s Partition, it took nearly 25 years for the book to see the light of day. Although Azadi ki chhaon mein did not set the Jumna on fire, it has been acclaimed as a moving attestation to the horrors perpetrated during the Partition violence. One of the many episodes in the book is the death of her husband Shafi Ahmed, brother of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, in communal violence at Mussoorie on 7 October 1947. One can discern a natural affinity between the author and its subject, and love, though sometimes blind, sometimes sees deeper than mere reasoning in her book. What makes Anis Kidwai’s persona exceptional is her decision to nurse the Partition victims at the camps in Delhi’s Purana Qila, a mute witness to the city’s changing fortunes, and Humayun’s tomb, the site of the doom and destruction of the last Mughal emperor (Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’, r. 1837–57).8 Performing her duties with stoicism and fortitude, she wrote in (p.57) anguish: ‘in its ancient book of history a new and bloody chapter began on 5 September 1947. In this storm-tossed city, I came to drown my deepest grief in the hope that I might find some clue to the future’.9 Anis Kidwai sought Gandhi’s advice. Just as Gandhi had asked a Hindu lady whose husband has been killed by Muslims to serve the Muslim refugees, he told Anis Kidwai that serving Hindu and Sikh refugees would provide her with real solace. She agreed. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914–87), the author-journalist, records the following conversation between her and the minister, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai: Just as he was signing the slip of paper, a frail handsome woman of about forty entered the room and Rafi Sahib got up from his seat to give respect to her. There was something about this lady that commanded respect. She was dressed in a plain white khaddar sari and carried a khadi jhola (bag) with her. ‘Bhabi’, Rafi Sahib said after she had sat down, ‘what is it that you want?’ She replied that she needed at least four sacks of ata for the refugees.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National There was a streak of sadness in her eyes, and in her personality generally, and I imagined that she was a widow of some friend of Rafi Sahib who was looking after some refugee camp … ‘You know that ata is needed in Srinagar, and we are airlifting all that we can arrange,’ Rafi Sahib said apologetically, ‘If it is one or at most two sacks that you need. …’ ‘All right,’ the lady assented, ‘let me have two today—but tomorrow I will be here again!’ Rafi Sahib gave her a chit and she departed after an ‘Adab Arz’. Who was she, I wondered, who was collecting ata for the refugees, whom Rafi Sahib called ‘Bhabi’, and who said ‘Adab Arz’ when departing?. … I asked my friend Ansar (Harvani) [1916–96] about the mysterious lady, and he said, ‘There is no mystery, she is Anees Apa, sister-in-law of Rafi Sahib’. Anis Kidwai comes across in her own writings as a person who harboured no ill will, and whose human feelings had no demonic antagonist to overcome. Humane and high-minded with a deep commitment to the family values she inherited and cherished all her life, she was, as her (p.58) granddaughter Seema Mustafa, the journalist, recalls, a devoted mother and grandmother. In the public domain, the objective of her manifold activities was to improve the lot of her fellow human beings. Indeed, one of the motives of her service during the Partition violence was a moral revolt against the inhumanity perpetrated in the name of religion. This is how she concluded the preface to Azadi ki chhaon mein: We have grown old now. We’ve spent our life, good or bad, reaping what we sowed. The body is worn out and the mind is feeble. The night is drawing to a close, while the lamp, a symbol of our age, is in its last gasp. The draught of morning breeze will snuff it out. But, then, life’s task is endless. The responsibility will now pass on to the next generation. But this book must reach them before they embark on their journey. They must know which way the wind is blowing. They must know about the whirlpools or the rocky shores. This is necessary so that their boat does not capsize in mid-stream as did ours.10 Sadly, besides Ghubar-e karawaan, Anis Kidwai did not write much about Masauli and Bara Banki. Her first collection of essays, published as Nazre khush guzre (1976), are stylistically refreshing but lacking in depth. In her second book, Ab jinke dekhne ko, many of her pen portraits are brief and impressionistic, including the pieces on her father Wilayat Ali, and his close friend Choudhry Muhammad Ali, or ‘Chamru Miyan’ or ‘Chamru Nana’ as he was affectionately addressed.11 Her contemporaries, too, concentrated on political Page 6 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National events, while neglecting all aspects of social life and the forces at work to maintain or to transform it. They did not, therefore, capture the richness and complexity of life in Lucknow, Aligarh, and Bara Banki—places where the Masauli Kidwais had lived from birth to maturity. Another deficiency, the importance of which will not be lost on those who realize the weight of the individual personality in certain situations, is the absence of personal accounts and intimate biographies in Urdu and English. The biographies of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai in English are few.12 (p.59) Biographical sketches in Urdu are in plenty, but they are mostly in the nature of panegyric. Yet, as Trevelyan wrote in his pioneering work on English social history, a millionth part of a loaf may be better than no bread. It may at least whet the appetite.13

II Ghubar-e karawaan Dust of the Caravan

Wilayat Ali Kidwai, whose writings and career I resurrect from a fast receding past, lived during the formative years of the liberation struggle. The RussoJapanese War of 1904 and the Japanese victories triggered much emotional espousal of nationalism. The socialist leader Acharya Narendra Deva (1889– 1956), then a student, recalled how Japan’s triumph ushered in an era of awakening in Asia. ‘The Asians’, he stated, ‘regained their self-confidence and the childlike faith in the honesty of the Britishers started crumbling’.14 Even Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose exploits in South Africa were scarcely known in India at the time, held up Japan’s national sentiment and unity as an example to be emulated. Bengal’s Partition, a testimony to Lord Curzon’s monumental folly, deepened countrywide discontent. The political landscape fashioned by the likes of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915) began changing under the influence of the ‘extremist’ challenge in parts of Punjab, and in the Bengal and Bombay presidencies. New voices, some with unmistakable Hindu revivalist overtones, demanded not so much the overthrow of Pax Britannica but a radical orientation of Congress strategies. Thus, an otherwise benign party, formed in the Christmas week of 1885 to foster quietist politics, found itself on the threshold of transformation. The economic and political crises during the First World War, coupled with the idiosyncratic reactions of British administrators, were used by the Home Rulers for political mileage. In the towns, the poorer population suffered increasingly from inflation and the shortage of supplies, and constituted, therefore, a source of potential unrest. Even so, anti-British sentiments were systematically channelled only after Gandhi’s resounding (p.60) success in organizing the countrywide ‘hartal’ of 6 April 1919 against the Rowlatt Act, ‘a law designated to rob the people of all freedom’. He may be seen as an ‘extremist’ breaking away Page 7 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National from the staid national movement, going to the people, and raising their levels of consciousness through novel methods, such as fasting and prayer. He sensed their anger, mobilized their discontents, and pursued, in principle, a coherent line of policy among the indigo planters in Champaran, the peasants of Kheda district in Gujarat, and Ahmedabad’s textile workers. He released new energy to mould a liberation struggle that endured. This is what he wrote to his lawyerfriend Mazharul Haq (1866–1930) and political associate in Patna: But there is fasting and prayer on which I myself lay even greater stress than on the memorial, for if there is universal fasting and prayer I know that money and whatever we want will rain down from heaven without further effort. I wish to give you my experience in this direction as a specialist par excellence. I do not know any contemporary of mine who has reduced fasting and prayer to an exact science and who has reaped a harvest as abundant as I have. I wish that I could infect the nation with my experience and make it resort to fasting and prayer with intelligence, honesty and intensity.15 Gandhi’s forerunners, by contrast, dithered. They preferred discretion and restraint in their engagement with government, but threatened with revolutionary movements and outdistanced by the people during the swadeshi upsurge in Bengal, they found it difficult to patch together a coalition and more difficult still to hold it together. ‘To eat our cake’, wrote the Oxford-educated Mohamed Ali in 1907, ‘and wish to have it too is not possible, and the secret of a double existence is bound to leak out.’16 In 1909, the Young Turk Revolution caused an explosion in Turkey, the focus of Muslim nostalgia for their great past and their hopes for Islam’s temporal status in the present. This was followed two years later by intense concern for Turkey when Britain and France renewed their drive to dismember the Ottoman Empire. In 1911, Italy embarked on the conquest of Tripoli and the following year four Christian states of the Balkans, (p.61) aided and abetted by Russia, Britain, and France, declared war on Turkey with the avowed aim of liberating their Christian brethren in Macedonia.17 For north India’s urban-based Muslim intelligentsia, Turkey was the only Muslim country that had held its own in the face of the aggressive West. Although the Turks themselves could not appreciate this quaint romanticism, pan-Islamism became the most overarching concern of Indian Muslims. News of Italy’s attack on Tripoli rocked the precincts of the M.A.O. College in Aligarh, where students wore tight black sherwanis buttoned to the throat, white trousers, and red fezzes or black caps. The importance of the head covering took on a political/panIslamic aspect: those wearing them were identified as supporters of Turkey.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National Pro-government elements that had been nervously testing the wind from the wings now flung themselves behind the pan-Islamic stirring. Saiyyid Ahmad Khan’s grandson, Ross Masood (1889–1937), fresh from Weybridge and waiting to go up to Oxford, told E.M. Forster (1879–1970), ‘we shall give the Turks all the money that we have collected for the University’.18 Although individuals like him were not overtly political, they were drawn to Islamic symbols in the face of many imagined perils. Mohamed Ali, whose feelings were so overpowering that he contemplated suicide after hearing of the Bulgarian army’s approach to Constantinople, found the orthodox and the anglicized drawn together.19 He, along with Zafar Ali Khan (1873–1956) and Hasrat Mohani, all Aligarh graduates, and Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), the rising star in Calcutta’s volatile political world, were in great spiritual turmoil. They embarked on new lives to write in white heat in favour of the Turkish ruler as the head of the Khilafat, and as the guardian of the holy places of Islam. Urdu (p.62) poets, prone to emotional outbursts, sang of the heroic feats of Turkish generals on the battlefield.20 They excelled at documenting the force of Muslim pain and anger, indignity and hatred, and tried to mould their coreligionists in their spirit and in their image. Long after the Khilafat movement withered away, the valorization of its cadres continued.21 Halide Edib (1884–1964), the Turkish visitor to Aligarh’s Muslim University in 1935, noticed the reverence with which the speakers addressed Abdur Rahman Qureshi’s portrait in the Students’ Union Building. They admired the Peshawar-born Qureshi, a member of the Red Crescent Mission to Turkey, because he had sided with a people fighting against forces threatening their independence. He remained in Turkey after 1912 and joined its army. Having fought on a number of fronts, he joined the nationalist struggle at Ankara, worked with Edib at the headquarters, and represented Turkey at a conference in Kabul in 1923. Four years later unknown persons in Istanbul murdered him.22 The printed word aided the growth of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cutting-edge commentaries became the province of newspaper columns, popular texts, and journalistic accounts that reflected upon the political mood. What were described as ‘extremist papers’ in official parlance multiplied: their number rose from fourteen in 1918 to ninety-three in 1921, and their circulation from 24,000 copies to 82,000 in 1921.23 As in the Arab world, new media of expression created a universe of discourse that united educated Muslims of north India more fully than the pilgrimage and the travel of scholars in search of learning had been able to do.24 The atmosphere was tense with articles, leaflets, and speeches. The proliferation of the printing presses extended, moreover, the increasingly romantic pan-Islamic horizon. An-Nizamiya, published from (p.63) March 1915 to February 1919, fed its readers’ appetite for literature on Islam and panIslamism.25 In parts of northern India, a deepening of religious life took place, in Page 9 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National the direction of increased religious instruction for the young, and translation of religious books into the local dialectics, including the Koran, of which inexpensive copies were circulated in the country districts.26 The publishing houses in Lahore, Delhi, Aligarh, and Lucknow produced textbooks for the increasing number of students, and also poetry, novels, and works of history. To the changes brought on by print were added those mental changes brought on by Western education.27 The Edinburgh-educated medical doctor, M.A. Ansari, led a medical mission to Constantinople in 1912 to express Indian Muslims’ solidarity with the Turks. Duty in Turkey promised a unique kind of excitement, and Ansari looked forward to adventure and comradeship. Several Aligarh graduates accompanying him floated various projects, such as the sale of Turkish bonds in India, settling refugees in Anatolia, starting a Muslim cooperative bank, and establishing a university in Medina, for which Mohamed Ali prepared a constitution. Most of these hastily conceived schemes fell by the wayside, though the medical mission did not lose sight of its pre-eminent role. One of its members, Mirza Abdul Qayyum, stayed back. There was something tragic and touching in his yearning to remain in Constantinople. Employed in a Turkish factory, he died in Mesopotamia fighting for the Turks. A Dutch rather than an Indian newspaper reported his death. At that point, people like him were openly talking of the need to throw the British out of India, and they would sound out the Entente Powers and Russia as partners for this purpose. Radicalization, then, was a direct outgrowth of the events from 1911 to 1915. The Ali brothers, riding on the crest of a popular wave, harnessed their (p.64) energies to fire their salvo against the British. Shaukat Ali (1873–1938), more capable of bursts of energy than of persistent political action, resigned from the government to found the Anjuman-e khuddam-e Ka’aba (Society of the Servants of Ka’aba), in association with Mushir Hosain Kidwai and his spiritual preceptor, Maulana Abdul Bari (1876–1926) of Farangi Mahal. On 26 June 1916, Hakim Ajmal Khan (1863–1927), Delhi’s proud citizen, endorsed the scheme of Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872–1944) and Maulana Mahmud Hasan (1851–1920), head of Deoband’s Dar al-ulum from 1890 to 1914, to establish the Nazaratul al-Maarif al-Korania (Academy of Koranic Learning) at Delhi’s Fatehpuri mosque.28 Sindhi and the Maulana, both fiery pan-Islamists, mooted proposals to persuade the Muslim States of West Asia to invade India. One such plan was the Silk Letter Conspiracy, and the setting up of a provisional government in Kabul by the Aligarh old boy, Raja Mahendra Pratap (1886–1979), and Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali (1859–1927).29 But vigilant police informers nipped their plot in the bud in August 1916. Sindhi escaped to Afghanistan, while Mahmud Hasan languished in Malta to earn the title Asir-e Malta. Sajjad Zaheer, a leading communist, later recalled:

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National All Indians of my generation, who were schoolboys at the time of the NonCooperation and Khilafat movements … were thrilled by the valour and the burning spirit of patriotism shown by those young Indians who migrated from their homeland. Trekking through Afghanistan to Soviet Central Asia, with the sole purpose of getting trained and equipped for waging an armed struggle against the British Imperialists in India, they faced innumerable difficulties and hardships.30 Throughout these years, a substantial number of lawyers, teachers, and journalists provided the movements with a large proportion of their leadership, their ideas, and their impetus. The rapid growth of regional and local organizations enabled them to develop political affinities with one another. Social and political interactions widened their cultural (p.65) horizons, quickened political awareness, and eventually their deeper political involvement. This enabled them to turn the tide of Muslim public opinion against British colonialism and eroded the entente cordiale that Saiyyid Ahmad Khan had tried to set up between the Muslims and their British rulers. Thus a growing wing of Aligarh- and Lucknow-based Muslims, mostly professionals, pushed the All-India Muslim League, founded at Dhaka in December 1906, closer to the Congress.31 They ensured that the League went through a process of shedding older, more conservative leaders, who were supplanted by more modern-minded figures. Step by step they seized control of the League and revised its constitution in February 1913, a move Shibli Numani, mentor of the Young Party Muslims, welcomed. The flurry of activity finally deflated the myth cherished by the government, of the League being pro-British at heart. ‘The Moslem community can no longer be duped or hustled in the good old way’, the Comrade commented on a meeting of Muslim moderates in Delhi. ‘Moderation’, it explained, ‘is the sole weapon of protest for every reactionary extremist. He is loudest in preaching it when he is most violently fanatical in asserting his narrow and hidebound shibboleth about the general schemes of things’.32 Under pressure from the Young Party with a fair mix of older men, and amid the storm and stress of counter-attacks, the loyalists sank back into political obscurity from which they had emerged. ‘A democratic spirit reigned at the [Muslim League] session’, Shibli wrote to one of his pupils at the Deccan College, Pune.33 ‘Veracity’, commented Wilayat Ali in his Comrade column of 23 September 1911: is the dastardliest concession to a vulgar demand for facts, and honesty is perhaps the only consolation of the moral bankrupt. The former is the last recourse of those who have no imagination to invent, and the latter is the last refuge of those who have neither cleverness enough to cheat nor courage enough to rob. The Indian melon is the great-great-great-great grandson of the apple, which brought about the disgrace of Adam and

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National destroyed his celestial prospects. (p.66) The Indian politicians should make it a point never to touch it if they want to avoid deportation. Wilayat Ali was thus in the grip of a contemporary political stir. With Turkey’s future hanging in the balance, events in the Balkans simultaneously pushed Muslims into the mainstream of Indian nationalism. Nurtured at a time when anti-government feelings ran high, Wilayat Ali was, in fact, the product of a tortuous process of intellectual and political fermentation spanning the early decades of the twentieth century. This ferment, which was the result of the confluence of several factors—both external and indigenous—centred around Aligarh’s Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, an ideological symbol of the educational, cultural, and political aspirations of the emerging Muslim middle classes.34 Wilayat Ali followed in the footsteps of Hasrat Mohani. The poet had joined the Congress in 1904, launched Urdu-e Moalla in 1908, and went to gaol for his antiBritish writings. A political maverick of sorts, the men in his generation admired him and his poetry. Gandhi described him as ‘one of the most respected of Muslims’ he was priveleged to meet after his return from South Africa.35 He, in turn, supported Gandhi’s political activism for years, before serious differences surfaced at the Ahmedabad Congress in December 1921. While Hasrat Mohani raised the demand for complete independence, Gandhi rejected a proposition that ‘lands you into depths unfathomable’.36 Though Wilayat Ali was not alive to witness this extraordinary duel on the banks of the Sabarmati, he had heard of Hasrat’s irrepressible spirit and his indomitable courage. Indeed, that is why the poet-politician became his icon. Attired in khadi clothes that Hasrat had popularized after setting up a swadeshi store in Aligarh, Wilayat Ali went up and down the elaborately decorated Congress pandal in Lucknow. His nephew Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, (p.67) then 20 years old, dutifully followed him, greeting the elders with Adab-arz, which was in turn reciprocated by Jeete-raho (May you live long!). This was during the foggy, wet, and cold Christmas week of 1916. Lucknow’s Baradari in Qaiser Bagh, built in 1850 at a cost of 80 lakh rupees, had come alive on this important occasion. The prolonged deliberations commenced and concluded with intense bargaining from all sides. In the closed sessions, representatives of various parties, who deliberately introduced rhetorical quarrels and pointless digressions, questioned every detail. There would have been raging conflict had the profound contrariety of outlook been brought into the open. The leaders were therefore anxious to keep it under wraps. Consequently, the only gain, and a significant one, was the legitimacy accorded to the friendly negotiations preceding this event. Most people swallowed the Lucknow Pact cynically because it strengthened the Congress-League entente against the government. They saw it as a bargain of Page 12 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National mutual advantage. Wilayat Ali and his friends watched from afar with great interest and anxiety, and were determined, at least in their own minds, to formalize the Congress-League concordat. They, however, had no clue that their efforts would soon fritter away, and that the pact would become not only contentious but also disturb inter-community peace in several provinces. The Hindu Sabhas in Punjab gathered together the urban moneylenders and traders. In UP, the pact offered too much to the Muslims and too little to the Hindu majority. Hence, several Congress stalwarts, backed by the Hindu Sabhas, expressed their disappointment. Equally distraught were the Muslim spokesmen in Bengal, headed by Fazlul Haq (1873–1972).37 Lest we be misled, it should be pointed out that the disputes among the leaders do not in themselves suffice to explain their failure in subsequent negotiations. There were deeper causes that, by comparison, kindled the spirit of defiance and led to communal antipathies. Provincial jealousies and religious particularism undoubtedly aided it. Moreover, regional parties in Punjab and Bengal, having broken up with or distanced themselves from the Congress, set themselves up as the sole arbiters. Indeed, four (p.68) decades later, the same political actors, having resolved the representational claims of their constituencies in Lucknow, seemed far less motivated to break the Hindu-Muslim deadlock in the twilight of their public career. In those stormy days, many meekly capitulated and settled for the country’s Partition. At least during Wilayat Ali’s lifetime, the Lucknow Pact ushered in Hindu-Muslim amity. ‘I was in Lucknow during the National Week as they call it’, Mohamed Ali’s young friend informed him in jail. ‘It was a week of vigour and enthusiasm, and every man was happy because he thought that he had the opportunity to feel the pulse of national life’.38 The flower of Hindu-Muslim unity blossomed after the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and the stir against the Rowlatt Bills. K.M. Panikkar, who joined Aligarh’s History Department in 1919, found that the young students had forgotten Madan Mohan Malaviya’s Hindu orthodoxy and expressed their gratitude for his heroic and almost single-handed work in exposing the Punjab atrocities. All but two described him as the most eminent living Indian.39 Mohamed Ali himself sang paeans of praise for Gandhi. After his release, he championed unity in the Congress ranks, desiring ‘the greater and more solid sangathan, the sangathan of the National Congress’. ‘Let us all go forth from this conference truly shudh’, he wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘purged of all narrowness, bigotry and intolerance in order to free our motherland from the most cramping slavery—the slavery not only of the body but also of the soul’.40 Meanwhile the appearance of national unity seemed palpably deceptive. With the political class deeply fractured, a wide gulf separated the Congress and League. Yet Gandhi’s rise to power and his advocacy of the (p.69) Khilafat cause proved to be a windfall, a political asset. Though some spurned his Page 13 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National emphasis on the primacy of religion in politics, and asked whether it was, after all, ‘a mistake’ and whether the price Indian nationalism had to pay for drawing Muslims into the nationalist fold was too great, the Gandhian initiative was predicated on the idea that cross-community contact would assist in furthering an understanding of, and tolerance for, opposing political and cultural traditions, and that its tangible outcome would be Hindu-Muslim collaboration. The Mahatma knew, moreover, that whether radical nationalists, the preachers of pan-Islamism, or anti-colonialists, they burned with the same desire— ressentiment of British rule—and fought the same enemy.

III Khanjar chale kisi pe tarapte hein hum Amir Sare jahaan ka dard hamare jigar me hei. No matter whose throat the dagger cuts, we toss about in pain, Amir The pain of the entire world is in our hearts.

[Amir Meenai: 1828–1900] The Khilafat and non-cooperation campaigns achieved national unity in several respects. They fit into the historical continuity of the country, though the task was far from complete even if the Hindu-Muslim barriers were breaking down. The nation was strictly defined vis-à-vis the colonial authority, so that the clamour for unity was much greater now than ever before.41 Sure enough HinduMuslim differences existed; yet, the angle of vision of the two communities, stated the Raja of Mahmudabad (1889–1931), the architect of the Lucknow Pact and a patron of the radically-inclined younger Muslims, converged more and more to the same point.42 (p.70) The Khilafat movement began from above, but pressure from below kept its momentum going. In many areas it merged with the tenancy movements. At such places the ‘Khilafat’ was sometimes presented less as a pan-Islamic grievance and more as a new and completely alternative social order, the millenarianism of Islam’s egalitarianism and the alleviation of all distress.43 Many who turned out in large numbers to attend the rallies did not understand the meanings attached to ‘Punjab wrongs’, ‘Khilafat’, and non-cooperation. Even so, they understood that ‘one little tiny man, frail in body and all alone, brought to his knees the great ‘Burra Lord Sahib’.44 Thousands were, consequently, ‘swept away and momentarily lifted us to the skies. That brief experience of soaring up with the winds of a great idea left imprints on the inner being’.45 In the Gorakhpur countryside, the enthusiasm generated was not separate from the popular regard and adulation for Gandhi. At the Dumri meeting, a Muslim began to sing a song exhorting the gathering to go to jail, as had the Ali brothers for two years apiece. The man slipped away thereafter, but the crowd marched to the thana to the cry of ‘Victory to Mahatma Gandhi’. In this way, the pan-Islamic

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National cause of Khilafat and the fascination with the Mahatma were compounded in Dumri that day.46 Abdul Bari, the learned scholar at Lucknow’s Farangi Mahal, was drawn to the Mahatma, found religious sanction for refraining from killing cows, and turned to the spinning that had become Gandhi’s ‘inner need’.47 Ajmal Khan worked hard for cow protection; the Ali brothers banished beef from their homes altogether.48 Abdul Majid Dariabadi, Mohamed Ali’s ardent follower, declared that Islam not only sanctioned satyagraha but that Islam and satyagraha were almost interchangeable terms.49 Zafar (p.71) Ali Khan’s pen, more often dipped in vitriol, produced poems extolling Gandhi’s virtues. These were published in Zamindar.50 Grudgingly, Akbar Allahabadi, who died the year non-cooperation gathered momentum, also sang paeans of praise for the Mahatma. Hasrat Mohani seemed reticent, and reserved his admiration for ‘Tilak Maharaj’. When Gandhi visited Panipat with the Ali brothers, Hakiman, called Hakko, listened to him attentively. When collections were made for the swaraj fund, she calmly took off her ornaments and offered them to the Mahatma. Following her example, other women did the same. There could however be no comparison with Hakko’s donation, for she had given away her entire life’s savings, and the hopes of her children’s future, to the cause of Hindu-Muslim amity and an indivisible nation.51 Ale Ahmad Suroor (1911–2002), the Urdu writer, recounts that amid the thundering against the West, Khilafat meetings took place in Budaun, and that he heard fiery speeches being delivered by Abdul Majid Budauni (d. 1931), Abdul Qadir, Saiyyid Sulaiman Nadwi (1884–1953), and Azad Subhani (1873– 1956). Aged eight, he collected money for the Khilafat fund from the ladies present at a family gathering.52 In Bara Banki, Shah Ghulam Rasool of Barauli, a faqir, invoked the divine messages he had supposedly received to wage jehad against the British. At Nageshwarnath Talab and the Ghanta Ghar, people set fire to foreign goods.53 Saiyyid Muhammad Makki, a young Arab speaking at Rudauli, declared jehad against those guilty of desecrating Islam’s holy places.54 The kisan movement in parts of UP intensified the agitation in Bara Banki. Towards the end of 1920, Baba Ram Chandra (1875–1950), a settler in Fiji who returned to UP after 1918, visited the region to propagate the Awadh Kisan Sabha programme. During his fortnight-long stay in the district, he delivered speeches, including one at the Nageshwarnath temple, on 8 and 11 January 1921; his useful contacts were with those who were (p.72) Khilafatists first and kisan workers only second.55 Abdul Bari was one of them.56 And he was feted by the taluqdars of Gadia and Shahpur and the zamindars of Bhayara, who attended his meeting on 26 December 1920.57 News of Ram Chandra’s arrest at Banaras on 10 February led to a spontaneous hartal in Bara Banki. Several Congress leaders, backed by the UP Kisan Sabha, descended on the city to pacify the Page 15 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National agitated kisans.58 Fearing large-scale riots, the district commissioner had the good sense not to try Ram Chandra in his own district. The prosecution witnesses, too, dreaded scores of people marching to Bara Banki from other places to express solidarity with him, which they did. In consequence Ram Chandra, supposedly in Bahraich, Bara Banki, and Faizabad on the same day and at the same time,59 was moved to Lucknow.60 Newspapers and pamphlets flooded the city then and later. When the drums beat to welcome the Prince of Wales in November 1921 there was instant acclaim from a large section of the officialdom, jubilant at the lion being made to roar when its tail was twisted by non-cooperation enthusiasm. Mushir Hosain Kidwai, a signatory to a well-publicized manifesto issued on 4 October 1921, called upon every Indian soldier and civilian to sever his connection with the government,61 and recollected the sense of nationhood entering ‘the humblest hut’ owing to the Mahatma’s intervention.62 He added: ‘No longer does a European dare to throw out unceremoniously the luggage of an Indian from a railway carriage and quietly occupy his seat. No longer does an English grocer’s son or grandson, when out in India, treats a respectable Indian with contempt’. Conclud (p.73) ing, he pleaded for Hindu-Muslim unity for the country’s liberation.63 He was one of these who would have told Halide Edib in 1935: It was the only time when we fully tasted the ecstasy of national unity around India’s independence. The Khilafat for us did not have the religious significance it had for the older generation, or for the masses. We even ceased to analyse non-cooperation. The supreme reality for us was that we were a united nation, and could stand by each other, shoulder to shoulder unto death. No one outside India can realize the sacred emotion, which swept over all India by the mere fact of complete unity between the Muslem and the Hindu. It made 360 million people fast on the same day, pray at the same hour, and take the same vow of sacrifice for the independence of the Motherland.64 Ajmal Khan had written in a similar vein when Gandhi was arrested and placed in the Sabarmati Jail in March 1922. Both he and Mushir Hosain Kidwai hyperbolized, but in essence they were right. Gandhi led the country in its first steps towards independence. When he was sentenced to imprisonment he left behind a rich legacy of inter-community cooperation. Limitations of space preclude any attempt here to summarize the history of the post-1922 years, during which the non-cooperation campaign lost its impetus and changed its character. Hindu-Muslim unity, which had been the source of strength, showed definite signs of weakening after the communal riots in Agra and Sahranpur in UP, and Multan and Amritsar in the Punjab. In the five years from 1923 to 1927, there were no fewer than forty-two riots. The most serious were at Agra, Saharanpur, and Shahjahanpur in 1923, Allahabad and Lucknow in Page 16 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National 1924, Aligarh in 1925, Allahabad and Lucknow again in 1926, and Bareilly, Kanpur, and Dehra Dun in 1927.65 Nonetheless, the Khilafat issue acquired a nationalist significance as well as a religious one. Among the masses who did not understand this clearly, the poor Hindu peasant who sacrificed his meal to give an anna (1/16 of a rupee) to the Khilafat fund became much more of a brother to the Muslim Indian than the other Muslims outside.66 Mobilized by (p.74) provincial and local Khilafat and kisan sabha activists, they boycotted the Prince of Wales. In Nawabganj and Kursi, once the headquarters of a pargana in the days of the Mughal emperor Akbar, they picketed schools and liquor shops, courted arrest, and joined the volunteer movement that the government declared illegal. By November 1921, thirty-five out of forty-one districts had Khilafat volunteer associations. The government reported an increase in the number of Muslim volunteers.67 Rafi was arrested near the Nawabganj clock tower; Saidur Rahman Kidwai on 17 November 1921. Anis Kidwai, only just married to her cousin Shafi Ahmed in 1919, leapt into the fray, organizing meetings in Masauli and other neighbouring villages. She joined the Congress two years later, and became secretary of Masauli’s Mahila Congress Committee. In Rudauli, Maulvi Afzal Husain faced imprisonment for joining a Khilafat rally. Accustomed to a leisurely lifestyle, the Muslim gentry cast off their silks and muslins of foreign manufacture. Khadija phupi (aunt), associated with Abdul Haq’s shrine in Rudauli, took to khaddar.68 So many others donned coarse khaddar and, in the new resurgence of religious fervour, grew long beards.69 News spread far and wide that the fashionably dressed Shaukat Ali had taken to wearing a loose, long green coat of peculiar cut, and that his shaggy beard symbolized his protest against Europe and Christendom.70 People heard of Mazharul Haq, who was with Gandhi in England and returned to India by the same boat in 1891, giving up his chota peg, wearing a beard, and abandoning his palatial bungalow to live in a kuccha house near the Ganga at Digha Ghat.71 Bihar’s leading barrister (p.75) ‘grew as fond of the ascetic life as he was of princely life’, stated Gandhi. Haq’s wife, a member of Bombay’s Tyabji family, offered Gandhi her choicest four bangles made of pearls and rubies. The Mahatma was ‘overwhelmed with joy when she produced the bangles and thanked God that He had brought me in touch with the Tyabji family’.72 Finally, newspaper headlines detailed the sacrifices of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890– 1998) in the Frontier Province. His fetters, grinding prison labour, and solitary cells were aptly drawn into the construction of a unified and indivisible nationalist struggle. Mushir Hosain Kidwai, ‘an aggrandized version of the Muslem of yesterday, of today, and in certain ways of tomorrow’,73 attracted attention early in life for visiting Constantinople in 1906 and writing on pan-Islamism in Calcutta’s Modern Review in February 1908. Gandhi had written to him in April 1907 Page 17 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National ascertaining his views on the Hijaz Railway.74 Mushir replied, expressing gratitude for Gandhi’s interest ‘in a matter, which is of great interest to my coreligionists’. ‘It behoves us, Hindus and Muslims of India’, he added, ‘to strive and help each other in matters concerning either of them’.75 Two years later, following his second trip to Constantinople, he set up the Central Islamic Society in London and urged India’s Muslims ‘to turn to the Khalifa with such ardour that it may become impossible for any earthly power, Muslim or not, to bring about any injury to the Khilafat’.76 Gandhi recorded one such meeting in November 1906. The report, published on 15 December 1906 in Indian Opinion, concluded with the following information: ‘Mr. Shaik Mushir Hoosain Kidwai, c/o Messr Thos. Cook & Son, Ludgate Circus, London, E.C., the present Honorary Secretary, receives and answers all communication’.77 In 1919, he co-founded the Islamic Information Bureau in London,78 and suggested the recall of Indian soldiers from Mesopotamia. He gave up his practice at (p.76) the bar when asked to do so, and was Gandhi’s partner as long as non-cooperation lasted. Yet Mushir Hosain Kidwai was not one suited for thundering out violent commandments. Nawab Ali, maternal cousin of Wilayat Ali’s father, figured prominently in Bara Banki’s Khilafat protest. Renouncing a flourishing practice at the bar in favour of a life of penury, he inspired several lawyers to emulate him. They followed him, along with close and distant relatives, to gaol. Rafi’s brother, Shafi Ahmed, resigned as assistant registrar in the co-operative societies. Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai was expelled from M.A.O. College, the news coming as a bombshell for his father in Baragaon who refused to see his son for many years thereafter. Undaunted by the family’s reaction, Shafiq worked in Andhra, where the Magistrate felt distressed at having to sentence a person like him. Gandhi wrote in Young India on 3 November 1921: I do not know whom to congratulate most, the brave young men, the Magistrate and the police or the Principal who has moulded the character of these young men. As for the Government, which sends such innocent men to prison, I can only say it is digging its own grave in a way no non-cooperator can.79

IV Hai mashq-e sukhan jaari chakki ki mashaqqat bhi Ek tarfa tamasha hai Hasrat ki tabiyyat bhi. The toil of poetry goes side by side with the jail’s grinding mill; O what a queer thing is Hasrat’s mind.

[Hasrat Mohani] Every fortnight families visited the prison in covered palanquins or draped carriages, bringing the choicest delicacies for the inmates. These parcels of food provided the occasion for feasts in the barracks, which went on till late in the evening to the accompaniment of much wit and banter, recitations of Urdu Page 18 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National poetry, or political disputations in high-flown Urdu.80 Some read voraciously and spent a great deal of time pondering over contemporary issues. Representing different ideas and strands, they were (p.77) emotional and ideological enthusiasts of nationalism, and often sounded as if they were engaged in a war between light and darkness. Making communal life richer and more profound was, apparently, one of the goals of the prison inmates. Not far away, Motilal Nehru (1861–1931) played gulli-danda at Lucknow’s Central Jail, talked and laughed, and read the verses of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet, Hafiz Shirazi (1325/6–89/90).81 His companions were Khaliquzzaman (1889–1973) and Maulana Salamatullah of Farangi Mahal, also known as Dulare Mian. When Dulare Mian went to jail, a song was written in which, speaking in the name of his nephew, Hamid, the songwriter said: Bole Hamid Dulare chacha se Jail jana mubarak ho tum ko. Hamid said to Uncle Dulare, ‘Congratulations on going to jail’.82

During non-cooperation, C.R. Das (1870–1925) grew a beard in jail. ‘It is bad enough’, wrote Jawaharlal to his father, ‘for the Maulanas to insist on beards. I hope Hindu-Muslim unity does not mean that we should also grow beards to match’.83 In Vellore Jail, C. Rajagopalachari (1879–1972) exchanged notes with fellow non-cooperators. ‘Of Shafiqur Rahman [Kidwai] of Aligarh, what shall I say’, he noted in his diary. ‘I count it as a privilege to know such a man—I have not known a better young man or a more self-restrained, a more truly Godfearing, finer or noble soul’.84 Another entry mentions: ‘I am very glad that the superintendent’s promise to look after Shafiq’s health has borne fruit. He will get two eggs and a pint of milk besides chappaties’.85 Meanwhile in Yeravda Jail Gandhi read Ameer Ali’s The Spirit of Islam (1992) and his Short History of the Saracens (1989), Muhammad Ali’s (p.78) translation of the Koran, and Shibli’s life of the Prophet. Jawaharlal too studied the Koran, along with books on Islam, and on medieval India. Ghaffar Khan, lodged in the Punjab jail, forged friendships with the Hindu and Sikh inmates and developed an interest in the scriptures, especially the Gita and the Granth Saheb. Urdu poets, influenced by a new political culture and inspired by a fresh and vigorous nationalism, transfigured patriotism into songs and breathed into their poetry the breath of a new life. I mention such reading habits here to illustrate the period’s eclectic mood. Anwar Jamal Kidwai, Wilayat Ali’s youngest son, had this to say decades later: The non-cooperation movement, thus fashioned by Gandhi, promoted itself by the power of spectacular personal example–-resounding acts of sedition, dramatic renunciation of jobs, professions or the comforts of affluent life. Page 19 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National The promotional needs of the agitation were the same as the dramatic needs of Shakespearean tragedy. The leading characters in this drama had to plunge into it from sufficiently high positions or stations in society in order to make a mass impact.86 Wilayat Ali did not live to see that day. Stricken with cholera, he died in July 1918, cut off in his prime, at the age of thirty-three. A cholera epidemic in 1907 had already taken its toll.87 ‘The lives of the living are fragmentary, doubtful, and subject to change; but the lives of the dead are complete, free from the sway of Time, the all-but-omnipotent lord of the world’.88 These lines from an essay by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), published in July 1904, would not have escaped Wilayat Ali’s notice. As an informed reader who quoted freely from Shakespeare, John Stuart Mill, and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), he kept himself abreast, like many of his well-read Aligarh contemporaries, with English literature, European politics, and British political thought and philosophy. Wilayat Ali left behind a twenty-eight year-old widow and five children. (p.79) Anwar Jamal, then two years old, was the youngest. Coincidentally, Mohamed Ali’s father also died of cholera. His mother, Bi Amma or Abadi Bano Begum (d. 1924), a woman of sterling qualities, was only a year younger. Reflecting on the family’s dwindling fortunes after his father’s demise, Mohamed Ali commented on the outlook and mode of life of younger Muslims like Wilayat Ali, and their expanding mental and spiritual horizon. He pointed to ‘a general levelling up [having] taken place in the Muslim community which has made it a power in the land as it had never been before, and that without any dependence on the use or force or external authority’.89

V Ab jin ke dekhne ko Those the eyes long to see

This was the climate in which Wilayat Ali grew up in Aligarh and this was the site of his brief career. This was the atmosphere in which he wrote. Why was he different from the others? In plain and simple terms, he mocked at British rule and ridiculed it in skits and sketches, while many of his contemporary activists held forth from public platforms. His political pursuits were serious, and yet their expression was humorous and satirical. True, he was neither the greatest master of English prose to spring from his community, nor was he expected to generate a large following as a journalist. What he did remarkably well was to stimulate the imagination of his readers in Comrade, the most popular newspaper during his lifetime. And this he did not only in special cases where minds similarly attuned used his articles creatively, but also amongst the widest circle of his readership. He did not write much in Urdu, but the few essays that he published in Maalomat demonstrated that he possessed the skill to use the language to express the nuances of a modern mind and sensibility. Page 20 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National Many of Wilayat Ali’s ideas were influenced by Saiyyid Ahmad’s Tahzib al-Akhlaq, modelled on the Tatler and Spectator of Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729). His style bore the imprint of Munshi Sajjad Husain’s writings in Awadh Punch, a magazine (p.80) launched in 1877. Hence his use of images and symbols, some with devastating effect, to expose Pax Britannica. Lambasting its collaborators in the manner of Akbar Allahabadi, he ridiculed the loyalists who exercised a restraining hand on the Muslim League activists, and made roaring fun of the mongrel culture that had evolved in India under British rule. The articles published in Awadh Punch, likewise, derided the ‘newly-made gentlemen’ and their new-fangled ways in a unique and original style. Thus Nai Raushni ki Dictionary by Saiyyid Muhammad Azad explains the meanings of certain words—ayah, papa, bearer, chota hazri—drawn into the Urdu vocabulary as a result of contact with the West. These explanations are masterpieces of satire and, at the same time, excellent character sketches, as for example, the description of the word ayah.90 Later, Wilayat Ali’s ‘Gup’ column in the Comrade generated much interest.91 Some of Wilayat Ali’s character sketches are convincing and some of his descriptive writing is vivid. Unlike Mohamed Ali’s acerbic style, he paints his portraits with depth, wisdom, and tolerance. His approach is patient and fair. He was a good observer and writer who learned much from what he saw. In his gallery of caricatures are the British, who brought with them imperialistic arrogance and a powerful sense of cultural superiority. He described the ‘TitleHunting’ association of ‘Noisy Jee-Huzoors’, the ‘gaudy survivals of a halfforgotten past, those living anachronisms who have made Oudh’.92 He noticed the ‘England Returned Barrister’ desperately aping the sahibs in manners and speech, and pretending to have forgotten his native tongue during his brief stay in England. ‘Disdainful of grammar, devoid of euphony and destitute of sense the phrase (p.81) ‘England-Returned’ well suits the type. For the EnglandReturned are the disappointment of fond parents and the disillusionment of foolish friends. He is the personification of false hopes, the embodiment of extravagant expectations and the incarnation of utterly vain delusions’.93 Specimens of the Baboo culture in India—from the patwari94 to the deputy collector and the honorary magistrate—are comic both in their servility to their white superiors and their arrogance towards the common people. ‘The Patwari’, wrote Wilayat Ali in his first piece in the Comrade, is a miracle-worker. His pen, which he plies from morning till evening, works wonders that would do credit to an average prophet. By a stroke of his facile narkul pen, which sometimes takes refuge behind his ear out of sheer exhaustion from its ceaseless operations, he transforms a tenancy of some years’ standing into sub-tenancy that may be determined any moment; ejects A from the possession of a plot of land without the use of that physical force which the Zamindar has to employ, and into his place Page 21 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National pitchforks B, who has no semblance of title or claim. But his most successful miracle is the one in which he changes the nature of the tenures and diminishes and increases areas of land at will. ‘The Hon’rary Magistrate’, Wilayat Ali jibes in another of his columns, ‘is a triumph of blatant but unconvincing loyalty, a justification of weekly salams to the Bara sahib and an illustration of the supreme efficacy of dalis. He is the apotheosis of intellectual inanity, and an official recognition of native imbecility. He is the most practical of the jokes the lieutenant (p.82) governor ever indulged in at the expense of a stolid and unappreciative public’. Read, furthermore, the sarcasm poured on the ‘Natural Leader’: [He] principally subsists on decorations and titles, and unlike the proverbial bread, a title, big or small—even a Khan sahib ship—can sustain an aristocratic life. He has no illusions about the aim and object of human life. Man is born to flatter and be flattered, to bore and be bored, to entertain bog Sahibs and tip their be-turbaned chaprasies, to despise an untitled neighbour and fawn on a bigger one, to value all settlements as sacred, to avoid old taxes and vote for the new, and—to hate the politician like the Devil. His description of ‘The Bore’: Real, solid, substantial boredom is imperishable defiant of death and oblivion; but superficial, shallow, ineffective boredom is ephemeral. The real bore is born like genius. Nature does not send him ill equipped to fight the battle of life. It bestows on him inexhaustible funds of loquacity—funds that survive a most reckless and improvident use and last a lifetime of unprofitable investments, extravagant effects and hazardous experiments. It is a pity that the bore often makes a wasteful use of his gift. With greater economy and less improvidence he could leave his unprovided-for children a rich heritage of vocal energy. The real bore is, as I have said above, immortal … . The bore is wedded to no particular political beliefs and convictions. Advocacy of most progressive reforms and the demand of Swaraj are as compatible with honest boredom as the loyalism, of the most aggressive type—the loyalism of the Oudh Taluqdar or the Punjab Khan Bahadur … . Of all the bores infecting this country—and their name is legion—perhaps the mightiest and indefatigablest is the Railway bore. I say this without fear of contradiction. The bore has received the scantiest of attention from the literary artists of this country. It is small wonder then that the most elusive of all bores—the Railway bore—should be so little known, and his feats of incredible loquacity performed in every train throughout India should excite so little admiration. Truly, a country which rewards its bores, Page 22 of 31

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National not with the immortality which they deserve, but with a cold and frigid neglect which kills nascent and disheartens confirmed and inveterate boredom has no right to exist. And, of course, the delightful piece on ‘The Borrower’, published in the New Era on 23 September 1917. Here is an excerpt: Borrowing is a delightful and fascinating recreation. Magnificent as a pastime, it is fairly profitable as a profession. But it must be confessed that borrowing has, (p.83) in this inartistic and unappreciative age, ceased to be the safe thing it once was … . I like a sturdy, daring and robust borrower. I have no patience with his difficult apologetic and halfrepentant brother. He fills me with unspeakable disgust. I can’t endure the faltering accents and trembling steps with which he approaches you for a paltry loan of a rupee or two. I can’t stand his clumsy improvisation of a railway journey interrupted by a daring theft of the borrower’s luggage and cash. I feel exasperated at the silly story and inclined to thrash its wretched and inartistic author within and inch of his life but the Penal Code with its penalties intervenes between my noble inclinations and their execution. I hate the would-be borrower but I hate even more the indecent hurry and expedition with which Magistrates send the authors of even noble crimes to jail. I wonder why the miserable sneak cannot come to me like a man and say: ‘Sir, I want to cheat you out of a few wholly superfluous rupees. Surely you can have no objection to such a mild operation. Have you any?’ I am not sure that I would readily assent to the operation but I would certainly admire both his courage and candour. Finally, the ‘Hon’ble Mr Gup in the Council’: Hon’ble Mr Gup is a Councillor of rare type. He is absurdly honest and conscientious and quite primitively industrious. During the first two years of his councillorship he served his country by his large impenetrable reticence. He resolutely and sturdily refused to speak and this in spite of the fact that he was brimming over with all manners of views and opinions imperiously demanding an outlet. There were moments when he felt sorely tempted to inundate the Council with his eloquence but he exercised a timely self-restraint and the insistent desire to speak exploded in judicious coughing. Day after day he listened to the nonsense of his colleagues without being provoked to a retaliatory or emulative exhibition of his own stupendous powers in that direction. Of all the temptations to which a Councillor is subject none is stronger or more irresistible than to compliment the official author of the Budget. But let it be said to the credit of Mr. Gup that during his period of taciturnity he never once opened his

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National lips to admire the ‘lucidity’, which inevitably characterized the official Member’s presentation of the Budget. Of dozing and snoring the two principal occupations of an honest and conscientious Councillor he did a lot. But he did both in no half-hearted fashion but with the perfection and skill of the leader of a Moffussil Bar in the courtroom. The style of writing of the contributors to Awadh Punch smacked too much of Awadh’s Nawabi court. The laughter was long and loud, the jokes full-blooded, and the criticism personalized and offensive. Though influenced by Awadh Punch, Wilayat Ali developed his own moderate and (p.84) restrained form. That is why his English-educated readers, especially in UP’s urban centres, enjoyed his reproaches, imagining that his strenuous exhortations had a concealed message. They credited his sketches with literary excellence. Indeed, their claim to survival rests on their being part of the political and social history of the time, free from the social and cultural ambiguities that developed in the murky political climate after non-cooperation. Notes:

(1) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 70. (2) Kidwai, Biographical Sketch of Kidwais, p. i. (3) V.K.R. Menon, The Raja and After: Memoirs of a Bihar Civilian (New Delhi, 2000). (4) Durga Das, India: From Curzon to Nehru and After (New Delhi, 1969), pp. 185–6. (5) Anwar Jamal wrote a few articles on Rafi, though anonymously. Adil Tyabji comments: ‘I recall meeting Mr Jamal Kidwai several times at the Oxford University Press parties when he was the vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, and perhaps later: an impressive and handsome looking man with a wonderful shock of long gray hair. I remember quizzing him about the authorship of a long, perhaps two part, article on Rafi Ahmed Kidwai published under a pseudonym (‘A Rafian’ I think it was) which had impressed me but all I could get out of him was an enigmatic smile!’ (6) Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 133. (7) Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, with an introduction by Anwar Siddiqi (New Delhi, 1983). (8) For a personal account of the communal situation in Delhi and how it affected the Jamia, see Abid Husain to Saliha Abid Husain (his wife), 12 and 15 January

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National 1948, Saliha Abid Husain, Aawaz-e dost: Saliha Abid Husain ke khutut Abid Husain ke naam (New Delhi, 1992), pp. 100–2. (9) A.J. Kidwai, ‘In the Shadow of Freedom’, Hasan (ed.), India Partitioned, Vol. 2, p. 171. (10) Anis Kidwai, Azadi ki chhaon mein, p. 345. (11) Anis Kidwai, Ab jin ke dekhne ko (New Delhi, 1990). There is no write-up on Wilayat Ali in the two voluminous volumes—Shakhsiaat number—of the Lahore journal Naqoosh (1955–56), and he does not figure either in the two-volume history—Namwaran-e Aligarh—published by the Department of Urdu, Aligarh Muslim University. (12) P.N. Chopra, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai (Agra, 1960); Jain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai; M. Hashim Kidwai, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai (New Delhi, 1986). (13) Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History, p. 13. (14) Hari Dev Sharma (ed.), Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva (New Delhi, 1999), Vol. 3, p. 63. (15) Gandhi to Mazharul Haq, 20 March 1920, Shivaji Rao Ayde, Message of Ashiana (Calcutta, 1962), p. 70. (16) Mohamed Ali, Thoughts on the Present Discontent (Bombay, 1907), p. 20. (17) ‘Turkey has fallen on evil times’, wrote an Aligarh graduate. ‘She is prey to external states abroad—the belligerent and all other European states without exception. She is the victim of her internal enemies—Kamal and his colleagues. What I mean by this is that Turkey is like the Aligarh College. The present Ministry is like the old trustees—weak, placid and feeble-minded. The allies are the English staff. Europe is the Government. The Committee of Union and Progress are the students’. Abdur Rahman Siddiqi to Saiyyid Mahmud, 10 January 1913, V.N. Datta and B.E. Cleghorn (eds), A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics: Being the Selected Correspondence of the Late Dr. Syed Mahmud (New Delhi, 1974), pp. 15–16. (18) P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life(Oxford, 1979), p. 227. (19) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 84. (20) Ghaffar, Hayat-e Ajmal, pp. 116–17, 120–1, 123–4. (21) For details, see my introduction to Halide Edib, Inside India (New Delhi, 2002). The book was first published in London in 1937, and has been reissued by the Oxford University Press with my introduction and notes.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National (22) Ibid., pp. 130–1. (23) Report on the Working of the System of Government: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 1921–1928 (Allahabad, 1928), p. 241. (24) For the Arab countries, Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, p. 338. (25) Robinson, Ulama of Farangi Mahall, pp. 101–12. (26) The Imperial Gazetteer of India: The Indian Empire (Oxford, 1907), Vol. 1, p. 438. (27) Minault, Secluded Scholars; Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi, 2000), p. 80; Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870–1920 (New Delhi, 1996); Claudia Liebeskind, Piety on its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times (New Delhi, 1998), p. 25. For the significance of print culture in nineteenth-century Bengal, see Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (New Delhi, 1997), Chapter 8. (28) Ghaffar, Hayat-e Ajmal, pp. 129–30, and Intizar Husain, Ajmal-e azam(Lahore, 1995), p. 173. (29) He belonged to the Ghadar party and edited Islam Fraternity from Japan and Naya Islam from Germany. (30) K.H. Ansari, ‘Pan-Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialists’, Modern Asian Studies, 20, 3, 1986, p. 536. (31) Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1885–1930 (New Delhi, 1991). (32) Comrade, 4 October 1913. (33) Makatib-e Shibli (Azamgarh, 1971), Vol. 2, p. 157, and essays in Maqalat-e Shibli Vol. 6, pp. 156–202. (34) Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore, 1961), p. 14. (35) The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Hereafter CWMG) (New Delhi, 3rd rev. edn), Vol. 22, p. 165. (36) This was at the AICC meeting. Hasrat insisted on the deletion of those phrases in the resolution, which excluded the possibility of resort to violence. He also demanded, contrary to Gandhi’s designs, complete independence. Although Hasrat’s amendments were rejected, they were supported by as many as fiftytwo members. CWMG, Vol. 25, pp. 339–54.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National (37) Fazlul Haq to Mohamed Ali, 23 November 1916, Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 1, p. 307. (38) Ziauddin Barni to Mohamed Ali, 31 January 1917, Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 2, p. 15. Motilal Ghose, editor of Amrita Bazar Patrika, informed Mohamed Ali in prison: ‘Though the Rowlatt Act sits like a dread nightmare on our breasts, it has united both Hindus and Muslims in a way, which has never been witnessed. Is it not a miracle that Hindus should preach in the masjid and Muslims should enter Hindu temples?’ This refers to Swami Shraddhanand’s Friday sermon at Delhi’s Jama Masjid and the Fatehpuri mosque. Motilal Ghose to Mohamed Ali, 14 April 1919, Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, p. 220. (39) K.M. Panikkar, An Autobiography (Madras, 1957), p. 336. (40) Mohamed Ali to Nehru, (?) October 1923, Jawaharlal Nehru (ed.), A Bunch of Old Letters (Bombay, 1958), p. 31. (41) To give an example of the prevailing mood, it was not uncommon in those days to see wounded cows running through the bazaars and for crowds of Hindus and Muslims to a shout after them—‘it is the work of the CID. It is the work of the C.I.D.’. S. Mahmud, ‘Looking Back’, 1921 Movement: Reminiscences (New Delhi, 1972), p. 142. (42) Presidential Address delivered by the Raja of Mahmudabad, Allahabad, 30 May 1915, p. 4. (43) For UP, Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India; for Malabar, D.N. Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India 1920–1950 (New Delhi, 1983), pp. 78–9. (44) C.F. Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 15 October 1920, quoted in Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927 (New Delhi, 1984), p. 251. (45) Herbert Passin, ‘The Jeevan-Dani: A Profile of Jayaprakash Narayan’, Encounter, June 1957, p. 49. (46) Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (New Delhi, 1995), p. 171. (47) D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma (New Delhi, 1951), Vol. 1, p. 274. (48) Navajivan, 8 August 1920, CWMG, Vol. 21, p. 130. (49) Modern Review (Calcutta), October 1920, p. 434.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National (50) For example, Gandhi ne aaj jung ka ailaan kar diya/Batil se haq ko dast-ogaribaan kar diya. Sadiq, Twentieth Century Urdu Literature, p. 87. (51) Abbas, I Am Not an Island, pp. 47–8. (52) A.A. Suroor, Khwab baqi hai (Aligarh, 1991), p. 27. (53) S. Ali Muhammad Zaidi, Bara Banki (Lucknow, 1984), p. 97. (54) Esha Basanti Joshi (ed.), Uttar Pradesh District Gazetteers: Bara Banki (Allahabad, 1964), p. 45. (55) M.H. Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in North India: The United Provinces 1918– 1922 (New Delhi, 1978), pp. 180, 183. (56) There are differing versions of how, following the Munshiganj tragedy, Ram Chandra was not allowed to leave Bara Banki for Rae Bareli. Kapil Kumar, Peasants in Revolt: Tenants, Landlords, Congress and the Raj in Oudh (New Delhi, 1984), pp. 136–7 and fn. 92. (57) Kumar, Peasants in Revolt, p. 118. (58) Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest, p. 184. (59) Gyan Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh 1919–1922’, Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, 1982), p. 165. (60) Kumar, Peasants in Revolt, pp. 160–1. (61) Among the other signatories were Gandhi, Azad, Ajmal Khan, Lajpat Rai, Ansari, Abbas Tyabji, Rajendra Praasad, and Abdul Bari. See CWMG, Vol. 24, pp. 360–1. (62) Edib, Inside India, p. 107. (63) Kidwai, Swaraj: How to Obtain It, p. 38. (64) Edib, Inside India, p. 214. (65) Report, UP, p. 79. (66) Edib, Inside India, p. 214. (67) Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh 1926– 34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (New Delhi, 1978), p. 35. (68) Hameeda Salim, Shorish-e dauran (New Delhi, 1995), p. 34.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National (69) Gandhi stated the following at Tinnevelly on 23 September 1921: ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan, in his old age, Dr Ansari, Abdul Bari, and many other distinguished Mussulman countrymen of ours and Pandit Motilal Nehru, in his old age, having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and C.R. Das enjoying a practice that was second to none in all India, were not joking when they adopted khaddar. Their wives are not joking when they adopted heavy khaddar just as heavy as you see myself, Maulana Saheb and Dr Rajan wearing and spinning from day to day as a sacrament’. CWMG, Vol. 24, pp. 312–13. (70) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 88, Mohamed Ali to F.S.A. Slocock, 29 January 1917, Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 2, pp. 13–14, and A.M. Dariabadi, Insha-e Majid (Calcutta, 1991), p. 479. (71) Mahmud, ‘Looking Back’, p. 143. (72) CWMG, Vol. 22, p. 54. (73) Edib, Inside India, p. 106. (74) Indian Opinion, 11 May 1907, CWMG, Vol. 6, p. 443 (75) Indian Opinion, 22 June 1907, CWMG, Vol. 7, p. 11. (76) Report submitted by Lindsay and Rauf on the cases of the Ali brothers, 11 December 1918. Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 2, p. 158. (77) Indian Opinion, 15 December 1906, CWMG, Vol. 6, p. 105. (78) P.C. Bamford, Histories of the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movements (Delhi, 1925, rpt 1985), pp. 142, 145. (79) CWMG, Vol. 25, p. 46. (80) Ibid., p. 177. (81) Khaliquzzaman, Pathway, p. 62. (82) Nasim Ansari, Choosing to Stay: Memoirs of an Indian Muslim, trans. from Urdu by Ralph Russell (New Delhi, 1999), p. 16. (83) To father, 17 August 1922, S. Gopal (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (henceforth SWJN), Vol. 1, p. 330. (84) Kidwai, ‘Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai’, Salahuddin (ed.), Dilliwale, p. 239. (85) To Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai, 17 March 1952, in Kidwai (ed.), Biographical Sketch of Kidwais, p. 166.

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National (86) A.J. Kidwai, ‘Conflict and Consensus in the Non-cooperation Movement’, Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1985), p. 161. (87) ‘Cholera is generally introduced to the district by pilgrims on their way to or from the fairs at Ajodhya and elsewhere, and spreads with greater or less severity to the season of year or the condition of the people’. DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 26. (88) Robert R. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (eds),The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903–1959 (London, 1961), p. 527. (89) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 87. (90) Shaista Akhtar Bano Suhrawardy, A Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story (London, 1945), pp. 208–9. (91) ‘Gup is the panacea we have found out for all the ills that an unwieldy empire is heir to. The remedy is simple and harmless—like all quack medicines … . No operation, however painless, will be performed. Gup will only take you out of the dices of Imperial Politics just for a dream-while. Every week or thereabouts it will chloroform you and make you insensible to the fever and the fret of an all-absorbing public life. For one short quarter of an hour every week you will forget that such things as the Nagri Pracharini Sabha and the Urdu Conference, the Bengalee and the Observer, the Partition of Bengal and the unity of modern Behar ever existed. Gup is a combination of negations. It has no politics, no religion, almost no morality. It has no race or colour …’ . Comrade, 1 July 1911. (92) Ibid., 4 October 1913. (93) Among his English articles were: ‘The Patwari’ (Comrade, 14 January 1911); ‘The Revenue Agent’ (Comrade, l8 February l911); ‘The Chaukidar’, (Comrade, 6 May 1911); ‘The Hon’rary Magistrate’ (Comrade, 1 July 1911); ‘Social Reform: A Lecture’ (Comrade, 2 September 1911); ‘The England-Returned’ (Comrade, 9 September 1911); ‘Obiter Dicta’ (Comrade, 23 September 1911); ‘The Restoration of the Camel—A Lecture’ (Comrade, 30 September 1911); ‘The Assessor’ (Comrade, 18 May 1912); ‘The Interview’ (Comrade, 10 May 1913); ‘The Title-Hunting Association of Noisy Jeehuzoors’ (Comrade, 6 October 1913); ‘The Bore’ (Comrade, 25 July 1914); ‘A Literary Marriage’ (New Era, 7 April 1917); ‘Interpellations’ (New Era, 14 April 1917); ‘A Literary Breakfast—II’ (New Era, 14 April 1917); ‘A Literary Breakfast—III’ (New Era, 28 April 1917); ‘The “Natural Leader”’ (New Era, 26 May 1917); ‘Gulam Husain’ (New Era, 1 September 1917); ‘The Railway Bore’ (Comrade, 2 August 1913); ‘The

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Negotiating Identities: The Local and the National Borrower’ (New Era, 22 September 1917); ‘Hon’ble Mr. Gup in the Council’ (New Era, 27 October 1917). (94) S. Raza Ali commented on this piece in Amaal-nama (Delhi, 1943), p. 151.

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A Family Saga

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

A Family Saga Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords Wilayat Ali Kidwai and his group belonged to a new social group among Muslims in Awadh. The group, which was influential in parts of the United Provinces, downplayed religion as an impediment to nationality, emphasized processes of interaction and linkages, and stressed the importance of cultural similarities. This chapter examines the rough terrain in Bara Banki district, traces the roots of Wilayat Ali Kidwai and his family, and looks at how the turbulence in 1857 affected the Kidwais and many others in their immediate surroundings. It also explores the outburst of political and intellectual energy in the form of a wide range of books, journals, and newspapers, as well as the role of various associations and societies that facilitated contacts between writers, poets, publicists, editors, and reformers. In the qasbas, the search for new ways of reasserting and maintaining the Muslim or Hindu identity and culture was less conspicuous. Keywords:   Wilayat Ali Kidwai, Muslims, qasbas, Kidwais, Awadh, Bara Banki district, identity, culture

February 22, 1850.—This part of Oude, comprising the districts of Durreeabad Rudowlee, Ramnuggur Dhumeree Dewa, Jehangeerabad, Jugdispoor and Hydergur, has more mud forts than any other though they abound in all parts; and the greater part of them are garrisoned in the same way by gangs of robbers. February 24, 1850.—There is at present no other district in Oude, abounding so much in gang robbery and other crime, as this Durreabad [Dariabad] Rodoulee [Rudauli] … Page 1 of 35

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A Family Saga February 26, 1850.—It is humiliating and distressing to see a whole people suffering such wrongs as are, every day, inflicted upon the village communities and town’s people of Dureeabad, Rodowleee, Sidhore and Dewa, by these merciless freebooters … February 27, 1850.—Sutrick, sixteen miles west, over a plain of muteear soil, tolerably well cultivated, and very well studded with trees of the finest kinds, single, in clusters and in groves. The mango trees are in blossom and promise well … Sutrick is celebrated for the shrine of Shouk Salar, alias Borda Baba, the Father of Syud Salar, whose shrine is at Bahraetch [Bahraich]. P.D. Reeves (ed.), Sleeman in Oudh (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971), pp. 275, 280, 286–8. We have examined the elements that combined to create a favourable climate for a rapprochement between the political classes. This unprecedented development was the work of a (p.86) new social group among Muslims, the new middle classes in Awadh with rationalist modes of thinking that appraised their own intellectual and political position in a critical and worldly manner. They could therefore defy, for the sake of their political vision and not personal interest, all previous traditions they had inherited from the loyalists at the college in Aligarh. To be sure, Wilayat Ali and his group, the products of a new school and college system, belonged to this class. Small in size but influential in parts of UP, they found out that if they were to become part of the national movement they had to accept its principle of political organization, namely, plural nationhood. They, therefore, downplayed religion as an impediment to nationality, emphasized cultural similarities, and laid stress on processes of interaction and linkages. Suffice it here to say that, to them community implied fellowship, and a broad sense of political, social, and cultural empathy with the people in the colonial frame of reference. This chapter falls into two broad sections. In the first section, I traverse the rough terrain in Bara Banki district, trace the roots of Wilayat Ali and his family, and uncover how the turbulence in 1857 affected them and many others in their immediate environs. In the second section, I trace the outburst of political and intellectual energy in the form of a great variety of newspapers, journals and books, and the role of wide-ranging associations and societies that facilitated contacts between publicists, editors, reformers, writers, and poets. In all of this several trends were at work, though the most important one from the point of view of this study was a historic fusion of the Indian and Muslim identity rather than a commitment to a rigidly elaborate and constraining doctrine postulated by the theologians. Indeed, the qasbas of Awadh were the sites where religious loyalties were more often than not fused with an emerging Page 2 of 35

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A Family Saga pan-Indian identity in a seamless web of symbols and sentiments. Religious differences and cultural diversities did not necessarily perpetuate separate and antagonistic interests. The traditional Islamic or Hinduized political-cultural systems that were firmly entrenched in cities and large towns were forced to adapt to the qasba ways. Hence the search for new means to reassert and maintain the Muslim or Hindu identity and culture was much less pronounced in the qasbas. This is best illustrated by the concerns of the individual members of everyday society—Wilayat Ali and his group—rather than the luminaries, or the tall poppies, who captured newspaper headlines for their dramatic (p.87) and wellpublicized activism as reformers and publicists. Although the story in this chapter is woven around Wilayat Ali, his grandfather and father and the Kidwais of Bara Banki district, my chief concern is to delineate the contours of the qasba’s cultural ethos, and to shed light on the themes, values, and aspirations of a distinct cultural group of individuals with special personalities and perceptions. There are, after all, good reasons for prying into this past with the historian’s telescope, and trying to see more clearly what happened rather than remaining content with simplistic theories and facile generalizations. Of all reasons for an interest in this group and their social milieu is that they have hardly figured in the imagination of the social historian of modern India.

I Born a year before the Indian National Congress’ founding session in December 1885, Wilayat Ali belonged to the Kidwai gentry that trace its descent to a Turkish immigrant, Kidwatuddin, who came to India in the wake of Shahabuddin Ghori’s invasions in 1191–92.1 Brother of the sultan of Rum and the kingdom’s qazi, Kidwatuddin’s conflict with the king drove him into exile with his wife and son. He wandered across many lands before coming to the saint of Ajmer, Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti (1142–1236). The Khwaja’s influence won him preferment in the Delhi sultanate. His descendants claimed that Ghori had received him with full honours on the outskirts of Delhi.2 Similar stories lend credence to the belief that he, an adventurer, managed to make his way up the social ladder. Qazi Kidwa (Kidwai means ‘elevate’ in Arabic), as Kidwatuddin had come to be called, led an expedition to Awadh against refractory Bhar chieftains.3 In 1201, he attacked the Bhar Raja of Jagdeopur, the modern (p.88) Juggaur, seizing a large tract of fifty-two villages that became his jagir. These became known as Qidwara, and Masauli is one of them.4 In the early twentieth century, this tiny village had a primary school, but nothing else of any significance.5 Today, it has a Rafi Memorial Junior High School, a railway station called Rafinagar, and an elaborately built mausoleum constructed over Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’s grave. From

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A Family Saga a few hundred in the early twentieth century, Masauli’s population has increased to approximately 13,000. Qazi Kidwa reached Ayodhya in 1205. This is when his success story begins. He is said to have converted several Hindu groups to Islam, and settled in a locality later designated as Kidwai Mohalla. He died three years later; his tomb, now destroyed, stood close to Aurangzeb’s mosque. His descendants took advantage of Qazi Kidwa’s reputation, and used his connections to rise to high positions in the service of the Delhi Sultans and the Awadh Nawabs. His son, Qazi Azizuddin, married Qazi Fakhrul Islam’s daughter at the court of Qutubuddin Aibak (r. 1206–10). Buried in Satrikh, an area Azizuddin administered, his tomb still exists in the mango grove known as Qazi Ashraf’s Bagh. During the reign of Aibak’s successor Iltutmish (r. 1211–36), contemporary sources recorded continuous ‘holy wars’ against the refractory tribes, and the overthrow of a chief named Bartu, ‘beneath whose sword about a hundred and twenty thousand Mussalmans had attained martyrdom’.6 This was roughly the period when the Kidwai Sheikhs of Juggaur began moving into Bara Banki, occupied Dewa and other places in the west, and acquired estates. Salar Ahmad’s family of Juggaur, fourth in descent from Qazi Kidwa, acquired the Gadia taluqa in 1843, and later extended its holdings in Dewa, Nawabganj, and Partapganj. The Kidwais of Juggaur were related to the Jasmara families, who were descendants of Qazi Qeyamuddin. Among them Qazi Abdul Malik, Muhammad Hamid, and Fakhrullah figure prominently under the Mughals.7 (p.89) Their resilience and staying power was amazing. While many of their fellow taluqdars declined for one reason or the other, the Kidwai Sheikhs of Juggaur managed to retain most of their estates until the abolition of zamindari in free India.8 Among the descendants of Qazi Kidwa were Qazi Shawwal, the author of Mirat al-Islam and the qazi of Delhi. Qazi Abdul Malik and Qazi Muhammad Hamid received mansabs under the Mughals, the latter a jagir in Keshnur; Muhammad Qasim commanded a force in the Deccan under Aurangzeb; Sheikh Fakhrullah served as paymaster to the troops in Bengal.9 Farzand Ali Khan, a man with vast estates in Nawabganj, Siddhaur, Dewa, Fatehpur, and Satrikh, belonged to yet another Kidwai clan. He supported Wajid Ali Shah, the last King of Awadh, but submitted early and added to his possessions by purchase. Other members of the Kidwai family lived in Shahabpur and Ambhapur, with headquarters in Bahraich district,10 and Jahangirabad, founded in honour of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569–1627).11 That estate later came to Raja Tasadduq Rasul Khan (1851–1921), uncle of Farzand Ali Khan, whose palace stood in a large enclosure to the west of the qasba. A key figure in landlord politics, he served as a member of the UP legislative council, and trustee of the Page 4 of 35

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A Family Saga Aligarh College. His nephew, Naushad Ali Khan, a taluqdar of Mailaraiganj attended the Muslim League’s first meeting at Dhaka in December 1906 and became the first secretary of the UP provincial league after its foundation in June 1909. It is noteworthy that such men, though operating within the confines of their small estates, forged important links with the élites in their province in order to gain access to the wider political arena. Qazi Kidwa’s grandson, Jalaluddin (d. 1271), was a disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya (1238–1325), the great Chishti saint in Delhi. He achieved considerable spiritual eminence in a land where the heterodox faith of Sufism softened the rigid theological formality of Islam. So did his brother Qazi Qeyamuddin. Both are buried in Rasauli.12 Some of their (p.90) descendants, notably Muhammad ‘Aabkash’ (d. 1472), earned respect for their learning. A Chishti saint, Aabkash (he was called so because he used to draw water from the well to quench the people’s thirst), in later years came under the spell of the Qadiri order because of his family’s matrimonial ties with Bansa.13 Abdul Majid of Dariabad, the author-journalist, descended from him.14 Though little is known about their fortunes under the later Mughals and the Awadh Nawabs, the Kidwais were a powerful clan for a while. The Raikars, having entered Bara Banki during Akbar’s reign and revolted against the Nawab in 1751, may well have affected their fortunes. Although crushed after a fierce battle and for many years out of possession of their family estates, Awadh’s lax government in the first half of the nineteenth century enabled the Raikars to recover, in 1751, a larger domain that had been theirs. Elsewhere, the star of the respectable Kidwais fell in 1765, when the British cannons at Buxar mowed down the flower of their gentry. Their exclusion from the Shia-dominated Awadh court was an episode devoid of glory.15 Thereafter, their influence as local notables remained confined to Bara Banki. It was an odd story from the start. The early settlements during the British regime were notoriously harsh in some areas. In Dariabad itself, Namdar Khan petitioned for the return of lands in 1802.16 So did Chaudhuri Muhammad Hasan, whose taluqa in Unarpur (Rudauli) was lost to Inayat Rasul during a settlement. In support of his claims he submitted on 16 May 1861: ‘Ever since the Qusbah of Rodowli was built (nine centuries passed), the Unarpur Talooqua continued to be in the undisturbed possession of [the] petitioner’s ancestors. …’.17 This is not, however, the whole tale. Gradually, dispossessed members of the Islamic gentry settled their debt, recovered their land, and secured employment both within the Nawabi and outside.18 This the Gadia taluqdars did. Though evidence is thin, the Masauli Kidwais also fared well until Awadh’s (p. 91) agrarian depression of the 1830s that left its scar on smaller landed estates.19 But the district’s big feudal barons were not substantially affected, including those belonging to the Kidwai clan. Others, forming an extensive squierarchy of small zamindars, multiplied on steadily subdividing portions of Page 5 of 35

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A Family Saga the patrimonial lands. Served by the occupational castes, their relationship was based on the jajmani system, and the dominant lineage of the descendants of Qazi Kidwa was referred to as sarkar. In this single appellation one finds the confluence and the consolidation of economic power and political authority. This is best exemplified by the career of Shujat Ali, the grandfather of Wilayat Ali.

II During his journey through Awadh, the results of which proved disastrous for Wajid Ali Shah, the last ruler of Awadh, Sleeman had found mud forts garrisoned by gangs of robbers. As he traveled through Dariabad, Rudauli, Ramnagar, Dewa, Jahangirabad, Jagdishpur, and Haidergarh, he found robber barons, rapacious revenue officials, and marauding detachments preying on the estates of the smaller zamindars, grabbing their property, and laying waste villages that resisted their visitations.20 A taluqdar of Khairabad was flogged to death. Mumtaz Ahmad, the taluqdar of Rudauli, was ruined by his adversaries and his zamindari was made over to others.21 Sleeman talked of gang robbery and other crimes in Dariabad and Rudauli that were committed with the Amil’s connivance.22 Here, as in the wide expanses of central India, such groups were so numerous as to constitute a familiar element of society, sometimes virtually a fourth estate. They were generally thought to be against the government, and this entitled them to some esteem among common people, who were never short of reasons for disliking their rulers and their collaborators. A tough, rugged country esquire, Shujat Ali lived during the turbulent (p.92) years in an area where the 1857 revolt spread and where the insult to the Nawab and his banishment to Calcutta bred popular resentment.23 Shujat Ali maintained a band of armed retainers and spent much time in skirmishes fought in mango groves or village commons against neighbouring landlords and revenue collectors. This was not uncommon in a volatile region with a high incidence of violence and death.24 As riding on horseback was not so common, Shujat Ali used one of the many types of conveyances suspended from or raised over long poles that rested on the shoulders of men who carried them.25 For as long as anyone could remember, his victories loomed large in popular memory, and village bards took to singing the story of his exploits in stirring verse in Awadhi dialect in the metre of the folk epic Alha and Udal. Dealing with three royal personages—Prithviraj Chauhan of Delhi (1162–92), Jai Chand (d. 1193), the Rathore King of Kanauj, and Parmal or Paramardi (1166–1203), the Chandela king of Mahoba in Bundelkhand—sang Alha and Udal itinerant bards all over India. It was, after all, ‘a noble story replete with incident, and with characters well contrasted’.26 ‘In our own house in Masauli’, writes Anis Kidwai, the granddaughter of Shujat Ali, ‘we spoke Awadhi, sang songs in Awadhi, including Alha and Udal’s razmnama (poetry on war or the battle field)’.27 Except for Hardoi, Awadhi was

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A Family Saga spoken in the Lucknow and Fyzabad divisions (except Tanda), and in Fatehpur, Pratapgarh, Allahabad, Jaunpur, and Mirzapur, and south of the Son river.28 Suddenly, the house in Masauli was rocked by a turbulent phase in Bara Banki’s history. In 1856, the Bara Banki district, along with the rest of Awadh, came under British rule. A year later, long festering but diffused grievances, including the loss of villages suffered by the taluqdars during (p.93) the 1856 land settlement, erupted.29 Karamat Ali of Uchagaon in Nawabganj joined the ‘rebels’, leading the British to make a settlement with his nephew.30 Captain Reid referred to his involvement and that of Raja Razzaq Bukhsh of Jahangirabad, Muhammad Amir, and Ghulam Abbas—‘all extensive landholders in this district’.31 Saifpur’s taluqdar lent credence to a proclamation from Lucknow ordering the death of Christians and offering rewards to the assailants. Choudhry Narain Singh, agent of the Rani of Surajpur, purchased the European’s ‘plundered’ property, while the taluqdar Nowrung Singh sent reinforcements to Lucknow. Sarfaraz Ali Choudhry of Subeha in Dariabad and Mumtaz Ali, Rudauli’s wealthy landholder, hitched their fortunes to the antiBritish bandwagon. Finally, Avtar Singh, Chunder B. (the surname is illegible), Bacchan Singh, and Gurbuksh Singh—‘minor’ taluqdars of Dariabad—threw in their lot with the anti-British forces. ‘Before annexation’, noted an official, ‘they earned a livelihood by rapine and murder, and immediately after the disturbance they took to their old practice and so great were their followers that they were able to send reinforcement to the rebels in Lucknow’.32 At Nawabganj in June 1858, the Raikar zamindars of Sitapur and Bahraich fought valiantly. ‘I have seen’, wrote the British general, ‘many battles in India and many brave fellows fighting with a determination to conquer or die; but I have never witnessed anything more magnificent than the conduct of these zamindars’.33 After the capture of Lucknow by the British troops in March 1858, a large proportion of Wajid Ali Shah’s defeated army passed through the Bara Banki district towards the Ghagra. Brigadier Hope Grants launched his assault on Kursi, and marched to Bari, a stronghold of the ‘Faizabad Maulvi’. He continued his triumphant march to Mahmudabad, Bilehra, the headquarters of the large estate owned by the Raja of Bilehra and Paintepur, and Ramnagar, situated on the east of the main road from Bara Banki to (p.94) Bahramghat. While returning to Lucknow, he halted in Masauli. Here he found the Gurkha army under Jung Bahadur.34 The range and depth of involvement in the 1857 Rebellion is evident from the various claims submitted to the provincial government after the British smothered the sparks of unrest. Thus, Abdul Halim sought compensation for his unspecified ‘losses’ in Dariabad.35 Ganesh Lal, Rudauli’s tehsildar (sub-divisional revenue official), claimed 978 rupees for the losses suffered during the attack by the ‘rebels’. Moinuddin filed his petition for 195 rupees.36 In the attack on the thana sixty-two rupees were ‘lost’; hence, Major I.M. Carneigie, Dariabad’s Page 7 of 35

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A Family Saga deputy commissioner, wanted permission ‘to debit the loss under the head of expenditure’.37 The following account reflects the state of affairs in another qasba: Rudauli, it must be known, is an entire Mahommedan city [sic] and it was with great eagerness that they embraced the opportunity of vindicating their freedom as they called it a fortnight ago before the Mutiny. The tehsildar of the place was killed by the Mahommedans, an expedition was sent out but the murderers had decamped. They soon, returned, however, and so great were the devastation covered in the Ruddowlee district, that the roads ceased to be frequented in broad daylight.38 Chamier’s settlement report described the three categories of people who objected to the assessment. Without detailing the events, he referred to the tumult in Rudauli. He added, The most discreditable of the third class were Ruza Hosein and Mahomed Abid, talukdars of Rudauli. I am not surprised at this, for whether in their tardy submission after the mutinies, or in their connivance in the attack in those days on our Rudauli tahsil, or in filing palpably incorrect rent-rolls, they have uniformly sustained a character for a sullen opposition to our Government.39 Individual members of the Kidwai clan offered some resistance to (p.95) the British troops. Munshi Muhammad Husain, a powerful noble and deputy of the minister Ali Naqi Khan at the time of annexation, was killed along with the mercenaries of Kidwai families from Rasauli, Baragaon, and Juggaur.40 Raufur Rahman of Baragaon died fighting the British in Gorakhpur; Abdul Majid Dariabadi’s grandfather, Mufti Manzar Karim, a serishtadar, was held guilty of holding a meeting with the ‘rebels’ in Shahjahanpur. He landed up in the Andaman Islands and returned home only in 1865.41 The bubble burst with Colin Campbell (1792–1863) advancing to the relief of the garrison at Lucknow in March 1858. By mid-January 1859, Bara Banki’s ‘uprising’ was suppressed. Consequently, quite a few Muslim families faced retribution at the hands of the British,42 a theme brilliantly portrayed by Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa in Zat-e sharif.43 Awadh’s population was disarmed, some 1,562 fortresses were razed to the ground, the ‘rebel’ taluqdars were made to surrender, and their properties were confiscated.44 There remained those who preferred to mourn the eclipse of their erstwhile benefactors in the Awadh court and declined contentedly in the lap of feudalism. They were a lost generation.45 (p.96) The immediate punishment meted out to the taluqdars and zamindars notwithstanding, many did not have to wait for long to recover their estates. Captain Reid had placed Jahangirabad ‘entirely beyond the pale of mercy’, but Page 8 of 35

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A Family Saga on 19 October 1858 the chief commissioner sanctioned the settlement of the taluqdari with Farzand Ali, son-in-law of Raja Razzaq Bukhsh, on the payment of a ‘fine’ of 5,000 rupees.46 The claims of Sarfaraz Ali in Satrikh, and Sheikh Qasim Ali in Kasimpur, Birha, were also accommodated. Confirming his zamindari rights, Lucknow’s deputy commissioner recorded Sarfaraz Ali’s ‘good service’ in the intelligence department.47 The Raja of Mahmudabad fought against the British, but the mother of the minor Raja petitioned for mercy when the government accepted her plea. The Masauli Kidwais survived the trauma of 1857. Part of the reason is that they were favourably disposed towards the world beyond the range of the palanquin and the mango groves, and, instead of lining up against the John Company, they carved out new channels of aspirations and creativity. In the larger frame of things, the colonial government itself adopted the policy of conciliation and compromise, especially towards the influential sections in the localities. Once the fury of 1857 subsided, most landed families and the service communities— Hindus and Muslims alike—were slowly but steadily integrated into the extensive bureaucratic and administrative structures.

III The future of the taluqdars more or less settled, there were compelling reasons for other groups outside this charmed circle to leave home and go to the city. New roads shortened the distances, so relocating did not mean complete separation from the qasba. It was easy for most qasba dwellers to get on to a cart road leading to Lucknow or Kanpur. By the 1870s, a person could work in Lucknow, return to his parent’s home, and then go back to his job. Quite a few had never left home before. Mumtaz Ali, the father of Wilayat Ali, was probably one of them. Yet, (p.97) he seemed much more aware than his father, Shujat Ali, of the dramatic changes taking place in and around the Bara Banki district. He knew, for example, how many ashraf families had been eclipsed after the 1857 Rebellion, and how their taluqdari lifestyle had changed overnight. He was equally conscious of the big picture, the intrusive role of colonial rule that started with Awadh’s annexation (1856) and culminated in its subsequent amalgamation with the north-west in January 1877. But he would have also heard of the government’s assurance that amalgamation would not affect the rights and privileges of the landed class, and the laws and rules that had previously governed Awadh would remain unaltered. Looking beyond the confines of his qasba, he would have noticed how the ‘Barons of Awadh’ were being gradually restored to a position of unquestioned supremacy in rural society.48 Hence Darogah Haji Abbas Ali’s typically servile account of the government’s ‘achievements’ in 1880: The Government, by being kind and considerate towards the taluqdars, have led them to be kind and considerate towards their tenants; there is no Page 9 of 35

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A Family Saga oppression, no uncertainty of the present or the future, and every sense of injustice is appealed to the British authorities, through the medium of Civil and Criminal Courts. Five and twenty years ago there was no province in India where there existed such malverisation, misrule, insecurity of life and property, and such wretchedness, and now probably there is no province in the country so consciously governed, so prosperous, and so contented.49 The ‘Oudh Policy’, as the likes of Mumtaz Ali discovered the hard way, ultimately bore fruit. Nearly 272 taluqdars received sanads conveying rights of ownership and revenue collection. Many obtained minor jurisdictions over criminal, civil, and revenue suits. Their estates were, moreover, protected by the Oudh Estate Act (1869), the Oudh Settled Estates Act (1900), and by the Court of Wards which rescued large estates from mismanagement. In 1869, 45 estates were under management; 28 under the Court of Wards and 17 as ‘encumbered’.50 In 1887, the Court of Wards looked after the same number of estates in Awadh, with a gross rental of 12 lakh and debts amounting to almost double the amount.51 (p.98) The immediate benefit of this relatively quiescent period in Awadh also accrued to middle-level zamindars and taluqdars. Sky-high prices and easy credit enabled them to make money and adopt opulent and luxurious lifestyles. However, petty taluqdars were not so fortunate. Their situation was made worse by the system of inheritance, which fragmented small holdings into even smaller ones. When prices rose greatly in 1860, 1865, 1869, and 1873 owing to bad harvests,52 some amongst them lost land or contracted debts.53 Others suffered the diminishing value of their estates. Dependent on rents rather than the control of the debts of their tenants—like the moneylending and sugarmanufacturing landlords—they became vulnerable to various pressures from the tenantry.54 Those who were already in a weak position were worst affected. They were probably being eliminated faster than at any time within living memory; so, when they complained they had cause to. Meanwhile a silent revolution was sweeping through UP. Its architect was Saiyyid Ahmad Khan, the chief catalyst of social and educational reforms among Muslims. He had come with good intentions and had set the community on a course to the twentieth century. Though most studied in a maktab where the curriculum consisted largely of the Koran and the teaching method of rote learning, the Saiyyid’s initiative encouraged the enrolment of children of ashraf families in Bara Banki district, including that of Wilayat Ali, in schools and colleges. Although the drop-out rate remained high, Saiyyid families of Motikpur and Qadirpur studied at Bara Banki’s Government High School before joining Lucknow’s Christian College. These families, notably that of Saiyyid Ghulam Jafar of Motikpur, also had ties of kinship in Rudauli. In some other areas, of course, the desire to attend schools was expressed long before Saiyyid Ahmad surfaced. In Malihabad’s mango-rich areas, ‘the great poverty of the residents of Page 10 of 35

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A Family Saga Mullibad (sic) who are generally Mahomedans who have lost Government service by annexation, seems no bar to their desire for learning’. In 1871, the qasba was chosen as the site of a Normal Training Class, ‘and the (p.99) success of the experiment in the midst of a stirring Mahomedan population is particularly gratifying’.55 Mumtaz Ali, whose immediate kith and kin emerged unscathed by the trauma of the 1857 Rebellion, went with the tide and kept abreast of the developments around him. This factor alone may have contributed to the upbringing of his son, Wilayat Ali. A man of wide learning, Mumtaz Ali read Awadh Akhbar, initially a weekly but published from 1878 onward, as a daily. His favourite magazines were Awadh Punch and Abdul Halim Sharar’s Mahshar, started in 1882 with the aim to ‘adapt the style of Addison to essays in Urdu, which, according to its editor, was ‘universally admired among Urdu speaking people’.56 The weekly ceased publication in 1884 after Sharar moved to Hyderabad, though he replaced it, three years later, with another weekly, Dil-gudaz. Its style appealed both to those who knew English and to people with old-fashioned tastes. In Mumtaz Ali’s collection of books were copies of newspapers like Gulkuda, Makhzan, and Payam-e yaar.57 This was not unusual. Persian had been the literary language of the upper classes, but Urdu, on the other hand, had universal recognition among Awadh’s educated Muslims as the idiom of religion or the distinguishing mark of an élite class. Consequently, newspapers and journals, which reflected the cultural and literary dispositions of a new generation of readers, came to be much more widely read than before. Some even subscribed to those published in faraway places: thus, Sandila’s Mazhar Ali waited for Paisa Akhbar, a Lahore weekly, to arrive.58 Several qasbas had their own printing presses: the Sati Pracharak Press and the Muraqqa-e Alam Press, both in Hardoi, and the Cox Press at Shahabad.59 True, Urdu was a victim of the tidal wave of narrow and aggressive politics, especially after the government of Anthony Macdonnell (1844–1925) in UP assailed its role as the sole official vernacular language.60 Yet, expressions of pride in the language already abounded in (p.100) the nineteenth century. Urdu was the most beautiful language of the world, the sweetest, the most gracious, and the noblest. Traveling across India in 1869, Saiyyid Ahmad Khan found: All the way from Allahabad to Bombay, in villages and marketplaces and trains, with Government officials and peons of all departments and coolies everywhere, I conversed in Urdu—and everywhere people understood and replied in Urdu itself. With some words, there was a need to explain the meaning, or sometimes to state one’s meaning more simply. But there is no doubt that everywhere in Hindustan the Urdu language is understood and spoken … .61

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A Family Saga Whether such claims are tenable or not, the fact is that most books were written in Urdu, most newspapers were published in Urdu, and most prominent associations recorded their affairs in Urdu. Urdu was still a language for a broad range of public occasions addressed to a wide and diffused public audience.62 It was, indeed, the inevitable vehicle of a modern literature of verse and fiction. Urdu was the quintessential language of Indian Islam. Deoband’s Dar al-ulum and Lucknow’s Nadwat al-ulama had already provided the impetus by translating Arabic works into Urdu and using it as the medium of instruction. Allah himself spoke Urdu; He learnt it from the ulama as well as other Muslims.63 ‘Urdu’, stated Mohamed Ali, ‘is the vernacular of Mussalmans’. Its disappearance will deprive them ‘of their tongue in which they lisped as children and in which they think today. In addition to this, we deprive them and the remaining millions of Muslims of the consolation that their religion has to offer’.64 The Comrade quoted an Urdu writer saying: Language is not an arbitrary and stereotyped convention, but a wind blowing where it listeth, a universal gift which men assimilate in their own way, or an inane faculty to which they give their own expression, a great ocean full (p.101) of currents and eddies, a ‘world sea’, or an atmosphere enveloping the globe.65 I have introduced this digression to emphazise that knowledge of Urdu literature and an abiding interest in books were also some of the traits Wilayat Ali inherited from his father. This was a major intellectual asset, which he used rather effectively to develop a rational understanding of the world around him and of Islam in its local environment. What is more, the father bequeathed to his son a liberal and enlightened vision, and a framework to interpret the world in the light of the changes ushered in by the British government after the 1857 Rebellion. At a time when pious Muslims invariably clung to the Sharia as a timeless and divinely guaranteed code of conduct, Mumtaz Ali led a life far removed from the strict Islamic codes. At a time when Western education was anathema to scores of Muslim families,66 he educated his sons in British-run schools in Bara Banki and Lucknow, encouraged his daughter to read and write, and harnessed the creative ability of his children to adapt their ideas in a modern and fast-changing world. Thus, Anis Kidwai, Mumtaz Ali’s granddaughter, studied at home along with two other girls from the locality. Maulvi Khalilullah from Rasauli taught her Bostan and Gulistan by Sheikh Sadi (1184–1292), the Persian moralist, the Urdu Reader by Maulvi Muhammad Ismail (1814–1917) of Meerut, the Anjuman-e himayat-e Islam’s Urdu and Persian course, the Hindi reader, and a bit of mathematics.67 In short, Mumtaz Ali was the man of the age of transition, and the link between the old order and the new. He belonged to the old order by birth, carried over to the new order by his receptivity to new ideas.

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A Family Saga (p.102) IV Mumtaz Ali’s younger son, Wilayat Ali, proved to be a freak in a family that had shown few traces of intellectual talent in the present or earlier generations. If the Aligarh and Oxford-educated Mohamed Ali is to be believed, boys and girls in Muslim households learnt far less of Islam than their English counterparts learnt of Christianity.68 Like the children of his age, Wilayat Ali read the Koran in Arabic without, presumably, understanding a word of what it meant.69 He took lessons in Urdu and Persian at home, before matriculating in the first division at the age of 15. The family may have celebrated, as was the custom those days, by visiting the nearest shrine and distributing sweets at the neighbouring mosque. The women would have performed fatiha, covering their head with a dupatta. Wilayat Ali’s performance did, after all, raise hopes of his joining the Provincial Civil Service; already, in UP as a whole, Muslims had a clearly disproportionate share of government employment.70 Wilayat Ali studied at Bara Banki’s High School. Here Hindu students were taught by Muslim teachers, and Muslim boys learnt Hindi, Urdu, Persian, and mathematics from their gurus.71 From this school, he proceeded to Aligarh’s M.A.O. College, the ‘Muslim Eton’, headed by Theodore Beck (1859–99). The college was designed to turn out free-spirited, intellectually accomplished, emotionally mature generations of young Muslims whose self-definitions would reflect liberation from the control of religious and traditional sources of loyalty and an unchallenged commitment to such underlying features of modernism as science and the ideal of progress. T.W. Arnold (1864–1930), an erudite scholar of Islam, came to Aligarh in 1888, and taught philosophy to, among others, Zafar Ali Khan. His favourite students were Sajjad Hyder Yildirim and Ghulam-us Saqlain; the latter acquired a reputation ‘owing to his historic war against the Moulavies’,72 and ‘combined moral earnestness and intellectual prowess (p. 103) [that] most closely resembled Arnold’s own’.73 Both were nurtured in sharif service families that were feared, especially, in a locality, on account of their strong economic profile and, at the same time, respected for their learning. J.C. Chakravarty taught mathematics: his best pupil, Ziauddin Ahmad (1877– 1947), eventually received doctoral degrees both in India and Europe. Shibli arrived in Aligarh in 1883 to take up a post in Persian and assist in teaching Arabic. He was to found the Nadwat al-ulama at Lucknow in 1894. The social characteristics of the educators, who often became role models to students, were highly salient. They were often the most influential agents of social consciousness, in which conceptions of self and one’s place in society were shaped. As for the students, they established bonds of solidarity with one another. Such bonding often turned out to be profound and enduring.74 For Wilayat Ali and his contemporaries, who had been sent by their parents to Aligarh to discover something new and different, the experience of living together and being instructed by different teachers aided in forging a collective civic culture and fostering an inclusive citizenry. The Aligarh College played this Page 13 of 35

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A Family Saga part as much as the Muir Central College in Allahabad or other educational institutions where Hindu and Muslim students, whether they identified themselves simply as Hindu, or as Muslim, Shia, Sunni or whatever, studied together at the feet of the same teachers. Generally, they shared similar tastes and styles in cultural products. Wazir Hasan (1872–1947), a student at Aligarh and at Muir’s Central College, stated that education on similar lines fostered Hindu-Muslim understanding and led to the recognition of a common destiny above ‘the existence of separate entities and the din of communal claims’. Western education, in particular, encouraged the Muslim communities to recognize their obligations and the responsibilities they owed to their country.75 Around the same time, the civil servant Henry Cotton (b. 1845) underlined the common educational background of those spearheading the campaign for a Hindu-Muslim entente in politics. A sympathizer of (p.104) nationalist aspirations, he found the rising generation in both the communities inspired by nationalist ideas and the vision of selfgovernment.76 Graduating at nineteen, Wilayat Ali obtained his law degree in 1902. During his stay in Lucknow, he stayed with Khaliquzzaman’s uncle, just as his cousin Nawab Ali had done before him in 1903.77 Thereafter, he began practising in his hometown along with Nawab Ali. Homecoming proved rewarding: Wilayat Ali matured as a writer, dealt with current topics, addressed the problems and aspirations of the new generations, and searched for styles of expression suited to society’s taste and reflected its feelings. Though it is nowhere documented, he soon became the centre of a lively group of radical intellectuals, who were simple lovers of good food and intelligent conversation. A fair number of individuals gathered in the privacy of his home. Here they combined serious political discourses with much fun and laughter, satire, and lampooning. The pattern of life they aped and gradually made their own was that of nineteenthcentury Awadh, the graces of which they were to perpetuate in a modern world. They created various cultural forms, produced new styles of appearance, behaviour and language, and developed new ways of communication, expression, and representation, which, significantly, they actualized in the course of their everyday life. There is an old Arab saying, originating from a hadis of the Prophet Muhammad, that ‘humour is to speech; what salt is to food’. ‘Without wit and humour speech is insipid and the company dull’, added Abdul Halim Sharar, the essayistnovelist.78 Indeed, there has been a long-standing tradition of wit and humour in South Asian Literatures.79 Urdu, too, produced its share of satire (hajv), a generic term applied to wit, humour, and satire alike,80 even before Sauda who is acknowledged as a master of qasidas as well as hajv. This was expressed in witty jibes, sarcasm, jokes and

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A Family Saga

Wilayat Ali Bambooque (courtesy Sabina Kidwai)

Rafi Ahmed Kidwai (courtesy Sabina Kidwai)

Rafi Ahmed Kidwai at S.C. Bose’s residence (courtesy Nehru Memorial Museum and Library)

Anis Kidwai (courtesy Sabina Kidwai)

Anis Kidwai receiving the Sahitya Akademi award (courtesy Sabina Kidwai)

Family photograph: (sitting from left to right) Azadi Mustafa, Bilqees Kidwai,

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A Family Saga (p.105) sallies, and was quite often directed against religious preachers, publicists, and the governing elites. Sharar boasted that humorous and witty writing was initiated and perfected in Lucknow by, among others, Mian Mushir, a hazal go (poet of comic verse) whose language and technique convulsed his readers

M.A. Kidwai, Anis Kidwai, and M.K. Kidwai (courtesy Sabina Kidwai)

Title page of Oudh Punch

with laughter.81 He conceded, however, that Urdu’s spread also gave rise to ‘excellent humourists’ in different parts of the country.82

Three inter-related factors contributed to this development. First of all, poets like Nazir Akbarabadi (1739–1830) first and Akbar Allahabadi more than a century later, legitimized, in their own respective ways, wit and humour as an important genre of Urdu literature. A folk-oriented poet On the Indian National Congress: ‘This who ‘shines like a lonely star on boy is smart at birth.’ the firmament of Urdu poetry’, Nazir created humour from anecdotes. Akbar, on the other hand, did so by distorting words, twisting their meanings, or resorting to pun, tazmin or tasarruf, and idiom-based or verbal jugglery.83 Although frivolity, humour, and satire were the mainstay of their poetry, they were serious thinkers with a strong historical sense and the sensitivity and acu (p.106) men to reflect on contemporary problems. Hence the jibes at the Pandit and the Sheikh, the lambasting of the mulla and the Brahman, and the criticism of outmoded beliefs and practices. Their readership was initially small but mixed, drawing all castes and communities into their fold. Thus, Nazir’s Banjara Namah, an excellent moral treatise with its powerful lyrical quality and its universal message, is addressed to Hindu and Muslim readers alike. The following lines, though cast in a sombre mood but interspersed with an element of irony and sarcasm, captures the poem’s flavour: Pride not yourself on the swords, do not be arrogant on the shields They will break all bonds and run away on seeing the death’s spears Whether it’s the casket of pearls and diamonds, or heaps of treasures, Bundles of brocades, or bales of shawls and double shawls, All the pomp will be left behind when the wandering merchant decides to pack up.84

Nazir Akbarabadi had a profound and enduring impact on Urdu poetry, though he probably did not make his readers laugh as much as Akbar Allahabadi. Akbar, one of the favourite poets of Wilayat Ali and his comrades, kept two generations laughing at themselves, bringing home the realities of the situation to them, and Page 16 of 35

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A Family Saga giving forceful expression to truth without causing offence or hurting feelings. He was at his best when he turned and twisted an ordinary phrase into a striking epigram.85 As his works reached the Urdu-speaking population in the towns and the qasbas, more and more poets and writers employed their idioms, picked their words, introduced humour into their similes, and emulated their style.86 While the qasbati men recited the verses of Nazir and Akbar, their eyes remained turned to the past in which many of their ideals had been set. They lionized Mohamed Ali, the volatile leader who laid his distinctive individualistic but unrealistic imprint on the pan-Islamic movement. They respected Hasrat Mohani, the poet who dealt with social-ethical themes and was one of the early exponents of the swadeshi idea, and the low- (p.107) profiled Ansari, fresh from his success as leader of the medical mission to Constantinople. They adopted the ‘Young Turks’ as their heroes and, with these as their ideological props, laced with a romanticized pan-Islamic vision, they aimed to challenge British rule.87 And last but not the least, the Sialkot-born poet Iqbal, who called upon Muslims to rise to action by introducing their heroes in their true glory, fired their imagination. ‘When we were not talking the Brothers [Mohamed and Shaukat Ali] generally sang poems of Iqbal from Shikwa, Shama aur Shair, Sicily, Fatima, etc. These were of course the poems that had made Iqbal the idol of Muslim youth’.88 His memorable line about the Prophet, ‘On his forehead is written the destiny of nations’, brought tears to the eyes of the reciter and audience. Mohamed Ali experienced ‘an exquisite thrill of delight’ reading Asrar-e khudi (The Secrets of

Bravo! Bravo fellows. Famed German physician Dr Koch has discovered an efficacious remedy for tuberculosis (T.B.).

Self), written in 1915.89 His sonin-law, Shuaib Qureshi (1891/2–1962), entertained friends with Iqbal’s moving, patriotic, (p.108) and panIslamic verses in Jawab-e shikwa.90 Iqbal’s Qaumi tarana (National Anthem), too, became immensely popular. Priced at The Congress seeking the blessing of the three rupees and sold by the Crown in a pliant manner. agents of the Gramophone Company Ltd. as a ten-inch double-sided record, the anthem was sung by ‘A Muhammadan Gentleman of Aligarh.’

Politics and poetry were not their only concerns. They turned to Islam for spiritual solace, and to its great heroes for inspiration. Their spiritual pir was no other than Maulana Abdul Bari, who turned his seminary at Farangi Mahal as a haven for an odd mixture of young liberals, radicals, and pan-Islamic ideologues. Page 17 of 35

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A Family Saga His major assets were two: first, he presided over a major, though by no means the only, centre of Islamic learning in India.91 Moreover, he was (p.109) the chief inspiration behind the great outpouring of sentiment and energy devoted to the defence of the Khilafat and the holy places.92 This institution imparted education to innumerable ashraf families, and was widely recognized as the domain of superior Islamic piety, and a repository of specifically Islamic wisdom. The Ali brothers, invested with the honorary title of ‘Maulana’ at Farangi Mahal’s Madrasa-e Nizamia, were Abdul Bari’s murids.93 Hasrat Mohani, a disciple of Shah Abdul Wahab, Abdul Bari’s father,94 had long-standing family links.95 A frequent visitor to Farangi Mahal, Maulvi Salamatullah hosted him. Soon after the Kakori Dacoity Conspiracy on 9 August 1925, an official from the central intelligence department followed him to Farangi Mahal. The poet made a rapid exit and went to Kanpur. Again, he spent time with Salamatullah in 1935 and discussed with him, often animatedly, the implications of the 1935 Act.96 Several members of the Kidwai family in Baragaon, such as Altafur Rahman (1888–1966) and Saeedur Rahman (1892–1955), were either educated at Farangi Mahal or recognized Abdul Bari as their spiritual preceptor. Similarly Abdul Majid Dariabadi’s grandfather had obtained a degree from Farangi Mahal before joining the collectorate in Shahjahanpur, (p.110) while his father, Maulvi Abdul Qadir (b. 1848), studied at the feet of Maulvi Muhammad Naim Farangi Mahali.97 Though the distinction between the different followers was not sharp, and individuals belonged partly to one group and partly to another, there were many that were radicals in politics and created the modern liberal outlook. Finally, for generations the sajjada-nashin of the shrine of Shah Abdul Haq in Rudauli and their families paid obeisance to the Farangi Mahali ulama. Every year, Abdul Bari attended the urs to commemorate the memory of Abdul Haq, and received preferential treatment. After the Par tition, his son Maulana Matin Miyan showed up in Rudauli during his visits to India and performed fatiha. ‘We recognize the Farangi Mahal ulama as our ulama’, reiterates Shah Abdul Haq’s biographer.98 The shrine itself was closely connected with other centres, notably Kalyar, Panipat (Abdul Haq was the murid and Khalifa of Jalaluddin Kabir Panipati belonging to the Chishtiya-Sabirya silsila), Gangoh, Saharanpur, Allahabad, (p.111) Lucknow, Thaneswar, Etah,

Turkey: ‘Excuse us! This booty belongs to us. If you don’t let us have it, we would then ….’

England: Then what?

Turkey: We’ll settle for that.

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A Family Saga Mainpuri, Delhi, Banaras, Allahabad, Amroha, Ayodhya, Bihar Sharif, and Hyderabad.

These links were, however, disrupted after Abdul Bari’s death, and also because people moved to other places for education and in search of employment. The madrasa itself lost its clientele to the Nadwat al-ulama in the same city. Finally, the high walls of the seminary, once the bastion of traditional education and conservative thought, could no longer prevent the fresh winds blowing from the city, the province, and the country at large. New generations grew up to challenge conformity and the status quo. Individuals read not only the bulky volumes of hadis, but also began accessing socialist and communist literature. They became aware of not just the great battles fought by the Prophet of Islam to cleanse the world of ignorance and immorality, but the war against poverty and colonial exploitation. Mufti Raza Ansari, grandson of Maulvi Salamatullah and an eminent scholar at Farangi Mahal, describes a meeting of the Muslim Academy (founded by Sharar in 1924) attended by Maulana Muhammad Inayatullah, Waheed Mirza, head of the Arabic Department in Lucknow University, and the barrister Muhammad Waseem.99 Hayatullah Ansari, editor of Hindustan, established a Study Circle to discuss socialism. Nehru spoke at one of their meetings.100 Socialism carried the same poetic and romantic appeal as the poetic blasphemy in the work of Hafiz, Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ (1797–1869), and Hasrat Mohani. When Hindustan published Majaz’s poem ‘Andheri raat ka musafir’ (The Traveller in the Dark Night), the young readers were inspired. One line ran thus: Khuda soya hua hai, Ahraman mehshar ba-daman hai. God is asleep and Ahirman comes bringing doomsday to him.101

M.A.O. College, during Wilayat Ali’s time, did not represent a united phalanx. After its founder’s death in 1898, the college was transformed from a politically benign institution to a stomping ground for restless students and teachers who preached an odd mixture of nationalism and (p.112) pan-Islamism. The strike in 1907, directed against British staff, reflected their defiant mood. ‘Life at Aligarh shows many seams’, Forster noted in his diary on 25 October 1912. The English staff complained that they were not trusted to give the help they had hoped to give, but would be turned adrift as soon as the Mahommedans cd. stand without them: they could make some was with the students—not much, owing to the influence of The Comrade, a forwardlooking Islamic paper ‘which told lies’; and none at all with the governing body. The Mahommedans had an air of desperation, which may be habitual, but was impressive, why should Sir Edward Grey have been the first to recognize Italian rule in Tripoli, they asked, and pertinently.102 The college authorities countered the unrest by encouraging their friends and allies to play a larger part in the Muslim League, and to polarize sentiments along religious lines. The likes of Mohsinul Mulk (1837–1907) responded to such Page 19 of 35

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A Family Saga overtures; but there was very little that they could do to contain the growing anti-British feelings. The M.A.O. College had already been transformed into the nursery of outstanding young Muslims who were to be heard of a great deal in the politics, literature, and journalism of the following decades. Mohamed Ali studied in ‘the Golden Age’ of the College from 1890 to 1898.103 So did Saiyyid Mahmud (1889–1971), Khaliquzzaman, Shuaib Qureshi, and Abdur Rahman Siddiqi (1887–1953). Abdur Rahman Bijnori had spearheaded the strike in 1907 and faced expulsion from the college for that reason. He charmed everyone with his manners, intelligence, and demeanour. He belonged to Seohara in Bijnor district, returned to India with a doctorate in philosophy from Gottingen, and attracted notice, indeed criticism, from some Muslims, for commenting that the Rig-Veda and the Diwan-e Ghalib were the two ‘revealed’ books of India. His pet project was the Sultania College in Bhopal.104 He defended women’s right to emancipation and modern education, believed in social harmony, and upheld a pragmatic version of modernity. His (p.113) reputation still awaits full rehabilitation. Like Wilayat Ali and Raja Gulam Husain (1882–1917), among the heroes of the 1907 strike, he died young; and, like them, he achieved fame during the short span of his life. Before their death, however, they had done enough spadework to establish local, provincial and national linkages for disseminating their ideas. The Ikhwan alsafa (Brotherhood of Purity) named after the Basra-based academy in the latter part of the tenth century, and the Duty Society, founded by Arnold at Aligarh in June 1890, fostered the Aligarh networks. The meetings of the Duty Society supplemented curricular teaching with a broader cultural framework and ethical content through readings and debates in Urdu about the history, literature, and religious ideals of Islam. Ideas emanating from such sources spread with great speed.105 The Shahjahanpur branch attracted Aligarh graduates like Abdul Latif Khan, Tofail Ahmad, and Nizamuddin Husain Nizami of

The Plague of Anarchy Lion: ‘This deadly epidemic of anarchy is not good.’

Tiger: ‘Get rid of this plague—by all means.’

Budaun, who edited the Urdu paper Zul-Qarnain.106

Members of the Duty Society visited Sandila that year to organize a (p.114) public meeting at the municipality hall.107 In November 1888, an Anjuman-e Islamia was formed with Saiyyid Fazl-e Husain (1849–1901) and other influential men raising funds for the Aligarh College. The same year, the Jalsa-e tehzib in Sitapur resolved to disseminate information on various historical and Page 20 of 35

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A Family Saga contemporary issues, but it only lasted three years.108 A year later, prominent individuals from Sandila, Hardoi, Shahabad, and Bilgram agreed to co-ordinate their activities with the tall poppies at Aligarh.109 Lucknow’s literary societies— Anjuman-e muin al-adab and mairaj al-adab—had a fair number of Aligarh graduates. Such organizations constituted a social space for cross-class intersection and interaction, and paved the way for forward-looking individuals in Lucknow and the qasbas to constitute a fraternity. In this enlarged circle were Ghulam-us Saqlain, editor of Asr-e Jadid, whose house in Golagunj attracted young teachers, journalists and lawyers, and Sajjad Hyder Yildirim, a second-generation student at Aligarh, whose brilliance had impressed his teacher Arnold and the principal, Theodore Morrison (1863–1936).110 Joining Mahmudabad’s Raja as his political secretary, he accompanied him to Bombay for the Congress and League meetings in December 1915. He lived in Milton Lane close to Hazratgunj; some of his associates had their homes around this fashionable area, or in Qaiser Bagh, Banarasi Bagh, and Sikandar Bagh, once a garden of 120 square yards built and laid out by Wajid Ali Shah for his wife. He had many admirers, including Niyaz Fatehpuri, who had launched the influential Urdu magazine, Nigar, in February 1922 and had subsequently moved to Lucknow in 1928. Fascinated by Sajjad Hyder Yildirim’s translation of Turkish texts that were published in Makhzan, he had gravitated towards him from the time they met at Mussoorie in 1911. Published uninterruptedly until 1966, Nigar was, in fact, named after a revolutionary Turkish poet. Sajjad Hyder Yildirim shared much with Wazir Hasan, the Muslim League’s secretary and the key figure in brokering the pact at Lucknow in December 1916. The Saiyyid, also part of the Mahmudabad household, lived in Khaqan Manzil before moving to Jopling Road. Sheikh Shahid (p.115) Husain (1878– 1924), a Cambridge graduate and barrister, Mushir Hosain Kidwai, and Sheikh Muhammad Habibullah (1871–1948), all part of the extended Kidwai clan, were Sajjad Hyder Yildirim’s other confidants. Habibullah, son of Sheikh Inayatullah of Saidanpur in Bara Banki district, managed the Mahmudabad estate, and was member of the UP legislative council (1926–36) and legislative assembly (1937– 46), and vice-chancellor of Lucknow University (1938–40). Munshi Sajjad Husain stood out in this company. His Awadh Punch, published from 1877 to 1912 with a weekly cir culation of four to five hundred, pioneered humour and witticism in Urdu journalism. Haji Baghlol, one of Sajjad Husain’s own characters, has survived the ravages of time and ensured longevity to the novel named after this character.111 Although a number of humorous papers had appeared in different parts of the Page 21 of 35

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A Family Saga country,112 Awadh Punch proved to be a great asset to Awadh’s literary record. It attracted Akbar Allahabadi, Brij Narayan ‘Chakbast’ (p.116) (1888–1926),113 Ahmad Ali ‘Shauq’ (b. 1853) from Juggaur, and Zarif Lakhnavi, who appealed to that most wholesome and human quality, capacity for laughter. The Lucknow-born Pandit Ratan Nath ‘Sarshar’ (1847/8–1902) was the prized trophy; his magnum opus Fasana-e Azad appeared from December 1878 to December 1879 in Awadh Akhbar. He edited this journal at the request of Munshi Nawal Kishore, a living symbol of Awadh’s composite intellectual and cultural ethos.114 Establishing his press in Lucknow in 1858 to publish classics and religious books in Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, he made no spurious distinction, which developed later, between the ‘Islamic’ and the ‘Hindu’ texts. He was, in essence, a safe custodian of an intellectual tradition, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ alike. According to Bharati Bhargava-Laiq, great-great-granddaughter of Nawal Kishore:

The elders of my family have EASY TO PROMISE, TOUGH TO repeatedly told me about the DELIVER! reverence with which Allan Octavion Hume: For God’s sake, thousands of copies of the pour water from your pitcher. Holy Koran were printed at the press, and which earned Nawal Kishore a tidy sum. The metal typecasting plates were washed in Ganga jal (water) prior to the printing of every issue of the Holy Book. The used water was not allowed to flow into the street-drains outside the press. It was carefully collected in vessels and then poured into the Gomti. The press’ printers and binders were bound to do wazu (pre-prayer ablutions) before the production of the Book commenced. This process, perhaps, represented the fine sensitivities of Lucknow’s culture and was also a good business practice.115 Fasana-e Azad’s basic theme, covered in four large volumes, is based on Don Quixote, the famous novel by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. Soon, the names of the hero Azad and his boastful attendant Khoji, an Indianized model of Sancho Panza who accompanied Don Quixote in his adventures, became household names in places where Urdu was read. His readers sympathized with the triumphs of the hero and laughed at the heroics of Khoji, who comes to grief at every step. ‘By writing the Fasana-e Azad’, wrote Sharar, ‘you have acted as a Messiah for Urdu language and have put a new life into it’.116 Another upcoming (p.117) Urdu poet described the Fasana-e Azad as ‘a vivid cinematographic presentation of a dream world, this picture gallery of the rapidly decadent Shia aristocracy’. He added that Sarshar’s ‘genius lay in immortalizing this phantom world, the magic shadow show. There is always something of the fascination of the unreal about all aristocracies. This fascination has been caught up and held in the page of Sarshar’s classic and in his other works which open like magic casements on this dream-world’.117 In this way, we see that the ‘old’ and ‘new’ literature coexisted, until the progressive writers in the mid-1930s discarded the view that art was for art’s sake, rejected romanticism, elitism, and subjectivism,

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A Family Saga and devised new forms of expression to express poverty, hunger, and colonial exploitation. What we have described so far is the life histories of a group that developed close bonding at a particular juncture. One of the purposes of this exercise is also to underline that many of them belonged to feudal families whose earlier generation had not earned their own living. They were, in this respect as indeed in their political orientation, different from the generation that had studied under the tutelage of Saiyyid Ahmad Khan, their intellectual mentor at Aligarh. Yet, they were no lean and hungry carcasses with dire intents against the colonial regime. The nationalist stir had gained a firm foothold outside the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, but it was still an affair of the educated middle class. The battle for freedom was still being fought, as illustrated by the proliferation of Indian-owned newspapers and the mushroom growth of sabhas and societies during the First World War, with words. Words and ideas under control versus words and ideas out of control was often the primary issue on the extraordinary stage on which the national struggle was being played out.118 It was the kind of political setting in which the writer and the speechmaker rapidly came to the forefront to salvage their society from colonial bondage and oppression. This explains the high public profile of newspaper editors and fiery orators like Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1925), B.C. Pal (1858–1932), and Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950). It also explains why Maulana Azad, Hasrat Mohani, Mohamed Ali, and Zafar Ali Khan achieved such fame among educated Muslims in north India. (p.118) When Comrade appeared from Calcutta in July 1911, the paper had less than 300 subscribers. But within a fortnight of the first issue the number of subscribers more than doubled, and the average increase in the number of subscribers thereafter reached about 200 per month. The demand for Al-Hilal (first published in June 1912) was such that the old issues were reprinted within the first three months;119 its circulation exceeded 25,000. Likewise readers bought up copies of Zamindar as soon as they reached the newsstands, especially after the Turco-Italian War broke out and Russo-Persian affairs reached a critical stage. Its circulation, earlier confined to a small number of people interested in the work and the advocacy of the Punjab zamindars, increased from 1,200 in 1910 to 15,000 in 1913. A reader promptly commented on its popularity by quoting Ghalib’s following lines: Nazar lage na kahins unke dast-o-baazoo ko Ye log kyon mere zakhm-o-jigar ko dekhte hain. I fear lest the evil eye should affect the strength of his hand and arm Why do these people stare at the wound of my heart?

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A Family Saga Although by no means equal to their stature, Wilayat Ali, having made his mark as a student at Aligarh, established his reputation as a writer. When Gulam Husain, the leader of the 1907 students’ strike at Aligarh, joined Comrade as assistant editor, Wilayat Ali, his friend, began contributing to its humour column, ‘Gup’, a shortened form of the Urdu word for ‘gossip’, under his pen name. The author of ‘Gup’ claimed ‘as great a license as the wind to blow on who I please’. The writer blew especially hard on the legislative council, describing it as a ‘variety stage’ and providing each of its members with unflattering nicknames. Jinnah was referred to as the ‘Bombay Duck’, who loved not to hear the voice of others so much as his own. Saiyyid Ali Imam (1869–1932), recently appointed legal adviser to the council, was called the ‘Moslem Dowager’.120 Wilayat Ali interacted with several leaders. Meeting Maulana Azad in 1917, he impressed him with his eloquence.121 A warm camaraderie developed between him and Mohamed Ali,122 and he campaigned for the (p.119) Ali brothers’ release.123 ‘There is not a Muslim whose heart does not bleed for the interminable sufferings of the Chhindwara prisoners’, he wrote.124 Again, when Pioneer celebrated their continuing detention, Wilayat Ali observed, ‘to fire at helpless and unarmed detenus from the barbed trenches of an editorial office is unmitigated cowardice’.125 Wilayat Ali and Mohamed Ali first met in Lansdowne. In the weeks and months that followed, the two had many conversations, including one at Lucknow’s Charbagh railway station in late December 1916, and got to know each other well. Later, they confabulated at Chhindwara in the company of Gulam Husain and Khaliquzzaman. ‘So you are coming’, wrote Mohamed Ali to Wilayat Ali, ‘tho after so many “false alarms” I shall be justified in doubting it. You are a set of indolent, indigent indigestionious vagabonds’.126 Though the Ali brothers were extremely complex men, full of contradictions and with many doubts and questions about their identities, their admirers looked forward to the ‘lively’ and ‘invigorating experience’ of meeting them.127 They planned on returning to Chhindwara towards the end of January 1917, but the censor withheld Mohamed Ali’s letter telling Wilayat Ali that he had applied for permission to receive them.128 Wilayat Ali considered writing Mohamed Ali’s biography, but Ziauddin Ahmad Barni (1890–1969), follower of Annie Besant (1847–1933) and member of the Theosophical Society, was one up on him. Wilayat Ali invited Barni, then subeditor of Hamdard (a Urdu paper), to Bara Banki, fêted him, and read his draft in three days. Messrs Ganesh & Co. in Madras published the book in 1918, with a preface by C.P. Ramaswami Aiyer.129 When Mohamed Ali contemplated stopping the publication of Hamdard (p.120) at the beginning of his internment, Wilayat Ali urged him not to do so: ‘I don’t approve of your decision and I don’t think

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A Family Saga many will. You can’t imagine what the loss of Hamdard will mean to us–the Musalmans’.130 In Chhindwara, friends mooted the idea of starting another English language weekly from Lucknow. Gulam Husain got into the act and told Mohamed Ali that he had raised 8,000 rupees for New Era. Just when they had scraped together the funds to run it, Wilayat Ali received an offer, perhaps from Naziruddin Hasan (later Nazir Yar Jung), his contemporary at Aligarh, to join the Nizam of Hyderabad’s service. This was not unusual. Although the poet Sheikh Ibrahim ‘Zauq’ had resisted the temptation of leaving Delhi for a position in Hyderabad,131 the Nizam paid host to talented and promising Muslims, termed ‘non-Mulki’, from various places, especially Delhi and the qasbas in Awadh and the Doab region. Maulvi Nazir Ahmad, known for his innovations in Urdu novelwriting, was employed in Hyderabad, whereas Maulvi Abdul Haq, who refused to join Hamdard’s staff,132 worked for a while in the translation department of the Home Secretary’s office. Saiyyid Mahdi Ali Khan of Etawah, who later earned the title Mohsinul Mulk, was a top-ranking Hyderabad civil servant. He had served as a serishtadar under Allan Octavian Hume ( 1829–1912), one of the cofounders of the Congress. Viqarul Mulk (1841–1917), also a serishtadar in the Meerut division, rose to eminence in Hyderabad. Both joined the Nizam’s service at Saiyyid Ahmad’s recommendation, Mohsinul Mulk in 1874 and Viqarul Mulk a year later.133 Shibli Numani spent many years in the Nizam’s dominions, his stay coinciding with that of Abdul Halim Sharar. Wilayat Ali was not, however, prepared to follow in their footsteps. He could not, says one of his biographers, ‘put up with the restrictions and humiliations of a government job’.134 New Era was eventually launched on 7 April 1916. It advocated Home Rule and secured for the movement great Muslim enthusiasm and support. Gulam Husain’s own contribution to Home Rule literature was (p.121) considerable.135 However, the paper had only a brief, bright career. When its editor fell from a runaway horse and died in August 1917, New Era faced a demand for fresh security from the government that it was unable to pay. The paper closed down towards the end of November that year. A shattered Wilayat Ali recapitulated: The death of the Comrade brought about by a ruthless and unplacable Press Act, after it had only partially accomplished its grand mission, did not induce him to leave his chief and friend. He stuck to him with a rare fidelity and loyalty, assisted him in his continued endeavours to educate the new-born Moslem democracy through his vernacular paper - the Hamdard of imperishable memory. Then came the unmerited internment of Mohamed Ali with its great, almost unprecedented, shock to the Muslim community. This was followed by the infliction of a most illiberal and rigorous censorship on the inoffensive Hamdard and the destructive pressure of the most ruthless fingers ever riveted on the throat of a Page 25 of 35

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A Family Saga vernacular paper. The second-born of Mr. Mohamed Ali followed his firstborn to the grave and a great chapter in Muslim history ended with a tragic abruptness.136 The Press Act was set in motion for many papers in north India, but that only fuelled anti-government sentiments and contributed to the popularity of newspaper editors. ‘It is sad to think’, commented the Comrade, itself a victim of stringent regulations, ‘that sincere and frank exponents of country’s feelings should always feel as if they are leading a dance on red-hot coals, especially when the Government can actually interpret the plain meanings of the following couplet: You can have a full game even sitting in your home if you choose Leopards would be forthcoming from woods and the deer from Tatars’. In this chapter I offered glimpses into an important Kidwai family in Masauli, established the historical and cultural context for the views of Wilayat Ali and many other qasba men, and explored their search for ways to adapt themselves to the new conditions created by British policies. Although the participants in this debate could be classified as nationalists, pan-Islamists, modernists, and the like, they shared a rational, nationalistic, and worldly approach and outlook, and, for this reason, reflected more accurately the historical evolution of certain ideas outside the national and provincial arenas. They were Muslims, observant or only nominally so, (p.122) and adhered to, in various ways and degrees, Islamic customs and values. But, with a few exceptions, they stubbornly refused to acknowledge, for reasons of The Indian Medley ideology, the existence of a separate and distinct Muslim community. They did not stand in isolation from their own culture and religion; equally, they did not distance themselves from the democratic and pluralists trends in society. It is in this context that the ideas of Wilayat Ali and his group, rising from the grassroots, should be recognized as part of the formative phases of modern Indian nationhood.

In the next chapter, I stay with such men and examine, in the qasba context, the outward continuity, based on some sort of tacit agreement between its various segments, of religious, spiritual, and cultural life. The narrative is largely centred on Rudauli, a major cultural and spiritual centre, and its leading taluqdar, Choudhry Muhammad Ali. His life story captures the essence of qasba ways. Acquainted with Western ideas, he possessed knowledge and intellectual capacity well above that of many of his contemporary taluqdars in Awadh. I shall assess his contribution to the qasba discourses by analysing his works and his

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A Family Saga efforts to find some sort of accommodation, within the framework of modernism and the changing needs of his class, between the competing ideologies. Notes:

(1) According to another version, he was Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna’s contemporary, came to India with one of his contingents, and settled in Ayodhya. A.M. Dariabadi, Aap-biti (Lucknow, 1989), p. 24. (2) Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 29. (3) An ‘aboriginal race’ which at one time dominated the eastern half of Awadh. Their earliest habitat was Bahraich, which is said to owe its name to them. Crooke, Tribes and Castes, Vol. 2, pp. 1–11; Sleeman, Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude, pp. 246–7. According to Faizabad’s district gazetteer, ‘they remained here and there till the days of the Jaunpur kingdom and then vanished, becoming either Hindus or proselytes to Islam’. H.R. Nevill, Fyzabad: A Gazetteer, Vol. xliii (Allahabad, 1928), p. 150. (4) Zarina Bhatty, ‘Status and Power in a Muslim Dominated Village of Uttar Pradesh’, Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social Stratification Among Muslims in India (New Delhi, 1978), p. 212. (5) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 231. (6) A.B.M. Habibullah, The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India (Allahabad, 1961, 2nd rev. edn), p. 104. (7) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p, 103. (8) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 155. (9) Kidwai, Biographical Sketch of the Kidwais, p. 32. (10) Ibid., pp. 103–4; Chamier, Report, p. 59. (11) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 231. (12) For the spread of such shrines in Budaun, about which the Urdu poet Musahfi wrote: Qatil teri gali bhi Budaun se kam nahin; jis ke qadam qadam pe mazar-e shahid hai. See Suroor, Khwab baqi hai, pp. 11–12. (13) Kidwai, Biographical Sketch of the Kidwais, p. 60. (14) Tahseen Faruqi, Abdul Majid Dariabadi: ahwal-o-aasaar (Lahore, 1993). (15) Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 32. (16) Bayly, Rulers and Townsmen, pp. 354–5. Page 27 of 35

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A Family Saga (17) File no. 894, 1861, BR. (18) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 103. (19) Asiya Siddiqui, Agrarian Change in a North Indian State, pp. 168 ff., quoted in Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ‘Trade and Empire in Awadh, 1765–1804’, Past and Present, February 1982. (20) 22 February 1850. Sleeman, Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude, Vol. 2, pp. 244–5. (21) Oudh: Papers Relating To (London, n.d.), p. 44. (22) 24 February 1850. Ibid., pp. 251–2. (23) Editor’s concluding note in Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857, C.A. Bayly (Oxford, 1986), pp. 236–7. (24) From 1848 to 1884, 4,399 persons were killed in Awadh. Oudh: Papers Relating to, p. 36. (25) The horse-driven carts were introduced later. This was the mode of travel for the sharifzadas (the respectable). Owing to purdah being observed in the landed and service families, women travelled less frequently. Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 42. (26) George A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India (Calcutta, 1916), Vol. 9, p. 411. (27) Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 42. (28) Census, UP, 1911, p. 287. (29) For this area, this story is yet to be told by the historians of the ‘revolt’, ‘mutiny’, or ‘civil rebellion’. (30) File no. 845, 1858, BR. (31) File no. 923, 1858–59, BR. (32) To lieutenant-colonel R. Stratchey, secretary to government, Central Provinces, Allahabad, 8 February 1858, File no. 720, 1858, BR. (33) Imperial Gazetteer, Vol. 4, p. 419. (34) For details, Pemble, The Raj, The Indian Mutiny and the Kingdom of Oudh, pp. 234–5; Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, 1857–58: A Study of Popular Resistance (New Delhi, 1984).

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A Family Saga (35) File no. 732, 1858, BR. (36) File no. 731, 1858, BR. (37) To Special Commissioner of Revenue, 25 September 1858, File no. 661, 1858, BR. (38) To R. Stratchey, 8 January 1857, File no. 720, 1858, BR. (39) Chamier, Report, p. 19. (40) For a reference to what happened in Bara Banki and to the defeat of the British troops at Chinhat, a village on the Faizabad road, see S.B. Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857–59 (Calcutta, 1957), pp. 126, 128. (41) Dariabadi, Aap-biti, p. 29. (42) Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge, 1972), Chapter 3; Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt, pp. 298–303. (43) He published his best-known work Umrao Jan Ada in 1899. Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa, Umrao Jan Ada, trans. Khushwant Singh and M.A. Husaini (Hyderabad, 1982). (44) Darogah Haji Abbas Ali, An Illustrated Historical Album of the Rajas and Taluqdars of Oudh (Allahabad, 1880), p. xxii. (45) Mohamed Ali offered a simplistic explanation of why certain groups amongst Muslims revolted. He also exaggerated the impact of the 1857 Rebellion on them. This is what he wrote: ‘The Mutiny began as an affair of the sepoys of the Indian Army; but in the storm-centre of my province where it had to be fought out if English rule was to continue in India, it soon attracted to itself many forms of discontent which had been gathering force and volume for more than a generation, and religion was inextricably mixed up with politics. It was the Muslim aristocracy in that province that suffered most in the terrible aftermath of the Mutiny. In fact, in its permanent results even more than in some of its terrors it could with out any considerable exaggeration be compared to the social upheaval that the French Revolution meant to the old nobility of France’. Mohamed Ali, My Life, pp. 51–2. This interpretation is widely contested by, among others, Peter Hardy and Francis Robinson. (46) File no. 923, 1858–59, BR. (47) To Major L. Barrow, 25 January 1959, File no. 198, 1859, BR. (48) Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj, pp. 186–7. (49) Illustrated Historical Album, p. xxiii. Page 29 of 35

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A Family Saga (50) Annual Report of the Administration of the Province of Oudh, 1872–73, p. 147. (51) Administration of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh, April 1882– November 1887 (Allahabad, 1889), p. 75. (52) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 41. (53) Anis Kidwai, ‘Wilayat Ali Bambooq’, Ab jin ke dekhne ko, p. 9. (54) Lance Brennan, ‘The Illusion of Security: The Background to Muslim Separatism in the United Provinces’, Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization (New Delhi, 1993), p. 335. (55) Report Upon the Progress of Education in the Province of Oudh, 1868, p. 483. (56) Sharar, Lucknow, pp. 90–1. (57) Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 44. (58) 17 April 1906, Ek naadir roznamcha, p. 270. (59) DG, Hardoi, pp. 70–1. (60) 19 August 1900. Ibid., p. 32, records a meeting at the Baradari in Qaiser Bagh against the ‘Hindi Resolution’ passed by the lieutenant governor on 18 April. Chaired by Mohsinul Mulk, the meeting was attended by 8000 to 9,000 people from different parts of the country. (61) Quoted in Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (New Delhi, 2001), p. 13. (62) David Lelyveld, ‘Eloquence and Authority in Urdu: Poetry, Oratory, and Film’, Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (New Delhi, 1988), p. 100; Robinson, Separatism, pp. 31–2. (63) Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival, p. 198; and her Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar (New Delhi, 1992), pp. 324–6. (64) Comrade, 9 September 1912. (65) Ibid., 29 July 1912. (66) Though Bara Banki had 116 primary schools and eight schools for middle and higher education in 1896–97. Liebeskind, Piety on its Knees, p. 19. (67) Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 48. ‘After completing Amal Nama [elementary Persian book] which children learn by heart, I was set to read Gulistan. My father said, “The first chapter is about the character of kings. Since Page 30 of 35

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A Family Saga you are not going to be a king, you do not need to read that. After that there is a chapter on love and youth.” As he turned the chapter on love and youth, he said, “There are the things that will concern you later. For the present what you need is the chapter on social graces, the manners of good company …” In Urdu I was taught only one book, i.e. Maulvi [Muhammad] Ismail Merathi’s book which the first of the series of several books which used to be taught in schools in those days’. Nasim Ansari, Choosing to Stay, pp. 54–5. (68) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 47. (69) Notice, for example, the comment: ‘my education began with learning to read the Koran, and I was charmed by its magnificent rhetoric. But I did not understand it all.’ Muhammad Mujeeb, Education and Traditional Values (Meerut, 1965), p. 172. (70) Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in Northern India (Cambridge, 1974), p. 156. (71) Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 40. (72) Comrade, 4 May 1912. (73) Katherine Watt, ‘Thomas Walker Arnold and the Re-evaluation of Islam, 1864–1930’, Modern Asian Studies, 36, 1, 2002, p. 57; Abdul Haq, ‘Khwaja Ghulam-us Saqlain Marhoom’, Chand hamasr (New Delhi, 1999 rpt), pp. 79–83; Dariabadi, Maasirin, pp. 127–8. (74) Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, p. 252. (75) India, 17 October 1913. (76) ‘India: Old and New’, Asiatic Review, July 1914. (77) Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan, p. 11. (78) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 201. (79) Christina Oesterheld and Claus Peter Zoller (eds), Of Clowns and Gods, Brahmans and Babus: Humour in South Asian Literatures (New Delhi, 1999); Ralph Russell and Khursheedul Islam, ‘The Satirical Verse of Akbar Illahabadi (1846–1941)’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 1–58. (80) Sadiq, Twentieth Century Urdu Literature, Chapter 12; Ali Jawad Zaidi, A History of Urdu Literature (New Delhi, 1993), Chapter 30. (81) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 91. (82) Ibid., p. 202. Page 31 of 35

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A Family Saga (83) Zaidi, History of Urdu Literature, p. 421. (84) Ibid., p. 148. (85) Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, p. 482. (86) See Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, ‘The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Illahabadi and the Changing Order of Things’, Think India, 6, 1, January-March, 2003, pp. 24–55. (87) Raza, Hamari manzil, pp. 4–5; for a passionate appreciation of Mohamed Ali’s role, see Dariabadi, Aap-biti, pp. 357–8. (88) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 148; Khaliquzzaman, Pathway, p. 38; Anis Kidwai, Ab jin ke dekhne ko, p. 16. (89) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 27. (90) Salim Ali, The Fall of a Sparrow (New Delhi, 1985), p. 50. (91) In his collection of essays published as The Ulama of Farangi Mahall, Francis Robinson boldly tries to repair the ruins of a crumbling edifice. Uncovering the world of the pious and learned men of Farangi Mahal, he plots their trajectory through three centuries, explaining their complex relationships with the society outside the boundaries of the seminary. ‘The learned and holy men of the Farangi Mahall family’, he writes, ‘are a remarkable body of people in the history of South Asia; indeed they would be remarkable in that of any society’. Why? Many of them were scholars and teachers for nearly three centuries, drawing students and disciples not only from parts of India but also from places as far away as Arabia and China. Many of them were men of piety, with a large following cutting across class and caste boundaries. Third, at a time when Western ideas and institutions undermined faith and traditional values, the Farangi Mahal ulama defended the Islamic tenets. In so doing, they acted as guardians, interpreters, and transmitters of the Sharia, and made available to each generation the central messages of Islam, i.e. knowledge of God’s word and how to know it in one’s heart. (92) Among those jailed during the period were Maulana Sharafatullah and his son Muhammad Shafi Hujatullah. Sharafatullah was president of the Khilafat committee in Calcutta. Arrested in November 1922, he was released after a year from the jail in Murshidabad. (93) Mufti Muhammad Raza Ansari, Bani-yi dars-e Nizami: Ustad ul-Hind Mulla Nizamuddin Ahmad (Lucknow, 1973), p. 214.

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A Family Saga (94) His grandfather Maulvi Muhammad Saeed and his mother were disciples of Shah Abdur Razzaq. In Fatehpur Haswa, Hasrat, a student at the government high school, was close to Maulana Zahurul Islam, the Khalifa of Shah Fazlur Rahman Gunj Moradabadi. See Maulana S. Sulaiman Nadwi, ‘Hasrat ki siyasi zindagi’, Nigar (Karachi, 1972), pp. 47–8. The Farangi Mahal ulama were widely respected throughout the country. They were in regular contact with influential men in politics and education. See the correspondence of Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung of Hyderabad with Qutubuddin Abdul Wali of Farangi Mahal. Makatib-e Bahadur Yar Jung (Karachi, 1967), pp. 101, 112. (95) Mufti Muhammad Raza Ansari, Intikhab-e kalam Hasrat Mohani (Lucknow, 1982), pp. 11–12. Kya cheez thi wo murshid-e Wahab ki nigah Hasrat ko jis ne arif-e kamil bana diya.

(96) Ansari, Intikhab khutbat-e Hasrat Mohani, pp. 25–6. (97) Dariabadi, Aap-biti, pp. 26, 31. (98) Shah Mubin Ahmad Faruqi, Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Haq Rudauli (Faizabad, n.d.), p. 265. (99) Ansari, Bani-yi dars-e Nizami, pp. 64–5. (100) Hayatullah Ansari, ‘Awadh ka naya janam’, Naya daur (Lucknow), FebruaryMarch 1994, p. 13. (101) Nasim Ansari, Choosing to Stay, p. 20. (102) Furbank, E.M. Forster, p. 226. (103) Mohamed Ali to B. Lindsay and Abdur Rauf, 2 November 1918, Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 2, p. 127. (104) For the Sultania College Scheme, New Era, 5 May 1917. For additional biographical information, Furqan Ahmad Siddiqi, Zila Bijnor ke jawahar (New Delhi, 1991). (105) Watt, ‘Thomas Walker Arnold and the Re-evaluation of Islam’, Modern Asian Studies, p. 52. (106) Muhammad Ahmad Kazmi, Nizami Budauni (Budaun, 1949), pp. 16–17. The Zul-Qarnain was launched in 1903 from Budaun. (107) 15 June 1901, Ek naadir roznamcha, pp. 32–3. (108) DG, Sitapur, p. 61. Page 33 of 35

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A Family Saga (109) 25 April 1909, Ek naadir roznamcha, pp. 179–80. (110) He joined the college after Theodore Beck’s premature death in 1899 and remained its principal until 1905. (111) Zaidi, History of Urdu Literature, p. 424. (112) For example, Mazaaq from Rampur (January 1855), ed. Hakim Ahmad Raz Lakhnavi and Abdul Jalil Numani; Madras Punch (1859) from Madras; Farhatulahbaab (January 1876) from Bombay; Rohilkhand Punch (1876) from Moradabad; and Bihar Punch (January 1877) from Patna. Abdul Salam Khurshid, Sahafat: Pakistan aur Hind mein (Lahore, 1963), pp. 234–5. (113) Saraswati Saran Kaif, Chakbast (New Delhi, 1988). (114) Shish Muhammad Ismail Azmi, Darasat Islamia ke farogh mein Hinduon ki khidmaat (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 290–326. (115) The application of wazu is confirmed in Amir Hasan Neorani’s book, Munshi Nawal Kishore aur unkey khattat va khush Navis (New Delhi, n.d.); for the obituary of Nawal Kishore, see 19 February 1895, Ek nadir roznamcha, p. 21. (116) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 90. (117) Raghupati Sahai, ‘Reminiscences of Prem Chand’, Twentieth Century (Allahabad), December 1936, p. 223. (118) Milton Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Nationalist Struggle, 1920–1947 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 319. (119) Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom: An Autobiographical Narrative (Bombay, 1959), p. 7. (120) Comrade, 16 March and 15 April 1912. (121) A.M. Dariabadi, Maasirin, p. 119. (122) The censors withheld several of the letters. Mohamed Ali to H.E. Hemingway, 9 May 1916. Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 1, pp. 252–3. (123) He was a member of the Central Bureau for the release of the Muslim Internees. New Era, 24 November 1917. (124) Ibid., 20 October 1917. (125) Ibid., 27 October 1917.

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A Family Saga (126) To Wilayat Ali, 23 January 1918. Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 2, pp. 82–3. (127) Khaliquzzaman, Pathway, pp. 37–8. (128) Mohamed Ali to Mazharul Haq, 31 January 1917. Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 2, pp. 28–9. (129) ‘I have been thinking of writing the life of Maulana Mohamed Ali, but now that you have undertaken to do so it is only fair that I extend to you my support. If you bring along your draft, I will read every single word’. Ziauddin commented that Mohamed Ali had many friends, and yet ‘Bambooq’s love, affection and regard for him was exemplary’. Ziauddin Ahmad Barni, Azmat-e rafta (Karachi, 1961), pp. 278, 280. (130) Cited in Robinson, Separatism, p. 202. (131) Garche hai mulk-e Dakkin mein in dino qadr-e sukhan Kaun jae Zauq par Dilli ki gailyaan chhor kar. In the Deccan these days, poetry receives patronage, But, then, why should Zauq leave the lanes of Dilli.

(132) Mohamed Ali to Mahfuz Ali, 29 April 1912. Mohamed Ali Papers. (133) M.A. Zuberi, Hayat-e-muhsin (Aligarh, 1934); Muhammad Habibur Rahman Khan Sherwani, Viqar-e hayat (Aligarh, 1925). (134) Chopra, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, p. 13. (135) Wilayat Ali, in New Era, 1 September 1917. (136) Ibid.

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In Allah’s Own Country

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

In Allah’s Own Country Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords The Kidwais were part of the Islamic service gentry and operated beyond the local boundaries. They transmitted ilm-e deen (knowledge of Islam) through khanqahs, mosques, and madaris and provided a local Muslim as well as a secular leadership. Hindu-Muslim consciousness was heightened by nascent revivalist assertions and the temple-mosque dispute in 1855 at Hanumangarhi in Ayodhya. Nevertheless, pluralism played a key role in Awadh, particularly at the qasba level. Qasba society seldom got polarized along the lines of religion. As a unique entity, the qasba enhanced its solidarity with the help of the gentry’s patronage and the common man’s veneration of Muslim shrines and holy men. The qasbas shaped Lucknow, with the Hindus and Muslims engaging in friendship and cooperation. Wilayat Ali Kidwai and his group moved from the sites of piety and devotion to Rudauli, some parts of which were characterized by anarchy at the time of Awadh’s annexation. Keywords:   Kidwais, Islam, Muslims, Hindus, qasbas, Awadh, Rudauli, Wilayat Ali Kidwai, Lucknow, pluralism

Bhooray Qawwal and Party clapped their hands in vigorous rhythm as they sang of the Lord Prophet’s Mystical Night Journey to the Celestial Spheres. The Lord Prophet rides a resplendent, winged stallion. In an instant, he reaches the Holy City of Jerusalem—he ascends from the grey-blue Rock and traverses the Seven Heavens, meeting the earlier prophets on the Way of Light. In an instant, he reaches the Presence of God. When he returns to

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In Allah’s Own Country earth the chain of his door is still swinging. The mystical experience of the human soul. The Profound Mystery. The devout who visited Peer Handey Shah’s dargah were mostly oilpressers, weavers, potters, butchers, peasants and their womenfolk, who spent their lives in flat-roofed hovels and were buried in graves. They were supposedly the beloved of God. Like the old woman Sharifan—destitute widow who was saying her Isha prayer in a corner of the shrine. … she went through the ritual movements and keep repeating a few jumbled-up verses of the Koran, for she did not know how to properly say her ritual prayers. All her life, whenever she could get some respite from her backbreaking labour, she communed with God in the same haphazard manner. Her only daughter had been axed to death. They had bribed the police and got away. Sharifan went from house to house doing odd jobs and earned a few annas a day. Technically, she should be among the first to enter the gates of Paradise. And the humble, unknown qawwal, his aged half-blind tabla-player, and his fellow-singers, and the lowly people who listened to them rapturously, and the poor traders who were selling their modest ware in (p.124) the Urs fair—they were all duly informed from time to time that they were to inherit the Kingdom of God. Outside the shrine, rows of thin, dark men in tattered sarongs, and women in patched, tight pyjamas sat on their haunches, selling sweets and peanuts and cones of sugarcane. Tiny kerosene lamps burnt at each ‘stall’. Qurratulain Hyder, The Street Singers of Lucknow and Other Stories (Delhi, 1985), pp. 1–3. As a part of the Islamic service gentry and given their proximity to Nawabganj, then a lively cultural centre, the Kidwais operated beyond the local boundaries, transmitting ilm-e deen (knowledge of Islam) through madaris, mosques, and khanqahs, and providing a local Muslim as well as a secular leadership. Doubtless, nascent revivalist assertions and the temple-mosque dispute in 1855 at Hanumangarhi in Ayodhya had heightened Hindu-Muslim consciousness and led to the intervention of the king’s troops under Captain Barlowe near Rudauli. Nevertheless, pluralism, no matter how amorphous, played a significant part in Awadh, both generally and at the qasba level in particular. It is true that religious attributions were by no means uncommon, but more often than not they were banners under which different economic and social groups organized themselves. The point to stress is that their motives had little to do with religion.1 The occasions when qasba society actually got polarized along the lines of religion were relatively rare.

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In Allah’s Own Country The gentry’s patronage and the common man’s veneration of Muslim shrines and holy men enhanced, undoubtedly, the qasba’s solidarity as a unique entity.2 In some ways, the qasbas shaped Lucknow much more than the other way round. Admittedly, divisions existed; for example, intermarriage across religious communities remained difficult and rare, and marks of distinction manifested in the details of dress and food as expressions of personal, familial, caste, and religious taste and identity. Negative social stereotypes and attitudes regarding the other religious group (p.125) also continued; but specific strategies evolved by individuals enabled them to avoid conflict whilst interacting in mixed social contexts. Friendship, cooperation and coexistence characterized daily interaction between the followers of Islam and Hinduism. Peasants and craftsmen created bonding through festivals, melas, and shared religious traditions, whereas gentry families, conscious of having fashioned a civilized world as opposed to the chicanery, huckstering, and manipulative materialism of city life, interacted with one another in the high tradition of a specifically Indo-Persian culture. Sharp social divisions and cultural fragmentation marked the city; consequently, the qasba people invoked their unity of experience. What enabled them to do this was the predominance of a typically Awadhi culture expressed through an Awadhi dialect, spoken in Sandila and in Unao, Lucknow, and Sitapur districts.3 As the temple bells rang and the muezzin’s cadences floated in the air, one of Rudauli’s prominent service families celebrated Basant and Diwali with much fanfare.4 Among such families there existed a much longer tradition, provided both by structural and liminal artifacts,5 of aiding the process of acculturation and extending its reach among the masses.6 Recalls the author Hameeda Salim: Nestling with the wall of the sehdari in the Bani Khana was my toy-house with five doors. My doll slept there during the year. Just before diwali, the toy-house (p.126) was painted, while clay pots and pans were kept inside filled with puffed rice and sweet balls. The toy-house was decorated with sugar toys and illuminated with wicks soaked in ghee.7 Take Dariabad, the home of a branch of the Kidwai clan, founded in 1444 by an officer in the army of Muhammad Shah of Jaunpur, and known in Akbar’s time as a mahal of Sarkar Awadh. Until the first half of the eighteenth century, Dariabad and Khairabad were centres of calico, chintz and gazi (white coarse cloth like khaddar) manufacture. The English merchants styled them derriabauds (cloth of Dariabad), kerriabauds (cloth of Khairabad) and eebbaryes (some cloth Akbar favoured).8 The British selected Dariabad as the headquarters of the Bara Banki district and a cantonment for European troops, but abandoned it because of the low-lying tracts, surrounded by swamps, along the Ghagra. Sources of livelihood had already begun to dry up, following the political uncertainties that prevailed after the 1857 Rebellion. Even so, Munshi Brij Bhushan Lal, author of Tarikh-e Dariabad, boasts of eight sarais, four dharamshalas, five grain markets, sixtyPage 3 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country seven bazaars, fifty mohallas, and thirty-four gates, large and small. Moreover, he takes pride in the qasba’s celebration of Dhanush-yagya, Dussehra, and Mahabirji ka mela.9 Over 50,000 to 60,000 followers of different religious creeds congregated during Muharram.10 One of the most impressive spectacles at such places was the tazia processions—emblems of fraternities—streaming along the streets, with a vast crowd of mourners that included Hindus of various classes and castes.11 Satrikh, the home of several ‘respectable’ Muslim families who had built several mosques of burnt bricks, was the site of a huge fair held in March at the shrine of Sheikh Salar, the father of Ghazi Miyan Salar Masud, whose shrine is at Bahraich.12 Pilgrims visited the shrine, bringing with them long poles covered with cloth, which is left at the shrine. A leather (p.127) worker living in Rudauli built the mausoleum in 1799. Sleeman’s Hindu camp followers revered the shrine as much as the Muslims.13 At such sites dotted on Awadh’s graph, and this is indeed a point that needs to be constantly underlined, the ulama and the theologian could scarcely turn against the more emotive and expressive aspects of Sufism. This was true of Rudauli as of Bilgram. The following statement sums up the overall tone and tenor of Awadh society: When the conch sounded in the temples in its notes [in Bilgram], the Muslims heard the voice of unity and kinship. When the call for prayer (azan) sounded, the mellifluous voice entranced the Hindus to accept Allah’s greatness. During Muharram, Hindus and Muslims walked shoulder to shoulder reciting elegies and dirges. Music did not provoke violence nor did the Pipal tree cause conflict. The slaughter of animals during Bakr Id did not lead to human killings. In short, be it matters of religion or matters temporal Hindus and Muslims were like sweetness in milk … . This is the atmosphere in which I grew up.14

I Friends, what can I tell you about the mysteries of the universe as I am lost myself I know nothing beyond knowing that I do know nothing.

On many weekends Wilayat Ali and his group took time off from their (p.128) professional and domestic chores to gather together in Bara Banki. For this they used the loop line of the Awadh and Rohilkhand railway system. It ran from the erstwhile Nawabi capital to Faizabad, the city founded by Saadat Ali Khan (1772–39) and refurbished by Safdar Jang (vazir from 1748 until 1753), and Banaras,15 traversed the district from west to east, and passed through Bara Banki, Rasauli, Safdarganj, Dariabad, Makhdumpur, Rauzagaon, and Rudauli. En route, they visited the shrine of Shah Abdur Razzaq (1636/7–1724) at Bansa, who not only won the recognition of his contemporaries but who exerted after his death one of the most powerful influences in Awadh’s spiritual history.16 His shrine, a nucleus of ascetic pietism, shelters the devotee, Hindu and Muslim Page 4 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country alike, from disease and mental ailments, and offers a place where one seeks refuge from the pressures of everyday life. In the 1870s, the urs at Bansa attracted as many as five thousand devotees. The Shah’s twenty-three immediate successors included at least three members of the Kidwai, and six of the Farangi Mahal family.17 Sitting cross-legged at one of the shrines, they may well have repeated the following lines: I stood by the Reformer’s tomb: that dust Whence here below an orient splendour breaks, Dust before whose least speck stars hang their heads, Dust shrouding that high knower of things unknown.18

Dewa, stated a petitioner on behalf of Bakhtawar Singh on 12 June 1859, ‘is a very old pargana, the Qanungos [a petty revenue official] can trace it as far back as 500 years …’.19 Decades later the urs at this site, (p.129) called DewaSharif, attracted many more devotees.20 Started by Haji Waris Ali Shah (1818– 1905) to honour his father Haji Qurban Ali Shah, it was held on Karva-chauth, the fourth day of the dark half of Kartika in October-November. The urs around Waris Ali Shah’s own mausoleum eventually became much more popular. Many of his devotees, and that included Mushir Hosain Kidwai, attributed miracles to him.21 Mazhar Ali’s diary mentions him as Dewa’s ‘rais’. Referring to his piety and his visits to Sandila on 23 July 1887 and 25 March 1900, he records meeting him at the Lucknow station. This is the entry on 30 June 1874: ‘I met Haji Waris Ali Shah at the Lucknow railway station. He has a large number of murids, especially women (mastoorat). Choudhry Imtiazul Zaman is the more devoted amongst them; in fact, everyone I meet seems to be more devoted than the other’.22 He notes, furthermore, that Waris Ali Shah attracted people from a variety of places and that on one occasion he, clad in a tehband, offered spiritual solace to those thronging the house of his host, Wiqar Ahmad.23 Recording his death on 7 April 1905, he points out that amongst his disciples were lakhs of men and women, Hindus and Muslims alike. Among the Hindus given to his service were Thakur Pancham Singh, zamindar of Mainpuri district, Raja Udyat Narayan Singh of Suratgunj in Awadh, Moti Misser, Vakil in Bhagalpur, and Guru Mohun Singh, a Thakur zamindar from the same place.24 He did not expect his Hindu followers to convert to Islam but exhorted them to observe their religious codes.25 In 1912, Saiyyid Ghafur Shah claimed that the Haji had 400,000 disciples that included Turkey’s sultan and a countess in Spain. There is, then, his account of the Haji consoling the Aligarh reformer that a Saiyyid could not be an infidel, a charge his detractors levelled against him. He urged him to proceed with the good work he had undertaken for the community’s upliftment. Finally, he provides evidence of his charisma in discussions with Faizabad’s Pandit Atma Ram: ‘No sooner did His Holiness recite some lines from a Hindi book named Padmavat, the Pandit fell on the ground and became unconscious. Having Page 5 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country regained (p.130) consciousness he embraced Islam and entered the Mission.’ Concludes Ghafur Shah: Great men have their place in the order and economy of the universe. Their advent has more than a local and individual significance. It is no wonder therefore that their advent should be awaited with longing and expectation and foreseen and foretold by men endowed with the inner vision. In the case of His Holiness his coming was foretold by His sanctity Shah Abdur Razzaq of Bansa, sixth in ascent from His Holiness in the Qadiria order, and also by the saint Shah Najatullah, third in ascent from His Holiness in the Chishtiya order.26 Few went that far. Yet in Dewa, as indeed at other sites of piety, Wilayat Ali and his group were sensitized to the eclectic traditions surrounding the shrines and religious fairs. It is not as if they were not conscious of cultural and political contention, almost Hindu-Muslim enmity in other places, but in a region where fairs of all sorts—religious and secular—were so common (see Table 5), the presence of Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, and Jews around the urs revealed the vitality of popular beliefs as against the strict codes of Islamic orthodoxy.27 Thus, Irwin’s description of such fairs starts with the comment that the great mass of the people, Hindus and Muslims, were generally ‘good-natured; honest among themselves; prone to verbal quarrels, but easily reconciled’. He proceeds to examine the significance of fairs. ‘It is difficult to watch those dense crowds of thousands, he continues, in their clean, bright-coloured garments, so patient, so good-humoured, so simply amused, without feeling that, whatever their other shortcomings, they are the best-behaved holiday-makers and sightseers in the world’.28 Visits to Dewa were frequently associated with the pride in Sheikh Abdur Rahman Chishti (d. 1683) of Dhaniti, a village near Rudauli. Many others did not acquiesce to his attitude; in fact, some of his contemporaries had strongly contested his ideas in his lifetime. Still he maintained that the policy of sulh-kul (peace with all) was a sterling ideal to which rulers should aspire, and exhorted his disciples to adopt the virtues of all religions.29 (p.131) In Bansa, Wilayat Ali and his friends heard stories of Shah Abdur Razzaq and Abdur Rahman Jaunpuri (d. 1673), who was revered by Shah Jahan and came to be known as Shamsul Haq, taking part in Allahabad’s Magh mela and interacting with the jogis.30 They would have surely heard of the Shah joining the Muharram rituals, and that even when he was old and infirm, he paid his respects to the tazias.31 They would have, moreover, heard accounts of his association with Champat, the leader of a group of bairagis or mendicants from Awadh, his presence at the theatrical performances featuring popular stories

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In Allah’s Own Country about Krishna and the gopis, and his visions of Ram and Lakshman.32 One of the ancestors of Hasrat Mohani, the Urdu poet, had written the following doha: More piyare Kanhayya birajat hain Mohe Brij bhai Bansa nagri. My dear Kanhayya still lives in Bansa Which has become as sacred as Brij to me.

Incidentally, Hasrat himself visited Mathura on Krishna’s birthday, watched the dance and drama festival, and composed poems describing Him as the leader of the company of lovers. In this, he followed the example of his spiritual preceptor, Shah Abdur Razzaq, and the poet Nazir Akbarabadi who had written poems not only on Holi and Diwali but also on Krishna’s birth and Mahadeo’s wedding. ‘Regarding Hazrat Sri Krishna (peace be upon him) I am a follower of the path of love of my pir and pir of pirs Hazrat Saiyyid Abdur Razzaq Bansvi’. Maslak-e ishq hai parastish-e husn Ham nahin jante azaab-o-sawaab. The path of love is the worship of beauty, We do not know what punishment and reward are.33

Exceptions apart, Muslim mystics knew that it is the second half of the professions of faith—‘Muhammad is the messenger of God’—which (p.132) makes Islam a distinct religion and draws the borderline between Islam and other religions. They also knew that ‘the distinction between good and evil is an illusion and does not exist for the mystic who sees the world from God’s perspective’.34 Hence, throughout his life, Abdur Razzaq encouraged by his words and actions a liberal and conciliatory approach to local Hindu religious rites and social practices. His principal concern was to maintain and enhance amicable relations between the diverse social and religious communities, even though some of his preferences violated the Sharia, as pointed out by Mulla Nizamuddin Muhammad Sihalwi (d. 1748), the founder of the Dars-e Nizami. Two of his major disciples and his son, Ghulam Dost Muhammad, were specially fond of bhakti-baz song and dance sequence depicting the life of Narasimha Avatar and Krishna. Indeed, it was in the full knowledge of their spiritual preceptor that they once watched bhaktiyas performing the life of Krishna at the home of Chait Ram and Paras Ram, the bairagis.35 The following story is associated with them: Once Bansawi arrived at the home of Chait Ram and Paras Ram in Rampur village, 10 kilometres from Bansa. He found the bhaktiyas dancing; one of them played the role of Krishna and the other was dressed as gopi. They sang Sant Kabir’s dohas. Moved by their songs, the Hazrat fell into a trance. Meanwhile the singing reached a high-pitched note. That is when the Hazrat, now under the spell of divine love, opened his eyes. The Page 7 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country audience—Hindu and Muslim zamindars, bairagis, and faqirs—was moved to tears. All those present, the rich and the poor, were spellbound. The Hazrat got up and sat under a banyan tree. He asked his son Shah Ghulam Dost Muhammad to massage his head, and Zaman Khan Shahjahanpuri, his disciple, to rub the soles of his feet. ‘What has happened?’ somebody asked Chait Ram and Paras Ram. ‘Hazrat Shah Abdur Razzaq is a distinguished auliya. At this point, he is entranced by divine love’. Then the devotees said to them: ‘We sang whatever we’ve learnt from our guru, but we’ve not been blessed with Krishna’s leela’. They replied, ‘We can tell you what you’ve not received from your guru, and (p.133) what we’ve received from ours. Yet, we do not possess the power to make you see Krishna. Only Shah Sahib does. The devotees approached Hazrat Saiyyid to seek his intervention. Hazrat replied, ‘He was in this assembly. Didn’t you see him?’ They said, no. Hazrat offered them some advice that they accepted. Immediately, their desire was fulfilled. They presented him with a gift—eleven rupees and a length of cloth. ‘Go and give these to your guru, the legitimate claimant’, Hazrat told them. They answered: ‘We’ve already done that. This belongs to you’. At their insistence, the Hazrat said to Ghulam Dost Muhammad, ‘Your sister must be expecting a gift from you. Take a rupee and buy some toys’. When the Hazrat rose to begin his homeward journey, the guru handed over the piece of cloth to Dost Muhammad asking him to make a turban with half of it. The other half, he suggested, was for his mother for he could make a quilt from it.36 Another story mentioned in the Manaqib-e Razzaqiyya, a Persian text, details the experience of one of Razzaq’s disciples. During one of his wanderings, he came across a handsome young man playing a flute and surrounded by young girls. As he came close, the flute-player asked him to convey his regards to his murshid. When the murid reached the khanqah, he was asked if he had met any one on the way and whether he had any message from him. His reply was: ‘Yes, a young flute player surrounded by young women asked me to convey his regards to you.

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In Allah’s Own Country But I considered it beneath all mention’. At this Abdur Razzaq said, ‘He was Sri Krishnaji Maharaj; he has visited me here too’.37 Even though the reading and recitation of such stories was frowned upon by the learned of the faith, and the reading or hearing of them was regarded as shirk or heresy, was such tales were in some measure adapted by the Sufi interlocutors so as to show some agreement with the requirements of the faith. They were, moreover, interpreted as a eulogy to the multicultural social reality. This had an important bearing not only on medieval Awadh politics but also on the emergence and sustenance of the region’s secular and composite values.

(p.134) II Yadon ki baraat Train of Memory

Wilayat Ali and his group moved to Rudauli from the sites of piety and devotion. Once the place of a great battle in 1442 between the Narauli taluqdars and the governor Tatar Khan, Rudauli faced virtual extinction in the wars between Bahlol Lodi (1402–36) and Husain Shah (1457–76), the last Sultan of the Sharqi dynasty. During the following decade it came under the rule of the Lodi Sultans. At the beginning of the last decade of the fifteenth century Rudauli temporarily passed out of their control owing to the war waged by the Bachgotia Rajputs, originally Chauhans, following Sikandar Lodi’s accession in 1489, and his war with his brother Barbak Shah. At the time of Awadh’s annexation, anarchy prevailed in parts of Rudauli. The low summary settlement, prompted Chamier, who conducted the first regular settlement of the Bara Banki district in 1861–62, to propose an increase. Influenced by Rudauli’s part in the 1857 Rebellion, he also suggested that the deputy-commissioner must ‘ever exercize a sleepless vigilance over the patrons of sedition who reside in Rudauli’.38 This was an exaggerated fear, for there is no contemporary record of social and economic unrest being expressed in antiBritish activism. But Rudauli’s image as a troublespot remained unchanged, finding its most eloquent expression in the stereotypical comment, ‘the people of Rudauli are principally Mahomedan, and are continually quarrelling amongst themselves’.39 The author of the review of education was not the only one to have made such anti-Muslim comments. Others, too, had their pejorative views of the ‘Muslim race’. Although the British destroyed, in 1857, the army post built by Ali Quli Khan in 1660 at mohalla Katra, Rudauli still had many landmarks. Its 12,000 inhabitants could therefore boast, at the turn of the twentieth century, that their qasba’s skyline was dominated by havelis, imambaras, mosques, including the one built by Khalilur Rahman (d. 1912), the landowner of Barai.40 Sufi shrines, some dating back to Iltutmish’s reign, (p.135) dominated the landscape. Sheikh Salahuddin Suhrawardy, a Khalifa of Bahauddin Zakariya (1182–1262) and Page 9 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country founder of the Suhrawardy order in Rudauli, was one of the patron saints.41 A stream of Sufi saints, with their families in tow, followed him to live in Rudauli’s neighbourhood. Rudauli was associated with Abdul Quddus Gangohi of the Sabiri silsila, and Sheikh Nasiruddin, who received land from the Sharqi ruler, Ibrahim Shah (1402–36). He had three sons; one of them occupied the office of ‘Hakim’, the second married into the family of a certain Qazi Khan. He was the one who spent the first thirty-seven (Muslim) years of his life in Rudauli.42 Indeed, he was the one to identify Unity of Existence (wahdat al-wujud) with the Hindu spiritual understanding of Gorakhnath, and regarded Gorakhnath as a Hindi name for God himself. He drew upon yogic tradition in his own practice of techniques for attaining ecstasy, penned poetry in Hindi, and quite late in life he would fall into ecstasy as and when Hindi verses were sung. The Rushd-nama of Abdul Quddus has many dohas composed by the khanqah’s other inmates,43 who drew upon a tradition Shah Abdul Haq pioneered.44 Preferring haq haq haq to salam-oalaikum, the use of the repeated word as a greeting by his followers recalls the alakh alakh or ades ades that the jogis used.45 Among Rudauli’s sacred sites is, of course, Shah Abdul Haq’s shrine. His grandfather, as the folklore goes, came to Rudauli from Balkh to escape the general slaughter by Hulagu Khan (1217–65). The hero of the story was said to be a very pious man since his childhood. At last the idea struck that he could gain information by keeping company with the dead. He (p.136) wandered about the country in the graveyards and finally got himself buried alive. After six months this grave opened of its own accord and he was taken out half dead. He returned to Rudauli after an absence of fifty years, and was introduced to his followers.46 With qasba life generally insulated from polemical Hindu-Muslim disputations that embroiled several towns in north India, especially in the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was fairly common—then and later—to invoke the ecumenical ideas of Sheikh Abdur Rahman, the seventeenth-century head of Rudauli’s Chishti order, and to legitimize traditions of tolerance and corporate living. Elders proudly told their younger ones how he had prepared a recension of the Gita in Persian, entitled Miratul-Haqaiq (Mirror of the Realities), and written a Sanskrit treatise in verse on Hindu cosmogony in the form of a dialogue between Mahadeva and Parvati. They reminded them of how Abdur Rahman exhorted Muslims to adapt Hindu legends to their beliefs, pointing out that the Gita was an ideal exposition of the doctrine of Hama ust (All is He).47 In this way, Sufism in a locality, as indeed on a pan-Indian scale, continued with its simple piety and gospel of love and absorbed heterodox elements.

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In Allah’s Own Country Abdur Rahman often visited Shah Abdul Haq’s tomb in Rudauli. Here he met Sheikh Muhibb-ullah (1587/8–1648), born in Sadrpur in Khairabad district but settled in Allahabad. Author of several treatises dealing with Sufi thought and practice, the Sheikh, like Abdul Haq before him, was one of the great exponents of wahdat al-wujud. Although some leading scholars criticized his views expounded in his two commentaries (Shah Abdul Aziz, c. 1746–1824, a believer in the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, thought that Muhibb-ullah had stepped into ‘the valley of heresy’),48 his image remained unscathed in most areas and his views were not wildly contested. ‘India was caught up in the communal cauldron after independence’, wrote Shah Abdul Haq’s biographer, ‘but Rudauli remained an oasis of communal peace. The Faiz-e Wilayat of Sheikh ul-alim has foiled attempts to create communal ruptures’.49 On 29 May 1817, Ghaziuddin Haider, the Awadh ruler, sanctioned (p.137) 163 and 17 bighas (unit of a land measurement) of land (in two separate areas of the Bara Banki district) for the lighting up and repair of Shah Abdul Haq’s shrine, but the sanad was lost during the 1857 disturbances.50 Meanwhile, Abdul Haq’s fame spread ‘over the whole of Hindustan, nay into Arabia, Turkey (Rum), Persia (Ajam) and in fact the entire world’. It is said that he declined the offer of a jagir from Sultan Ibrahim camping near Rudauli. ‘You think that the Sultan, and not God, provides sustenance to my family’, he told the qazi. ‘Will Allah, who provides for the horses and elephants of your Sultan, not look after my children?’51 In the 1860s, the government assigned, free of revenue, land yielding one 1100 rupees annually. Abdul Haq’s fair attracted, according to Chamier’s testimony, 10,000 devotees.52 Zohra Bibi’s important shrine is also located in Rudauli. A ‘virgin saint’ who recovered her eyesight through a visit to the mazar of Saiyyid Salar at Bahraich, the hero of many popular ballads, she died at the age of eighteen and was buried in Rudauli. It is believed that her parents started the practice of bringing a group of people every year from Rudauli to Bahraich and formally giving her in marriage to Ghazi Miyan. The group brings gifts that are offered at the tomb of the bridegroom—Ghazi Miyan. At the tomb built to commemorate her memory, the head sweeper presents a bed as his offering, and the lower classes undertake marriage ceremonies.53 In the 1870s, average attendance at the Rudauli fair sometimes exceeded the figure of 6,000. The chief proprietors of the pargana, administered under Act II of 1916 as a notified area, were sheikhzadas, while coparcenary communities held 36 per cent of the land. ‘As we opened our eyes into this environment’, writes Hameeda Salim, who belonged to one of Rudauli’s landed families, (p.138) ‘we found the people split into two classes: the taluqdars/zamindars whose sole preoccupation was to realize revenue through munshis, and the barbers, washermen, potters, curlers, mirasi, qawwals, and so on, who provided services to the gentry’.54 Accustomed to treating their praja with contempt, they had no sense of justice. Page 11 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country They did not even allow the ajlaf to greet them saying adab-arz (I pay my respects to you) with the customary Muslim greeting, salam-o-alaikum (peace be upon you) for that implied equal status. Instead, the accepted expressions of salutation were Sarkar ko salam, Hujoor salam, Miyan salam, or Bhaiya salam. To this, the rais simply nodded without the obligatory reply walaikum-ussalam (On you too be peace). Nor did he raise his hand, the prescribed code of conduct.55 As in any other qasba, the landed class and the few service families were demarcated by mohalla Qaziana, mohalla Pura Khan, mohalla Khwaja Hall and mohalla Sufiana, the home of Shia taluqdars like Irshad Husain. Besides owning 37 villages and 17 pattis, he was a local notable—an honorary magistrate, member of the district board, and president of Rudauli’s notified area committee. Note Hameeda Salim’s following description: Passing though a huge gate in Khwaja Hall, one came across an open vista where five or six members of the same family lived. This part of Khwaja Hall was known as Bani Khana. On the left side of the open square was a dohri-baradari, on a somewhat elevated platform, with six doors on two sides. At the centre of the back wall a curtain of faded green covered a niche. In the niche was a strong box containing the holy relic of the Prophet. The responsibilities of holding the twelve-day long fair in the month of Rabi-ul-Awwal, milad, qawwalis and natiyya [poetry in honour of the Prophet] were shared among the families in Bani Khana. The heterogeneity of physically separated groups produced conflicts in city life, but not in the qasbas. Here, the well-off sections, without having to make both ends meet, patronized poets, musicians, qawwals, marsiya-khwans, and miryasis, and played a key part in organizing the annual urs at the shrine of Makhdoom Sahib in Makhdoom Zada that lasted two days and drew some 50,000 persons.56 The mela in mohalla (p.139) Sufiana at Salahuddin Suhrawardy’s shrine also had their financial backing. Besides the urs, the Prophet’s birthday on the 12th of Rabi-ul-Awwal, the third month of the Muslim lunar year, was a great occasion on their calendar. So were Id (Id-ul-Fitr) on the first of Shawwal, the tenth month, and Baqr Id (Id-ul Adha) on the tenth day of Zil hijjah, the last month of the Islamic calendar. During the festivities acquaintances and relatives gathered from the neighbouring qasbas, and added to the fun and excitement in qasba life. In the private, domestic and feminine world of home, women displayed family wealth to outsiders, through both their homemaking and their consumption practices, which determined the relative standing of their families. They appeared in their colourful robes and elaborate headgear. Equality between the sexes was one of the values of qasba society, but when it came to the practical routine of daily life, the matter

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In Allah’s Own Country provoked constant controversy; the women usually found themselves cooking, cleaning, and sewing. In a patriarchal society, the men’s lives and world often contained more duality than women’s did, as they moved back and forth between the male-dominated work and the home environment. During the festivities, the men sported their expensive achkans or angarkhas—each one of them had a tailor based in Lucknow who sewed their expensive robes—smoked the hooqa (hubblebubbles),57 recited poetry, listened to qawwalis, a source of spiritual solace, and attended late night mujra (dancing sessions), a major focus of leisure activity. They ate lots of mangoes, and if they wanted more, they could get them from their orchards. In between, they worked out travel itineraries, discussed the range of marriage choices, resolved inter- and intra-family disputes, and developed strong friendship networks based on the extensive cultural homogeneity in the area. Generally speaking, they observed the rules of good taluqdari society. Besides its Sufis, ulama, taluqdars, and mujahidin or freedom fighters, whose names are inscribed on a government building,58 Rudauli had its fill of Persian and Urdu writers and poets. Prominent amongst them were Basharat Ali Nadeem (d. 1875), a pupil of ‘Aatish’ of Lucknow; Khuda (p.140) Baksh ‘Shauq’ (d. 1888); Brij Bhukan Lal ‘Muhib’ (b. 1874); Wilayat Husain ‘Haqir’; and Maulvi Muhammad Halim Ansari (1877–1939), an Arabic scholar, whose writings appeared in Cairo’s newspaper Al-Hilal, and later in Azad’s Al-Hilal and AlBalagh.59 Rudauli’s most popular poet turned out to be Asrarul Haq ‘Majaz’, one of those effervesent personalities that one saw performing at mushairas. Ahang, the slim collection of his poems, became hugely successful. The image of an angry, reckless, and iconoclastic poet, coupled with his finer poetic sensibilities, gained him a large following. The younger generation, in particular, ‘lovingly clasped the book to their bosoms, lotteries were held in his name in girls’ colleges, his book was hidden under their pillows, and unmarried girls made firm resolves to name their unborn sons after him’.60 I dwell on these aspects to reiterate that Rudauli and its neighbouring areas were not rootless pre-colonial or colonial outposts, but centres of Islamic piety, and of literary and cultural effervescence. Sleeman, himself well versed in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, describes some of the classics, including works by the religious thinker al-Ghazali (1056–1111) and Sheikh Sadi, which were most commonly studied. These were, according to him, ‘the great “Pierian spring” of moral instruction from which the Muhammadan delights to “drink deep” from infancy to old age; and a better spring it would be difficult to find in the works of any other three men’.61

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In Allah’s Own Country The little qasba of Kakori, about ten or twelve miles from Lucknow, had more educated men in the 1850s, filling high and lucrative positions in the civil establishment, than any other place in India, except Calcutta.62 Private libraries dotted the countryside: in Kintur, for example, situated on the high bank of the Ghagra, where the Saiyyids held two-thirds of the village lands, including a number of rent-free grants. In Sandila, the libraries of Kunwar Durga Parshad, taluqdar of Sarawan-Baragaon, and Munshi Saiyyid Fazal Rasool (b. 1897) stocked eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts on theology, jurisprudence, and yunani medicine.63 The (p.141) Kunwar, founder of Sandila’s Quin Press, himself wrote several Persian works on history and morals.64 Son of Raja Dhanpat Ray, he had succeeded his father as rais, and was appointed an Honorary Magistrate of Sandila in 1884. In addition to the Gulistan-e Hind he wrote a history of Awadh, Bustan-e Awadh, published at Lucknow in 1892, and a tazkira of women poets, also, published at Sandila in 1894.65 These sources provide a sense of the overall shape of reading as represented in some of this period’s literature. Such men neither created heroic historical narratives nor were they all engaged in the nationalist project of inventing symbols of Hindu-Muslim amity. Their own self-conception, which Wilayat Ali and his group constructed, was that of being intertwined with a distinct Awadhi culture, a view reinforced by family tradition, by the schools and colleges, and by personal and sometimes professional relationships. At a time when culture was strongly tied with religious nationalism in several regions, they saw themselves as the embodiments of Awadh’s pluralist values, and, for that reason, affirmed continuity. Pluralism was for them an ideology of accommodation with firm historical and philosophical roots, and it served as a guide that allowed them to manage their right to be ‘different’. We see some of these convictions being elaborated in the writings of Wilayat Ali and his friend Choudhry Muhammad Ali, the central linchpin in the mediation of culture and family values between the qasba-based and Lucknow’s urbanized elites.

III Amaal-nama Taking Stock

Comparing Muhammad Ali’s style of writing with that of Mirza Ghalib, Saiyyid Abdullah, the Urdu writer and critic, introduced him as Abhi kuch log baaqi hain jahan mein [There are, indeed, some wise men still around].66 Even though his books have not earned their place on the college and university bookshelves and in the home of Urdu readers, they carry the imprimatur of a famous and authoritative series. Salah-kaar, (p.142) the first ever study on the psychology of sex in Urdu, set out that Islam was the ‘average ethic’, to use Max Weber’s expression, which accommodated sexuality rather than challenging it. At Mirza Abdur Razzaq’s house Muhammad Ali discussed whether or not ignorance and Page 14 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country irrational suppression of sex breeds perversion.67 The treatise received approval in some quarters, even though Muhammad Ali appears sometimes to be weighed down by the burden of getting it published.68 His friend Niyaz Fatehpuri published a similar text,69 though it is based largely on Havelock Ellis’s (1859– 1939) monumental work, Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Kashkaul-e Muhammad Ali Shah Faqir, a collection of thirty-six short stories, articles, and pen portraits, introduces a rich profusion of new ideas and suggestions. Lively and readable, it is lauded as a classic.70 His letters, published in Karachi during his lifetime, received acclaim for their simple style and lucidity. They were so natural and eclectic, so full of grace and charm. For a man who had the advantage of first-hand knowledge of the leaders and movements during part of the first half century, understanding and frankness mark his judgements of them. However, his views were clouded, as we shall see in Chapter 7, on problems relating to the landed classes and their future prospects in free India. Muhammad Ali’s articles in Awadh Punch and Maaloomat were widely read and commented upon. His collection of short stories, published in 1939, mirrors the qasba culture and its social manifestations in family and societal relations. His poetry did not set the Ghagra or the Gomti on fire, but he possessed sufficient poetic talent. Wherever he ranges, and he goes far and wide, he has something refreshing to say in his inimitable style. Finally, the small biography of Saiyyid Karamat Husain, founder of the Muslim Girls’ School in Lucknow, is arresting, communicating uninhibitedly Muhammad Ali’s unequivocal approval of women’s (p.143) education.71 One reason, perhaps, lay in the growing body of opinion in the service families, by no means recent, that women had as much need of enlightenment and as good a claim to it as men. Muhammad Ali was two-and-a-half years old when his father died in 1884. The Court of Wards administered his taluqa in Amirpur. Even though Amirpur’s annual income was Rs 22,994 in the 1880s, the estate had accumulated debts to the tune of Rs 74,998. The Allahabad Bank was its sole creditor. According to an optimistic official review, ‘during the 16 years’ minority of the ward the estate will, in all probability, be entirely cleared of debt. Nothing can be done towards improvement at the expense of the estate until funds are available … .’72 When Muhammad Ali was fourteen, the British manager prevailed upon the young man, who showed signs of sloth and indolence, to study at Lucknow’s Colvin Taluqdar School. Soon, Muhammad Ali created a circle of friends that included Raja Prithipal Singh, the taluqdar of Surajpur in Dariabad, and became a favourite pupil (shagird-e rasheed) and intimate friend (dost-e aziz) of Muhammad Askari.73 But the monotony of the school routine was too much to bear. Sensing this, the Court of Wards quietly arranged his marriage with Abida Begum (d. 1929), a distant relative. The boy was seventeen. The school manager Page 15 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country protested, but, as Muhammad Ali’s daughter recalled, the die was cast (teer kaman se nikal chuka tha).74 Muhammad Ali developed studious habits, even though his formal education remained inconclusive. He preferred to be left alone with the works of Karl Marx and George Bernard Shaw, whose attack on Victorian humbug and hypocrisy delighted him. He read Pygmalion (1912), and seems to be influenced by Shaw’s other play, Getting Married (1908). Besides his extensive readings, he translated Oscar Wilde (1806–1900), Irish poet, wit, and dramatist, and Shaw’s play Paradox. This, too, was quite a (p.144) feat for a person living in a world that was socially and geographically very small indeed. Muhammad Ali studied the Upanishads too, as did several educated Muslim families, who combined reading Urdu with Hindi and Hindu religious books with Western and Islamic literature. At the end of 1887, Abdul Halim Sharar invited contributions to his journal about Hinduism. ‘There is a serious defect in Dilgudaz’, he wrote, ‘it is becoming more and more engrossed in the affairs of Islam to the exclusion of other points of view. We would be grateful, therefore, for the assistance of our Hindu friends in this matter, to add distinction to Dilgudaz’.75 The Lucknow poet, Saiyyid Maqbul Husain (Zarif Lakhnavi), learnt Hindi and Sanskrit from his neighbour Pandit Rajan Lal.76 In 1914, Niyaz Fatehpuri, the upcoming Urdu writer and critic, translated Tagore’s Geetanjali into Urdu. From 1909 to 1918, the years Abdul Majid Dariabadi cast aside religious rituals and turned agnostic, he studied Confucianism, Buddhism, the Gita, and the writings of Aurobindo Ghose, Tilak, and Bhagwan Das (1869–1959) on Hinduism. He found the teachings of Gautam Buddha and Krishna to be much more inspiring than the works of Mill and Spencer.77 Mushir Hosain Kidwai wrote a long poem—‘Hope’—in Urdu. In the poem Hope, Rama’s companion in Lanka, roams the forests with him. It protects the honour of Sita. To Arjun it is Hope that appears as Krishna to instil him with courage when his heart is likely to fail him. Again, in the poem, the prophets of old are all sustained with the ministrations of Hope.78 The list of those who admired seers and saints is a long one. To mention just a few more, Saiyyid Mahmud was attracted to Krishna and by the Hindu ideal of life.79 Robert Talbot Dalby, Principal of the Cambridge Preparatory School in Dehra Dun, made Muhammad Mujeeb read the Gita at school as well as the writings of Annie Besant and other theosophists.80 (p.145) Awadh’s literary circles recognized Muhammad Ali’s literary skills. But this is not the whole story. At a time when Shia-Sunni polemics raged in Lucknow’s bazaars and mohallas, Muhammad Ali eschewed the Shia practice of tabarra, and pleaded for religious tolerance. He favoured Shia-Sunni intermarriages, and did not convert his first wife, a Sunni, to the Shia faith.81 What he wrote did not inflame the prejudice of his readers. His book Mera Page 16 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country mazhab (My Religion), which also provides an interesting account of his Haj journey in 1929, represented the moderate voice.82 He leans neither to one ‘school’ nor to another; his aim seems to be to soothe sectarian passions, and in that he succeeded. Urdu newspapers and Muslim organizations hotly debated whether Muslim girls should be sent to school or not. Muhammad Ali powerfully defended their right to access education and seek empowerment. He disliked segregation as much as he expressed his aversion to the maktab and madrasa curricula. He found their teaching methods outdated and medieval, and their management inefficient. With Saiyyid Karamat Husain as his role model, he enrolled his four daughters (his son, Salman, studied at Oxford) in his school at Allahabad and later in Lucknow when it shifted there, and persuaded Sirajul Haq, Rudauli’s first graduate, to do the same.83 Some of his thoughts on the status of Muslim women were not new, for they had been afloat in the articles of, for example, his friend Niyaz Fatehpuri, published in Nigar in June 1932, and in Gahwara-e tamaddun.84 (p.146) On a practical plane, however, his efforts and encouragement created an atmosphere conducive for Muslim women to defy patriarchy and carve out their own independent space. It is extraordinary how in so small a qasba so many women made the break with tradition to choose a career for themselves in politics, education, and creative writing. This is true of Zarina Bhatty, a sociologist in Delhi,85 the author Hameeda Salim, her sister Safia who lived in Bhopal and married the noted Urdu poet Jan Nisar Akhtar (1914–79), and Nayyara Hasan (1924–200), who shed her veil in Delhi at a very early age. Deeply involved in the progressive women’s movement in Delhi, she organized the Muslim women of the walled city—Ballimaran in Chandni Chowk—for the Communist Party of India-led National Federation of Indian Women. Daughter of a judge in Hyderabad she was married to a civil servant who died in 1968. Then there was Sufia Numani (d. 1997), who belonged to a family well known for its Sufi heritage. The late Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), Sufia Numani’s son, (p.147) believed that this connection influenced her mother’s life in many intangible ways; ‘she had the grandeur of a Sufi’, he liked to say.86 Sufia, who lived in Jamia Nagar, New Delhi for many years, was married into an affluent Shia family in Kashmir. Her husband Agha Ashraf Ali taught at Jamia Millia Islamia and went on to become the Principal of the Teachers’ Training College in Srinagar. Associated with ideas of regeneration, progress, and happiness, the meaning of these words amplified in his own writings, Muhammad Ali appeared at his best in the circle of intimate friends. That circle included Wilayat Ali.87 On one occasion in 1917, he proved equal to the task of standing up to Maulana Azad’s wit and humour.88 Easy, cheerful, courteous, and urbane, he discussed literary and public affairs candidly, quoting from Spencer, Mill, Shaw, H.G. Wells (1866– 1946), Somerset Maugham (b. 1974), Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), the Syrian poet Page 17 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country and painter, and Tagore.89 ‘The roots of my scepticism and heresy (kufr-o ilhad) lie in my reading of Spencer and Mills’, he informed his daughter.90 Surprisingly he does not mention Shakespeare’s plays that were already adapted into Urdu by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.91 Without feeling cut-off from the world, Muhammad Ali spent much time in congenial company conversing for hours and discussing, over drinks and kebabs, the day-to-day political events that impinged on the lives of the common people.92 He often heard poor people, many meekly gathering around the haveli on festive occasions in mohalla Salar, complaining that the world went on without them and without heeding or caring for what (p.148) had become of them. To those who came to him, he promised sympathy for their sorrows and alleviation of their burdens. During Wilayat Ali’s lifetime, Awadh had yet to find itself in the throes of a kisan upsurge. Nonetheless, he and his taluqdar friend knew that government offices were inundated with complaints of tenants being ill-treated and assaulted by the zamindars or their karindas. Pointing to Choudhry Muhammad Ali’s kindness and generosity (raiyyat parvari) towards his raiyya (tenants), an Urdu writer from the region recalls witnessing the exploitation and oppression of the karindas (landlord’s agents), and felt deeply upset by their brutalites and coercive methods.93 When the kisan sabhas gathered momentum—the first signs of protest manifested themselves towards the end of 1919 in Pratapgarh district —Muhammad Ali realized its implications on the fortunes of his class. He was apparently impressed when Ram Chandra, the kisan leader, visited Rudauli on 29 December 1920, exhorting the kisans to take to swadeshi and handspun cloth. To Muhammad Ali’s credit, he announced his intention to stop eviction, nazrana (a present or premium), and begaari (forced labour) in his estate.94 Later, he closely followed the 1931 report of a Congress committee documenting peasant grievances. His late friend’s nephew, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, was one of its authors. In his younger days, Muhammad Ali acquired a certain stimulus from Wilayat Ali, a ‘unique friend’ and a ‘very enlightened person’.95 It was Wilayat Ali, who explained to him how the taluqdars, owning half the land and depending on illpaid hirelings to manage their estates, shattered the backbone of the rural economy and drove the cultivator to the verge of penury. It was he who told him how Tasadduq Rasul Khan of Jahangirabad abused his powers over defenceless peasants, and had to wait for twelve years before earning the title of Raja in 1893.96 The property in Salamau taluqa, too, was temporarily sequestrated on the grounds that its taluqdar had failed to fulfil the obligations imposed on him by the sanad under which he held his estate.97 Again, it was Wilayat Ali who told Muhammad (p.149) Ali how, in their own Bara Banki district, people subsisted principally on agriculture, and that the tenants with no rights of occupancy or of inheritance were open to evictions, high rents, nazrana, extortion of illegal Page 18 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country cesses called abwabs, and begaar.98 The number of ejectment notices in Awadh increased from 85,138 to 92,451 in 1886; and the areas covered by them from 320,000 to 360,000 acres. The increase was considerable in Unao, Lucknow, Hardoi, and Rae Bareli. In consequence, the government exacted a new law protecting tenants from ejectment for seven years from the date of his entry on his holding.99 Rents were, on the whole, vitiated by nazrana. In the bigger estates—both taluqdari and zamindari—nazrana at the rate of one to two years was levied at the renewal of a lease.100 Wilayat Ali reminded his taluqdar friend of scarcity in 1877–79, the famines of 1878 and 1896–97, and the sufferings, regardless of the Rent Act of 1886, of the poor. Indeed, ‘it was doubtful whether in any other part of India the tenures of the cultivating community were so little protected by law as in Awadh’.101 Nearly two decades later, the director-general in the Education department had this to say from Sandila, a qasba Wilayat Ali and Muhammad Ali frequented: This day, in the camp of the district officer where I am staying, troops of peasants, bringing sheaves in their hands, have been to see him, in order to show him that they will not be able to pay the ordinary revenue at the ordinary time. They brought wheat, which has gone sick and will bear no corn; pulse, of which the leaves are curled up and flower dead; gram of which the pods are hollow, and poppies which have perished (owing to frost). The poor things come with stamped petitions, which cost them a shilling, 4d. to the penman and 8d. for the stamp.102 On the strength of such mounting evidence, Wilayat Ali underscored (p.150) the potential for an impending agrarian crisis, the complete lack of harmony between the people and the government, and the fact that the masses, in many cases resigned for thousands of years, demanded greater well-being and freedom. It was no longer possible to ignore their cry.103 Wilayat Ali was right. Life in the countryside generated feelings of exploitation, dependency, and frustration, especially at the bottom of the social ladder, but also on somewhat higher rungs. During the First World War the taluqdars, finding themselves under financial pressure, turned to a more intensive exploitation of their sir land, unencumbered by settled tenants, and to an enhancement of their tolls and dues. With conditions for widespread peasant disaffection ripe,104 protests were aired against demands for rasad and begaar in Bara Banki.105 ‘In my opinion’, stated Maulvi Salamatullah of Farangi Mahal, an institution Muhammad Ali valued, ‘the greatest enemies of Islam are the taluqdars of Awadh and those who visit officials’. The peasants should not be treated as a flock of sheep but rather as human beings with hearts and souls.106 In the Kothi village in Bara Banki district, a zamindar’s peon was killed in March 1922 when he attempted to rob the simple folk of their money. A month earlier, a Page 19 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country police circle in Hardoi reported twenty-one Eka meetings in three days, attended by 150 to 2,000 people.107 During the civil disobedience campaign, the Pasis’ tenants murdered a Muslim zamindar in Bara Banki district in April 1931. The following month a serious clash was averted between 4,000 tenants and some Muslim landlords at Asiwan in Unao district. In Allahabad district, tenants, all Lodhs, fatally attacked their landlord and six others.108 (p.151) Muhammad Ali may have grumbled ineffectually, and complained of the plethora of Congress declarations; but his friend Wilayat Ali insisted that the intractable stubbornness of the landed classes alarmed the poor. All that was required of them, and this indeed is the tenor of Wilayat Ali’s newspaper articles, was to ensure that the peasants were not turned off the land. They were not destined by nature and by tradition to support them, and maintaining traditional forms, in authority and subjection, was not an ideal political arrangement. It is fair to speculate that he read out to Muhammad Ali the pamphlet, Thoughts on the Present Discontent, in which the author had criticized the governor in the following words: When the dusty plains are visited, he (governor) comes to an expectant district like a comet, none knows whence, and goes away again like a comet, none knows whither. His whole life is an enigma. To many millions, his very existence is an unbelievable myth. The joys and sorrows of his existence do not touch him.109 For a man brought up in the sturdy tradition of loyalty to the raj and true to the habits of his time in matters of place and patronage, this was a bitter pill to swallow. Still, Muhammad Ali kept his distance from the arch loyalists as a concession to his friend’s political creed.110 ‘The late Wilayat Ali’, he admitted, ‘sensitized me to the virtues of democracy … . The pro-British sentiments of the younger days began to be diluted’.111 Against the background of the situation in the years 1911 to 1918, this was a striking confession of political faith. In the 1920s, Muhammad Ali developed an interest in the Congress and forged friendly ties with Jawaharlal Nehru. He even designed a charkha on wheels: it was called Chamru Charkha.112 In April 1936, the All-India Progressive Writers’ Conference invited him to chair the reception committee. Initially, he declined on the plea that he had not been part of any ‘movement’, and that he stayed clear of political campaigns. He was however subsequently persuaded to change his mind by Sajjad Zaheer, whose father Wazir Hasan he knew well, and by the writer Rashid Jahan (p.152) (1905–52), famed for her two stories published in the collection entitled Angare (Sparks or Embers, or Burning Coals).113 Years later Sajjad Zaheer described Muhammad Ali as ‘a taluqdar and aristocrat of Awadh who belonged to a generation before us’. According to him, no taluqdar conferred his gifts (one hundred rupees for the conference) with better grace, or

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In Allah’s Own Country was able to make his words, his smile, his very glance, precious to those on whom they were bestowed. He added: He combines in him so many qualities that made him one of the most interesting figures in Awadh. He observes the etiquette and manners of the aristocrats, but in appearance—the fair complexion and the clean-face—he looks like a western-educated young man. He writes Urdu in the attractive old style of Lucknow characterized by sweetness of diction, elegance and subtlety, and wit and humour, but in conversation he discussed Nietzsche, Marx, Tagore and Iqbal on the one hand, and Freud and Havelock Ellis, on the other. When he is with men of his own age he discusses the problems of life after death, landed property, and family affairs. In the company of younger men, he will discourse on sexual problems in so learned a manner that the eyes of even the most colourful among them will open wider. Groups of beautiful young women attract him as surely as the magnet attracts iron … . He has always looked upon progressive youngsters with a kindly and sympathetic eye.114 Broadly speaking, Muhammad Ali eschewed direct involvement in politics, and yet he threw all caution to the winds at the time of the publication of Angare, the collection of stories written by Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmad Ali (1910–93), Mahmuduzzafar (1903–56), and Rashid Jahan.115 Bold and innovative, these writers wanted to break the chain of custom, emancipate Urdu literature from its shackles, and release it from its bondage to the past and from that of the enemies of its progress. Moreover, they wanted to advance with a firm and sure step along the path of socialism. Abdul Majid Dariabadi, an influential literary figure in Lucknow, (p.153) got himself tangled up in an amateurish controversy. From being an agnostic in his college days, he, by the stroke of the pen, turned pan-Islamist under the spell of Muhammad Ali. After playing the liberal tune for a while, he began to spearhead many a crusade against progressive causes. Angare’s publication infuriated him, and he vented his rage by demanding its ban. Joining him was the newspaper Khilafat, the journal Maarif, and Lucknow’s Shia weekly Sarfaraz. They took serious exception to the satirical attacks upon religious leaders and on religion, and to accounts of intimate sexual relationships. They charged that the stories were deliberately designed for erotic and licentious purposes. Their views elicited a special response from an unexpected quarter—from Muhammad Ali. What he said is unrecorded. But he would have known that the hysteria generated by Abdul Majid Dariabadi was based on ill-founded assumptions, and that stories in Angare, though inspired by the writings of the English novelist D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and James Joyce (1882–1941), the Irish writer, could not be attributed to deliberate immorality. His attitude was, in short, very far from that of one who defends a traditional orthodox position. Page 21 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country Abdul Majid Dariabadi decried Muhammad Ali and others for defending heresy and revolution.116 Drawing upon the weakness of those who stood by the status quo in traditional Lucknow society, he and his cohorts mounted enough pressure on the local government to ban Angare, a book that has not been translated into English. Having the book banned brought the Abdul Majid Dariabadi group no benefit, despite the assumption that it did. For the progressive writers, on the other hand, the storm raised by their critics hastened unity in their ranks. In April 1933, Mahmuduzzafar, one of the contributors to Angare, defended his comrades, and called for the immediate formation of a Progressive Writers’ League. In 1936, three years after his call, this aim was realized.117 Later, in September 1944, the ‘neutral’ stance adopted by the Congress members led to the defeat of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’s brother and Anis (p.154) Kidwai’s husband, Shafi Ahmed, in the election to the Allahabad Municipal Board. ‘This matter’, wrote a correspondent from Ghazipur, ‘so vividly proves that Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations and that our Hindu brethren neatly betray their indelible prejudice against Muslims simply because they are Muslims’. He sent details of what had transpired so that Jinnah could ‘show it to Mr. Gandhi [during their talks] and ask him if even now it did not make entirely evident that separate homeland for Muslims is absolutely necessary for their very existence in India’.118 Normally a cool customer, Muhammad Ali too reacted angrily. Referring to how the sacrifices of Shafi Ahmed had been set aside owing to the conspiratorial role of Gopinath Srivastava, Gopal Narayan Saxena, and Purshottamdas Tandon (1882–1962) in ensuring his defeat, he told Gandhi: After this Sir, will it be surprising if Muslims in general become sceptics of every thing in politics except rank communalism? Is it any wonder if sitters on the fence [sic] join the communal camp en bloc? Religion and nothing but religion in its worst aspects holds sway in this benighted country and will do so till the leopard changes its spots.119 In the 1940s, Muhammad Ali closely followed the unfolding of events, and evinced interest in the Simla Conference, the Cripps offer (1942), and the Cabinet Mission (1946). His house thronged with guests sharing one another’s anxieties. This is illustrated by the following description: In the summer holidays of 1946 all of us had gone to Rudoli [Rudauli] to take part in the urs, the death anniversary of a Sufi. Maulana Hasrat Mohani was there too. The recommendations of the Cabinet Mission were announced over the Radio and all of us went to listen to it at Nawab Muhammad Ali Chamroo Mian’s house: this was the only place in town where there was a radio set [emphasis added]. When we heard the announcement all of us breathed a sigh of relief and Maulana Hasrat was Page 22 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country also very pleased. He had been elected to the Provincial Assembly and was delighted with his success. The sahib-e-sajjada, Hayat Miyan, asked him why he was so happy at having become a member of the assembly, he said, ‘Don’t you know I shall get a lot of money and now I intend to perform the Haj by air. Perhaps the arrangement of the money has been made for this purpose’.120 (p.155) Although religious rhetoric fouled the political pathways, the climate was much less communally sensitive. But the fervour with which Muhammad Ali entered into Hindu-Muslim controversies in the 1940s and the publicity centred on them were remarkable. We have not made a careful chronological analysis of his writings, but our impression is that the more rigid ideological formulations were the work of later years. His interventions, nonetheless, indicate how the political atmosphere on the eve of the transfer of power deepened misgivings and stirred doubts even in the minds of those who had valued inter-community amity and stayed clear of communal claptrap.

IV Ai mere tez-gaam sham-o-sehar Morning and Evening Whirling Past

[Munibur Rahman] There had long been associations and anjumans, literary and cultural, linking individuals in cross-city communities. Jalsa-e tehzib, with its 120 members and branches in Gonda and Sitapur, was established at Lucknow in 1868 and run by a cosmopolitan group of Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmans, and Muslims. The Rifahe aam followed in 1877, with its fair mix of Awadh’s erstwhile royalty and government officials.121 The poet Saiyyid Ali Naqi ‘Safi’ (1862–1950), whose ancestors had moved from Pingori in Punjab to Faizabad and then to Lucknow during Nasiruddin Haider’s reign, founded Daira-e adibiya, a literary society, in 1888. Its active members were Brij Narayan ‘Chakbast’, Aziz Lakhnavi (1882– 1935), Mirza Muhammad Askari (1869–1951) and Anwar Husain ‘Aarzoo’ Lakhnavi (1882–1935).122 Chakbast also founded the Young Men’s Association in 1905 for the Kashmiri Pandits.123 In Rudauli, the Madrasa Rifah al-muslimeen flourished for a while before the Anjuman-e khuddam-e ka’aba overtook it. Chaudhry Sarfaraz Ahmad, Master Latifur Rahman, Lala (p.156) Nanak Saran and Irshadul Haq Siddiqi (1901–74), who studied at Aligarh and joined the Jamia Millia Islamia during the non-cooperation campaign, founded the first Club in 1912.124 They set up a library, and played football and hockey rather than cricket. Under the leadership of Master Muhammad Haider of mohalla Sufiana in Rudauli, they organized the first major hockey tournament in 1927.125 Such events on the qasba’s calendar provided the basis for forging links with the world outside their confines.

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In Allah’s Own Country The founding of the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference at Aligarh and the Old Boys’ Association were major events for UP’s Muslim intelligentsia. The annual reunion was an occasion to elect new office bearers, settle scores with adversaries, and, at the same time, turn it into a great social affair. Often, arrangements were made well in advance. Thus the Comrade suggested, well before one such meeting, that ‘while the principal table should be reserved for Captain of games and Union office-bearers, elsewhere and even on this table the order of seating the Old Boys should follow lines of seniority’.126 The Old Boys gathered wearing their blazers, stitched in far-away places like Ludhiana by Ahmed Shaw Mohamed & Co., Military and Police Fitters. Local bodies played a far more important role than the monolithic structures of pan-Indian organizations. We see their influence in the early twentieth century when local leaders, rather than national figures, organized, led and conducted the agitation against the ‘Hindi resolution’ of April 1900. They were young Muslims, drawn mainly from the qasba-based professional families. The birth of the Anjuman-e khuddam-e ka’aba signalled the combination of such elements with the Muslim theologians in their zeal to defend the Khilafat and the holy places. The important sociological aspect of such associations lay in bridging the yawning chasm between the traditionally-educated and the Western-educated, and linking the cities with their hinterland, and with local fraternities. The young men who assembled in Bara Banki and Rudauli were, in (p.157) one way or another, linked with these local associations. They combined feudal graces with modern education. It is true that they often spoke in contradictory voices, but they, the graduates of an expanding network of educational institutions, were the best and the brightest of their generation. They worked in politics, business, higher education, philanthrophy, journalism, or moved among several of these fields. They possessed a self-assurance that was unique to their generation—not found earlier or thence. They had no profound sense of being a minority grafted on Indian soil, and doomed to remain as such. If anything, their project, which has been obscured by the exaggerated attention paid to ‘Muslim separatism’ and its protagonists, furthered plurality and modernity among north India’s educated Muslims. As they gathered around their favourite qasbas, they relaxed physically and mentally, and were able to be at ease with themselves, or, as some poets and writers formulated it, able to be one’s ‘real self’, as opposed to the otheroriented self of public life. In what would invariably be an open household, they sat cross-legged on the farsh (carpet) helping themselves to betel leaves from the silver khas dan (betel box) or relaxed in easy chairs reflecting on the fastchanging world around them. Pulling leisurely at long hubble-bubbles and filling the air with the smoke of scented tobacco, they quoted the writers of antiquity,

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In Allah’s Own Country bandied Urdu or Persian ghazals, recited or read their own compositions in verse or prose, or shouted at each other in violent, political argument. The nature of these gatherings varied with the taste of its members. If they were interested in literature and language, the conversation was devoted to such things. If they happened to be scholars and men of erudition, they engaged in learned discussions. If the company was composed of nobles the conversation turned to fashions, clothes, appurtenances of luxury, food and drink, and how they should be enjoyed with social grace and discretion. ‘If the concourse consisted of libertines, bazaar beauties will be in the company and one will witness dalliance and coquetry’, commented Abdul Halim Sharar.127 The arguments were not confined to the house but extended to the public domain. Hence, S. Khuda Bukhsh engaged Ghulam-us Saqlain in a major public debate over the publication of his book Essays: Indian (p.158) and Islamic; in those days many burning questions were discussed freely in newspapers.128 The Lucknow writers delighted in concocting sentences that were Persian in construction and vocabulary, but the qasbati Urdu was not as highly Persianized as the literary dialect. It possessed the typical order of words that Urdu borrowed from Persian.129 There was some attempt to strip Urdu of its traditional Persianized imagery and poetic devices. The choice of poems varied—from the Barkha rut (rainy season) of Hali, the Bahar (spring) of Jwala Prasad ‘Burq’, the Dehra Dun of Chakbast, and Iqbal’s Himalaya and the Mah-e nau (new moon). They read and recited from the great classical poets, notably Mir, Ghalib, Momin Khan ‘Momin’ (1800–51), and Mirza Muhammad Rafi ‘Sauda’ (1703/7–80/1), and enjoyed their upbraiding the theologians and other self-proclaimed custodians of Islamic piety. Averse to theological disputations and the religious rhetoric of Hindu and Muslim publicists, they were comforted by their shunning a narrow and sectarian worldview. We thus find them quoting their verses in public speeches and newspaper articles. They knew the famous storytellers like Mirza Toor, Mir Fida Ali, and Nawab Hadi Ali Khan, and made use of paraphrases, allegory, and fable. They knew their Sauda, the master of hajv (satire), who went to Faizabad at Asaf-ud-Daula’s court and came with him to Lucknow where he died at the age of almost 70 years. ‘Whatever Mirza composed’, wrote Muhammad Husain ‘Azad’ (1830–1910) ‘is on the lips of every child’.130 They also knew that ‘it was not the story but the manner of narrating it, with suitable poses of the body, the rise and fall in the tone and the glib and glare in the eyes which by themselves were remarkable feats of expression’.131 All that they needed in those days to win admiration and social esteem was the ability to amuse, to provoke, to embarrass, or to abash others with wit, irony, and sarcasm.132 They spoke, they recited, they sometimes sang, and they mimed. With a few exceptions, they observed correct speech and Page 25 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country (p.159) a respect for good taste. ‘Where cultivated and lively people gather, and the materials for attractive pursuits are available, right there is where those flowers will bloom’,133 wrote Muhammad Husain Azad about Lucknow’s proud claims. Later, Abdul Halim Sharar, referring to Lucknow becoming the main centre of culture and good manners, declared: ‘All refined men from other regions now follow the ways of the citizens of Lucknow’.134 Much the same can be said about the qasba men whose lives I have studied briefly. They were temperamentally different, and often inspired by different kinds of knowledge. Their appeal, too, was sometimes quite different; the appeal of Ansari was always optimistic, that of Hasrat Mohani and Saiyyid Mahmud human, that of the Ali brothers rested on their demagogic qualities displayed during the early days of the Khilafat upsurge. Their feuds did not go unnoticed in newspapers; their personal predilections and antipathies were all too evident. Wrangling and jealousies were chronic. They extended to the Muslim League, with the liberal and radical segments flexing their muscles to gain control and oust the pro-British faction. The Ali brothers gained notoriety for being haughty, abrasive, and manipulative in ousting their opponents at the M.A.O. College; indeed, their pir Abdul Bari was so ‘repelled’ by them prior to close encounter, that he did not feel like saying salaam to them.135 The campaign for the Muslim University at Aligarh created serious rifts among the members of the Foundation Committee, who traded gossip and innuendo.136 In the discussions that ensued one faction tried to prove that the other was just a collection of lazy intellectuals, trapped in illusions about the government’s sincere intention to grant the Aligarh College the status of a university. Mohamed Ali, who had a talent for besmirching the good reputation of others, chided the Raja of Mahmudabad. ‘You have rightly compared me’, an indignant Raja responded after refusing to preside over a Muslim League session in December 1919, ‘to a mountain—all bulk no intelligence’.137 Azad fulminated against Mohamed Ali at a meeting, (p.160) leading to a total breakdown of their relationship.138 He frowned or turned his face away at the mention of his name. The idea of a Sultania College in Dehra Dun, mooted by Abdur Rahman Bijnori and Gulam Husain, split the Muslim leadership of the time. They found some of their friends an obstacle, not fit for intense, broad, and deep discussions on serious matters affecting the educational regeneration of the community. Those associated with the running of New Era continued to be tormented by doubts about their future. Eventually, the newspaper ran into rough weather owing to Wazir Hasan and the opposition of his ‘rich circle’. Gulam Husain demurred: ‘The existing law is such that no dog should be allowed to bark unless he takes his cue from the M Palace [residence of the Raja of Mahmudabad], but there are

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In Allah’s Own Country dogs and dogs and those of the pestilent breed like to bark just when they are told to be silent’.139 Regardless of such divergence of opinions and perceptions, the ‘Young Party’ met periodically, pondered and debated their points of view, and reflected on topical issues. Social kinship, death, marriage ties, and festivals such as Id and Baqr Id made such meetings common. Shaukat Ali refers to a get-together at the annual dinner of the Aligarh Old Boys on 7 April 1912, attended by Sajjad Haider Yildirim, the Ali brothers, Ross Masood, and Wilayat Ali. As the foundation stone of the Old Boys’ Lodge was being laid, Sajjad Haider held forth on the rights of Muslim women.140 Abdul Majid Dariabadi describes a get-together at the home of Nisarur Rahman (b. 1902) in Baragaon in July 1924. The Ali brothers were treated to qawwali and to the choicest of mangoes—the Bara Banki district was rich in mangoes; in the 1870s, 41,237 acres were covered with them. The guests spent the night in Baragaon before setting out for Masauli and Bansa the next morning.141 Generally speaking, in their discussions covering history, politics, and religion, they talked with emotion of the great religious conflicts of the past in Europe as well as of the religious intensity in India around them. (p.161) They often talked about ‘the spirit and the substance of faith, the Ethics of Islam … very often in the form of legends and folklore which would not stand the severe test of the Traditionalists’.142 At the same time, they pointed to the essential hypocrisy of religious preachers practising divisiveness while preaching Muslim brotherhood. For Aligarh’s first generation, tutored by Shibli and Arnold, the figures of Islam loomed large on their intellectual horizon. They included the Prophet, the first four ‘orthodox’ Khalifas (khulafa-e rashideen), and Abbasid heroes like Harun-ur-Rashid (764?–809), the fifth Abbasid Khalifa of Arabian Nights, and his younger son Al-Mamun (786–833), a patron of philosophy and astronomy in Baghdad. For the second generation, however, Asoka, the king of Magadha (BC 273–232), and Harshavardhan of Kanauj (590?–647), were a part of their history just as much as Babur or Aurangzeb. Tilak (1844–1920) and Gokhale inspired them as much as Saiyyid Ahmad, and Iqbal. Sanchi’s stupa and Khajuraho’s temples were as much a part of their heritage as the Taj Mahal or Delhi’s Jama Masjid. They knew all the stories surrounding the lives of those who had built these great structures; thus, Halide Edib’s comment that Zohra Ansari (1913–97), Ansari’s daughter, humanized and dramatized for her the great monumental edifices, which would otherwise have been only heaps of stones more or less artistically, arranged. She was right. As in the late Ottoman Empire, reading as an activity—central to modern society—reinforced individual exploration as well as group identity, secular as well as religious pursuits, and local as well as national and international awareness.143

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In Allah’s Own Country Their feuds surfaced when the going was tough, but when the going was easy, each one of them shared his personal readings of British rule, the Congress, and the Muslim League. Munshi Sajjad Husain, having joined the Congress in 1897, boasted that his article Ande-bacche wali cheel-chalhaar had demoralized his political detractors on the eve of the Congress session held two years later at Lucknow.144 Abdur Rahman Siddiqi, wearing a tight-fitting sherwani, was in the habit of talking about (p.162) his meetings with Talat Bey and Sheikh Abdul Aziz Shawish, leaders of the Young Turks.145 Though he sailed into years of disappointment and near-despair for being denied a teaching position in Aligarh,146 he never missed the opportunity of recounting how his personal efforts had led to the sale of Turkish bonds in India, and how he had been feted, for this reason, by Egypt’s Nationalist Party. Saiyyid Mahmud, Nehru’s contemporary at Cambridge, returned to India in 1912. He reminded Siddiqi of their frequent travels, in the company of Abdur Rahman Bijnori, to raise funds for women’s education.147 Thereafter, he would invariably produce the letters he exchanged with W.S. Blunt (1840–1922) and E.G. Browne (1862–1926), scholars and Irish radicals, on Islam and Indian Muslims.148 Ansari was more circumspect. His black moustache, always well trimmed, exuded a kind of military vigour and frigid aloofness. Whenever he joined the group, he quietly indicated that he thought less of the medical work that he had performed than of the political results he had achieved by way of establishing closer links between Turkey and India’s Muslims. He recounted to them their history and his own; a story they all knew, but that he alone had the gift, the right, and the duty to tell. While they talked, ate, and relaxed, a short, plump, shy boy did the chores of the host, or ran errands between the zanana (women’s quarters) and the mardana (men’s quarter), or the selamlik and the haremlik, as the Turks call it: that is to say, the apartments where the family’s male members received visitors, and those where the ladies lived, to which entrance was only permitted to those before whom the ladies appeared unveiled. When the Ali brothers’ father died, their mother shut up the adjoining new house that her husband had recently built to receive friends.149 Comfortably ensconced in the mardana wing, the company had no idea that the boy serving tea and snacks was to serve his apprenticeship (p.163) just a few years later during the non-cooperation movement. They had no clue that the quiet boy from the village would organize the no-rent campaign in Awadh early in 1930, and, in addition, assume charge of the Congress election machinery in 1937. Little did the company suspect that he, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, would be their fellow traveller on the road to Indian freedom and plod on to the journey’s end, even while some of them were to fall by the wayside or stray from the path. The ornithologist Salim Ali refers to one of them, ‘the handsome and loveable’ Shuaib Qureshi, who found cause to turn a complete somersault later and Page 28 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country become a Leaguer.150 He migrated to Pakistan when the Bhopal State, where he was a minister in the Nawab’s government, was taken over as part of the Indian union, and in due course ended up as a minister in Pakistan.

V Bazdid Visitations

Wilayat Ali’s own house lived from one political excitement to another. When the Young Turk Revolution occurred, he gave his sons and nephews the names of Turkish generals. This was not unusual. One of the earliest letters Ansari wrote from Constantinople described the coup d’etat engineered by Enver Bey, ‘a young man of about 35, exceedingly handsome, with most expressive eyes full of determination [and] with a demeanor of a very strong man, chastened with hardship and sufferings’.151 He referred (p.164) to the Young Turk Party’s triumph, to the assurances of help given to Turkey by the Triple alliance, and to large financial contributions promised by the Deutsche Orient Bank. He firmly believed that there was purpose and justice in the war the Turks were fighting. Published regularly in Comrade that had moved office from Calcutta to Delhi, Ansari’s letters are intimate in tone, evincing a measure of personal attachment to developments in Turkey. He internalized all the platitudes of the pan-Islamic cause and regurgitated them in his letters as if they were his own invention. During the Balkan Wars, Wilayat Ali recited Iqbal’s Shikwa and Jawab-e shikwa, with tears rolling down his face, or set about raising funds for Ansari’s medical mission to Turkey. When the Anjuman-e khuddam-e ka’aba was founded, he organized a meeting in Bara Banki. When the First World War broke out, his circle, thrilled by German victories and depressed by German setbacks, watched the ebb and flow of German fortunes with intense anxiety. At the time of Sharif Husain’s revolt, he joined a deputation in May 1916 to convey their disappointment to their chief patron, the Raja of Mahmudabad. The Raja advised them to hold meetings at a variety of locales.152 The young men who met more or less regularly did not dictate the course of events, however experienced and skillful they might have been. Their role consisted of watching the events, writing reports, and then, depending on the orders of their patrons, expressing their views at the Congress and League sessions. Their hopes were high. Thus, when the Congress and the League seemed close to brokering a political deal in 1916, Wilayat Ali and his companions argued in a never-ending torrent of words over a memorandum they had sent to Jinnah, then the ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity. Long afterwards, the group’s surviving members claimed that all their suggestions had found a place in Jinnah’s presidential speech. Wilayat Ali, for one, gave his friend Gulam Husain the credit for actively supporting the Lucknow accord.

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In Allah’s Own Country Again, in October 1917, Wilayat Ali and his group tried persuading the ulama not to submit their grandiose demands, ‘conceived in a spirit hostile to the progressive movement of the Hindus and Mohammedans’, (p.165) to Edwin Montagu (1879–1924), the Secretary of State for India.153 Finally, Wilayat Ali hosted a gathering when Bara Banki’s district magistrate banned protest meetings against Annie Besant’s internment. Released in September 1917, she immediately expressed a desire to meet Mohamed Ali in Chhindwara. ‘Will you ask some Hindu friends’, she wrote to Shaukat Ali, ‘to take charge of my servant for me, as he is a caste Hindu, and would find it awkward to stay in a Muslim house. I always do so when staying with Muslim friends.’154 The government of the Central Provinces did not accede to her request; instead, she travelled to Simla to urge the viceroy to release the Ali brothers. Even so, Wilayat Ali had only one foot in the political and literary circles of Lucknow and Bara Banki; the other foot was firmly planted in the family past. During his brief life, he sought to preserve the values and private virtues he had inherited from his family past: hospitality, filial devotion, constancy in friendship, and a refusal to change towards those with whom he had grown up. The virtues he esteemed and which he preached were loyalty to friends, gratitude to benefactors, kindness and consideration to subordinates, and contentment and sincerity. Packed with guests and poor relations, his house was a free hostel for any boy from the village who studied at the local high school, and a gratuitous inn for country bumpkins whom litigation or business with the magistracy brought to Bara Banki. Like Anand Bhavan in Allahabad, Mazharul Haq’s ‘Ashiana’, or Ansari’s ‘Dar-us Salam’ in Daryaganj, Delhi, it was the den of local nationalist agitators and the rendezvous of politicians and journalists. Rustic coarseness and urban refinement, Anwar Jamal Kidwai told me years ago, lived cheek by jowl in his father’s house and country yokels and sophisticated gentlemen sat down to eat at the same table. Wilayat Ali accepted every tie of kinship or fellowship he had inherited. According to Anwar Jamal, his rustic past intruding on his urbane present did not embarrass him. Imagine him sitting among fellow-Aligarians, arguing animatedly on some political theme, when a country bumpkin (p.166) would arrive, with his dhoti tucked up to his knees and bedding swung on his long staff barge. He would invariably run out, embrace him, and announce to the company that he was his uncle or cousin by some twist or turn of the Kidwai bloodstream. His generosity was clandestine and only limited by his income and the debts he could raise. When he dragged one of his ragged and shabby looking visitors into a corner to whisper to him, the household knew that some money was being passed on. As with Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Wilayat Ali’s acts of generosity came to light only after his death.

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In Allah’s Own Country Notes:

(1) For Allahabad, see C.A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1890–1920 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 18, 173–4; Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986 (Princeton, N.J, 1988), for Banaras. (2) This has been brought out in Salim, Shorish-e dauran, p. 17; Hosh Bilgrami, Mushahidat, pp. 4–5, 43. (3) The principal dialect of the Hardoi district was Kanauji slightly mixed with the Awadhi dialect of Eastern Hindi. (4) For Masauli, see Anis Kidwai, Ghubar-e karawaan, p. 45. (5) For a discussion on this point, see Freitag, Collective Action and Community, pp. 250–9. (6) Notice the following plea by the Shia journalist, Saeed Naqvi, at the height of the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi controversy in the late 1980s and early 90s: ‘Concentrate’, he suggested to Murli Manohar Joshi (currently minister of Human Resource Development) who planned an Ekta Yatra from Kanyakumari, India’s southern tip to Kashmir, ‘in areas that bind us. Passing through Awadh and Braj, examine the literatures of these regions. Visit the ancient town of Jais, not far away from my own village (Mustafabad), and reflect on Malik Muhammad Jaisi’s Padmavat. Look how the great poet compared Padmavati’s eyebrows to the bows of Krishna and Arjun, and come to Vrindaban and let the entire congregation around your rath (chariot) chant Raskhan poems on the naughty boy from Gokul. Did they ever know that the real name of this great Krishna bhakt (disciple) was Saiyyid Ibrahim? Common folk in Braj may have forgotten Raskhan, but people in Orissa to this day welcome Jagannath with songs written by Salbeg, a Muslim. Saeed Naqvi, Reflections of an Indian Muslim (New Delhi, 1993), p. 98. (7) Salim, Hum saath the, p. 57. (8) A.L. Srivastava, The First Two Nawabs of Awadh (Agra, 1954), pp. 252–6. (9) Lal, Tarikh-e Dariabad, pp. 14–17. (10) Ibid., pp. 18–19; Salim, Shorish-e dauran, p. 30; Freitag, Collective Action and Community, pp. 27–8, for Muharram in Banaras. (11) W. Crooke, The North-Western Provinces of India: Their History, Ethnology, and Administration (Allahabad, 1897), pp. 263–4; Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, 3 vols. (London, 1835).

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In Allah’s Own Country (12) Abul Fazl comments on the shrine: ‘The common people of the Muhammadan faith greatly reverence this spot and pilgrims visit it from distant parts, forming themselves in bands and bearing gilded manners’. The Ain-e Akbari, trans. from the original Persian by Jarrat, p. 182. His contemporary Mulla Abdul Qadir Budauni had this to say: ‘One day Muhammad Husain Khan asked the Sheikh (Abul Fath of Khairabad), ‘what sort of a man was Salar Masud, whom the common people of India worship. The Sheikh replied, ‘he was an Afghan who met his death by martyrdom’. Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh, pp. 46–7. Sleeman, Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude, p. 325. ‘His [Salar Sahu’s] tomb is still a place of considerable sanctity, and a large number assemblage of pilgrims gather here in his honour, to the number of some 15,000 persons, on the full moon of Jeth. Offerings are made at the shrine, which is also supported by a revenue-free grant of 46 acres. The dargah itself is comparatively modern, having been erected over the tomb about a century ago by a tanner of Rudauli’. DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 266. Among the many traditions quoted is the following one: ‘Sahu Salar died in Satrikh 800 years ago, was considered as holy man, but probably little would have been known of him but for his son Syud Salar Mahmud Ghazi who was very active in the crusades all over Oudh; and eventually was killed in Bahraich at the early age of 21 years’. Chamier, Report, p. 55. (13) Ibid., p. 288. (14) Hosh Bilgrami, Mushahidat, p. 3. (15) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 55. The rail link between Lucknow and Sandila was established on 1 February 1872 and between Sandila and Hardoi on 15 July. Ek naadir roznamcha, p. 100. (16) Bansa is a qasba once controlled by Nagar Brahmans and later assigned to Saadat Ali Khan. Rizvi, History of Sufism, Vol. 2, p. 147. (17) Robinson, Ulama of Farangi Mahall, p. 58. Among the Shah’s disciples were such leading scholars as Mulla Nizamuddin Muhammad Sihalwi (d. 1748), the son of Mulla Qutubuddin Sihalwi (d. 1692). The Mulla paid his debt to his pir by writing the Manaqib al-razzaqiyya, a biographical and anecdotal work. (18) Iqbal wrote these lines for the pirs in Punjab. Poems from Iqbal, trans. V.G. Kiernan (Karachi, 1999 rpt), p. 157. (19) File no. 925, 1859, BR. (20) Sharif conveys sanctity and reverence. (21) Mushir Hosain Kidwai, The Miracle of Muhammad (London, 1906). (22) Ek naadir roznamcha, p. 103. Page 32 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country (23) 25 March 1900, ibid., pp. 160–1. (24) 10 April 1905, ibid., p. 169. (25) Liebeskind, Piety on its Knees, p. 191. (26) Haji S. Ghafur Shah, The Blessed Lord Haji Syed Waris Ali Shah of Dewa (Calcutta, 1912), pp. 1–2. (27) Ibid. (28) Irwin, Garden of India, p. 53. (29) Rizvi, History of Sufism, Vol. 2, pp. 369, 396. (30) Mufti Muhammad Raza Ansari, Tazkira Hazrat Saiyyid Saheb Banswi (Lucknow, 1986), pp. 259–60. (31) Rizvi, History of Sufism, Vol. 2, p. 147. (32) Ibid., p. 397. (33) Qadiri, Hasrat Mohani, p. 18. (34) Quoted in Schimmel, As Through a Veil, p. 9. (35) Alam, ‘Assimilation from a Distance’, pp. 182–3, and his ‘Religion and Politics in Awadh Society: 17th and early 18th Centuries’, Anna Libera Dallapiccola and Stephanie Zingel-Ave Lallemant (eds), Islam and Indian Regions (Stuttgart, 1993), Vol. 1, pp. 344–5. (36) Ansari, Tazkira Hazrat Saiyyid Saheb Banswi, pp. 289–91. (37) Qadiri, Hasrat Mohani, pp. 16–17. (38) Chamier, Report, p. 64. (39) Review Upon the Progress of Education in the Province of Oudh, 1868, p. 23. (40) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, p. 263; Zaidi, Apni-yadein, for Rudauli’s detailed history. (41) Rudauli was his vilayat; a territorial division denoting the hierarchy of saints. In consequence, Abdul Haq performed, as was the practice among the Sufis, rituals to secure his ‘permission’, so to speak, to start his mission. Husain, Medieval Towns, p. 17. (42) According to Simon Digby, he moved from Rudauli in 1491 owing to the establishment of ‘Hindu rule’ over that pargana and the revolt of the Bachgoti Page 33 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country chiefs. This view is contested. It is pointed out that many of the Muslim notables, including the Sheikh’s preceptor, and Sheikh Mar Suri, the Chaudhri of Rudauli, continued living there even after his migration to Shahabad in the Karnal district of eastern Punjab. Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Sheikh Abdul Quddus Gangohi’s relations with political authorities: A Reappraisal’, Medieval India: A Miscellany (New Delhi, 1977), Vol. 4, pp. 75–6; Zameeruddin Siddiqi, ‘Sheikh Abdul Quddus of Gangoh and Contemporary Rulers’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 31st Session, Varanasi, 1969. (43) Digby, ‘Abd Al-Quddus Gangohi’, p. 65. (44) Ibid., pp. 35–7, 62. (45) Ibid., p. 39. (46) Chamier, Report, pp. 55–6. (47) Alam, ‘Assimilation From a Distance’, p. 175. (48) S. Moinul Haq, Islamic Thought and Movements (Karachi, 1979), p. 256. (49) Faruqi, Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Haq Rudaulvi, p. 49. (50) File No. 823, 1885–86, BR. (51) Moinul Haq, Islamic Thought, pp. 167 n. 1, 168. (52) Chamier, Report, pp. 55–6. (53) DG, Bara Banki, 1904, pp. 53–4; Kerrin Graefin V. Schwerin, ‘Saint Worship in Indian Islam: The Legend of the Martyr Salar Masud Ghazi’, Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Ritual and Religion Among Muslims in India (New Delhi, 1981), pp. 148– 50; Shahid Amin, ‘On Retelling the Muslim Conquest of North India’, Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (eds), History and the Present (New Delhi, 2002); N.R. Farooqi, ‘The Legend of Sayid Salar Masud Ghazi’, Islamic Culture, July 2001. On Salar Masud and Shah Madar, see Garcin de Tassy, Muslim Festivals in India and Other Essays, pp. 177–8. (54) Salim, Hum saath the, p. 26; Dariabadi, Aap-biti, pp. 23–5, for a brief but graphic description. (55) Zaidi, Apni-yadein, pp. 36–7. (56) DG, Bara Banki, p. 54. (57) There is an interesting description of Muhammad Ali’s elaborate hooqa in Naqoosh: Shakhsiaat number, November 1955, p. 355. (58) Ansarul Haq, Uwaiz Qarni, Latifur Rahman, and Habibul Haq. Page 34 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country (59) Tarikh-e Rudauli, p. 329. (60) Chughtai, My Friend, My Enemy, p. 278. (61) Quoted in Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Ghalib: Life and Letters (New Delhi, 1994), p. 32. (62) 20 January 1850, Reeves (ed.), Sleeman in Oudh, p. 192. (63) Cole, Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism, p. 76. (64) DG, Hardoi, p. 71. (65) C.A. Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-Biographical Survey, Section 2, Fasciculus 3 (London, 1939), pp. 491, 712. (66) Naqoosh: Makatib number, November 1957, p. 52. (67) Khaliq Ibrahim Khaliq, Manzilein gard ke manind (Karachi, 1999), pp. 441– 56. (68) This book was written in 1926 but published two years later. In his letter, Muhammad Ali mentions Dr. Abid Husain, the Jamia Millia Islamia-based scholar, arranging its publication with the Maktaba Jamia, the university’s publishing house. Muhammad Ali to Tamkeen Kazmi, 23 May 1928. Naqoosh: Makatib number, p. 809. (69) Entitled Targhibat-e jinsi (Manual on Sex), and was published in 1950. (70) Siddiq Book Depot in Lucknow first published it in 1951, and the Urdu Academy, Karachi, in 1980. Part of this collection is reproduced in Saughaat (Bangalore), September 1995, p. 314. (71) Yaadgaar Karamat Husain ‘Marhum’. Published by Nawal Kishore Press in 1917, it carried a foreword by the Raja of Mahmudabad. See also, Gail Minault, ‘Saiyyid Karamat Husain and Muslim Women’s Education’, Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City (New Delhi, 1999). (72) Review of the Management of Estate in the Court of Wards under the Taluqdar’s Relief Act in Oudh, for the year ending 30th September 1887 (Allahabad, 1888), p. 4. (73) Mirza Muhammad Askari, Man keestam (Lucknow, n.d.); Khaliq, Manzilein gard ke manind, p. 127; Masoodul Haq, Urdu adab, July-September 2001, pp. 77–102. (74) He married a second time in 1936. (75) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 23. Page 35 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country (76) Kulliyat-e Saiyyid Maqbul Husain (Lucknow, 1939), p. 13. (77) Dariabadi, Aap-biti, p. 247. (78) Mushir Hosain Kidwai, Hope (London, 1923). (79) Mahmud to Nehru, 30 November 1923, in Datta and Cleghorn (eds), Nationalist Muslim, p. 47. (80) Mujeeb, Education and Traditional Values, p. 163. I have not mentioned Iqbal in the main text, but the fact is that in his youth he admired the awful sublimity of the Vedanta, extolled the virtues of the Indian sage Bhartrihari, whom he allotted a seat in Paradise for expressing his own ideas about action as determinative force in human life, and introduced Vishvamitra into the heavenly spheres under the name of Jahandost. He had a good knowledge of Indian mythology, admired the Indian epics, and expressed interest in a good translation of the Ramayana. See A. Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing (Leiden, 1963), pp. 334–5. (81) Muhammad Ali, Mera mazhab (Lucknow, 1951 edn), pp. 4–17. His grandfather, Inayat Rasul, was Sunni, but his father Ehsan Rasul (b. 1857) was married to Murtuzai Begum, a Shia. Ehsan Rasul became a Shia at the insistence of his father-in-law. (82) Unlike the Shias, he admired the first Khalifa Abu Bakr. To Atiq beti, 16 June 1951, Goya dabistan, p. 24. Though the date of publication of the article is not indicated, as is often the case with Urdu books, Muhammad Ali’s friend, Niyaz Fatehpuri, wrote in much the same strain in ‘Shia-Sunni Confrontation’, Man-oyazdaan (Lucknow, 1978, 2nd edn), pp. 116–28. In 1949, the first edition of this collection of articles was published. (83) Salim, Shorish-e dauran, p. 86. (84) Aqeela Shaheen, Niyaz Fatehpuri: shakhsiat aur fan (Karachi, 1995), p. 31. (85) The following is her recollection of Muhammad Ali: As a child I knew him as Chamru Mian. I discovered later that he encouraged women’s education, and supported those who dared to break tradition. He lived in Rudauli, our hometown, and was close to our family. That was also because our family was liberal enough to send daughters to school. This was unusual at the time (early thirties). Girls from ‘respectable’ families were only given elementary education in Urdu and some knowledge of religion at home.

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In Allah’s Own Country Chamru Baba, as we called him, visited us in Lucknow and invited my sister and me to his home when we went to Rudauli during school holidays. I remember him telling us about Sarojini Naidu and Aruna Asaf Ali, and advising us to study seriously and look up to them, the freedom fighters, as role models. I also remember the occasion when he invited me along with a few of my friends, and treated us to sundarya mangoes—a variety that have yellow and bright red skin. He told us about different varieties of mangoes. Familiarity with them was an important part of qasbati culture. To be a connoisseur of mangoes was the hallmark of a ‘cultured’ person. During the season friends and relatives exchanged mangoes as gifts. The first women graduate in and around Rudauli was my aunt Safia Akhtar, mother of the lyricist Javed Akhtar. Chamru Baba visited Lucknow to congratulate her. Just about that time, Safia Akhtar’s father moved into a new house and Chamru Baba did not know our new address. So he came to the locality and simply asked someone about the house ‘where the newly graduated girl lived’ and was immediately directed to the house. Chamru Baba was impressed. He would often narrate this story. Chamru Baba opposed purdah. He did not allow his wife to observe purdah and always took her along with him to social occasions without a burqa. Such defiance was unheard of, particularly in his class. A widower when still young, he married the daughter of a prostitute. This was, in his class, anathema, but Chamru Baba didn’t care. He was probably the first male feminist I knew. (86) Amitav Ghosh ‘The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid in Brooklyn’, Span, September–October 2002, p. 43, and his ‘The Ghats of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn’, The Annual of Urdu Studies (University of WisconsinMadison), Number 17, 2002, pp. 1–19. (87) Mera mazhab, p. 18. (88) Dariabadi, Maasirin, p. 119. (89) Muhammad Ali, Kashkol-e Muhammad Ali Shah Faqir (Lucknow, 1980 enlarged edn), pp. 253–61. (90) Goya dabistan khul gaya, p. 161. (91) Siyyid Abdul Latif, The Influence of English Literature on Urdu Literature (London, 1924), pp. 100–1. (92) For a biographical description of some of his friends and contemporaries, Anwar Husain Khan, Choudhry Muhammad Ali Rudaulvi: hayat aur adbi khidmaat (Lucknow, 1992), pp. 41–51.

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In Allah’s Own Country (93) Khaliq, Manzilain gard ke manind, p. 127. (94) Kumar, Peasants in Revolt, p. 118. (95) Mera mazhab, p. 18 (96) Divisional Commissioner to Secretary, Government of N.W.P. & O., 27 February 1882. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the Raj, pp. 343–4. (97) Administration of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh, April 1882– November 1887, p. 79. (98) During the first two decades of the twentieth century, evictions in UP increased by over 100 per cent, embittering landlord-tenant relations. Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India, p. 115. (99) Review of the Revenue Administration of the Province of Oudh, for the year ending 30th September 1886 (Allahabad, 1887), p. 35. (100) Pandit Brij Chand Sharma, Final Report on the Settlement of Land Revenue in the Lucknow District, Oudh 1926–28 (Allahabad, 1930), p. 8. (101) Administration of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh, April 1882– November 1887, p. 81. (102) Letters from India, April 1904 to March 1905, Vol. 2, H. Orange Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge. (103) The following account of a British civil servant is useful: ‘Taking the province as a whole, it is scarcely too much to say that a large proportion of cultivators have neither food sufficient to keep them in health, nor clothes sufficient to protect them from the weather; that their cattle are miserably thin and weak from under-feeding; that they are hardly ever out of debt for twelve months together … and that, except in specially favourable seasons, they are dependent on the money-lender for their food from two to six months in the year’. Irwin, The Garden of India, p. 33. (104) Metcalf, Land, Landlords and the Raj, p. 382. (105) Pandey, ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism’, p. 177. (106) Speech at Malihabad, 14 January 1921, Home Police Deptt., File no. 51 N, 1921, UPSA. (107) Ibid., p. 184. (108) Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India, p. 128, fn. 48. (109) Mohamed Ali, Thoughts on the Present Discontent, p. 63. Page 38 of 41

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In Allah’s Own Country (110) Ali, Mera mazhab, in Saughaat, September 1995, pp. 334–5. (111) Muhammad Ali, Mera mazhab, p.19. (112) Anis Kidwai, Ab jin ke dekhne ko, p. 59. (113) Sajjad Zaheer, Raushnai (New Delhi, 1985 rpt), p. 103. (114) Ibid., pp. 102–3; Guftugu: Taraqqi-pasand adab number (Bombay), August 1980, p. 86. (115) For brief outlines of some the stories in this collection, see Ralph Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature (London, 1992), pp. 206–8; Qamar Rais, ‘Urdu afsane me Angare ki rawait’, Guftugu, pp. 47–53; Shabana Mahmud, ‘Angare and the founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modern Asian Studies, 30, 2, 1996. (116) Faruqi, Abdul Majid Dariabadi: ahwal-o-aasaar, pp. 278–81; for the coverage of the storm caused by the publication of Angare, Khalid Alavi, Angare ka tarikhi pasmanzar aur taraqqi pasand tehrik (Delhi, 1995). (117) Russell, Pursuit of Urdu Literature, p. 208. (118) To Jinnah, 18 September 1944, SHC. (119) Muhammad Ali to Gandhi, 21 September 1944, SHC. (120) Nasim Ansari, Choosing to Stay, p. 61. (121) Rama Amritmahal Laws, ‘Lucknow Society and Politics, 1856– 1885’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of South Wales, Australia, 1979), pp. 193–4. (122) For biographical notes, Hamidullah Nadwi, Lakhnau ki lisaani khidmaat (Delhi, 1975). (123) Henry Sender, The Kashmiri Pandits: A Study of Cultural Choice in North India (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 254–6. (124) For his profile, Abdul Salam Kidwai, Chand tasveer neekaan (New Delhi, 1989), pp. 83–98. (125) Zaidi, Apni-yadein, p. 124. (126) Comrade, 1 April 1911. (127) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 196.

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In Allah’s Own Country (128) Comrade, 13 April 1912; and the author’s polemical response on 27 April 1912. (129) Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, pp. 48, 122. (130) Muhammad Husain Azad, Aab-e hayat: Shaping the Canon of Urdu Poetry, trans. and ed. Frances Pritchett in association with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (New Delhi, 2001), p. 153. (131) Khaliquzzaman, Pathway, p. 9. (132) Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, p. 442. (133) Azad, Aab-e hayat, p. 93. (134) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 193. (135) Robinson, Ulama of Farangi Mahall, p. 154. (136) David Lelyveld, ‘Three Aligarh Students: Aftab Ahmad Khan, Ziauddin Ahmad, and Mohamed Ali’, Modern Asian Studies, 9, 2, April 1975, pp. 227–40. (137) To Mohamed Ali, 13 January 1919. Hasan (ed.), Mohamed Ali in Indian Politics, Vol. 2, p. 186. (138) Asar bin Yahya Ansari, Hasrat Mohani: Ek siyasi diary (Malegaon, 1977), p. 53. (139) Weekly Report of the Director, Central Intelligence, 10 March 1917, Home Political (B), March 1917, 625–8, National Archives of India, New Delhi. (140) Qurratulain Hyder, ‘Yildirim aur Turkey’, Suraiya Husain (ed.), Saiyyid Sajjad Hyder Yildirim (Aligarh, n.d.), p. 43. (141) Quoted in Kidwai, Biographical Sketches of the Kidwais, p. 93. (142) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 56. (143) Edib, Inside India, p. 19; Benjamin C. Fortna, ‘Learning to Read in the Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East’, Vol. xxi, Nos. 1 and 2, 2001, p. 40. (144) Mumtaz Husain Jaunpuri, ‘Munshi Sajjad Husain’, Nuqoosh: Shakhsiaat number, January 1955, Vol. 2, p. 1424. (145) 1872–1921; leader of the Young Turks who, after the Turkish revolution in 1908, held several ministerial positions. He succeeded as grand vizier of Turkey in February 1917, but was forced into retirement in October 1918. Ansari

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In Allah’s Own Country described Sheikh Abdul Aziz Shawish as ‘a very impressive man’. Comrade, 8 February 1913. (146) To Mohamed Ali, 6 July 1915, Mohamed Ali Papers, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. (147) Minault, Secluded Scholars, p. 240. (148) Datta and Cleghorn (eds), Nationalist Muslim, pp. 6–13, 17–27. (149) Mohamed Ali, My Life, p. 56; for Rudauli, see Salim, Shorish-e dauran, p. 25. (150) Salim Ali, The Fall of a Sparrow, pp. 53–4. (151) Comrade, 15 February 1913. Enver Bey (Pasha) was born in 1881. He had raised the revolt in Macedonia (1908), forcing the Turkish sultan to restore the constitution of 1876. During the negotiations after the Balkan war in 1913, he led a group that assassinated the minister of war, turned out of office of the grand vizier, and forced the Sultan to fill governmental offices with Young Turk leaders. An interesting entry in Nehru’s prison notes is Enver Bey’s comment to Tarak Nath Das, author of India in World Politics: ‘The best way an Indian can aid Turkey and the World is by concentrating all efforts on the freedom of India, because without a free India it will be hard for Turkey to maintain her national independence. Above all, every Indian Muhammadan should learn that they have to cooperate with the Hindus as Indians, and that religious fanaticism must be banished from the field of national and international politics, unless the world is to go back to the darkness of Middle Ages’. SWJN, Vol. 1, p. 317. (152) Khaliquzzaman, Pathway, p. 35. (153) Raja of Mahmudabad to Mahmud, 27 October 1971, Datta and Cleghorn (eds), Nationalist Muslim, p. 30. (154) J.C. Corbett to Mohamed Ali, 8 October 1917, Mohamed Ali Papers.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords Adab refers to the manners and ‘professional’ etiquette that Muslims should follow. Used as a greeting, adab signifies a sense of complete respect and deference. In both Lucknow and Awadh, caste- and community-neutral categorizations remained the social identifiers. Three individuals—Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Hakim Ajmal Khan, and Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari—exemplified the family code of right conduct. Without being formal interpreters of the Sharia, all three were wrapped in the folds of the banner of tradition, religion, and traditional morality. They argued that religion helped shape man’s conduct and ideas, but also believed in the political ideal consistent with the spirit of Islam. As exponents of the ‘liberal-humanitarian ideology’, they evolved an inclusive concept of adab without confining and twisting its application to a single national community. Keywords:   adab, Muslims, Islam, respect, code of right conduct, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, morality, Awadh

There were the Ali brothers on the platform, who, it was stated, managed to lead the speaker by his nose. That was not the fact. The Ali brothers loved their religion and he loved his own and they were not going to give up their religion. Each has his own dharma and each had to follow it implicitly, come what might. Then there was the great Hakim Ajmal Khan. He was not an ordinary person to come to Ghatkopar casually; his fees were high and he charged one thousand rupees a day for such visits. He was not a doctor versed in the Western methods of medicine; he had a few Page 1 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives secret medicines which were very efficacious. Then there was Dr. Ansari who was well versed in the Western system of medicine—he had gained a diploma to kill people (Laughter.) for if a doctor killed a man they could not take any action against him. (Laughter.) Then there was the great Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was a great authority on Islamic religion and law. Why had all these great people come to Ghatkopar? Not for the purpose of making speeches to them! For that was not the time for making speeches, but for work, solid work for the country. [Gandhi, speech at Ghatkopar, 15 June 1921, CWMG, Vol. 23, p. 291] A branch of Muslim literature in which didactic morality is a frequent subject of treatment is that concerned with adab, manners and ‘professional’ etiquette.1 In its most general sense adab—the (p.168) plural of the word meaning ‘respect’—used as a greeting conveys the sense of ‘I am showing complete respect and deference’.2 It is also defined as correct knowledge and behaviour in the total process of a person being educated, guided, and formed into a good Muslim.3 Thus the eighteenth-century French adventurer Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (1741–95) used phrases like ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour, ‘candour’, and ‘loyalty’ to express proper conduct. Polier’s image of local people is based on their relationship to success and power, not on their status within the varna hierarchy. He therefore deploys a vocabulary to identify them in terms of the professions they pursue, relates to them on professional grounds, and judges their conduct by using the urbane and upper-class notions of proper conduct which the Mughals had popularized.4 In the post-Mughal capital of Lucknow and the erstwhile Mughal subah of Awadh, the social identifiers continued to be caste- and community-neutral categorizations.5 Both in Delhi and Lucknow, the old culture and its accompanying eclectic values did not vanish despite the intrusive role of colonial rule. While clinging to many of their traditions, the acquisition of knowledge and the strict observance of professional codes being part thereof, individuals and families became part of an ever-changing social and cultural ethos. Thus, the death of Delhi’s Hakim Mahmud Khan (1816–1900) moved Hali to write an elegy of great pathos and power, which turns into a powerful lament for the receding glories of the Imperial city, its arts, its culture, its wealth and talent. The wealth that is so scarce in the market of the world today, Thy graveyard is endowed with it in abundance.6

(p.169) The same deep regard was paid to the memory of Hakim Ahsanullah Khan and Hakim Ajmal Khan, the younger member of the same family. At the time of Ahsanullah’s death, ‘the whole city of Delhi mourned him as one of its greatest benefactors’.7

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives Likewise, Comrade mourned the demise of Hakim Abdul Aziz, the renowned Lucknow physician, and the scholar Aga Kamaluddin Sanjar. Founder of the Madrasa-e takmil-ut tib and a physician of exceptional attainments and experience, the Hakim enjoyed repute amongst those who preferred the yunani system of medicine. ‘We still await’, the paper concluded its obituary with the comment, ‘the birth of … eminent physicians like the late Hakim Abdul Aziz, or poets of the power and versatility of the late Aga Kamaluddin Sanjar. Hitherto, (the products of the “New Spirit”) have had to depend for light and inspiration on men who had formed their minds and characters on the faith and culture of the past’.8 Three other persons, of whom one was a Hakim, the second an Edinburghtrained medical doctor, and the third a professional politician, exemplified the family code of right conduct. Their importance was far greater than was realized by most of their contemporaries. Admittedly they had different histories and affiliations, but they need not be considered separately for the reasons set out in the following narrative. For one thing, all three were men of faith and piety without being formal interpreters of the Sharia, wrapped in the folds of the banner of religion, tradition and traditional morality, without claiming to lead their everyday lives in accordance with Islamic doctrines. While maintaining that religion played a part in shaping man’s conduct and ideas, they believed in the political ideal conforming to the spirit and not to the letter of Islam. They neither sought to revive their heritage as a base for their own self-identity nor eliminate the Hindu influences interwoven into their life. The values they had built and nurtured had been the work of confidence and faith in the future, and they hoped that the composite heritage would not be lost in times of trouble ahead. The three men are Hakim Ajmal Khan, Dr. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. Introducing Ansari, Ajmal, Azad, and the Ali brothers, Gandhi stated: ‘Each has his (p.170) own dharma, and each had to follow it implicitly, come what might’.9 All three created an organic synthesis between traditional religious values and the humanist values that were not specific to Islam. Exponents of what I here term the ‘liberal-humanitarian ideology’, they evolved an inclusive concept of adab without restricting and twisting its application to one single national community. At the heart of their conception was the idea of virtuous citizens, helpful, respectful, and trustful towards one another, even if they differed on political and religious issues. The Indian community they had in mind was not likely to be blandly conflict-free, but tolerant of opponents. In short, their derived or structured ideas were often a more sophisticated distillation of popular experience and the people’s ‘inherent’ beliefs.10

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives By invoking such valid precepts of political and social morality, they created a model of the public figure worthy of emulation. With Ajmal Khan’s death in 1927, wrote C.F. Andrews (1871–1940), ‘passed away … one of the last links of this Old Delhi, which had derived its traditions of culture and refinement direct from the great Moghuls’.11 ‘We are not likely to see the like of Dr. Ansari again’, concluded Mahadev Desai (1892–42), Gandhi’s private secretary from 1917 until his death, in his tribute.12 The Mahatma was himself distraught. ‘Few deaths leave me disconsolate as this has done’, he wrote. ‘Quite wrongly, I know, but I had pictured Dr. Ansari as one destined to finish his century … . He had become part of the lives of many’.13 Living in the shadow of Ghalib’s Delhi, Ajmal Khan personified gentlemanly manners, both as a noted practitioner of yunani medicine and as a public figure. Suave, meticulous in his ways, and very seldom excited, he was, like Wilayat Ali’s father Mumtaz Ali, in more ways than one a link between the old order and the new. The government commended his role and conferred upon him titles, but he was one of those who, to quote the famous nineteenth-century essayistnovelist, Maulvi Nazir (p.171) Ahmad, brought more honour to the titles than the titles brought to them. Andrews referred to him as ‘one of the noblest and most self-sacrificing men’ produced by modern India;14 Nehru commented on his courtesy, his unhurried voice, and dry humour.15 Ajmal was much more than that. Living through the decaying Mughal culture and nurtured in Pax Britannica, he satisfied the standards of two radically different cultures, the aristocratic, and the democratic.16 Unlike Azad, he did not generate ideas, but synthesized diverse movements. He, thus, bridged the gulf between traditional and modern-educated Muslims, serving both as a trustee of the Aligarh College and the Nadwat al-ulama. He favoured both yunani and ayurvedic medications, and joined hands with the vaids (doctors of ayurvedic medicine) in founding the Tibbiya Conference in 1906. This project was designed to preserve what was best in the ancient arts of healing as practised in India, to coordinate them with the established principles and discoveries of the modern European system, and to make them living sciences capable of growth through systematic research and experience. It was discussed, though not for the first time, at a conference, held on 27–28 November 1910, of over 300 vaids and hakims from all over India. In March 1916, viceroy Hardinge (1900–16) laid the foundation stone of the Ayurvedic and Yunani Tibbiya College.17 Incidentally, the hakim, the viceroy and the vicerine were good friends. No wonder, Ajmal Khan named his new hospital after them, and later invited Gandhi, the recepient of the Kaisar-e Hind gold medal from Hardinge for his work in South Africa, to unveil their portrait in the hospital building. Ajmal Khan recognized—which so few contemporary Muslims did—the need to enhance the status of women in society. He therefore established a women’s section in his Yunani and Ayurvedic College in 1909, though (p.172) it might have been unclear to him how, in those circumstances, Muslim women could join Page 4 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives forces to seek justice. Towards the end of his life he drew the theologian’s attention towards their physical deterioration caused by purdah, which kept them confined, without a breath of fresh air.18 Finally, Ajmal Khan became a link between the old and the new order, and lent the former’s support to the nationalist cause. He produced, consequently, a harmony between the two, giving strength and solidity to its advance.19 As a statesman he chaired the Congress and Khilafat committee sessions in 1921 and earned goodwill and respect in political circles. This did not mean that he could lead the people from the front. Without offering any grandes illusions, as was being done by his contemporary ideologues, he preferred the austere appeal to the style of the rhetoricians. This worked during a violent Hindu-Muslim outburst at Agra in September 1920. ‘Though Hakimji cannot be everywhere appearing at the exact hour as an angel of peace’, wrote Gandhi, ‘he has shown us how to do it’.20 Deeds rather than words mattered. Again, in Delhi, he came out strongly against the assaults on Hindu women in the disturbances that occurred in July 1924, inviting the Khilafat committee and the Jamiyat al-ulama to soothe inflamed passions.21 Despite his social background and links with the Nawabs, especially of Rampur, Ajmal Khan nonetheless responded to the people’s aspirations during the Home Rule movement, the Rowlatt Satyagraha, the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, and the Khilafat tumult. He could have stayed away from the rough-and-tumble of politics and yet retained the people’s goodwill. Instead, he chose to be drawn, without any personal motive or inducement from any quarter, into politics where only the strong-willed survived and, more importantly, managed to keep their reputations intact. His emotions stirred by the brutal killing of unarmed enthusiasts at Jallianwala Bagh, he told Andrews in equivocal terms: ‘My political ideas were wholly changed by the iniquitous deeds of the present bureaucracy in India’.22 That year, the Congress, the Muslim League, and the Jamiyat (p.173) al-ulama, all met simultaneously at Amritsar. Ajmal Khan chaired the League session. His political views had been transformed, but he was too much of an individualist to fit comfortably into any one party. He gave himself no rest, even after his prolonged treatment in Europe, and met friends and patients at all hours of the day, even at night in Sharif Manzil or the nearby Kibirya Manzil. At both these places, he treated patients free of charge. Gandhi urged him to mend his ways, and repeated the motto, ‘Physician cure thyself’.23 Officials were, on the other hand, wary of his political engagements: ‘if the really influential men are to be goaded into a more active line, the situation will require still more careful watching’.24 At the AICC meeting in November 1922 that Ajmal Khan and Ansari hosted, Gandhi stated:

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives The present All-India Congress Committee met for the last time at Delhi on 4th November. The arrangements were under the control of the renowned Hakimji Ajmal Khan. He is ailing and badly needs rest. But he will not have any. His spacious house and Dr. Ansari’s have turned into dharmsalas for the accommodation of guests, whether Hindu or Muhammedan. The Hindus have their prejudices scrupulously respected. Those who will not take even water at a Muslim house are provided separate quarters. Here in Delhi one certainly finds Hindu-Muslim unity in full working order. The Hindus implicitly and gratefully accept Hakimji’s leadership and they do not hesitate to place their religious interests too in his keeping.25 Gandhi hinted at the unassailable moral authority of an individual who did not wield political power and influence. That such levels of tolerance existed in the 1920s reveals the friendly political climate created by the Khilafat and noncooperation campaigns. Indeed, it was in those circumstances that Ajmal Khan brought the Hindus and Muslims of Delhi much closer to each other, for both honoured him and found it worth their while emulating his example. ‘He is a man’, wrote Delhi’s chief commissioner, ‘whose opinion [on Muslim feelings generally] is of great value as he comes across all classes of men and has a very sound judgement (p.174) in all such matters’.26 When he renounced the title Haziq-al mulk and returned the gold medal of kaiser-e hind together with the two silver medals of the Coronation darbar of England and India during noncooperation,27 Delhi’s chief commissioner summoned him to the Town Hall. Soon, news of his ‘arrest’ spread like wildfire. Crowds gathered to see and cheer him around Chandni Chowk, and at his house in Ballimaran. They dispersed only after Ajmal Khan’s safe return.28 Again, when Ajmal Khan renounced the title, an official circular directed the princely states, which he frequented and from where he earned approximately 1000 rupees a day as consultation fee, not to entertain the Hakim. Rampur’s Nawab and the Maharajas of Patiala and Kashmir summarily dismissed the directive.29 Ajmal Khan, one might add, enunciated no great principles to be incorporated in party manifestos, but he demonstrated, through his personal and professional life, the outlines of a future multicultural society. The cultural symbols to whose elaboration he and his family made their contribution were derived from those aspects of civilization that were associated with Islam in which non-Muslims played significant roles. They contrast with the very different kind of religious symbols that gained currency later.30 During the Delhi riots in 1919, he, the ‘king without a crown’, restored inter-community peace. ‘It was then’, wrote Andrews, ‘that I saw the Hakim Sahib in all the true greatness of his character. Night and day he laboured for peace … .’31 Rising above religious sectarianism, he also mediated between the contesting Shia and Sunni claims. A devotee of the Prophet and his family (Ahl-e bait), he visited Iraq’s shrines after he suffered a heart attack in 1905. At the shrine of Ali ibn-abi-Talib (600?–661), the fourth

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives Khalifa, in Kufa, he experienced an emotion of deep happiness that was to last throughout his life.32 (p.175) When Ajmal Khan died, Nawab Hamid Ali Khan (1875–1930) of Rampur said, ‘I am a Shia in religion and do not accept the relationship of spiritual guide and disciple, but I know that if I were to be anyone’s disciple in this world, I would have been Ajmal Khan’s. What things I found in him cannot be found in the greatest saint’.33 What is vividly portrayed in Ajmal Khan’s public life is not a moribund or a benign ineffectual pluralism, but the vibrancy of a composite culture. Working against heavy odds and in a climate of growing political and religious intolerance, Ansari preserved Ajmal Khan’s legacy. Indeed, this personal friend and political ally for nearly a decade proved to be his worthy successor. Indeed, it is he who fits into any of the multiple meanings attached to the concept of adab, or right personal and political conduct. Like Ajmal Khan, multiple identities shaped Ansari’s personality and informed his world-view. And like Ajmal, diverse concerns found expression in the variety of roles he played: from the role of Macbeth in Edinburgh to raising funds for, and presiding over the affairs of, Jamia Millia Islamia, the ‘lusty child’ of non-cooperation. Born at Yusufpur in UP’s Ghazipur district, Ansari took pride in his family ancestry. It pleased him to know that his roots lay deep in Arabia and that he belonged to a family with branches all over the country. His brother, Abdul Wahhab, popularly known as Hakim Nabina or Luqman al-mulk, studied at Delhi’s Tibbiya School run by Hakim Abdul Majid Khan (1850–1906), practised in Hyderabad, Poona, Bombay, and Delhi, and accepted Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1828–1905), the Deobandi alim, as his pir. Hakim Abdur Razzaq, the younger brother, turned to Mahmud Hasan, another prominent Deoband alim, for spiritual solace. He told the maulana that both he and his mother desired to become his murids, but that his mother was too old to travel. After some persuasion the maulana broke his usual rule and came to Delhi where they became his murids, as did Ansari at the same time. Ansari’s fame rested not on hikmat, a family vocation, but on his reputation as an Edinburgh-trained medical doctor. His contemporaries respected him for his sobriety and sense of duty and dedication. Curiously, when Halide Edib, the Turkish author and Ansari’s close friend, stayed at Dar-us salam, she noticed that he had not changed from their first meeting in Turkey in 1912 and later in 1925. Struck by his Indian personality after (p.176) their meeting in Jamia Millia in 1935, she observed: ‘from the top of his head down to his feet, he was clothed in stuff woven and designed by his countrymen and women’.34 He, as the university’s chancellor, hosted her visit to India. He told her that, ‘we desire to

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives build an institution which, while being Islamic in its traditions, will be national in its outlook’.35 Ansari comes across as the bridge between the old school of medicine and Western science and, after returning from his medical mission to Turkey, the bridge between India and the Near East. From the early-1920s until his death in May 1936, he acted as an arbitrator between the contesting claims of Hindu and Muslim ideologues. All this while at the centre of his universe was the family, the quiet wife, the son Harold, and the adopted daughter, Zohra. He also cared for and looked after the needs of others: his nephew Shaukatullah Ansari (1908–72) who married Zohra; his cousins and relatives, Aziz Ansari (1889–1985) and Faridul Haq Ansari (1908–72); and his young confidants Abdul Basit, Shuaib Qureshi, Khaliquzzaman, and Abdur Rahman Siddiqi. He paid for their education and supported, in Siddiqi’s case, his business enterprises. ‘You can hardly realize’, he told Shaukatullah Ansari studying in England, ‘the tremendous difficulties which beset me in supporting you and sending you your monthly allowance regularly. I would at all costs go on doing so and see that you complete your studies there’.36 Wedded to middle-class family values, he did not demand loyalty from relatives or associates. Even when they let him down, often brazenly, his letters exuded nothing but a kind of stern, almost formal, correctness. ‘I have always to take the back seat and be contended with cold and different treatment from friends’, he once told Khaliquzzaman.37 With his poised nature and gift of equanimity, he suffered the disappointments and reverses of fortunes associated with political life. This summary account fails to do justice to the full range of ideas or beliefs that underlie Ajmal Khan and Ansari’s social and political actions. It does, however, provide a perspective for understanding an era when (p.177) some public figures were not just busy advancing their personal or political interests but enunciated ideals and morals that sublimated their more immediate political interests. Whether in Delhi or in twentieth-century Awadh, men traded convictions for wealth or power, forged unprincipled alliances, weakened the foundation of India’s monumental national edifice, and fouled the politics of representation by their strident communitarian claims. At the same time, there were those who resolved the disparity between beliefs and deeds, lived in abject poverty as a sort of sublimation or compensation for high ideals, nursed the vision of a harmonious society, and chose the path of national service. Thus, Andrews saw Ajmal Khan as a Christ-like figure, ministering to the sick and unobtrusively distributing woollen blankets to the pavement dwellers on a cold Delhi night.38 Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai, trained and tutored by Ajmal Khan, Ansari, and Gandhi, shunned publicity. ‘He was that rare type of human that was the salt of the earth, not seeking public acclaim, quietly working away not losing

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives heart, whatever happened, in fact, cheering up others who, at times might lose their heart’.39 There were indeed not many like him. Ansari, ‘symbol of a new political conception’, brought something new and different into politics. For one, he thundered against the idea of a separate political community organized on the basis of religion. This explains his resignation from the Khilafat committee in 1925, his disgust with the All-Parties Muslim Conference, formed in 1929 in the wake of the debates over the Nehru report (1928), and his estrangement from the Ali brothers, who had joined hands with the conservative political establishment. Long before the disappearance of the Khilafat, he had reached the inescapable conclusion that this age-old institution, brittle enough in its own clime, was a fragile thing to transport across the world. He often repeated what had long been Azad’s political axiom, that future India must be a field of cooperation between men of different faiths. People could live according to the tenets of their faith, but introducing theological subtleties into modern political forms could be dangerous. India’s Muslims, Ansari stated, identified not only their beliefs, but also their manners and customs, with the prescription of their faith. Although (p.178) religion and social life were inseparable, he repudiated religious conformity. A society unable to distinguish between conservatism and stagnation had to be insular in outlook.40 Several of Ansari’s contemporaries castigated him for his consistency: in his loyalty to friends, family, and political comrades; in providing succour to the poor and sick; in upholding political morality; and in championing communal harmony. He saw clearly the incompatibility of nationalism or narrow religion with the sort of democracy he dreamt of for his country, a detail some of his nationalist Muslim colleagues scarcely understood. Writing to Halide Edib on 5 May 1936, just before his death, he stated: I consider the brotherhood of man as the only real tie, and partitions based on race or religion are, to my mind, artificial and arbitrary, leading to divisions and factious fights. Nationalism of a general and liberal type I can appreciate, but not the jingo nationalism of the German or the Italian type. Nationalism as a step to Internationalism I can put up with. I am deliberately using the phrase ‘put up with’. But, nationalism as it is conceived even among us Indians, is to my belief not very helpful. The nationalism of a subject race is a defensive armour, and is the inevitable result of the grinding poverty to which the subject peoples are forced and the daily humiliations to which they are subjected. But, even that has its limits. I think it should be kept in bounds. Otherwise it is liable to react and do us harm.41

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives Consistency is not a feature attributed to a successful politician. However, as Halide Edib pointedly remarked, ‘his [Ansari’s] mission in life was not that of a successful politician, it was that of a pioneer’.42 It is worth concluding this section by summarizing a dialogue between Ansari, Halide Edib, and some colleagues of opposite conviction. The contentious issue, one that polarized political opinions along purely religious and caste lines, was the Communal Award announced by the British prime minister and head of the second Labour ministry (1929–31), Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), after the failure of the Round Table conferences in London. ‘We Muslems are being generous and more consistent when we uphold Communal Award both in Muslem majorities and minorities. It is the only safeguard against (p.179) communal friction. The Hindu, when in a minority, can no longer have a grievance if he has definite representation and proportional posts.’ Ansari: ‘But it will be accepting the fact that Hindus and Muslims will neither trust each other, nor are able to co-operate without interference of a third power.’ ‘What if they came to a mutual understanding on the subject?’

Ansari: ‘I would oppose it still. It would perpetuate two things which prevent us becoming a nation in a modern sense: the fight for jobs by this on that community; the continuation of nations within a nation.’ ‘But what do you say to the way the Muslem minority is treated?’

Ansari: ‘Let the Muslems then vote for the best Hindu, and let the Hindu minority vote for the best Muslem, one who will work for the good of all.’

Edib: ‘May not the Communal Award be a temporary expediency to prevent HinduMuslem friction, until there is a civic education which will change this communal mentality.’

Ansari: ‘No … civic education begins with experience. Let us face the disaster of even friction, rather than retard our civic education. If the Muslems as a body throughout India would back the Hindus who are against Communal Award in principle we could do away with the canker of Communal Award. This bone of contention over which we are fighting so shamelessly constitutes both the strength and the perpetuation of foreign domination.’43

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives I If we are agreed that democracy is an Islamic principle, that the organization and promotion of social welfare is an Islamic duty, the Indian Muslims can serve Islam and themselves best by associating themselves with persons and parties who aim at making democracy as real as possible and as achieving the maximum of social justice and social welfare through the legislative and administrative action of the state. There has been this kind of association. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, who died in 1956, is still remembered as one of the ablest administrators the Indian Government had, a man of swift decisions whose trust in his subordinates made it a stimulating experience. His generosity was limitless, and his regard for fair dealing so great that his bitterest political opponents came to him for justice. He came from a family of landlords, but it was he who took the lead in the abolition of landlordism. M. Mujeeb, Islamic Influence on Indian Society (Meerut, n.d.), pp. 200–1. Wilayat Ali, located not in the imperial capital but flitting in and out of Bara Banki, exemplified the family code of adab. Yet his values and way of (p.180) life would have perished with him had it not been that Rafi was groomed in the same house. His uncle’s example sank deep into the recesses of Rafi’s being. Philanthropy came to him naturally; indeed, stories of his generosity came to light mostly after his death. Those who knew his father and uncle, after whom he modelled himself, believed that it was already inscribed in his genetic code. No man in need turned empty-handed from his door. There is, thus, the account of a handwritten list of people with a note for a Calcutta industrialist: ‘Who knows how long one would live; but please keep helping them’.44 Even as a student, the stipend from his father went into buying books for a poor friend or paying the fee of a needy classmate. In 1935, he could not even afford renting a small house in Almora where he needed to be with his ailing sister. Govind Ballabh Pant (1887–1961), chief minister of UP (1937–39 and 1946–55), offered to bear the burden himself rather than impose it on Rafi.45 As UP’s minister, he rented Major General Shahid Hamid’s house in Lucknow and turned it into a hostel for boys of all ages, mostly poor students from his constituency. He had taken it upon himself to educate them.46 Later, he recreated in the ministerial mansions in free India’s capital the setting and atmosphere of the home in which he had grown up as a boy. In this latter-day house at 6, Edward Road (now Maulana Azad Road), the past and the present lived cheek by jowl.47 Rafi’s father, Imtiaz Ali, had inherited some land, but much of it got split among the brothers and the offspring from his two wives. Starting as a naib-tahsildar and ending up as manager of the Court of Wards, he nonetheless kept his own share intact. By a curious irony, the feudal system’s final undoing came at the hands of his son, ‘who had a taste for work among the kisans and trouble among the zamindars’.48 It meant the ruin of his own and thousands of other families Page 11 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives whose income came from the dues they collected as intermediaries. His stepmother once jokingly (p.181) remarked, ‘Now what will become of us, Rafi? This Act of yours will starve the whole family’. Rafi smilingly said, ‘Don’t worry, mother, I shall take the sickle and cut grass, and you will sell it in the market, and the family will pull on’.49 Such romanticization apart, the fact is that, Rafi gave away to the tenants the land he had inherited. He had no time or money to tend to his family or repair his house in Masauli. Although indulgent towards his wife, Majidul Nisa, he left behind no assets except the people’s affection. That was his heritage.50 As Revenue Minister, Rafi had framed the UP Tenancy Bill. The Bill went to the council in July 1939 and to the Assembly two weeks later. The landlords’ spokesmen could do nothing except to protest. When they did that, they merely gave A.P. Jain (1902–77), parliamentary secretary and Rafi’s prime hatchetman, an opportunity to denounce landlords’ oppression.51 When Rafi officiated as the premier on 4 October, the assembly accepted the bill (as amended by the council) without any change: to celebrate its passage thirty-five lakhs of people congregated on a single day, 15 October. On 6 December, the governor gave his assent. The Act was not Rafi’s brainchild, but he piloted it with kindly geniality. He did, nonetheless, scare some of the zamindars and had to, for this reason, manipulate the moneylending interests in the council to get the bill endorsed. The price for bania support appears to have been the UP Debts’ Redemption (Amendment) Bill favourable to their interests.52 He informed Rajendra Prasad (1844–1963) who had intervened on behalf of the Awadh taluqdars and the zamindars of the Agra Province, that the Bill was ‘based on principles of equity and justice’.53 Worst of all, as UP’s Revenue minister, he moved the historic resolution on 19 July 1946, which pronounced the death sentence on the zamindari system.54 Though (p. 182) some like Mubashir Husain Kidwai (1899–1957), the Muslim League representative on the Tenancy Bill Select Committee dismissed this talk of abolition as ‘vote-catching’, the first electoral ‘broadside’ against the landlord ‘Order’,55 the UP Zamindari Abolition Committee prepared a scheme for abolishing zamindari.56 Rafi was ‘really the brains behind this legislation’, says Qudsia Aizaz Rasul (1909–2001) whose taluqdar husband lost his estates and land.57 While campaigning in Bahraich district during the 1946 elections, Jawaharlal Nehru urged the electorate to vote for ‘one of the valiant fighters for freedom, Mr. Kidwai, from its district’. ‘Mr. Kidwai’, he added, ‘enacted the Tenancy Bill for the kisan’s benefit’.58 Rafi Ahmed Kidwai lost in that election, as did many of his Congress Muslim colleagues. The substructure of Rafi’s views and lifestyle remained always that which had been laid down for him in youth by Wilayat Ali. From his uncle, at whose house he had his schooling from the age of eight, he learnt the virtues of hospitality, generosity, and magnanimity. His freedom from pettiness, moral or intellectual, Page 12 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives and his manner of helping those who had actually tried to hurt him politically showed that he could not only forgive but also forget. For the rest, Rafi largely relived Wilayat Ali’s political style. Like his uncle, he worked for serious political purposes on a diet of non-serious reading, while the movements around him expounded grand theories and philosophies. He drowned his own feelings in expressions of light-heartedness. Joking and laughing, he made events and things look easy.59 Like his uncle, he transacted business amidst uproarious merriment, banter, and gossip. Once when the vagaries of the censor greatly irritated him, (p.183) he did not know whom to write to. He resolved the difficulty by writing to the censor and addressing the envelope of that letter to himself. Sure enough, the letter reached its destination. This led to some improvement in his correspondence.60 While assembly members shuffled and stumbled through speeches abounding in platitudes and well-worn expressions, he would move from seat to seat, smiling and joking, shaking hands with one, hugging another to his bosom, and putting his arms round the shoulders of the next.61 His ‘infectious smile’, remembered a co-legislator, ‘adorned (sic) and cheered the way at the committee tables. His words had a ring of sincerity … .’62 ‘When he talked’, recalled the civil servant Y.D. Gundevia (1908–86), ‘he blinked and blinked and blinked, and sometimes looked at you with his eyes almost shut’.63 Inheriting his uncle’s terror of the political platform, Rafi preferred conducting public affairs behind the scenes, in committee rooms and small caucus meetings. Neither rules and regulations nor his experience of working as a cabinet minister tamed his unconventional style of functioning; in fact, Nehru found Rafi too daring and prone to taking too many risks.64 He spent years in organizational work when not confined behind prison walls. In gaol, he mixed freely with fellow-prisoners, regaling them with whatever Urdu verses he remembered. Nehru, of course, sent books to him in Bareilly in 1942, and then at Naini prison. ‘Probably Rafi will appreciate books ever more than fruits’, he wrote to Indu (Indira Gandhi) from the Ahmednagar Fort where he and eleven members of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) were interned after the passage of the Quit India resolution.65 His strained relationship with Pant apart, he would take hold of any two of his children, bang their heads together, twist and pinch them, or, after making them open their mouths, blow cigarette smoke into them.66 Growing up in Masauli, Rafi studied under the tutelage of Maulvi (p.184) Imam Ali and Haji Chhotak, reputed to be strict disciplinarians. His stay at Aligarh coincided with the pan-Islamic euphoria on the campus,67 but he rejected the pan-Islamic obsession of his uncle’s generation.68 Halide Edib commented that the Indian Muslim attachment to his country took precedence over his solidarity with fellow-Muslims outside India. She might have had Ansari, Ajmal, and Rafi in Page 13 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives mind when indicating that, faced with a choice between the interests of India and their religious sentiment, Indian Muslims preferred the interests of their motherland.69 As it proved later, Rafi’s commitment to the freedom struggle and his staying in power were greater than that of almost anybody else who thundered from his district.70 This brought him into conflict with the colonial government, and led to a total of thirteen years of confinement in jail. No wonder, he was the bete noire of UP’s governors, notably Henry Graham Haig (1881–1956) and Maurice Carnier Hallett (1883–1969), who thought that Rafi had ‘no support from responsible or reasonable Muslims’.71 F. Wylie, his successor, crossed swords with Rafi on the issue of political prisoners. Later, however, he revised his opinion: ‘I had a very interesting talk yesterday with Rafi Ahmed Kidwai who was my bete noire’, he told Wavell. ‘I say, “was” for I find that on closer acquaintance I rather like the scoundrel … . I welcomed the opportunity of having a talk with him on a non-controversial subject, as I wanted to let him see that, on my side at any rate, there was no lingering ill will on account of our quarrel about the political prisoners. Rafi turns out on a closer view to be rather an amusing little ruffian. He was perfectly friendly and spoke much more frankly than Pant usually does’.72 (p.185) Rafi slipped into the Congress ranks as a student without having to give up a lucrative practice or a government post. True, he ambled along behind local notables in demonstrations but lacked the will and lungpower for slogan shouting or the flair for crowd management. Reserved even with those who knew him best, he remained aloof and Olympian. He avoided public speaking as far as possible, realizing that eloquence did not guarantee political success. He therefore concentrated on intensive organization in his home state, the only way of retaining supremacy, and kept the lid on the unsolved internal party crisis. Masterly at manipulating his opponents’ weaknesses, and at balancing competing political factions, he possessed considerable organizational skills. During the 1937 election campaign in UP, of which he was in charge, he maintained a list of the number of voters in each locality and of how many were expected to vote for the Congress. He mobilized all vehicular transport in UP and Bihar on election days, not so that the Congress could use it—their sturdy peasant supporters marched happily to the polls—but to ensure that effete zamindars did not transport toadies to vote for them.73 Rafi’s great challenge—not in 1937 but earlier—was to survive the rough and tumble of politics after the suspension of civil disobedience, a watershed in Indian politics. Suddenly, old allegiances changed, and the forging of new alliances became a virtual historical necessity. With pan-Islamism a spent force and agitational politics receding into the background, politicians of all hues debated the issue of council entry and the working of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. The results were too obvious to go unnoticed. In most places, the newly created arrangements produced some measure of regional autonomy, and nurtured a more moderate and pragmatic political culture. In some regions, Page 14 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives therefore, caste and community leaders, and voters generally, regarded the provincial government, even with the limited franchise, as an improvement over the institution it replaced—certainly more accessible and probably more effective. Formal changes induced informal breaks and adjustments that became self-sustaining. The focus, in the mid-twenties, shifted from the national arena to the provinces. Here the politicians eschewed, despite the Swarajist plan to wreck the councils from within, confrontation with government so as to (p.186) avoid jettisoning the progress towards representation and political empowerment. The Swaraj party, led by Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das, formed the first opposition party, one that possessed little cohesion but nevertheless directed systematic criticism towards the government. At the same time, they pinned their hopes of regaining power in a system where power and authority would be gradually transfered to Indians. The primary motives behind their moves are revealed in the private calculations and actions of Swarajist ministers far more than in their speeches. Internal rivalries plagued the Congress itself. ‘Strife has surged beyond its precinct so much’, Azad told Mazharul Haq after being released from jail in January 1923, ‘that there is hardly any deterrent left to it … . Nobody looks ahead into the future, nobody stands in defence of the country and freedom, aims and ideals, Congress and organization. They yield to groupism and factionalism. On the one hand you have dissidence and free-lancing, on the other blind loyalty, reaction and deadlock’.74 Azad stated the obvious. At the same time the fissures he referred to did not undermine the Congress structures or erode its popularity. Gathering support in UP, the party membership alone, in 1926–27, was over six times as large as the membership of the Chinese Communist Party, and larger than that party’s membership in the agrarian revolutionary period that followed.75 To be sure, Wilayat Ali had lived through a stormy phase. The unsettled conditions at Aligarh, the early pan-Islamic stirring, the Ali brothers’ internment, the excitement over Home Rule, and the anger over Annie Besant’s internment: these disparate events were the products of different historical situations, some arising from heightened nationalist fervour, others from the Khilafat tide. Given the causes that swayed his generation, Rafi came of age after the dissipation of the pan-Islamic energy, embracing new responsibilities and challenges in relatively settled times. Having played second fiddle to the Khilafatists, he could now make good not in the institutional matrix created by the Act of 1919, but by the vacuum created by the intransigence of the pro-changers and by the desertion of some prominent Muslims from the Congress ranks. He felt comfortable with those for whom the Khilafat symbol served as a potent weapon for uniting Hindus and Muslims against British colonialism. The times and (p. 187) circumstances in which such feelings came to the fore strongly suggest

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives that positive impulses impelled them to take a leading part in the liberation struggle. Rafi felt as much at ease with the Ansari-Ajmal generation as with the younger leaders imbued with quasi-socialist or socialistic ideas. Although their paths were separate, they were destined to cross. In the 1923 elections, the Swarajists made a clean break; the sun of the moderates faded. Rafi, for one, kept the Swaraj party machine in fairly good working order. Elected to the Assembly three years later, he dutifully followed Motilal Nehru, who ‘had the manner and the polish of a man both born to authority and the right to exercize it’.76 As the party’s general secretary, he lived in a house in Daryaganj close to Ansari’s, which he shared with Shafee Daudi (b. 1879), later vice-president of the Muslim League (1933–36), Yusuf Imam, Shah Muhammad Zubair (1884–1930), and Jinnah’s lieutenant, Abdul Matin Chaudhry. He was well served by the inmates sharing of one another’s contacts and social linkages.77 Acting in unison with Motilal Nehru during the All Parties’ Conference, Rafi worked behind the scenes to draft the Nehru Committee Report in July-August 1928. Thereafter, he joined Ansari’s All-India Nationalist Muslim Party founded in April 1929, issuing appeals and raising subscriptions.78 His personal loyalty led him to take the plunge, for he knew full well that a group so closely identified with the Congress had no future in the vortex of communal politics, and that it was hardly well placed to mediate between the parties arrayed against each other. This is precisely what happened. Within a few years of its founding, the Nationalist Muslim Party, designed to wean away the Muslims from the conservative Muslim establishment, faded into oblivion. In the 1930s, Rafi took part in several popular struggles. ‘Carry on as you have begun’, Nehru told him in April 1930, ‘and I am sure that Rae Bareli would distinguish itself’.79 That it did: he was arrested on 15 May (p.188) 1930 during the early phase of civil disobedience. The no-rent campaign, a prelude to civil disobedience, generated mass enthusiasm. In May 1931, the government estimated the number of active Congress volunteers in UP at around 13,000, concentrated mainly in the Rae Bareli, Pratapgarh, Bara Banki, and Allahabad districts.80 At last the police caught up with Rafi and arrested him. When he was released after the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, he returned to the peasant campaign as UP PCC’s elected general secretary. Rafi worked hard during the elections.81 Elected unopposed from the Bahraich Muslim rural constituency, he joined the ministerial ranks in 1937. Yet the process of ministry-making was mired in bickering, innuendoes, and controversies. To begin with, rumours were afloat of ‘a scheme being hatched’ by Khaliquzzaman, Pant, and Mohanlal Saxena (1896–1965), later president of the UP PCC, to rope in Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Muhammad Ismail Khan (1866–1958) into an understanding with the Congress.82 As a matter of electoral Page 16 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives tactics, Rafi persuaded them to contest the elections on the Muslim League ticket, but to rejoin the Congress or at least endorse its election platform.83 He promised Khaliquzzaman ‘two Muslim Leaguers to join the Congress Ministry’ prior to his election’.84 Such assurances led Khaliquzzaman to indicate that, if the UP League went against the Parliamentary Board’s declared policy, he would fight another election on that very issue. Nehru denied knowledge of any such deal. Evidently, he seemed unwilling to allow Muslim Leaguers to take office in Congress provinces without an agreement on an all-India basis.85 Eventually, though, Jinnah rather than Nehru proved to be the main stumbling block. He rebuked those who considered cooperating with the Congress, and affirmed that, for the time (p.189) being, the League would join hands neither with the Congress nor with the government, but wait until it gathered strength.86 Khaliquzzaman himself forfeited his claims in the Congress by raising the cry of Islam during the Bundelkhand election. ‘I have carried on the past’, Nehru chided him, ‘and I shall carry on in the future thinking more of the principles I cherish than of the results that may follow from my actions. Without that basis of thought and action, I would become a straw upon the waters, blown about hither and thither, without rudder or compass’.87 With a friend lost to the League, Nehru urged Rafi to meet the challenge in Jhansi where Nisar Ahmad Sherwani was pitted against a formidable candidate.88 Rafi dithered, owing to his misunderstanding with the Congress High Command. Nehru reprimanded him for being ‘so liable to such moods and tie yourself up in this curious way’. In a letter that received wide publicity, he added: ‘I feel sometimes you are much to blame because you imagine things and seek no explanation for them. Or some little things happen which you magnify enormously’.89 Two years later, Nehru typically turned to Rafi for plotting the Congress strategy in UP vis-à-vis the War. Informing him about the Congress Working Committee resolution on the war aims, he underlined the importance of debating why India should have been declared a belligerent country without reference to its people and the assembly. He tutored Rafi on what to say in the assembly,90 urging him to tackle the minority issue with utmost sensitivity. He did not want him to discuss matters that might militate against democracy or the country’s unity,91 but seemed perfectly willing to let Rafi share the resolution with the Muslim League members.92 According to Haig, UP’s lieutenant governor (1928–30 and 1931–34), ‘Kidwai, a somewhat baffling figure, presenting outwardly a mask of (p.190) impassivity, commands a great deal more influence than one would suppose from talking to him. He has been always on the side of the left wing … .’93 Still, they got on fine. During Pant’s illness in September and October 1939, they explored a possible working agreement with the Congress, and exchanged notes on the Congress Page 17 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives relinquishing office. At his behest, Rafi even directed the local committees to exercise restraint until the All-India Congress Committee meet. Rafi conceded, soon after the UP Congress Ministry finally resigned on 30 October, that this move had ‘a very unsettling effect on district authorities’. Haig also settled with Rafi a draft for dealing with revolutionary discontent in light of an earlier meeting with Nehru, Azad, and Mahadev Desai.94 He found him amenable to reason, prompt in taking decisions, and strict in adhering to them. ‘This is certainly in marked contrast to Pant’, he informed the viceroy. In dealing with the landlords, too, Rafi appeared flexible. Hostile to any major concessions,95 he agreed to a compromise within the broad parameters of the UP Tenancy Bill.96 He allayed Haig’s fears that the ministry’s intention was to amend the Bill merely to satisfy the left-wingers.97 Expressions of goodwill apart, some people accused Rafi of blinkered ideas and prejudices. After Independence, in particular, his detractors mounted a campaign against him. They were drawn from the ranks of Congress Socialists led by Acharya Narendra Deva, Damodar Swarup Seth (1896–1960), and C.B. Gupta (b. 1902), and the group around Purshottamdas Tandon, whose election to the speakership of the UP Assembly he had organized to clear the way for Pant. But his opponents struck back, in May 1948, by asking over 1,000 Congressmen to explain why they had acted against the Congress candidates in the district board elections. Around the same time, Tandon, speaker of the UP Assembly (1937–39 and 1946–50), decided to contest the UP PCC presidentship. Infuriated by the ‘inquisition’ against Congressmen, Rafi also jumped into the fray. Whether this move had Nehru’s backing or not is a matter of speculation, but he did not favour a contest in public life.98 Much to (p.191) Nehru’s chagrin and that of his followers, Tandon was elected President. Rafi found this a bitter pill to swallow. Such developments weakened Rafi’s position and facilitated C.B. Gupta’s rise to power in the UP PCC, as well in as the Congress Legislature Party. Gupta and Pant pushed aside the ‘Rafians’ in Allahabad, once their stronghold.99 Munishwar Dutt Upadhyaya, a Brahman of the Congress Socialist Party, sealed their fate in Pratapgarh district. In the district board elections of 1948, every elected member belonged to Upadhyaya’s group. Starting from the late 1940s, and continuing into the 50s, this exclusively Brahman faction controlled the district Congress.100 Finally the Rafians, who had the district organizations in Moradabad, Shahjahanpur and Bijnor in their pocket, ultimately lost political leverage to the former Congress Socialists. Lance Brennan, the historian, attributes their decline to the rapid loss of their provincial leaders, first in the provincial party executive, and later in the government when Rafi, Home minister, shifted to Delhi.101 In the inner councils, Rafi’s friends had always doubted his strategy of fighting on two fronts. They felt that their authority

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives weakened within the party, they would also be exposed to the charge of doubledealing. A.P. Jain, Rafi’s biographer, recounted their dilemma: After I had resigned the membership of the UP Legislative Assembly in 1947 … he [Rafi] told me to leave the Congress and join the Socialist Party. However, that party was full of men who had formed the socialist wing of the Congress, and with whom for long we had been at loggerheads. I protested that they would treat me as a suspect, isolate and outcast me. I was not prepared to go alone … . (p.192) Another friend, Harish Chandra Bajpai, had left the Congress and joined the Socialists under Rafi’s advice. He met the fate I had visualized for myself.102 Rafi’s inflated sense of destiny and self-righteousness brought him in sharp conflict with Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Satyamurti (1889–1943),103 Tandon, and C.B. Gupta. For a while, Rafi and Acharya Narendra Deva, the socialist leader, shared certain political concerns. Acharya had, in fact, endorsed his views on the reactionary character of the policies and personnel of the Congress Parliamentary Board,104 and joined him in criticizing the ‘Ministerial’ programme.105 But they soon fell apart when the Acharya refused to sign the Select Committee Report on the UP Tenancy legislation. A Congressman who knew them both observed: It was a painful thing to me that Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Acharya Narendra Deva couldn’t pull on. Kidwai’s criticism of Narendra Deva was that the latter was too much of an idealist and perhaps Narendra Deva felt that Kidwai had no principles, that he was just a politician. However, one thing Acharya Narendra Deva used to tell me that, whenever there was a question of taking a progressive step, Kidwai would always agree; he [Kidwai] was very progressive in his views.106 Without going into the details of such rifts, there is no denying that Rafi often displayed an astounding lack of political circumspection, and tended to raise trivial and relatively unimportant issues.107 To Patel, who traveled to Lucknow in early January 1950 to sort out party dissension, Rafi wrote dismissing his argument that the majority’s will should prevail. (p.193) ‘I had hoped your visit may smoothen matters’, he wrote, ‘but I find from your statement you have approved the behaviour of the so-called “majority” and your advice to the “minority” is to quit. I hope they will realize that after this support from you of the “majority” they have no future in the Congress and will not hesitate to quit’.108 Again, he bemoaned the increasing indiscipline among Congress workers. Reacting to the Congress losses in the by-elections, he charged that the leaders had not stopped the rout, because they were out of touch with public opinion. ‘They still think’, he added, ‘their position with the people is secure and it is a few vicious and intriguing men like Kidwai and a few disgruntled men like Kripalani and Ghosh who were exaggerating the importance of public Page 19 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives criticism’.109 Patel rebuked Rafi, pointing to the dubious role of those who encouraged factions rather than unity within the party’s rank and file.110 Patel’s own conduct was not above reproach. He was not contented with words. Touchy and unbending, he hardly ever forgave anybody who offended him. For example, he could not stand Azad, Rafi, and Nehru, who he derisively mentioned as the one and only ‘nationalist Muslim’.111 No wonder, the Pioneer led a whisper campaign against Rafi, and expressed serious doubts over his methods of collecting funds for the party from Akhani, from the Nepali dissidents who had revolted against the Ranas in 1950, and from the sugar lobby.112 ‘He [Rafi] has a knack of getting money’, stated Tandon. ‘He obliges people individually by helping them. He has no organizing capacity, but he is not an honest man. He may tell a thousand lies in a day’.113 While Rafi stood exonerated through Nehru’s intervention,114 his image stood tarnished in right-wing circles. Even Nehru conceded that, (p.194) while there was no question of misappropriation of funds, Rafi should have taken a little more care in dealing with public funds.115 The fact is that Rafi did not hesitate to exploit the rich for the Congress party; indeed, his contacts with industrialists and commercial magnates ensured the flow of funds. Quite often, he would even bring pressure on the Supply department, for the same reason, to favour one or the other contractor.116

II Har ek baat pe kehte ho tum ke tu kya hai To every word that I utter you answer, ‘What are you?’

[Ghalib] Rafi’s style, his fiercely independent and defiant spirit, and his political engagements were not comparable with the Congress Muslims. For one, they complied even when Congress policies went against their own convictions. Rafi, by contrast, refused to budge, both before and after Independence, and periodically threatened to resign or forge a partnership with like-minded groups within or outside the party. In April 1948, he sought Nehru’s permission to take part in the district board elections and support candidates who were more loyal Congressmen than the officially sponsored candidates.117 Although Nehru dissuaded him, Rafi was convinced that his fate and that of the Prime Minister were entwined within some deified destiny. Wary of this streak in his personality, Nehru urged him, on another occasion in 1950, not to side with the expelled members of UP who had decided to support candidates opposed to the Congress nominees.118 Sometimes, Rafi heeded such advice. Often, he tacitly carried out his threats in order to force Nehru to act in his own interest. He resigned, with obedient courtesy, as a means of forcing Nehru to do what he knew his political mentor wanted to do on his own.119

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (p.195) Contrast this posture with that of Ansari’s generation. Ansari was himself at the centre of a controversy over his criticism of the Congress decision to launch civil disobedience in 1930. His reasoning: the country was unprepared, because political conditions were quite the reverse of what they were in 1920. With Hindu-Muslim-Sikh unity wanting, there was imminent danger of the nonviolent campaign being submerged by the outbreak of violence. Civil disobedience would therefore be a reckless course and cause ‘incalculable damage’. He advised Gandhi to retrace his steps and, among other things, concentrate on building the edifice of Hindu-Muslim unity. Communal unity was not only one of the basic planks in the Congress programmes, but ‘the one and only basic thing’. Independence, he contended, had to be an end-result, not a beginning.120 Ansari wanted to visit Ahmedabad to press his views on Gandhi and the CWC members, but was unable to do so. He despatched his letter to Rafi for discussion.121 Meanwhile, Gandhi and Motilal Nehru, unable to free themselves from a teleological view of the nationalist ideology, brushed aside Ansari’s objections. The Mahatma felt that a meeting of minds could be accomplished only through fighting for common causes, and wanted Ansari to recognize the new orientation he had given to the civil disobedience contest. T.A.K. Sherwani (1889–1935), a Swarajist loyalist close to the Nehru household, felt let down because the Mahatma’s reply showed utter indifference to the feelings of those who stood by him like soldiers.122 With the communal situation deteriorating steadily and civil disobedience proceeding haltingly, Jawaharlal Nehru learnt in prison that Ansari, Sherwani, and Khaliquzzaman were disappointed, cynical, disgruntled, and sad. He expressed surprise that Rafi was also part of the same flock.123 The fact is that, despite being disillusioned, Rafi canvassed for the Nehru report that had already become a dead letter. ‘The absence of our friends from Punjab and Bengal’, he told Ansari in early March 1930, ‘reduced us to a minority in the Muslim League. However, still we were twelve and the other (p. 196) party was not sure the moneys we had in our pockets would give us the majority’.124 Ansari’s Nationalist Muslim Party did not live up to the highest expectations of its optimistic advocates. Its rank and file was plagued by factionalism, gridlock, inefficiency, and plain incompetence. Nehru referred to the personal predicaments of its leaders that weakened their position and the value of their perspectives.125 Rafi would have agreed, for he himself showed no inclination to represent the Muslims or to create a Muslim constituency. He stood his ground as a Congressman rather than a Muslim politician.126 When Shafee Daudi chided the Nationalist Muslim Party, Rafi replied that the number of Congress Muslims were more in numbers than the combined strength of all the provincial Muslim Leagues and Khilafat committees.127 Similarly, when Shaukat Ali repeated the parrot-cry in 1937 that Nehru ought to be negotiating with Jinnah, Rafi curtly

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives responded: ‘It is always the people who count who, to maintain their status of being people who count, frustrate these negotiations’.128 Such a political stance enhanced Rafi’s credibility in nationalistic circles, provided him with greater leverage in the Congress, and enabled him to face the criticism that came his way. During such times, many of his colleagues tried assuaging his fears and apprehensions. To cite an example, Nehru spoke at Bara Banki explaining how the Congress had accepted office to give the masses some relief and an opportunity to develop the necessary strength for wresting real power. Rafi, who had positioned himself against office-acceptance,129 was eventually converted to the view that office-acceptance would, after all, position the Congress in an advantageous position for striking alliances with the minority parties: Muslim, non-Brahman, and Harijan. This, of course, required cajoling and admonition on Congress President Rajendra Prasad’s part.130 Similarly, when the left-wing members of the UP PCC revolted against the composition of the (p.197) Central Parliamentary Board in 1934, Patel, as acting Congress president, invited Rafi to Wardha to redress grievances of his group.131 As an activist first and foremost, Rafi neither expounded a political philosophy nor did he set for himself a high moral ideal. Critical of fascism, favourably disposed towards the Soviet Union, and supportive of the Nepal Congress’ revolt against the Ranas, he rarely spoke on international events. In the early 1930s, he read socialistic and communist literature, but this, like religion, disappeared into the recesses of his reticent being. He disliked talking about first principles. He was hell-bent on urgent and specific tasks.132 Without being a formal socialist, he was more socialistic in his outlook than those formally belonging to the Congress Socialist Party [CSP].133 He favoured a socialist order but felt uncomfortable with those professing a sectarian ideology.134 Liberal in orientation and sympathetic to progressive causes, he focused on the Congress and its role. Dazzled by the romantic dream of achieving liberation under Nehru’s leadership without the presence of right-wing elements, he wrote to Nehru in December 1935: Today, I am in an extremely distressing situation and I blame you for landing me in it. After my sad experience of 1925–27 I had determined to keep myself out of the P.C.C. Executive. But in 1931 in spite of my persistent refusal, you dragged me in. I had warned you against the possible source of opposition. What I had apprehended is happening. I am today in a very very embarrassing position. If I try to withdraw myself and retire, I am accused of causing another crisis. But if I continue to be active, every opportunity is availed of to humiliate me, even though this may undermine the discipline of our organization.135

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives Again, when Nehru invited as many as ten right-wing leaders to join the CWC (only four from the ‘left’ were included), Rafi’s misgivings resurfaced with greater force: I have passed the last few days in agony. Apparently you were our only hope, but are you going to prove an illusory one? Some people had their doubts as to how far you will be able to withstand the combined opposition and influence of (p.198) Gandhism. You were given an opportunity of reshuffling the W.C. You have excluded Tandon, Nariman, Pattabhi, and Sardul Singh. You have included Bhulabhai and Rajagopalachari in preference to Govind Das and Sarat Bose. They would have brought you strength. They have manoeuvred to isolate you from the middlemen. We have been weakened both in the A.I.C.C. and the delegates. And the Working Committee you have formed is bound to prove more reactionary than the one it has replaced. It may be my vision is narrow. I rely more on the number of heads than on ideological discourses.136 Finally, during the unseemly struggle between Subhas Chandra Bose (1897– 1945) and the Congress right-wing, Rafi backed the mercurial Bengali leader. Publicly, he announced that the votes in the presidential election would be cast for or against federation,137 a statement that led a large number of UP voters to support Bose. Asserting a position contrary to that of Pant, Lucknow hummed with excitement and rumours. Newspapers talked of the ministry’s position being shaken, whereas some people discussed even the possibility of Rafi replacing Pant.138 Ultimately, of course, Bose confessed in the AICC meeting on 29 April that he could not work out a formula with Gandhi and resigned. Rafi and Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–79), one of the founders of the CSP in 1934, endorsed Nehru’s idea of not changing horses in mid-stream. Finding an escape route, a humbled Bose founded the Forward Bloc within a week of his resignation. History repeated itself in 1950 when Tandon defeated Rafi’s presidential candidate, J.B. Kripalani (1888–1982), former general secretary of the Congress (1934–46) and president (1946). Immediately, the Congress Democratic Front came into being. Kripalani quit from the Congress in May 1951 to form the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party. For the time being Rafi withheld his resignation, awaiting the outcome of the negotiations initiated by the Rajaji-Azad combine to persuade Tandon to include Rafi and his comrades in the CWC.139 ‘I know Rafi better than Jawaharlal does’, Tandon told Azad. Patel, too, refused to intervene on Rafi’s behalf.140 (p.199) The fact is that Tandon, wracked with contradictions, had sown the seeds of dissent from the moment he grasped power. To Edwina Mountbatten (1901–60), wife of Viceroy Louis Mountbatten (b. 1990), Rajaji sentimentally announced that ‘people are getting tired of one another and of

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives those who try to keep them together. All smiles are the sad type, no joy in them. I am awfully distressed’.141 Eventually, the rancorous debates caused Rafi’s resignation on 17 July; Nehru prevailed upon him to withdraw not once but again on 3 August.142 In this battle of nerves, Nehru, too, bid adieu to the CWC. Rafi had his sweet revenge only after Tandon quit, owing to mounting pressures from Nehru and his group. Having tasted victory, he now dutifully responded to Nehru’s appeal to those who had left the party to return. Kripalani stayed put in the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party (KMPP).143 In this encounter, too, personal or factional motives gained precedence over ideological protestations. The KMPP suffered reverses, despite Rafi’s support, with only one candidate winning a seat in the Assembly. Also short-lived was the alliance with the Socialist Party that had led to the birth of the Praja Socialist Party (PSP).144 Soon, the PSP itself split, exposing the socialist front’s weakness. Rafi’s stressful life may have caused serious distortions in his public conduct. How else does one explain his mysterious disappearance to what he referred to as ‘the underground’? While neither the police nor his family could trace his whereabouts, his detractors feared some move being planned against them in his hideout. That rarely happened, and yet there was sufficient ground for suspicion in political quarters. Only once did Rafi (p.200) confide in his friend that he smoked and read mystery books while in hiding.145 Doubtless, Rafi had a knack for raising controversies that were avoidable, such as the appointment of Ramaswami Mudaliar as governor of Assam, the public disclosure of Mountbatten’s note circulated only to the cabinet ministers,146 and his accepting 50,000 rupees for the Lucknow daily, National Herald.147 Nehru, whose own personal and political stakes in the National Herald were high, contained the mounting opposition. He persuaded Rafi to resign from its directorship. Even so, the connection between the contributions received from Nepal, the subsequent launching of air service by the Himalayan Airways owned by one of the exiled Ranas in Calcutta, and Rafi’s suspected involvement in arms purchase by the Nepali Congress, smacked of shady political deals.148 Patel also received reports that small arms had been smuggled under Rafi’s instruction from Burma. He informed Nehru, but to no avail.149 ‘Bapu [Patel]’, recorded Maniben (1903–90), daughter of Vallabhbhai Patel in her diary, ‘passed [the] whole night in total restlessness and saw Nepal-Tibet on film in half-awake conditions’.150 Rafi could shut away unwelcome facts; worse still, he could at times ignore their existence in a way that laid him open to the charge of deliberately twisting evidence. Time and time again he either extended undue patronage to his friends even if it meant flouting established norms,151 or intervened in matters that were clearly outside his brief. He got him (p.201) self needlessly entangled Page 24 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives in the affairs of Sardar Narmada Prasad Singh in Madhya Pradesh, a region well beyond his political battleground.152 Similarly his speech at Jabalpur in November 1950, in which he exhorted the audience to quit the Congress if it had no place for their principles, prompted Rajaji to comment that the minister actively fomented a possible rupture within the party.153 That Rafi did. On the Narmada Singh affair, an angry Patel stubbornly insisted: Personally, I feel considerably embarrassed at these interventions from you. I know already that one District Magistrate did not give assistance to the Vindhya Pradesh police, because he felt that Sardar Narmada Prasad Singh had your support and he might get himself in trouble on that account. I am sure you will realize that such an impression lower down in the ranks of the investigating staff is completely demoralizing.154 All said and done, Rafi stood out as an energetic and innovative minister. There is this interesting story of how the post and telegraph office decided to issue a set of stamps on Gandhi’s eightieth birthday. While the design was being finalized, Gandhi’s assassination took place on 30 January. The government then switched over to designing a ‘mourning’ stamp. But in a typically bureaucratic fashion, negotiations were carried out with the Austrian Printing Press without informing the Nasik Press. When the print order was finally placed, the Nasik Press protested as it had been deprived of its legitimate right to offer indigenously produced Gandhi stamps. The Master of the Nasik Security Press, an Englishman, wanted to quit, but Rafi, the minister of communications, saved the situation. Holding charge of the communications ministry from 15 August 1947 to 2 August 1951, he cooperated with Patel in building a road and the telephonic and telegraphic links between Pathankot and Jammu.155 (p.202) He initiated the ‘Own Your Telephone’ scheme, and launched, despite stiff opposition in parliament, the night airmail service on 30 January 1949.156 This increased the total mileage of air routes from 5,264 in 1939 to 22,952.157 Even though the Tatas opposed the night airmail service, arguing that night flying in India was unsafe, Nehru brushed aside the objection.158 He knew full well that the Tatas were, in reality, fearful of the companies undercutting each other and the end of their monopoly. V.K.R. Menon (1903–74), appointed secretary in the ministry of communications in February 1948, recalls: Kidwai was a very practical man. He had a knack of developing ideas, which, to others, might appear fantastic. But when these ideas subsequently developed to major policy measures and were implemented, even the doubting Thomases had to admit their success. But during the process, officials were allowed complete freedom to attack or criticize the

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives proposals. In the same way, Kidwai never interfered in day-to-day administrative decisions by his officials.159 All these years, able bureaucrats like Menon, H.L. Jairath and T.P. Bhalla served Rafi well. Khurshidlal (1903–50), and Raj Bahadur (b. 1912), a Congress leader of standing from Rajasthan, assisted him with aplomb. Yet controversies—small and large—marred his ministerial record. In June 1952, Jayaprakash Narayan fasted following his negotiations with Rafi, then minister of communications, over the payment of wages to postmen and other lower-grade staff for the period of their strike in 1946. Rafi denied having given an assurance: all that he promised was a solution, if possible. Some ministers felt embarrassed, but the government yielded to pressure by agreeing to pay emoluments for the strike period. This (p.203) prompted JP [Jayaprakash Narayan] to end his fast on 14 July. Damodar Swarup Seth complained that JP had been wronged by Nehru’s statement in Parliament on 2 July 1952, a statement in which he denied any knowledge of the assurances Rafi had given. The Prime Minister, he implied, should have trusted JP rather than a person who did not believe in ‘means justifying ends’.160 As the food and agriculture minister (1952–54), Rafi initiated bold measures to solve India’s food crisis. He traveled from state to state to get first-hand accounts from ministers and visited Myanmar on 19 April 1953 to confer with U. Nu, even though the ensuing negotiations triggered a controversy that left Rafi at the receiving end.161 He knew, says Durga Das, the journalist, the psychology of the trader, small bania, and wholesaler. Therefore, when he decided to import a large quantity of rice despite the existing stocks, he told Durga Das: ‘This news is the only language that our bania understands’. Sure enough, the move paid off and rice prices fell.162 Again, Rafi helped the sugar industry to make large profits and expand production from about 10 lakh to about 20 lakh tonnes a year. The only other time the industry had expanded was in 1932. That was when protection was granted, without any control of sugar.163 Probably, Rafi’s most important step was the one related to decontrol. Following his talks with the state food ministers in Bombay in October 1952, he realized that controls had not served the interests of the common consumers, and that the higher prices in ration shops, in comparison with those in the open market, made decontrol necessary.164 Hence, he disbanded the rationing system. The policy envisaged that the existing ban on interstate movement of food grains would be lifted: linking up a deficit state with a surplus one would create certain food zones. At the same time, he did not think in terms of having complete decontrol that would leave behind a vacuum. Instead, he explored an alternative method of regulation, or ‘regulated decontrol’, and his ministry proposed various (p.204) precautionary measures, including the building up of buffer stocks and the licensing of traders, as an integral part of the decontrol proposals.165

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives The Planning Commission’s Advisory Board did not back Rafi’s initiative and the Food Ministry ignored the countervailing measures. But the immediate consequence of decontrol made foodgrains freely available even in the remotest village at prices well below those in the fair price shops. In Madras, Rajagopalachari’s decision to allow the free movement and sale of foodgrains ‘had a dramatic effect’ on stabilizing prices and making foodgrains available in the open market.166 At the end of Rafi’s tenure the man-made scarcity changed into man-released abundance, leading S.K. Dey, cabinet minister of community development (1956), to commend ‘the highly energetic management of the food portfolio by one of the ablest and astutest Ministers in India ever produced’.167 As on this occasion when the combined opposition of politicians, the Food Corporation and the rationing department bureaucracy criticized and finally abandoned the derationing experiment, Rafi strongly disagreed with some of his ministerial colleagues. The differences were not tight-lipped: C.D. Deshmukh (1896–1982), minister of finance from 1950 to 1956, T.T. Krishnamachari (1881– 1964), minister of commerce and industry, and Rafi pulled in different directions, bitterly denouncing each other and repeatedly offering to resign. He fell out with Deshmukh on the issue of controls,168 and on the nationalization of the Himalayan Air Lines.169 He clashed with Rajagopalachari, union minister without portfolio and then for home affairs (1950–51), over developments in Nepal, and worked up an agitation against Shanmakhem Chetty (1892–1953) for withdrawing certain cases of tax evaders. He crossed swords with Patel (p.205) over the scuttling of the Jayanarayan Vyas (1898–1963) ministry in Rajasthan and the Bhim Sen Sachar (b. 1893) ministry in Punjab, and the installation of the more communal Gopi Chand Bhargava (1889–1966) as chief minister. When Saiyyid Mahmud urged him to cooperate with Nehru, Patel replied: ‘This Rafi is after creating a cleft—what about it?’170 Rafi’s forays into Kashmir as a member of an informal Kashmir Committee also raised quite a few eyebrows.171 The last straw was the arrest of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah (1905–82), Prime Minister of Jammu & Kashmir (1947–53) on 8 August 1953, ‘a defining moment in the state’s relationship with the union of India and its people’s feelings towards the country’.172 The circumstances leading to his arrest are still shrouded in mystery, but it is often suggested that, at the behest of D.P. Dhar,173 a crafty politician, and Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad (1907–72), an unscrupulous power broker, Rafi took courage in both hands and ousted Abdullah from power. Besides the murky role of his chief trouble-shooter A.P. Jain, who is supposed to have delivered to the Sadr-e riyasat instructions for Abdullah’s dismissal and Bakshi’s appointment as his successor,174 Rafi asked Durga Das to report on the coup he had organized. He also planned a short trip to Srinagar. But when Rafi learnt that Mridula Sarabhai, Abdullah’s close friend, was also booked on the same plane, he changed his travel plans.175 His cousin Midhat Kamil Kidwai, then serving as chief secretary in Kashmir, was ‘blissfully unaware of what was happening. When he learnt that the Sheikh had been Page 27 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives dismissed and arrested he sank down on the steps holding his head in his hands, and was revived only after he had been plied with a couple of stiff whiskies’.176 (p.206) There is little evidence to substantiate the various claims and counterclaims, but Rafi may well have instinctively followed Nehru’s game plan.177 At the same time, there is no proof to support the view that Rafi did not see eye-toeye with Nehru on the Kashmir issue.178 Though both had a major role in Abdullah’s dismissal and subsequent incarceration, they were, retrospectively, uneasy with their own reckless course.179 Yet, it took many years for Nehru to provide the healing touch. In April 1964 he withdrew the conspiracy case against Abdullah and his associates, and encouraged him to visit Pakistan and invite its President, Ayub Khan (1907–74), to come to Delhi. Nehru breathed his last on 27 May, the day the invitation reached the Indian High Commission for transmission to Ayub Khan. For a man who did not subscribe to a formal political ideology, Rafi’s posturing got him into deep trouble. Prone to resigning at the slightest pretext, and not always for the right reasons, he often precipitated a crisis in the party. In August-September 1950, as on previous and later occasions, his public conduct came under close scrutiny by Patel, Rajaji, and other right-wing Congress leaders. Plans were afoot to exclude him from the CWC. Even though Rafi’s behind-the-scene manoeuvres embarrassed Nehru, he jumped to his friend’s rescue: Rafi was, as he had stated during the Quit India movement, his ‘closest colleague’ in UP.180 This is what Maniben Patel recorded on 29 September 1950: When 4–5 names were left, he [Nehru] abruptly spoke, ‘Rafi is essential in the W.C.—this is not a bright Committee’. Thereupon Rajaji said, ‘what is bright in Rafi? He got angry and said, ‘Rafi has got a most revolutionary outlook. I have got a very high opinion about his ability, honesty. He is very capable and went on eulogizing him. Whenever Rajaji put up a word, Jawaharlalji would get wild, Maulana [Azad] approached and requested to concede, he told [sic] that he [Patel] conveyed his opinion. ‘There is no meeting ground. There is difference of opinion in our value estimation’.181 (p.207) Even so, Nehru was to tell his sister quite a while later about Rafi’s statements and actions repeatedly upsetting his plans: ‘He has a great affection for me, but he just cannot restrain himself and thus he plays into the hands of his opponents’.182 Another instance when, Nehru felt let down was when Rafi flirted with the Congress Democratic Front and the KMPP, ‘an organization without an ideology should not be called a political party ordinarily, it should be more aptly called a drinking den’. On the crisis caused by the Democratic Front, he wrote with a touch of irony and sadness:

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives I cannot claim, and have not claimed, that anyone, however close he might be to me, should stand by me or agree with me under any circumstances. But I do claim that I have a right to be consulted. Unfortunately this does not often take place. You consult frequently enough many of your other colleagues and are no doubt influenced by what they say. It is quite possible that I might have gathered some experience in a fairly lengthy career and that this might be useful.183 Incidentally, Nehru had corresponded with Saiyyid Mahmud in a similar vein. ‘I have long known that your viewpoint and approach are different from mine,’ he commented. ‘Still’, he continued, I imagined that there was a fundamental agreement about essentials between you and me. I now realize that there is no such basic agreement and that we are poles apart … . I have long felt also that you avoided discussing many important matters with me … . Last year, in November, it amazed me to find that you should give a long letter … to Gandhiji without any reference to me, although you and he were in Anand Bhavan at the time. The contents of that letter stupefied me. I could not possibly conceive that a Congressman should write it, least of all you … . I broke with my father on political questions. So you imagine how deeply I have felt what you have said or written. It has upset me completely.184 What is striking in these two excerpts, one from a letter to Mahmud in 1940 and the other to Rafi in 1951, is how Nehru demanded their political allegiance and personal loyalty. He, for one, was neither prepared to respect independent opinions nor willing to brook opposition from the (p.208) people who he believed were part of his close circle. In the Ahmednagar Fort prison, Nehru reflected on his differences with Mahmud: What Mahmud said hurt and angered me suddenly and I flared up, using rather hard language. I proclaimed further that as we differed so radically in regard to basic political questions, and indeed about our whole outlook on life, I shall in future not discuss politics with him. I wonder if I shall succeed in keeping this promise.185 The fact is that Mahmud’s loyalty to the Nehru household bordered on sycophancy. Quite early in public life, he had said to his mentor on his birthday, ‘I am painfully conscious of the worthlessness of my devotion, but then, my boy, just like a dog I have nothing else or better in my possession to give my master— a thought which sometimes makes me bitter and sad’.186 ‘Why are you so emotional or rather why do you exhibit your emotion so much’, Nehru once chided him. ‘Surely emotion should not be cheapened, it is too valuable a commodity’.187 On the issue of his daughters observing purdah and not being educated, Kamala Nehru (1899–1936) rebuked him: ‘Your profession and Page 29 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives practice are different. Is it correct? I took you as a frank and independent minded person, but you have proved just the opposite’.188 As a politician, Mahmud carried no weight. His views were brushed aside and more often than not his indiscretions embarrassed his mentors. While he bore the insults, most other Muslim Congressmen felt dispirited by the condescending attitude of their bosses. The charge of a ‘sell out’ levelled against them by the Muslim communalists compounded their sense of isolation. The Congress Muslims of the Ajmal Khan-Ansari generation tended to be selfeffacing but proud, respectful of their leaders but equally confident in their political conduct. Azad, the scholar-politician, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, derived strength from their own resources without being dependent on party patronage. Rafi, too, carved out a place without being pliant and submissive. ‘You know,’ he said to Durga Das, ‘I never go to Nehru to seek advice or guidance. I take a (p.209) decision and just present [it to] him as a fait accompli. Nehru’s mind is too complex to wrestle with the intricacies of a problem. Those who go to him for advice rarely get a lead—and that only serves to delay matters’.189 Rafi’s flair for organization, his managerial talents, and his devotion to the Congress party stood him in good stead. He had to be courted, feted, and brought back into the flock for these reasons, and not because he carried out Nehru’s dirty jobs.190 Without being malicious, Rafi condemned and rejected anyone who violated the values of his idealized group, and, for this very reason, people complained about his manner of functioning and conspiratorial style.191 When he moved to Delhi on 15 August 1947, Pant expressed to Patel his unconcealed joy: ‘I have now transferred my headache to you’. The Sardar, in turn, told him: ‘You are mistaken; he will be a greater headache for you from here’.192 He hinted that, whether located in Delhi or Lucknow, Rafi would select his men well, and post them in positions of authority in several states.193 They, in turn, would play his game. In the circumstances, Nehru said to him, ‘whatever that group does is attributed to you, whether this is a fact or not. Evil consequences flow from this belief’.194 More generally, Rafi’s political manoeuvres reveal his obsession with Nehru and a fixation on safeguarding his position vis-à-vis his opponents. Without explaining his successes or justifying his actions, he confessed: ‘the last thirty years’ association has so developed me that all you say assumes the form of my ideology’.195 A day before his death, he told a journalist that he was prepared to be the Prime Minister for six months, and added, ‘I will do so well in the job that people may not want Nehru back’. A friend cautioned him that the fear of displacement might prevent Nehru (p.210) from taking leave. Rafi replied: ‘Exactly! I want him to think twice before he relinquishes office’.196

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives III Thandi thi jis ki chhaon wo deewar gir gai Alas, the wall that provided cool cover has collapsed!

Rafi had a passion for fast driving, had accidents, and smashed many cars. Once when Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–90) and K.N. Katju (1887–1968) were going to Delhi by train for a meeting, they saw a Buick lying upside down on the road. It was Rafi’s car, and Katju observed cynically: ‘Will Rafi be at the meeting or are we attending his funeral?’197 The funeral did not happen until many years later. Rafi’s pace of life eventually took its toll. Impaired by a heart attack in 1939 and again in 1944, his health deteriorated steadily. Pant, who was extremely solicitous of his well-being, desired that he should rest and undergo a medical examination. But that was not Rafi’s way. ‘Few even among public workers’, Pant commented, ‘were endowed with his impersonal outlook’.198 In September 1954 Rafi told Nehru that ‘the spirit of revolt is not dead in me’. Providence willed otherwise. He died before the Prime Minister’s return from China on 24 October. Wherever one travels in the districts of UP one has only to mention Rafi’s name to hear a new story of his loyalty to his friends and of his generosity to enemies.199 Shy, withdrawn, and humble, he was by far the most popular Congressman in the state, widely loved and admired by the rich and the poor alike.200 Travelling in the winter of 1946–47, Malcolm Darling, the former Punjab civil servant, found, in village Khatauli (in the Muzaffarnagar (p.211) district of UP), a young man of 22 who had read up to the eighth class. He knew the king’s name, but there was no mention of the ministers. When Darling tested his memory he found that the man knew there was a ‘vizier’ for the province, and he mentioned Rafi’s name.201 Again, in a predominantly Jat village in Hardwar, a police constable, after some whispered consultations, mentioned ‘Pantji’ [G.B. Pant] and someone else after a pause, another minister—Khidwai [Rafi]. When Darling pressed for more names, they said the local Congress secretary must be sent for.202 Now, in Masauli where only a few members of his family survive, he rests in his grave in the stillness of death, all passions spent, largely forgotten by the people he served.203

IV A strange inn is this world; Everything that comes here goes, goes away But, when old age creeps in, it never goes away; While youth, when once it flees, never comes again.204

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives From the Ahmednagar prison, Nehru quoted this Mir Anis’s quatrain (rubai) in his letter to Indira Gandhi on 12 June 1943. He referred to Rafi’s illness and wondered ‘how many others among our friends are ill and deteriorating in body under the stress and strain of events’.204 The test of a nation’s ‘cultural background and its conscious or subconscious objective’, Nehru had said, may be found in the answer to the question, ‘to what kind of a leader does it give its allegiance?’ In India, Nehru told us, ‘the ideal has continued to be of a man full of learning and charity, essentially good-selfdisciplined, and capable of sacrificing himself for the sake of others’.205 These qualities are, without question, found in three leaders: Ajmal, Ansari, and Rafi. Notes:

(1) Rueben Levy, The Social Structure of Islam (Cambridge, 1957 edn), p. 235. (2) Sharar, Lucknow, p. 197. (3) Ira M. Lapidus, ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfilment in Islam’, Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (California: Berkeley, 1984), p. 39. (4) Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi (eds), A European Experience of the Mughal Orient (New Delhi, 2001), pp. 60–1. (5) Ibid., p. 57. (6) Some of the Urdu lines and their translations are in Hali’s Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam, trans. and with a critical introduction by Christopher Shackle and Javed Majeed (New Delhi, 1997), p. 41. See, also, Intizar Husain, Ism-e Azam (Lahore, 1995), pp. 48–9, 65–8, and the detailed account in Ghaffar, Hayat-e Ajmal, chapter one. (7) C.F. Andrews, Zakaullah of Delhi. With Introductions by Mushirul Hasan and Margrit Pernau (Cambridge, 1929; rpt., Delhi, 2003), p. 47. (8) Comrade, 21 October 1911. (9) Speech at Ghatkopar, 15 June 1921, CWMG, Vol. 23, p. 291. (10) I have borrowed this idea from George Rude, Ideology and Popular Protest (London, 1980), p. 29. (11) Andrews, Zakaullah of Delhi, p. 47. (12) To G.D. Birla, 12 May 1936, G.D. Birla (ed.), Bapu (Bombay, 1997), Vol. 2, p. 235.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (13) To Zakir Husain, 12 May 1936, Ansari Papers, Jamia Millia Islamia. (14) Andrews, Zakaullah, p. 44, and his ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan’, Eminent Mussalmans (Madras, 1926), p. 28. (15) Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London, 1936), p. 168. (16) Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, p. 534. (17) Gandhi cited this fact, as also the unveiling of the portraits of Hardinge and his wife, on a number of occasions; also, in his debate with Tagore on noncooperation. Young India, 1 June 1920, CWMG, Vol. 23, p. 215. S. Irfan Habib, ‘Delhi Tibbiya College and Hakim Ajmal Khan’s Crusade for Indigenous Medicine Systems in Late 19th and Early 20th Century India’, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and Feza Gunergun (eds), Science in Islamic Civilization (Istanbul, 2002), p. 259. (18) Ibid., p. 535. (19) Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 169. (20) Young India, 6 October 1920, CWMG, Vol. 21, pp. 303, 337. (21) Appeal cited in CWMG, Vol. 28, p. 390. (22) Cited in Andrews, ‘Ajmal Khan’, Eminent Mussulmans, pp. 297–8. (23) To Ajmal Khan, 26 March 1926, CWMG, Vol. 34, p. 458. (24) Quoted in Barbara Metcalf, ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan: Rais of Delhi and Muslim ‘Leader’, R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), Delhi Through the Ages: Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society (New Delhi, 1986), p. 308. (25) Young India, 10 November 1921, CWMG, Vol. 25, p. 75. (26) Ibid., p. 308. (27) Tendulkar, Mahatma, Vol. 1, p. 287. (28) Allama Akhlaq Husain Dehalvi, ‘Masih-ul-mulk Hakim Ajmal Khan’, Salahuddin (ed.), Dilliwale, p. 41. (29) Muhammad Ahrar Khan, Maasir-al masih (Hardoi, 1976). The author was Ajmal Khan’s Secretary from 1920 to 1921. (30) Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Nationalist Muslims in British India: The Case of Ajmal Khan’, Modern Asian Studies, 19, 1, 1985, p. 4. (31) Andrews, ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan’, Eminent Musalmans, p. 298.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (32) Ghaffar, Hayat-e Ajmal, p. 15. For a selection of verses on Karbala and Husain, see A.R. Bilgrami, ‘Karbala: Aman-o-salamati ki awwaleen dargah’, AlQalam (Karachi), Vol. 6, 2001, pp. 105–19. (33) Barbara Metcalf, ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan: Rais of Delhi and Muslim Leader’, p. 307. (34) Edib, Inside India, p. 12, and Ansari’s description by Saliha Abid Husain in Salahuddin (ed.), Dilliwale, pp. 321–5. (35) Bombay Chronicle, 2 March 1935; Hasan, A Nationalist Conscience, p. 246. (36) To Shaukatullah Ansari, 28 September 1931, Hasan (ed.), Muslims and the Congress, p. 130. (37) Ansari to Khaliquzzaman, 24 February 1930, ibid., p. 107. (38) Akhlaq Husain, ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan’, pp. 42–3. (39) S.R. Kidwai, ‘Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai’, Salahuddin (ed.), Dilliwale, p. 243. (40) Preface to Halide Edib, The Conflict of East and West in Turkey (Delhi, n.d.), pp. ix–x. (41) Ibid., pp. 323–4. (42) Edib, Inside India, p. 216. (43) Ibid., pp. 217–18. (44) Jalil Abbasi, Kya din the, p. 158. (45) To R.D. Dutt, 21 March1935, B.R. Nanda (ed.), Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant (New Delhi, 1996), Vol. 6, p. 359. (46) Major General Shahid Hamid, Disastrous Twilight: A Personal Record of the Partition of India (London, 1986), p. 132. (47) For a description, see Radha Rani, ‘The Great Humanist of Our Times’, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, 1970: A Souvenir, p. 84. (48) M. Chalapathi Rau, Govind Ballabh Pant: His Life and Times (New Delhi, 1981), pp. 177–8. (49) Chopra, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, p. 24. (50) Mridula Sarabhai, ‘Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, 1970: A Souvenir, p. 81.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (51) For details, Peter Reeves, Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of their Relations until Zamindari Abolition (Bombay, 1991), pp. 242–3. (52) B.R. Tomlinson, The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1928–42 (London, 1977), p. 97. (53) Rafi to Rajendra Prasad, 17 December 1938, Valmiki Choudhary (ed.), Dr. Rajendra Prasad Correspondence and Select Documents (New Delhi, 1984), Vol. 2, p. 175. (54) ‘This Assembly,’ stated Rafi, ‘accepts the principle of the abolition of the zamindari system in this province which involves intermediaries between the cultivators and the state, and resolves that the rights of such intermediaries should be acquired on the payment of equitable compensation and that Government should appoint a committee to prepare a scheme for this purpose.’ (55) Reeves, Landlords and Government, pp. 265–6. (56) The Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Bill was introduced in the UP assembly in July 1949 and passed on 10 January 1951. Its opponents appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the Act on 5 May 1952. The UP Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act came into effect from 1 July 1952. (57) Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 117. (58) 8 February 1946, SWJN, Vol. 14, p. 239. (59) Based on discussions with the late A.J. Kidwai and M.K. Kidwai. The journalist Prem Bhatia referred to Kidwai’s ‘simple and inexpensive habits, puckish humour [and] his noteless style of administration’. Prem Bhatia, Reflections Along a Journey (New Delhi, 2002). (60) Nehru, An Autobiography, pp. 401–2. (61) Chopra, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, p. 24. (62) Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 117. (63) Y.D. Gundevia, In the Districts of the Raj (New Delhi, 1992), p. 137. Gundevia was posted in Gorakhpur when Rafi was the Revenue Minister (1937–39). (64) Rau, Govind Ballabh Pant, p. 329. (65) 17 February 1945, SWJN, Vol. 13, p. 560. (66) Rau, Govind Ballabh Pant, p. 335.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (67) M. Hashim Kidwai, ‘Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’, Namwaran-e Aligarh: Fikr-o-nazar (Aligarh Muslim University), January 1987–July 1988, 1, pp. 243–5. This article provides a romanticized version of his stay in Aligarh. (68) For this section, I have used, among other sources, the articles published by Anwar Jamal Kidwai in the National Herald (Delhi and Lucknow) on the eighteenth anniversary of Rafi’s death. I also draw upon his essay ‘An Unsung Hero of Freedom Struggle: Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’, Islam and the Modern Age, May 1993. (69) Edib, Inside India, pp. 214–16. (70) Kidwai, ‘Conflict and Consensus’, p. 171. (71) To Wavell, 2 July 1945, Nicholas Mansergh (ed.), The Transfer of Power 1942–47 (hereafter TP) (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office: London), Vol. 5, p. 1185. Hallet was governor of Bihar (1937–39) and of UP (1939–45). (72) F. Wylie to Wavell, 19 June 1946, TP, Vol. 7, p. 982. (73) Chopra, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, quoted in Tomlinson, Congress and the Raj, pp. 72–3. (74) To Mazharul Haq, 10 August 1923, Ayde, Message of Ashiana, p. 76. (75) Pandey, Ascendancy of the Congress, p. 37. (76) Raja of Mahmudabad, ‘Some Memories’, C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright (eds), The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935–1947 (London, 1970), p. 380. (77) Kidwai, ‘An Unsung Hero’, pp. 90–1. (78) For example, he issued a letter on 15 July 1929 inviting members to a conference at T.A.K. Sherwani’s house at 2, Canning Road in Allahabad on 27 July. Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Vol. 40, NMML. (79) To Rafi, 13 April 1930, SWJN, Vol. 4, p. 312. (80) Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India, p. 128, fn. 46. (81) Rafi to Nehru, 20 August 1936 & 1 September 1936, AICC Papers, File G-38, 1936, NMML. (82) Abdul Wali (1885–1945), a Bara Banki based Congressman, to Nehru, 28 March 1937, G 5(1), 1937, AICC Papers. (83) Das, From Curzon to Nehru and After, pp. 181–2. Page 36 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (84) Kanji Dwarkadas quoted in Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York, 1984), p. 149; Haig to Linlithgow, 8 October 1939, Haig Papers; Khaliquzzaman to Nehru, 29 June 1937, G 61,1937, AICC Papers. (85) Haig to Linlithgow, 8 October 1939, Haig Papers. (86) Leader, 9–10 May 1937, quoted in B.R. Nanda, ‘Nehru, The Indian National Congress and the Partition of India, 1935–47’, Philips and Wainwright (eds), Partition of India, p. 156. (87) ‘To Khaliquzzaman, 27 June 1937, SWJN, Vol. 8, p. 135. (88) To Rafi, 1 July 1937, SWJN, Vol. 4, p. 146. (89) 5 July 1937, ibid., p. 153. (90) To Rafi, 30 September 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Vol. 40. (91) To Rafi, 13 October 1939, ibid. (92) To Rafi, 23 October 1939, ibid. (93) Haig to Brabourne, 26 September 1938, Haig Papers. (94) Haig to Linlithgow, 17, 25 & 29 September 1939, ibid. (95) Haig to Linlithgow, 6 December 1938, ibid. (96) Haig to Linlithgow, 25 February 1939, ibid. (97) Haig to Linlithgow, 6 December 1938, ibid. (98) Nehru to Tandon, 7 June 1948, SWJN, 2nd srs, Vol. 6, p. 443. (99) According to Saligram Jaiswal, secretary of the Allahabad District Congress Committee from 1932 to 1942, ‘I was in the Kidwai group, and we were against Pant and against Gupta—and Gupta was Pant’s man. We did not like the corruption of Congressmen; they were taking bribes and dealing in permits, licenses, and so on. But also they (Gupta and Pant) were engaging in activities to destroy us. We had a majority in Allahabad, but they changed the membership lists, and so on, and changed the voting so that the other group could win. There was nothing we could do. I was bitterly opposed to C.B. Gupta. So one day twenty-six of us crossed the floor [in the assembly] and formed the opposition. Pant was quite upset over this. He did not think that we would do it since we were old Congressmen. Angela S. Burger, Opposition in a Dominant-Party System: A Study of the Jan Sangh, the Praja Socialist Party, and the Socialist Party in Uttar Pradesh, India (Bombay, 1969), p. 187. (100) Ibid., pp. 120–1 Page 37 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (101) Lance Brennan, ‘From One Raj to Another: Congress Politics in Rohilkhand, 1930–50’, D.A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle, 1917–47 (London, 1977), p. 496. (102) Jain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, pp. 56–7. (103) For Rafi’s denunciation of Satyamurti and their differences over the issue of office acceptance, see Marguerite Dove, Forfeited Future: The Conflict over Congress Ministries in British India, 1933–1937 (New Delhi, 1987), pp. 88, 179. (104) Statement on Congress Parliamentary Board, 1 September 1934, Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva, Vol. 4, p. 329. (105) Joint Statement on Office Acceptance, 31 August 1935, ibid., p. 331. (106) Paul R. Brass, Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh (California: Berkeley, 1965), p. 40. (107) There was, for example, the case of a high court judge who Rafi accused of corruption. Nehru told him bluntly: ‘I am afraid you set about the business in the wrong way. You talk about corruption and spend a lot of time over relatively unimportant matters, thereby possibly missing the major things. There is a certain priority and a certain degree of importance about matters, and there is also a certain restraint in a minister in referring to such matters’. To Rafi, 27 June 1949, SWJN, New Srs., Vol. 12, p. 181. (108) Rafi to Patel, 11 January 1950. Patel replied on 14 January: ‘Thank you for your letter of 11 January 1950, the tone and contents of which have not come as any surprise to me. With all the part that you have played in UP politics, there could hardly have been a different approach to my statement from that which you have taken’. Durga Das (ed.), Sardar Patel’s Correspondence: 1945–50 (Ahmedabad, 1973), Vol. 9, p. 315. (109) Rafi to Patel, 16 June 1949, ibid., Vol. 8, p. 559. (110) Patel to Rafi, 19 June 1949, ibid., p. 559. (111) 21–24 February 1947, Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, p. 135. (112) 22 September, 5 and 27 November 1950, Inside Story of Sardar Patel, pp. 424, 454. (113) 27 September 1950, ibid., p. 423. (114) Report to President, UP PCC, 12 April 1949, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 10, pp. 194–202. (115) Ibid., p. 201. Page 38 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (116) N.V. Gadgil, Government From Inside (Meerut, 1968), p. 135. (117) Nehru to Rafi, 11 April 1948, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 6, pp. 435–6, and p. 436 & ns. 3–6. (118) Nehru to Rafi, 21May 1950, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 14, Part 2, p. 302, and fn. 3–4, Vol. 14, part 1, p. 437. (119) Myron Weiner, Party Politics in India: The Development of a Multi-Party System (Princeton, N.J., 1990), p. 84. (120) Hasan, A Nationalist Conscience, p. 211. (121) Ansari to Rafi, 18 February 1930, Hasan (ed.), Muslims and the Congress, p. 105. (122) Hasan, A Nationalist Conscience, p. 215. (123) Prison Diary, 23 June 1933, SWJN, Vol. 5, p. 485. (124) Rafi to Ansari, 4 February 1930, Hasan (ed.), Muslims and the Congress, pp. 118–19. (125) Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 139. (126) Prem Bhatia wrote that ‘he was totally immune to the communal appeal and disliked being referred to as a Muslim leader’. Prem Bhatia, Reflections, p. 225. (127) Leader, 10 April 1931, quoted in Hasan, A Nationalist Conscience, p. 197. (128) Times of India, 23 April 1937; Dove, Forfeited Future, p. 406. (129) See ‘Joint Statement on Office Acceptance’, 31 August 1935, Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva, Vol. 4, p. 331. (130) Dove, Forfeited Future, pp. 86–7, 103. (131) Tomlinson, Indian National Congress and the Raj, pp. 41–2. (132) Kidwai, ‘An Unsung Hero’, p. 94. (133) Sampurnanand, Memories and Reflections, p. 125. (134) Rau, Govind Ballabh Pant, pp. 328–9. (135) To Nehru, 9 December 1935, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Vol. 40. (136) To Nehru, 20 April 1936, ibid.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (137) Quoted in Rani Dhavan Shankardass, Vallabhbhai Patel: Power and Organisation in India Politics (Hyderabad, 1988), pp. 180–1. (138) Haig to Linlithgow, 8 February 1939, Haig Papers. (139) D.P. Mishra, The Nehru Epoch: From Democracy to Monarchy (New Delhi, 2001), pp. 240–1. (140) Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: A Life (Ahmedabad, 1990), p. 527. (141) Quoted in Rajmohan Gandhi, The Rajaji Story (Bombay, 1984), p. 206. (142) In his letter of resignation, Rafi outlined the objectives of the KMPP. He said that the foremost objective was to throw out the Congress government plagued with inefficiency and corruption. In such circumstances, he stated in Lucknow, ‘if Mr. Nehru come s during the election campaign and asks for a vote for the Central and State governments, it will be our duty not to act on his advice. Though the Congress has declared its faith in Mr. Nehru’s leadership, he is not able to get the organization to work along the lines he would wish. We will regard Mr. Nehru as our leader, but that is confined to the high ideals preached by him, and not in regard to the matter of voting for the present Congress governments’. (143) Weiner, Party Politics in India, pp. 74–84; Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Volume Two: 1947–1956 (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 150–5. (144) The Socialisat Party and the KMPP formally merged in September 1952. (145) Jain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, p. 2. (146) Patel to Nehru, 25 June 1949, Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, Vol. 8, p. 253. (147) The paper was launched in September 1938. Among its board of directors were Jawaharlal Nehru (chairman), Kailas Nath Katju, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Mohanlal Nehru, and Raghunandan Saran. (148) For correspondence on the subject, Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, Vol. 10, pp. 386–91. (149) V. Shankar, My Reminiscences of Sardar Patel (New Delhi, 1975), Vol. 2, p. 107. (150) 24 November 1950, Inside Story of Sardar Patel, p. 466. (151) This relates to the appointment of the Raja of Bhadri as Cattle Utilization Adviser under Rafi’s ministry. The Union Public Service Commission opposed his appointment, and Nehru agreed that he did not possess the requisite technical qualification. He did not want Rafi to override the UPSC recommendation; ‘also, Page 40 of 44

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives the fact that he happens to be a friend of ours and is personally known to us goes rather against him in this particular matter’. To Rafi, 29 June 1953, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 22, p. 304. (152) Patel to Nehru, 28 August 1949, ibid., Vol. 8, p. 337. Patel told Rajaji: ‘He [Nehru] has gone so suspicious now. I don’t want to say anything to him about Rafi. You don’t tell him’. 27 October 1950, Inside Story of Sardar Patel, p. 451. (153) Rajagopalachari to Patel, 11 November 1950, Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, Vol. 10, p. 335. (154) Patel to Rafi, 15 September 1949, ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 456–7. (155) He wrote: ‘Although the normal time for the completion of such construction is two months, it may be possible to construct it much earlier’. Quoted in B. Krishna, Sardar Patel: India’s Iron Man (New Delhi, 1995), p. 369. (156) Jain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, pp. 118–20. (157) Kidwai, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, p. 133. (158) ‘Rafi used to discuss air services with me frequently. He always had a good word for your air services, except for the fact that he thought you were too cautious and he did not like the idea of high fares. He may have been right or wrong. But I have no doubt in my mind that any desire to injure your services was never present in his mind. So far as the subordinate officials were concerned, they may have behaved or misbehaved, occasionally, but Kidwai did not give them too much rope and even in their case it seemed to me incredible that, secretly in their minds, they were pursuing this long-distance policy of causing harm so as to make acquisition easy later. I doubt if they even thought of acquisition’. Nehru to J.R.D. Tata, 10 November 1952, SWJN, New srs., Vol. 20, pp. 229–30. (159) Menon, The Raj and After, pp. 88–9; Jain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, pp. 102–13. (160) Nehru to Damodar Swarup Seth, 8 July 1952, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 18, p. 232, fn 2. (161) Ibid., Vol. 23, p. 472, fn. 3. (162) Durga Das, From Curzon to Nehru, p. 310. (163) M.V. Kamath, Points and Line Charat Ram: A Biography (New Delhi, 1994), pp. 53–4. (164) Nehru to the Chief Ministers, 5 July 631, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 18, pp. 631–2.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (165) Report of the Foodgrains Enquiry Committee, quoted in D.R. Gadgil, Planning and Economic Policy in India (Poona, 1961), p. 167. (166) C. Subramaniam, Hand of Destiny: Memoirs (Bombay, 1993), Vol. 1, pp. 167–8. (167) S.K. Dey, Power to the People? A Chronicle of India 1947–1967 (New Delhi, 1969), p. 176. (168) ‘I was more cautious and regarded control prices once controls were withdrawn as, essentially, floor prices, as they had to be once the open-market prices fell below the control prices’. C.D. Deshmukh, The Course of My Life (New Delhi, 1974), p. 208. (169) ‘The other issue which Kidwai bitterly resented was a decision taken by the Economic Committee of the Cabinet under my Chairmanship (prior to March 1952), not to accept Kidwai’s proposal to nationalize Himalayan Air Lines—in which he apparently felt interested’. Ibid. (170) 18 October 1950, Inside Story of Sardar Patel, p. 442. (171) Azad, K.N. Katju and A.P. Jain were the other members. In August 1954, Farooq Abdullah (b. 1937), son of Sheikh Abdullah, suggested to Nehru that Rafi should visit the Sheikh in prison and have a frank talk with him. The latter, according to his son, was unhappy with Nehru that, ‘after twenty years of friendship with him, I should have dropped him in this way’. Note to Vishnu Sahay, 17 August 1954, Ravinder Kumar and H.Y. Sharada Prasad (eds), SWJN, New srs., Vol. 26, p. 298. (172) A.G. Noorani, ‘Missed Moments’, Statesman, 25 October 1999. Focusing on Nehru’s role, this is an informative review of the controversy over Abdullah’s arrest. (173) B.M. Kaul, The Untold Story (Bombay, 1967), pp. 137–47. (174) O.M. Mathai, My Days with Nehru, p. 241. (175) Durga Das, From Curzon to Nehru, p. 410. (176) Karan Singh, Autobiography (New Delhi, 1994), p. 164. (177) For a different version, see Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol. 2, pp. 132–3. (178) According to Durga Das, Rafi had told him that ‘I found a solution for Kashmir. I got him to agree to throw Sheikh Abdullah out. Unfortunately, however, there was no follow-up action. We should have absorbed Kashmir for good and all’. Durga Das, From Curzon to Nehru, p. 379.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (179) For Rafi, see Kidwai, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, p. 169. (180) To J.L. Berry, 3 June 1942, SWJN, Vol. 12, p. 356. (181) 29 September 1950, Inside Story of Sardar Patel, pp. 425–6. (182) To Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, 24 July 1951, Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol. 2, p. 153. (183) Nehru to Rafi, 6 May 1951, ibid., pp. 151–2. (184) To Mahmud, 12 October 1940, Datta and Cleghorn (eds), A Nationalist Muslim, pp. 202, 204. (185) 17 April 1943, SWJN, Vol. 13, p. 115. (186) To Nehru, 13 November 1924, Datta and Cleghorn (eds), Nationalist Muslim, p. 51. (187) Nehru to Mahmud, 21 March 1927, ibid., p. 48. (188) Kamala Nehru to Mahmud, 21 June 1927, ibid., p. 77. (189) Durga Das, From Curzon to Nehru, p. 379. (190) 28 September 1950, Inside Story of Sardar Patel, p. 426. (191) Nehru to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, 23 July 1951, quoted in Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Volume Two: 1947–1956 (New Delhi, 1979), p. 153. (192) Shankar, My Reminiscences, p. 76. (193) Amongst them were: A.P. Jain, minister for relief and rehabilitation (1950– 54), and for food and agriculture (1954–59); Khurshidlal, Congressman from Dehra Dun and deputy-minister in the central government (1948–50); and Mahavir Tyagi (1899–1980), member of the UP Legislative Assembly (1938–48), Constituent Assembly (1947–49), and Lok Sabha (1952–67). (194) Nehru to Rafi, 14 February 1950, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 14, p. 438. (195) Rafi to Nehru, 17 July 1951, ibid. (196) Jain, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, p. 5. (197) Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (New Delhi, 1979), p. 136.

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Adab and Political Morality The Story of Three Lives (198) Pant to Chandra Datt Pande, 9 August 1944, Nanda (ed.), Selected Works of Pant, Vol. 10, p. 261. (199) Brass, Factional Politics in an Indian State, p. 39. (200) Statement to the Press, 18 May 1942, Nanda (ed.), Selected Works of Pant, Vol. 9, p. 408, and Nehru to the chief ministers, 15 November 1954, G. Parthasarathi (ed.) Letters to Chief Ministers 1954–1957, (New Delhi, 1988), Vol. 4, p. 70. (201) Malcolm Lyall Darling, At Freedom’s Door (Oxford, 1949), p. 157. (202) Ibid., p. 151. (203) Kidwai, ‘An Unsung Hero’, p. 107. (204) SWJN, Vol. 13, p. 163. (205) Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York, 1946), p. 62.

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords In 1877, Awadh was annexed to the neighbouring North-Western Provinces, which heightened the anxieties of Lakhnavis. This despite the fact that the ensuing changes had little effect on their city’s position vis-à-vis Allahabad, the new capital. Lucknow, British India’s fourth largest city, soon became the centre of political activism. Compared to Allahabad which was bustling with intense political activity, Lucknow was a benign city. This is where Wilayat Ali Kidwai’s children grew up. The educated professional classes and some wasiqadars lost political power and privileges after the annexation of Awadh. From 1885 to 1905, Lakhnavis constituted the majority of Muslim delegates in the United Provinces. Keywords:   Awadh, Lakhnavis, Lucknow, British India, Allahabad, Wilayat Ali Kidwai, United Provinces, political activism

There is no city—except Bombay, the queen of all—more beautiful in her garish style than Lucknow, whether you see her from the bridge over the river, or from the top of the Imambara looking down on the gilt umbrellas of the Chutter Manzil, and the trees in which the town is bedded. Kings have adorned her with fantastic buildings, endowed her with charities, crammed her with pensioners, and drenched her with blood. She is the centre of all idleness, intrigue, and luxury, and shares with Delhi the claim to talk the only pure Urdu. [Rudyard Kipling] Page 1 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood I had to go to Bara Banki on Sunday—and oh how hot it was. M. Marsh Smith suddenly became agitated about the Civil Defence preparations there, and nothing would satisfy him but that we should go over on the Sabbath—in the middle of the afternoon too. And things were in a rather mess, I must admit. But the D.C. and the S.P. are Indians—not bad fellows really, but rather too much inclined to trust to paper reports instead of what they see with their own eyes. As for Bara Banki itself it seemed almost more squalid than Sultanpur; and the bungalow wasn’t as good— but of course it has the great advantage of being close to Lucknow. I shouldn’t mind being D.C. there … [Diary, 2 June 1942, D.P. Hardy Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge]

(p.213) I Awadh’s amalgamation with the neighbouring North-Western Provinces in 1877, just a year before the darbar extravaganza, deepened the anxieties of Lakhnavis,1 despite the fact that the changes it entailed did not substantially affect their city’s position vis-à-vis Allahabad, the new capital. It is true that the lieutenant governor of the new administrative unit was located in Allahabad and the provincial court too was relocated. Yet the new offices added to Lucknow’s civil establishment created new job opportunities at various levels of the bureaucracy. What is more, Lucknow, the fourth largest city in British India, continued to be Awadh’s principal military station in the early twentieth century, and for part of each year as the government headquarters. Attracted by its homogeneous élite community and culture, Harcourt Butler (1869–1938), governor of UP from 1918 to 1922, was sure that there was no district like Lucknow in all of India; to be its deputy-commissioner was the best that an Indian career could offer. Even as secretary to the UP government, he had planned to convert Lucknow—‘that Eastern Oxford, the inspiration of my youth, … my Indian home’—into the capital of the province. But Curzon turned down his proposal.2 Undeterred by this rebuff, Butler had helped to set up the medical college a year later. With its rais and taluqdars herded together in the British India Association located in Qaiser Bagh, Lucknow was a benign city compared to Allahabad, the hub of intense political activity. While Butler described Allahabad as, the ‘intellectual capital’, he designated Lucknow as UP’s ‘social capital’. The Leader referred sarcastically, on the one hand, to the repelling impact on the British psyche of ‘the pestilential influences in Allahabad of agitators and demagogues for whom despots have a holy horror’, and on the other, to the alluring charm for the rulers of ‘the aristocratic and autocratic aroma and stifling and enervating atmosphere of taluqdar-ridden Lucknow’.3

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Lucknow had ceased (p.214) to be a mere Anglo-Indian suburb with its abundant share of artists and writers and their lazy patrons. Even though musicians, poets, and prostitutes stayed to lend light and colour to its feudal lifestyle, Lucknow’s political landscape steadily changed after Saiyyid Ahmad Khan delivered his anti-Congress speech in 1887 and the United Indian Patriotic Association got busy holding its meetings. His legacy was, however, strongly contested in Lucknow. Already, the Congress movement had attracted some professionals, including Kashmiri Brahmans like Bisham Narain Dar, Ganga Prasad Varma, editor of English and Urdu newspapers, Ajudhia Nath Kunzru (1840–92), Raza Husain Khan of the Rifah-e aam, Saiyyid Nabiullah (d. 1925), a graduate of Aligarh settled in Lucknow, and the Shia barrister Hamid Ali Khan. These men, having contributed to changing Lucknow’s dull and quiescent image, formed part of the expansive Urdu-speaking élite. They operated outside communitarian boundaries, and shared a common lifestyle and a common worldview that bore the strong imprint of an eclectic social and cultutal milieu. In addition to the educated professional classes, there was a handful of wasiqadars, the erstwhile members of the ruling elites who had been stripped of political power and privileges after the annexation of Awadh. In 1873, 2,786 of them lived in Lucknow and Faizabad. They were led by Nawabs Muhammad Raza Khan, Bakr Mirza, and Ali Muhammad Khan, president of the Anjuman-e muhammadi, an organization that selected the ninety-seven wasiqadars to attend the Congress sessions.4 From 1885 to 1905, Lakhnavis formed a majority of UP Muslim delegates. Three hundred and fifty individuals attended at least one session and seven more organized by other parties (605 of the total number of UP Muslim delegates). When the Congress met in Allahabad in 1888 and 1892, Lucknow had more Muslim delegates in attendance than the host city. At the 1899 Congress, out of 313 Muslim delegates 288 belonged to Lucknow itself. It was the largest Muslim attendance at an annual session before 1916.5 And when the gradual erosion of Muslim support for the Congress took place, it was principally caused by the anti-cow slaughter riots in eastern UP, and the activities of the Gauraksha Sabha and the Hindi Pracharni Sabha. (p.215) Introducing the Nagri resolution in April 1900, Anthony Macdonnell brought in a strong element of agitation and, moreover, fissured the intelligentsia. Increasingly, the Hindi-Urdu question produced separate symbols —Hindi for the Hindus and Urdu for the Muslims—and led to a fair degree of religion-based polarization. At the time of the 1911 Census, as in earlier census of 1901, people tried to falsify the returns of language. Hindu enumerators

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood recorded Hindi whether the persons enumerated Hindi or not, and Muslims enumerators acted in the same manner with regard to Urdu.6 Although lines of cleavage were much more sharply drawn in Banaras and Allahabad, the heartland of Hindu resurgence, the Hindi-Urdu question became the first major contentious issue in Lucknow’s political and cultural domain. Besides the cultural and material fears it engendered, expressed succinctly in Mohsinul Mulk’s now famous lines—‘It is the coffin of Urdu, let it be taken out with great eclat’—the Hindi-Urdu divide raised UP’s communal temperature as a whole, and in Lucknow particularly. Inevitably, each language or script became identified with a community, and, in the process, sounded the death-knell of a composite linguistic heritage. As the Times of India noted in June 1900, ‘both Allahabad and Lucknow contemporaries agree in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh even Hindu pleaders and petition writers prefer Urdu, but it is not likely they will continue.’7 Before the city could recover from the impact of the language controversy, two major controversies erupted. One of them related to the Privy Council’s judgement on the question of waqf ala al-aulad, leading Shibli Numani, the alim at Lucknow’s Nadwal-al-ulama, to organize a meeting of the religious intelligentsia in November 1908.8 A public meeting two years later debated the ‘wrong interpretation of Moslem precepts and contrary to Moslem doctrines’.9 Around the same time, some publicists hotly contested the issue of Muslim representation on municipal and district boards, already the cause of communal alignments in UP and the Punjab.10 The same year, the Muslim League and the Muslim Educational Conferences held their meetings. The assembly commended their host, the Raja (p.216) of Mahmudabad, and compared his contribution with the conservative landed class that seemed ‘very little disposed to move with the times’.11 Despite his dependence on the government, the Raja patronized not just radical political activities but also extended generous financial support to various educational institutions, large and small. The M.A.O. College was his pet child. He also backed the Shia College, the Karamat Husain Girls’ School, and the Islamia School, all in Lucknow.12 Then, of course, the pan-Islamic winds began to blow slowly across the subcontinent. The Anjuman-e khuddam-e ka’aba came into being in Lucknow. This is where Saiyyid Hashmi Faridabadi published his evocative poem in AlNazir—‘Let’s go to the Balkans’ (‘Chal Balkan chal’)—in December 1912.13 This is where the Urdu paper Hamdam carried Abdul Bari’s ill-fated directives on hijrat, i.e. the migration of Muslims from India to Afghanistan designated as Dar al-aman (The Land of Peace).14 It is a fascinating story for scholarly analysis, but not always a laudable one. Hundreds of Muslims paid for the adventure with their lives. The roads to Afghanistan were filled with poor Muslims, all ravaged by hunger, fear, and disaster. The survivors were miserable and pathetic, and the

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood orders of the Afghan government to send them back troubled them more than the hazardous journey. Lucknow hosted the Khilafat conference in 1920 at which a local poet Abdul Qavi recited the memorable line—Aseero! Karo kuch rehai ki batein (Enslaved! Let’s talk of liberation). This sentiment echoed throughout the city—at the shrine of Shah Mina at the Jauharanwala Park in the middle of Chowk, and at the Aminabad Park, and at the Amin-ud-Daula Park. At the same meeting Mohamed Ali, who kept the pan-Islamic flame alive, spoke uninterruptedly for six hours, declaring that the ‘Indian Muslims have chosen the path of non-violent noncooperation in the belief that by their cause they could secure the interests of the country’. Accompanied by his goats and charkha, Gandhi, the main draw at the meeting, stayed at Farangi Mahal’s Mehal-Sara. A spate of conferences and demonstrations during 1921–22 caused a (p.217) flutter in political circles.15 During the visit of the Prince of Wales in November 1921, Ali Miyan, then young, recalled streets being deserted, the bonfire of foreign goods at the Amin-ud-Daula Park, his schoolteacher brother Saiyyid Habibur Rahman joining a National School, and his relatives wearing khadi. ‘It appeared as if the city was taken over by Gandhi and the Ali brothers, while the British government had retreated’.16 Despite being rocked by the political turmoil, the legislative council decided, in August 1921, to build a council chamber in Lucknow. This erstwhile Nawabi city, now the de facto capital, was preferred over Allahabad, a city tainted with Bengali and Maratha infusion.17 When the university was founded the same year, Butler told his mother: ‘I have exalted Lucknow and “depressed” Allahabad that will never be forgotten’.18 This led, as he had desired, to a rapid and sustained growth of population, which boosted the city’s economy from trade and industry, and led to much construction activity.19 With the overcrowding of its centre, the growing heterogeneity of its population, increases in land price, and the development of new housing areas amidst the palaces and havelis, Lucknow became gradually transformed into a city with better access to services and opportunities. This ‘process of the aggrandizement’ not only continued in the 1920s and 30s at the expense of Allahabad,20 but it also transformed Lucknow into a more complex, segmented and fragmented city. While the poet Sukhdev Prashad ‘Bismil’ derived comfort from the fact that ‘Gomti cannot be transformed into Ganga’ (Wo Gomti ko to Ganga bana nahin sakte), an aggrieved Jawaharlal Nehru, chairman of the municipal board, complained that Allahabad (p.218) received much smaller government grants or loans compared to Lucknow and Kanpur.21 On the eve of Independence, several government departments remained in Allahabad, and Pant, the chief minister, did not endorse the suggestion to situate them in Lucknow. He did not want to deprive the Allahabadis of the solace that Page 5 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood their city was still UP’s de jure capital. ‘The substance is gone’, he wrote, ‘but let them have at least the shadow’. ‘They are entitled to sympathy and consideration’, he added.22 Why? Safi Lakhnavi, the Urdu poet, would have said: Ai Ilahabad ai jaulan gah-e gang-o jaman Tera daman teen triveni ki hai ek anjuman. O Ilahabad, O meadows of Ganga and Jamuna Your robes are three but one is the confluence of the Triveni.

II On River Gomti’s Bank

With the location of the council (1921–36) and the assembly (1937–39 and 1946 onwards), Lucknow soon became the pivot of political activism. In the 1920s, two major episodes heightened tensions. One was the Hindu-Muslim riot in September 1924, a fallout of the violence that had engulfed many parts of the country. ‘The old moon’, bemoaned Mushir Hosain Kidwai in 1924, ‘has disappeared altogether and the new moon has become the proverbial Eid kachand. We are all looking towards the sky for its appearance but have not yet succeeded in locating it. Who can say if it is on the horizon at all’.23 The Simon Commission’s boycott proved to be another major occurrence. When John Simon (1873–1944), its head, was being entertained at a tea party by taluqdars, kites were flown from various points in the city and were then cut in such a way that they dropped at the site of the feast. They had inscribed on them the words ‘Simon go back’.24 An irate administration let the police resort to lathi-charge on a procession on 29 November 1928. (p.219) This ill-fated decision helped the boycott become much more widespread and deeper than it had been earlier that year. The boycotters themselves stirred up anti-British sentiments, drawing political mileage in the elections to local bodies and the Congress’s own organizational elections that were held at the end of 1928,25 which nourished a patriotic surge. ‘Out of evil cometh good and so we have no reason to be dissatisfied with the happenings at Lucknow’, said Nehru.26 The public response to the Simon Commission prepared the groundwork for the civil disobedience movement. Though largely boycotted by Muslim groups, many Lucknow and its outlying areas felt its impact. Following reports of picketing, Lucknow and Bara Banki were placed, along with Unao and Hardoi, under the Unlawful Instigation (Second) Ordinance of 1930. Although the initial burst of activity was quelled by the presence of the army, the UP government apprehended that, ‘after the withdrawal of the troops the Congress will get busy again and resume picketing and boycott; to say nothing of processions’.27 When the heat and excitement was eventually over, Lucknow returned to its easy and laid-back style, with flower shows, resplendent balls at the Government House, and dog shows, ‘a recognized event in the Indian canine calendar’.28 Page 6 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood Though the colonial obsession with rank and the desire to maintain class distinction were closely entwined, wedding receptions occasioned the narrowing down of the segregation between the British élite and the ‘natives’. At the same marriage ceremony solemnized at the Christ Church, where Malcolm Hailey (1872–1969), the lieutenant governor (1928–30 and 1931–34), gave away the bride, the Balrampur’s maharani gifted a gold broche gown. Wazir Hasan and his wife, the Rajas of Jahangirabad, Salempur and Rasulpur, and Nawab Muhammad Yusuf (1885–1956) of Jaunpur attended another wedding at the same church on 29 January 1934. That week Hazratgunj looked ‘like Camberley High Street, full of cars and people hurrying in and out of shops buying things they can’t find in their own home towns’.29 Earlier, Hailey had arranged the match for Qudsia Aizaz Rasul, daughter of his friend Zulfiqar Ali of (p.220) Malerkotla, with the taluqdar of Jalalpur estate in Sandila. The wedding was held at the ‘Dayar-e Daulat’, the Nawab’s house, on Sikandra Road in Delhi.30 In this de facto capital of India’s most populous state, the feverish beat of new life throbbed, as it did elsewhere in India. For one, splintered Muslim groups were drawn to Lucknow to stake their claims to represent the widest possible segments of the community. That included leaders from outside UP, who met to create trans-regional links. In January 1934, Fazl-e Husain visited Lucknow at the suggestion of the Khoja leader, the Aga Khan (1877–1957), to persuade Salempur’s Raja to work with the All-India Muslim Conference, a body formed in the aftermath of the Nehru report controversy. Their aim was twofold: first, to rope in the influential taluqdars; second, to press them into service for recovering the influence they had lost at Aligarh’s Muslim University.31 One man who disapproved of such manoeuvres was Mushir Hosain Kidwai. Within the precincts of the council and outside, he went along with the Congress on the reform issue and lambasted the organizers of the All Parties’ Muslim Conference for their ‘stinking sycophancy and servile loyalty’.32 In the second half of April 1937, the Ahrar Conference caused a ripple in local society. But it was the momentous League session in October that attracted countrywide attention. At Lalbagh, Jinnah launched his diatribe against the Congress, underlining, in the same breath, the country’s need for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.33 Serving in Sind from 1927 to 1947, H.T. Lambrick noted in his diary: ‘when the cry of “Islam in danger” goes up, as it has now done at the big meeting of the Muslim League in Lucknow, we shall see whether “Congress-ki-jai” or “Allah-o-Akbar” will rally the Muslims’.34 It is worth mentioning (p.221) that the League, with its nominal headquarters in Lucknow, had become virtually defunct three years earlier: during the central legislative election that year, UP Muslims had contested their reserved seats under the auspices of the Unity Board. By the admission of one of its members, they were not bound by any rules of conduct.35

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood In 1937, an industrial exhibition was held on the banks of river Gomti; its fame spread far and wide because of the Parsitan Theatre and the parts played by K.L. Sehgal (1904–47) and Akhtaribai Faizabadi (later Begum Akhtar: 1914–74), two of the most popular singers in upper India. Yet all eyes were fixed on the election campaign. Lawrence J. Stubbs reported from Lucknow that ‘the Congress had a definite policy, funds, plan and men. The opposition had funds but no policy and no leaders, or if they had, no united front and no real organization’.36 The result was predictable. Haig conceded that: As against the discontent, which is either sectional, as in the case of the Muslims, the landlords and the industrialists, or vague, as in the case of men of moderate views, we have to place the immense prestige that the Congress have won in the Province since the general election, and particularly since they took office, the authority they possess and to exploit fully by virtue of being the Government, the nationalist sentiment which extends probably to the much larger proportion of the population than one group might suppose, and is greatly reinforced by Hindu feelings and ideas if Hindu raj, the great personal popularity of Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant whose name is known throughout the Province. These are very important assets and far outweigh the factors of discontent … . There is in my opinion at the present time no sign at all of the possibility of any Congress Government being formed in this Province other than a Congress Government.37 With the virtual disappearance of the National Agriculturist Party and the formation of a Congress ministry, Lucknow became, after decades of intense competition with Allahabad, the principal arena where provincial and national politics intersected. Indeed, this is where crucial decisions were taken. In April 1936, for example, when the Congress spelt out its agrarian (p.222) programme in Lucknow, Nehru, the president, raised a storm by offering a blueprint for a socialist society.38 Seven members of the working committee that included Rajendra Prasad, Rajagopalachari, Patel, and Kripalani offered to resign. Ultimately, Gandhi’s intervention led to a truce. Long accustomed to hosting important gatherings and housing numerous organizations, Lucknow now provided the lead for conducting mass mobilization campaigns. In 1937, the Students’ Federation organized an ‘Anti-Repression Day’ at the Aminabad Park. The star performer was Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, followed by Ansar Harvani (1916–97), president of the UP Students’ Federation, Qazi Jalil Abbasi (b. c. 1912), the Basti-born and Aligarh-educated president of the Lucknow Students’ Federation, and Sultana Minhaj, a student activist at the Lucknow University. Minhaj was later married to the poet, Ali Sardar Jafri. This successful campaign, which brought scores of students on to the streets, buoyed the Federation to organize yet another protest rally against Maurice Gwyer (1878–52), the vice-chancellor (1938–50), as an expression of solidarity with two Page 8 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood rusticated members of the Federation in Delhi University. The rally turned violent, and the governor arrested Jalil Abbasi on 17 December 1940. Among his jail inmates were Ali Sardar Jafri,39 Ali Jawad Zaidi (b. 1920), Chetan Singh, Sajjad Zaheer’s elder brother Husain Zaheer, and C.B. Gupta. When he was not playing chess with the prison guard, Jalil Abbasi read Good Earth (1931) by Pearl Buck (b. 1892), the American novelist, and Mother (1907) by Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), the great Russian writer. He also read a great deal of communist literature. When he was released in 1941, he had been converted to communism.40 His political views, which had underwent a sea-change from the time he joined the anti-Communist front with Balram Singh Srivastava, were fortified by his meeting Kaifi Azmi in 1943. Deeply stirred by his revolutionary poems (p.223) in his collection, later published as Jhankaar,41 Jalil Abbasi remained with the Communist party until 1946. He quit and joined the Congress only after the Communist party tactlessly decided to endorse the Muslim League demand for a separate nation. Much the same younger players dominated Lucknow’s political life during the Quit India movement. True, the enthusiasm it generated mostly affected the districts in eastern UP—Ballia, Ghazipur, Azamgarh, Banaras, Jaunpur, Allahabad, and Gorakhpur. Yet, the Individual Satyagraha Campaign from October 1940 to December 1941 had elicited much greater response in Lucknow; in fact, Rafi’s arrest on 13 December caused much excitement. It was ‘a shrewd blow, as he was responsible for the organization and finance of the extended movement’.42 Gandhi described his detention, along with the forfeiture of the National Herald’s security and the search of the A.I.C.C. office, as a ‘triple tragedy’. He insisted that the government revoke the forfeiture order, discharge Rafi, and return the papers seized from the A.I.C.C.43 And when the government freed Rafi in mid-July 1945, the Mahatma wrote to him at his resting-place in Anand Bhawan: ‘It is good you were freed. Do you get fever? Do you have weakness? Write to me fully’.44 In August 1945, leaflets distributed in Lucknow reaffirmed the August 1942 resolution. Observance of Martyrs’ Day followed.45 A year later, industrial unrest fanned by the nationalist stirring spread from Kanpur to Lucknow. A strike at the R.G. Cotton Mills led to two short strikes by the clerks of the MTCR and the workers at the Carriage & Wagon Workshop. Railway employees at Jhansi, Tundla and Lucknow struck work. ‘The labour situation has deteriorated’, stated a fortnightly report, ‘and the Province in general and Lucknow, Cawnpore and Allahabad in particular are suffering from a wave of strikes’.46 In early October 1945, Nehru returned to Lucknow to attend the UP PCC meeting, and introduced the Indian National Army slogans of Jai Hind and Delhi Chalo.

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood (p.224) In Lucknow lived the Raja of Mahmudabad, Nanpara, Jahangirabad, and Salempur, the latter a Muslim League supporter before his expulsion for joining the interim government. Far removed from their estates but operating through the British India Association, of which the Raja of Jahangirabad was president, they were engaged in a life and death struggle to retain their rural dominance. ‘The taluqdars,’ commented a communist activist, ‘have come to think Lucknow their fortress where the wailings or the wrath of the groaning Kisans can not reach them’.47 Stationed in their palaces to lobby with their benefactors in government and their allies in the non-Congress camp, they chose the council chamber and the columns of the Pioneer to vent their anger and disenchantment. Wary of local leaders from the mofussil towns and their supporters, who flocked to the city with their demands and grievances, they warned the officials of letting Lucknow, once a benign feudal city, turn into a hub of agitation politics. Once the kisans and workers stormed the assembly and council building or marched through the streets of Lucknow, as in 1938 after Easter and again in May 1946,48 they talked of mob rule. Indeed, the huge abyss that was opening up was not such between the Congress and the landlords, as between the kisans and the Lucknow-based zamindars and taluqdars. The divide was consolidated by the propensity of the police to violently suppress discontent and unrest among impoverished landless proletarians and kisans. At the same time the city’s rapid politicization created new cleavages. The Congress and the League fell apart over the coalition issue in 1937, with Khaliquzzaman, the Raja of Mahmudabad, and Nawab Muhammad Ismail Khan of Meerut opting to revive the defunct League from their vantagepoint in Lucknow. The Shias and Sunnis fought their battles on the street; the magnificent imambaras mutely witnessed the depth of sectarian feelings in a city that had set exemplary standards of harmonious living for its citizens. The idiosyncratic Inayatullah Khan (1888–1963), popularly known as Allama Mashriqi, created panic, as his Khaksar followers exacerbated the mounting Shia-Sunni tension. ‘The situation in Lucknow’, wrote the Raja of Mahmudabad, ‘is telling on the peace and prosperity of (p.225) other districts, and I am afraid that unless and until the people in authority will enforce dictatorial orders the situation will go from bad to worse’.49 The Congress ministry, too, triggered disputes and conflicts. The aggrieved kisans demonstrated in Lucknow: a demonstration in early March, addressed by Nehru, attracted fifty thousand kisans. ‘They were a miserable lot with sorrowladen eyes, many with bent backs, old and decrepit, and I wondered what force had made them drag their wretched bodies through many miles of dusty road’.50 Meanwhile some landlords—the majority remained inert and passive—revolted against the UP Tenancy Bill. The Oudh Zamindars’ Conference met on 28 May 1938 at Lucknow followed by the landlords’ meeting with the CWC on 21 September. The problem at the heart of the landlords’ claim was rarely articulated so clearly. These were, however, rearguard actions of a minority: Page 10 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood their dream ran counter to the principles of democracy. Wrote the National Herald: What right have these people to complain of the anti-zamindar slogans … when they have done nothing so far, and do not appear prepared to do anything in the future to remove the grievance which are responsible for those cries? … Most of them (taluqdars, Rajas and zamindars) are still in love with the Union Jack and all that it means for their country … They have not been able to convince themselves that the Congress has come to power for good, and that their alliance with John Bull should be considered an old, unhappy tale of their miserable past of which they should be thoroughly ashamed.51 The landlords knew that they had to fight alone or not at all, and that the widespread criticism of their stance did not diminish their right to determine the fate of their country. Ahmad Said Khan (1888–1982), the Nawab of Chattari tried to lay the foundation of a non-communal party on the same lines, as there was in Punjab, but the outcome of the elections led Hindu and Muslim landlords to go their separate ways.52 He should have added that the landed class had, in fact, lost its raison d’être in a rapidly changing society. What made its position vulnerable were (p.226) adult suffrage, the emergence of new classes poised to stake their claims, and the political awakening in the countryside. Ultimately the abolition of zamindari knocked the last nail into their coffin. Reverend D.P. Hardy (1912–77) served two short periods in Lucknow as joint magistrate. He complained of the dust and heat: ‘I guess’, he wrote on 20 May 1942, ‘that’s really all the news there is’.53 The fact is that a great deal was happening in and around Lucknow. Besides the Shia-Sunni riots in May 1938, Lakhnavis, who were now exposed to the intrusion of the Hindu Mahasabha stalwart, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), felt the bitter legacy of Hindu-Muslim riots in Banaras and Allahabad in March that year. The Maharashtrian ideologue had published Essentials of Hindutva in 1924, outlining his exclusionary notion of Hindu nationalism. Many of his ideas were coherently set forth in We; or, Our Nationhood (1939) by Madav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906– 73), the high priest of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS). Monitoring Savarkar’s activities, UP’s governor reported in early April 1938: A new development which might perhaps grow in importance in its effect on communal relations, and even of the general political situation, is some re-emergence of the Hindu Mahasabha influence. This was almost completely submerged at the time of the general election, but Savarkar has been touring in this Province and, I am told, has addressed big gatherings both in Cawnpore and in Lucknow. His policy is violently anti-British, but the support he receives is probably mainly based on Hindu communal feeling. He has been attacking the Congress for neglecting the interests of Page 11 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood the Hindus, and has been trying to rouse Hindu feeling in just the same way as the Muslim League has been rousing Muslim feeling.54 One of the offshoots of these developments was that the Muslim taluqdars, notably the Rajas of Mahmudabad, Pirpur (Saiyyid Muhammad Mehdi, b. 1927) in Faizabad district, and Nanpara (Saiyyid Muhammad Saadat Ali Khan, b. 1904) in Bahraich district began gravitating towards the League.55 Welcoming the Nanpara Raja to the League fold, Jinnah stated, ‘The issue of Pakistan is simple and clear. It means either we live with complete freedom and honour or perish’.56 The campaign for the (p.227) 1946 election, suggested Ziauddin Ahmad, a late convert to the League creed, should be organized from Lucknow and not Meerut—‘far away from eastern districts’.57 Still, serious conflicts and divisions afflicted the ‘landlord party’. Thus, the Raja of Mahmudabad (1914–73) complained to Jinnah: ‘All my father’s enemies have formed into one solid block.’ ‘The means and methods that they adopt’, he continued, ‘are such, as no selfrespecting persons would stoop to. Falsehood, back-biting, boot licking of the officials are a few of the methods that they are resorting to, and Salempur [the Raja of] is at the head of this opposition’.58 Besides the internal fissures, there remained much ambiguity in attitudes. In the province as a whole the Muslim communities had not thought out the implications of creating Pakistan. Their leaders still regarded it as a bargaining point to secure the most favourable terms from the Congress.59 ‘I have no reason to believe that the conception of “Pakistan” has advanced beyond the stage of wishful thinking’, Viceroy Wavell (1883–1950) was told in December 1944. The correspondent added: ‘I realize that it has proved a very valuable bargaining counter—but I hope that Mr. Jinnah will compromise before Pakistan turns into a tiger that he is riding’.60 Wavell referred to the emotional appeal of the Pakistan idea. He recognized the part played by Fazl-e Husain, Sikander Hayat Khan (1892–1942) and Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana (1900–75) in aligning political parties on economic and communal differences, and therefore talked of encouraging ‘local patriotism’ by leaders of ‘strong character’ and ‘great determination’. For, on long view, neither Bengal nor the Punjab would gain by separation. The driving force came from the Muslim-minority provinces, and not from the prospective Pakistan itself. The viceroy concluded: Until we have something to offer in place of Pakistan, I do not think you should risk being represented as openly hostile to it; but I see no harm whatever in your asking your Muslim visitors sympathetically how they propose to deal with some of the obvious difficulties, and whether there is not some solution short of partition.61

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood (p.228) Every single event or development in Delhi impacted on Lucknow; this brought members of the Non-Party Conference, led by Tej Bahadur Sapru (1875– 1949), to Lucknow on 7–8 April 1944. Every single statement or speech by Jinnah was discussed, debated, and closely monitored.62 Thus a massive public meeting in Lucknow acclaimed his stand at the Shimla Conference in 1945. ‘You have once again’, stated Khaliquzzaman, ‘saved the community from a serious pitfall and steered the ship of Muslim politics clear through rough and stormy weather to a safe anchorage’.63 Meanwhile communal feelings in Lucknow were heightened by the RSS rally on 1 September, the refusal of the Lucknow Municipal Board to appoint a Muslim Assessment Officer and the subsequent walkout by the Muslim members, and the growing Hindu-Muslim rift in the Lucknow University’s Students’ Union. The qasbas were being gradually affected by such ominous developments.64 Still, hopes were pinned on the outcome of the Cabinet Mission. UP’s governor reported on 30 April 1946: ‘Generally speaking the situation in the Province— and more particularly the communal situation—is bad. There is much nervousness and much tension. In the towns people are reported to be laying in lathis and knives and if anything goes wrong over the Cabinet Mission, very serious communal trouble at any rate would seem to be inevitable’.65 It was difficult, stated that month’s fortnightly report, to draw the line between communal and political differences, but an increase in Hindu-Muslim tension had taken place in some places.66 Certainly, the mission failed to resolve the deadlock, and the interim government was wrecked by its inherent contradictions. Jinnah’s call for ‘direct action’ led to the Calcutta killings—4,000 dead and 10,000 injured—between 16 and 20 August. The retaliations in Bihar and UP, wrote Wavell, ‘have been, on the scale of numbers and degree of bestiality, far beyond anything that I think has yet happened in India since British rule began’.67 At Garhmuktesar (Meerut district), the site of an annual fair on the Ganga, a minor altercation between a Jat from Rohtak, Haryana, and a Muslim (p.229) showman led to a melee and to the massacre of every Muslim at the fair. The news spread to the surrounding villages, and in one of the few where Muslims were in a majority, they killed every Hindu man, woman, and child. Reprisals followed elsewhere. About 600 dead bodies were recovered, all but forty were the bodies of Muslims, but no one knows how many were not recovered. As in Bengal and Bihar, where the killings were on a much larger scale, fearful savagery accompanied the outbreak.68 Faced with a crisis of major proportions, UP’s governor found Rafi ‘reasonableness personified’, agreeing to cooperate with the government in dealing with an explosive situation.69 At the crossroads of religious polarization, India became a fertile ground for the idea of a divided nation to nurture. Most found, and that included powerful Congress stalwarts who had until now paid lip service to the conception of a Page 13 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood united India, the country’s partition as the way out of the impasse. Vallabhbhai Patel had said: ‘Frankly speaking, we all hate it, but at the same time see no way out of it’. The options, if any, were foreclosed.70 Recognizing the ground realities that had moved inexorably towards the split of the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities, the Congress agreed to the Partition. Nehru found no other alternative,71 though one of his own colleagues, notably Azad, contested this assumption then and later. Independence brought joy and raised expectations, but it also left its scars on polity and society. Lucknow society split up; the Lakhnavi culture, the pride of its protagonists, was fragmented. Helpless, as the chess players in Satyajit Ray’s film Shatranj ke khilari who sat listlessly at the banks of the Gomti, they watched the tide of hate, anger, and violence sweeping across their city and state. Only a few progressive writers and poets provided the healing touch. Some organized a mushaira; others, including Sardar Jafri and Ale Ahmad Suroor, a young Urdu lecturer at the university, convened a national conference.72 Whatever one might say, these were small but vital interventions for dispersing the clouds of fear and reprisals. (p.230) The Pakistan movement profoundly influenced the lives of the qasbadwellers. Usually benign and tranquil, Rudauli turned volatile, with some celebrating the resignation of Congress ministries. Such was the political climate that the Congress Muslim candidates lost to their League rivals in the notified area elections.73 In Bara Banki’s outskirts, once the chief recruiting ground for kisan activists who had marched to Lucknow in March 1939, HinduMuslim violence occurred in August-September 1945. The lieutenant governor’s visit to Bara Banki to open a Sports Pavilion on 3 September failed to assuage illfeelings. There existed, none-the-less, a silver lining in an otherwise dismal picture. Master Parshotam, a private tutor in Rudauli, continued visiting Muslim homes to teach the girls.74 Likewise Kaul Saheb, a popular teacher at the Government High School, regularly paid obeisance at Haji Waris Ali Shah’s shrine at Dewa. Eventually, in his devotion to the saint, he refused promotions and transfers, and died in Bara Banki in 1995.75 At a time when the Partition’s painful memories were still an intrinsic element of popular consciousness, Bara Banki’s district gazetteer (1964) pointed to the worship of the tombs of pirs and Saiyyids, belief in spirits and ghosts, and cures by witchcraft and sorcery.76 The Hindu merchant Khunkhunji contributed substantially to Shah Mina’s dargah. A survey conducted in the 1960s suggests that out of the twenty visitors eight were Hindu, and the other twelve, Sunni Muslim.77 While contemporaries often bemoaned the sudden rise in the communal temperature, one is, in retrospect, startled by the resilience of pluralism in sustaining these tendencies in Awadh.

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood Urdu poets and writers, both Hindu and Muslim, illustrate the resilience of pluralism, a point Munshi Prem Chand (1884?–1936) underlined. As subinspector of schools, he wrote four somewhat lengthy short stories in Urdu (later published as Soz-e watan), before embarking on his career as the master-writer of Urdu and Hindi fiction. Anand Narain Mulla (b. 1901) learnt Persian at the feet of Maulana Barkatullah Raza of Farangi Mahal. He accepted Pandit Manohar Lal Zutshi’s advice to write in Urdu, underscoring (p.231) the significance of cross-cultural exchanges in Awadh’s composite society.78 Lucknow was the home of many liberal writers and critics, notably Saiyyid Masud Husain Rizvi (1893–1975), who headed the Urdu and Persian departments since 1930, and Saiyyid Ehtisham Husain (1912–72), who moved from Allahabad to join the Lucknow University in 1939. It also hosted a large number of poets in the late 1920s and 30s.79 The best known were Josh Malihabadi (1898–1982), who lived in Nazar Bagh, his drinking companions, the irrepressible Majaz, Moin Ahsan Jazbi (b. 1912), Ali Sardar Jafri, who moved from Balrampur to Lucknow in 1930, and Kaifi Azmi. Some of them wrote for the journal Naya adab, published from Bhopal House in Hazratgunj. Though some left for Bombay to earn their livelihood in the film industry, Lucknow’s literary life was still embellished by the presence of Rashid Jahan, Abdul Aleem (1905– 76), Ehtisham Husain, Niyaz Fatehpuri, Hayatullah Ansari (b. 1911), editor of Hindustan, and Ali Abbas Husaini (1899–1971).80 Sajjad Zaheer was, doubtless, the most prominent figure. Though his own creative writings were few, it was he who launched the quarterly journal, New Indian Literature, of the Progressive Writers’ Movement from Lucknow in 1939. A brilliant organizer, it was he who convened the All-India PWA conference at Lucknow’s Rifah-e aam Club. These meetings and others like them enabled Sajjad Zaheer to evaluate, with a large measure of precision, what he could expect at the next conference.81 The conference proceedings began in April 1936. Along with other luminaries that included public men of national stature, Choudhry Muhammad Ali, Rudauli’s taluqdar, was dutifully present.82 This unique gathering, the significance of which is obscured in the pages of history, (p.232) reflected the yearning of a generation that wanted to change, restructure, and revolutionize society in order to bring about a better world under the leadership of socialist and communist leaders. Not all agreed with the prescription. Not all endorsed militancy, or shared their colleague’s revolutionary zeal. Yet, they sat animatedly listening to Munshi Prem Chand whose short stories and novels had permanently won for him the position of an unquestioned master of Urdu fiction. Anwar Jamal Kidwai was one of them, sitting close to his political guru, Shafiq Naqvi. Little did they realize that Munshi Prem Chand, the star performer, would die a few months later. Long afterwards, they recalled his summation of the role of literature in a colonial society. He had stated:

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood Literature should criticize and analyse our life … . The literature, which does not … infuse in us true strength and determination, is worthless for us in our present times … . In the earlier ages the reins of society were controlled by religion … today literature has taken charge and its means is love for beauty … . The downtrodden, the pained and the deprived—their protection and advocacy is the duty of literature … . The writer and the artist feel revolted at the current mental and social temper. They want to end this plight so that the world can turn into a better place … to end slavery and poverty.83

III Is shehr me ek aahoo-e khush chashm se humko Kam kam hi sahi nisbat-e paimaana rahi hai. In this city, from the doe with the beautiful eyes, Sparingly perhaps, but for long have we sipped.

[Makhdoom Muhiuddin (1908–69) on Lucknow] (p.233) This is the city where Wilayat Ali’s children grew up. This is where they studied, played cricket and hockey, participated in public debates, and eventually chalked out a career for themselves. Midhat Kamil Kidwai played inside-left and represented the Lucknow University and the UP State in hockey. Anwar Jamal Kidwai chose a different turf, emerging as a left-wing student activist. His political akhara was Lucknow University, an institution with high quality teachers drawn from different parts of the country.84 Twice he was expelled for protesting against a condolence meeting held for King George in 1936,85 and for writing ‘pure communist jargon’ as president of the university parliament. At the meeting of the Federation of the Universities’ Union, the chair moved a resolution on the death of George V. That year, Shapurji Saklatwala, the Communist member of the British House of Commons had also died. Anwar Jamal insisted on including his name in the resolution. The ensuing uproar led Muhammad Yakub (1879–1942), member of the Council of State from 1938 until his death, to adjourn the conference and leave the venue by the back door. In December 1938, too, Anwar Jamal led a group that hoisted the Congress flag on the occasion of the university’s convocation.86 Anwar Jamal moved in the company of radical writers and poets, mostly connected with the Progressive Writers’ Movement.87 Almost each one of them mirrored the national life in their creative writings, and reflected its hopes and aspirations, its yearnings and ambitions, and its political ideals. And almost each one of them depicted human life as it was lived from day to day under colonial rule, focusing on the hopes and fears, the pleasures and pains of humble life, with ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’. Recalls Ali Sardar Jafri: ‘We smoked bidis in drawing rooms, recited poetry in bars, delivered political speeches at cross-roads, published books and journal [Naya adab] and engaged Page 16 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood in endless arguments with (p.234) professors and the ulama’.88 The Centre for South Asian Studies in Cambridge has an intelligence report on Anwar Jamal’s activities, though it does not mention his essays, including the one published in the March 1940 issue of the Allahabad journal, Twentieth Century, extolling the Bolshevik Revolution and its leader, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). After the Soviet Union’s collapse, however, he often talked about how justice, freedom, and equality in the communist idea or ideal, had in effect been betrayed by the so-called real communism. Although unhappy with Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, the year Anwar Jamal was posted in Bern, he thought the CIA had inspired the events. It was the slow trickle of information about Stalin in the late 1950s and 60s, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) that led to his final disenchantment. His letter to a friend, written sometime between 1976 and 1978, shows how far he had moved from his early admiration for the Soviet Union. ‘This is the other Russia’, he told him, ‘where truth is stifled, the Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs are exiled or silenced. If tomorrow, the Soviet Union enacts a Mai Lai in any of the lands under its hegemony, there would be no protest inside in the Soviet Union but it would be exposed in the USA’.89 His wife Shakuntala (b. 1921) shared his political beliefs. Both read widely, their bookshelves stocked with the works of Lenin, Gandhi, Jean Paul Sartre (1905– 80), Albert Camus (1913–60), Bertrand Russell, and Pablo Neruda. During their stay in Italy, they read Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, the novels of Alberto Moravia (1907–90), and the short stories and plays of Luigi Pirandello (1867– 1936), the Italian novelist and dramatist. Anwar Jamal remained at heart instinctively averse to Western political hegemony. Deeply critical of the Truman doctrine, McCarthyism, and the execution of the Rosenbergs, he publicly supported the jailed communist poet Nazim Hikmet (1906–63) in Turkey. He shared his anger and indignation with Shakuntala, who had risked the disapproval of both the Sikh and Muslim communities by marrying a Muslim in 1945. Shakuntala, an Allahabad University graduate with a law degree from Lucknow, belonged to Kapurthala. Her father, Balwant Singh Jaspal, had quit his government job when asked to arrest Congress activists in the 1930s. By contemporary standards, Anwar Jamal was a minor actor, who did (p.235) not occupy commanding heights in the power structures. Though he had little personal ambition and rarely sought advancement, his character and abilities made it certain that some degree of recognition would come his way. Saiyyid Raza Ali (1882–1949), in his autobiography published in 1943, described him (Anwar Jamal) as ‘promising’ and ‘talented’.90 That he was. Starting his career as a journalist in Lucknow with the National Herald, a paper M. Chalapathi Rau (b. 1907) edited, he was posted to the Indian High Commission in London in October 1947. He was en rapport with V.K. Krishna Menon (1896–1974), Page 17 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood secretary of the India League (1929–47) and the country’s high commissioner (1947–52) after Independence. It was a time of rationing in Britain, with the C.R. Attlee (1883–1967) government laying the foundations of the welfare state. Coal, gas, and steel were nationalized, and the National Health Service was founded. Predictably, Anwar Jamal felt enthused by the new ideas sweeping away the old Britain to create a more egalitarian society. Returning to London from Istanbul, he arrived just in time, in May 1951, for the general election when the Labour party lost power and Winston Churchill (1874–1965) became Prime Minister. Anwar Jamal’s work in London became more and more demanding. He held the responsibility of publicizing India’s first general election. In February 1953, he joined an Indian delegation led by Girja Shankar Bajpai (1891–1952) to the talks on Kashmir at Geneva. June 1953 saw the queen’s coronation, Nehru’s visit to London, and Tenzing Norgay’s conquest of Everest. In September that year, he was seconded to the United Nations General Assembly for three months to write speeches for Vijaya Laxmi Pandit. He returned to London in 1964 as minister in charge of education at the High Commission. Meanwhile, the family had returned to India in February 1958. Anwar Jamal joined the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, ‘which he absolutely hated’.91 He enjoyed his next assignment (1962–64) with Saiyyid Husain Zaheer at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Later, he served as secretary, Department of Science and Technology (1971–73) and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (1973–75). He was Jamia Millia Islamia’s vicechancellor from 1978 to 1983. When his daughter, settled in London, visited him in Jamia he would tell her that the world (p.236) and international politics no longer interested him, and that his only interest in events in the rest of the world was how they impacted on India. A bureaucrat and administrator, he read much, and was endowed with the gift of a wonderfully retentive memory. His colleagues found him engaging, recalling his impressive size, bearing, and energy, his frank, open countenance, with its firm jaw and steady eyes, his liaisons with women, one of whom became his lifelong partner in 1945, his drinking bouts, and his occasional outbursts of temper. What Bertrand Russell’s biographer has written of him applies to Anwar Jamal: women were as necessary to him as air and sustenance.92 A man of personal charm, though at times humourless, Anwar Jamal jealously guarded the political legacy bequeathed to him by his father Wilayat Ali and cousin Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. He was wedded to their anti-colonial proclivities, their liberal humanism, and their aversion to strident religiosity. In an article published in March 1940, he refuted the two-nation theory. That was the time when he sensed the changing political landscape in Bara Banki caused by the activism of the Muslim Students’ Federation.93 Though the distinct as a whole was still to be wholly polarized along religious lines, the warning signals were Page 18 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood heard clearly. In January 1945, the federation invited Jinnah ‘to motor down from Lucknow to Bara Banki for a few minutes’.94 Whether Jinnah’s presence at the conference made any difference or not is unclear, but there is no denying the enthusiasm in the 1946 election, and the cry of Allah-o-Akbar (God is Great) resounding from the homes and alleys. ‘Sadly,’ Abdul Majid Dariabadi recalled, ‘nobody knew then that this was the final moment when Allah’s name will be raised in this manner at public demonstrations. It shall not be heard again. Why mention Mohamed Ali or Bahadur Yar Jung (who are dead), we will not even see Choudhry Khaliquzzaman’.95 Anwar Jamal thought differently. In the election to the UP legislative assembly, Rafi lost to the Muslim candidate in all the three constituencies: Rae Bareli, Gonda, and Bahraich. Whenever Anwar Jamal wrote, he underlined that Rafi’s driving urge for freedom did not dampen when (p.237) Hindus and Muslims drifted apart. He wore no beard, could not punctuate his speeches with quotations from the Koran, did not spout Urdu poetry, never harked back to the early glories of Islam, and kept away from purely Muslim bodies. That is why even in the fullness of time he never qualified for the Muslim show window of the Khilafat movement.96 Pakistan, Anwar Jamal observed, ‘is romanticism in politics. Like the dream of Ram Raj it has its own yearnings. It is socially reactionary because the leadership is obscurantist and feudal; politically, it is high treason, because it aims to split Indian nationalism. Historical, economic, cultural arguments are against it. But Pakistan, like Gandhism depends upon mass delusion for realization’.97 From being a fellow traveller in the 1940s to joining free India’s staid bureaucracy, Anwar Jamal stood out, as one newspaper headline put it after his death on 4 January 1996, as ‘a nuts “n” bolts man’. His concerns were intertwined with imaging the future, however dreamlike. This is reflected in the essays he wrote during his stint at India House in London. He commented on the magnitude of India’s educational effort, on the upsurge of regional languages replacing or seeking to replace English, on brain drain, on channelling the surplus energy of the young, and on Gandhi’s role as an educational reformer. Gandhi, he observed, was not destined to complete his silent revolution. Even after Independence he was left to fight the greatest battle of his life against his own people who had been maddened by Hindu-Muslim strife after the Partition, and fighting it, he died at the same hands that fired the faggots and nailed the cross.98 After retiring from government his greatest passion was the promotion of mass communication in universities. He lectured to Kanpur University students on developing a district level radio system that would enable people to communicate their needs and problems. He spoke in Ahmedabad (p.238) on starting television programmes with local colour in educational establishments. He lectured at the Television Institute in Pune (Poona) on autonomy, and Page 19 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood elsewhere on ‘Science for the Masses’. India, he said, has had a strong oral tradition through which the knowledge of religious books and great epics was circulated. It was necessary to combine oral and visual channels of communication to disseminate information on natural and social sciences to the common man. ‘It is a challenge to us’, he stated elsewhere: as responsible citizens who care about each other, to lead us towards a new interdependent world community in which, to quote Bertrand Russell, the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure of hope and joy, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what he possesses or to seize what is possessed by others. Welcoming students at Jamia’s Mass Communication Centre (MCC), which he founded and headed, he reminded them of the dominant classes treading thoughtlessly on the rights, liberties, and livelihood of the weak, and urged them to maintain the Centre’s tradition of social protest and dissidence. ‘You should be “nosy Parker’s” in all fields of knowledge and life itself’, he said. During the Emergency (1975), he told his minister of information and broadcasting, I.K. Gujral, ‘Sir, you get out of it. I’m a bureaucrat; I’ll fade out of it’. He retired two weeks later. Perhaps he spent his most creative years in Jamia. He wanted to rescue the institution, founded in 1920 during the non-cooperation enthusiasm, out of the mess into which it had been landed by the previous administration. As its vicechancellor his consuming interests were to set up an engineering college, the mass communication centre that was then a novel idea, and a working women’s hostel. ‘When I see women drilling on our campus’, he commented once, ‘I rejoice at the thought that some of them will not only break into the spaces which are male preserves, but also will be able to fight back against male tyranny and violence’. Though the project of a working women’s hostel, a novel concept for any Muslim institution in the country, evoked hostile responses, its completion gladdened many hearts. Appropriately named after Mridula Sarabhai, whom he admired and who was a close friend of his sister Anis Kidwai, the hostel stands as a tribute to Anwar Jamal’s foresight and tenacity. His other schemes generated anxieties, mostly misplaced, about the (p.239) loss of Jamia’s ‘identity’. While optimistic ‘modernizers’ backed his initiatives, the Jamia community itself, led by the teachers’ association and backed by the non-teaching staff, was not as sanguine about surrendering its individuality to the demands of a modern educational centre. Nonetheless, Anwar Jamal was very much the master, notwithstanding the spate of strikes. He conducted university affairs virtually uncontrolled, unchecked by the academic council, and with not much interference by the executive council, where he enjoyed the support of Professor Sarup Singh, former vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi. Like Rafi, his icon and the source of his inspiration, he fought for victory. Page 20 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood His critics were an impotent handful. Despite their grumbling and discontent, he knew that he was going to lay down the lines on which the university would develop for many years after his retirement. When the institution celebrated its seventy-fifth year of existence, many of the changes foreseen earlier had come to pass, taking Jamia to a place of intellectual prominence. Jamia’s rise to intellectual distinction, though marred by the poor quality of students and teachers, and the lack of infrastructure for sustaining primary research, rests on an array of achievements for which Anwar Jamal deserves credit, and on a concurrent and deliberate reorganization of the existing structures. It was at his behest that the collegiate system, resting on the whims and idiosyncrasies of some powerful but unimaginative administrators, was dismantled. Instead, Jamia fell in line with the modern university system with its separate faculties and departments. Eventually, it was elevated from its demeaning ‘deemed to be university’ status to that of a fully-fledged central university in 1989. In the mid-1980s, Anwar Jamal Kidwai’s sole preoccupation was the setting up of the mass communication centre, a project he nursed till his death with the aid of a highly dedicated Canadian couple, James and Margaret Beveridge. Both played a big role as catalytic agents in the project both at the Indian and the Canadian ends. ‘You and Margaret’, he wrote to the former, ‘were young when you came to India and identified yourselves with our travails and tribulations. In the process both of you have built a network of friendships with Indians’.99 That included the left circles that gathered at the home of the editor of Seminar, Romesh Thapar, and the civil servant P.N. Haksar (1913–98). (p.240) The idea of setting up a mass communication centre at Jamia, though discussed in April and May 1978 with senior officials of the University Grants Commission (U.G.C.) in Delhi, was formally proposed to Professor Satish Chandra, the Chairman, a year later. In his note, Anwar Jamal stated: ‘The Jamia Millia as the smallest of Delhi’s three Universities has been trailing behind the other two Universities of Delhi in the development of studies in traditional subjects and in elaboration of its faculty system. But there is now an emerging academic discipline in which it should be allowed to take the lead. The Jamia thinks that by reason of its philosophical tradition stemming from Gandhiji and Dr. Zakir Husain … it is best fitted to establish teaching and training facilities in the discipline of mass communications’. The U.G.C. accepted the scheme in October 1981 and the Planning Commission in March 1981.100 The cash flow from Canadian International Aid Agency and the York University in Ontario, Canada, commenced in September 1982.101 ‘We are very very pleased’, wrote Jim Beveridge, ‘that this long-drawn-out affair has

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood finally reached the operational stage. A tribute to everybody’s stamina and fortitude’.102 This was a monumental feat, particularly because of Jamia’s poor infrastructure. Hence, the carefully muffled contempt of the visiting Canadian experts, Jim Fisher, Tim Harris, and David Roebuck. ‘You know’, Anwar Jamal told Jim, ‘the Jamia is not so “posh” as York, nor is that part of Delhi in which Jamia is situated. Not only the eyes of Jim and Margaret Beveridge but of thousands of British, American and other westerners are accustomed to the poverty, squalor and untidiness of Indian life. And they love India from some angle or another. But this was the trio’s first exposure to India and they must have felt demoted by their new assignment’.103 In addition, in the initial stage when the MCC project was being discussed Jamia’s image as a traditional ‘Muslim’ university came in the way of securing recognition from the government establishment. In popular perception, the institution did not offer an ideal setting for instruction (p.241) in mass communication; it was good for teachers’ training, social work, and rural engineering. But Anwar Jamal changed this mindset. His energy and stubbornness enabled him to overcome all manner of prejudices, which often come to the fore when Muslim institutions seek funding for advanced courses in engineering, medicine, management, and business administration. Even after the MCC was firmly established, Anwar Jamal had to explain to his counterparts in Canada that the Jamia Is predominantly devoted to modern and secular education for all Indians, especially Muslims … I repeat again that we have no organic link with any Madrasa or any theological school in this country and abroad.104 Engaged in furthering his plans, Anwar Jamal also found time to back certain causes that were so passionately dear to him. In 1982, Israel-allied Christian militiamen at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps killed hundreds of Palestinians during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Anwar Jamal initiated moves in Delhi’s academic circles to demand that the 1978 Nobel Prize, awarded to President Anwar Sadat of Egypt (1918–81) and Menachem Begin of Israel (1913– 92), be withdrawn from the latter, Israel’s Prime Minister (1977–83). ‘You live among the biggest concentration of intellectuals in Delhi’, he wrote to Professor Rasheeduddin Khan of Jawaharlal Nehru University, ‘and would be the proper person to initiate such a move’.105 On 23 May 1982, Yasser Arafat (b. 1929) visited the Jamia campus at the height of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. This is how Anwar Jamal, the vice-chancellor, addressed him: We address you without the ceremonial prefixes of a visiting head of State. We call out to you in the manner in which the early Muslims called to their prophet and first Caliphs of Islam in the drab little mosque of Medina Page 22 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood fourteen hundred years ago. This is because, Ya Abu Amar, in your embattled existence the revolutionary traditions of early Islam live again. In the footsteps of Muhammad, you are in Hijrat from your homeland; you are the Head of a State which is still in the hearts of men and not yet a territory … . You are in the vanguard of the struggle that began under Gandhi and Nehru to roll up the vast spread of colonial (p.242) domination from our part of the world. You are the hope and pride of freedom loving peoples after Ho Chi Minh, and Palestine is the second battlefield of the Third World after Vietnam. Therefore, Ya Abu Ammar, you are more precious to us than all the petrodollars in the world. The Jamia Millia Islamia feels deep affinity with you because we were also born in struggle during the great national movement launched by Gandhi in this country against British rule … . The memory of that stirring period in our history still lingers in our mind, and feel close to liberation struggles in all lands. While this speech reveals something of the man and his commitment, Anwar Jamal’s engagement with the controversies caused by the Shah Bano affair (1985–86) and the dispute over the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya helped raise his public profile. He repeatedly appeared on the platform of Sahmat, a body of artists, poets, and writers founded in memory of a young and brilliant communist activist Safdar Hashmi (1954–89). He contended that the political establishment would tolerate and even encourage mass religiosity only when religious excitement could be manipulated to control the people. He was right. Not only did Anwar Jamal regard secularism as supremely important; he knew that it needed to be ceaselessly defended. He chided Francis Robinson, the British historian of Islam in South Asia, for researching on the ulama of Farangi Mahal. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘do you pay attention to these retrogressive forces? There was a time when Western academics used to work hand in hand with the progressive forces in our society’.106 In April 1992, a massive furore against my remarks on the banning of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses rocked Jamia. While others dithered, Anwar Jamal promptly stated his credo in a public statement. ‘What message are we conveying to our secular allies by our own storm in Jamia?’ he asked. ‘We are afraid’, he continued, ‘that the message is that while the Muslim community claims and needs the right of dissent and protest to organize itself against Hindu fundamentalism, it is not prepared to concede the right of dissent to any intellectual in its own rank. This will further reinforce the stereotype in communal minds about Islam and Indian Muslims’. As angry and agitated students stormed the MCC, he emerged from his office, as he had so often done during his stormy term as vice-chancellor, and stood defiantly at the gate puffing at his pipe. They got (p.243) the message, retreated, and headed towards their

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood next target. Fear, calculation, and suspicion rather than spontaneous generosity inspired their decision to leave the premises. Anwar Jamal died a lonely man, ignored by jealous and ambitious colleagues, and shunned by the university establishment. Reflecting on his life, he tore away the veil of romance that covered so many years of his public life and revelled in the naked and sometimes ugly truth that he experienced after retiring as vicechancellor. In retirement, he lived in a newly-built but secluded community in Noida, far removed from the world of academia he regarded as his natural habitat. He lived with his son Khurshed and daughter-in-law, Tazeen, after the death of Shakuntala. Holding his pipe, he would gather his thoughts and read the source materials he had collected at the India Office Library (now the British Library at St. Pancras) in London. He had an insatiable appetite for books, rows of which, mainly the works of Gandhi and Nehru, stood by his bed. At sunset there was lightning about. But it was not to go on much longer. The long-awaited monograph on Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, fragments of which appeared in a book and a journal, remained unfinished. It was too late in the day to chronicle the complexity of a turbulent era that was as much part of his as of Rafi’s heritage. ‘On the banks of the river of Time’, he would read from Bertrand Russell’s essay ‘On History’, ‘the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave; in the quiet country of the Past, the march is ended, the tired wanderers rest, and all their weeping is hushed’.107 Had I met him a few days before his death, he might have recited to me the supramoral verdict of the Spirit of the Years in Thomas Hardy’s great epic drama: Soon men as thou, who wade across the world To make an epoch, bless, confuse, appal, Are in the elemental ages’ chart —Like meanest insects on obscurest leaves— But incidents and grooves of Earth’s unfolding; Or as the brazen rod that stirs the fire Because it must.108

(p.244) The maker of phrases survives the maker of things in history. There is nothing so swiftly forgotten, says Gore Vidal (b. 1925), the American novelist, playwright and essayist, as the public’s memory of a good action. That is why great men insist on putting up monuments to themselves with their deeds carefully recorded, as those they served will not honour them in life or in death. Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will. Quoting these lines, Anwar Jamal concluded: ‘Rafi Ahmed Kidwai lacked such forethought and his good deeds have crumbled to dust. One wished he were a maker of good phrases and not a maker of things’.109

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood Historians explain the past, and with that our duty is finished. ‘The dead are dead,’ stated A.J.P. Taylor (1906–90), the liberal British historian, in his essay on the 1945 famine in Ireland, ‘they have become so many figures in a notebook’. Yet, their histories need to be told, and their values understood and interpreted to unravel the complexities of the past.110 This is, in sum, the raison d’être of this exercise. Had Jamal Saheb been alive, I would have said to him, I entrust what is mine to thee You know best whether it is much or little. Notes:

(1) Oldenberg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, pp. 261–3. (2) Kusum Pant-Joshi, ‘The Choice of a Capital: Lucknow Under the British’, Indu Banga (ed.), The City in Indian History: Urban Demography, Society, and Politics (New Delhi, 1991), pp. 239–40. (3) Ibid., p. 243. (4) John L. Hill, ‘Muslims and the Congress Organization in Lucknow, 1885– 1905’, John L. Hill (ed.), The Congress and Indian Nationalism: Historical Perspectives (London, 1911), p. 136; Robinson, Separatism, p. 115. (5) Hill, ‘Muslims and the Congress Organization’, pp. 146, 148. (6) Blunt, Census of India (UP, 1911), p. 285. (7) Sender, The Kashmiri Pandits, p. 253. (8) Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments, pp. 170–2. (9) Comrade, 15 March and 22 April 1911. (10) Ibid., 8 July 1912. (11) Comrade, 7 September 1912. (12) For the Islamia School, see Samiullah Beg’s letter in ibid., 6 November 1913. (13) Rais Ahmed Jafri, Auraq-e gumgushta, (Lahore, 1968), p. 350. (14) Ibid., pp. 149–81. (15) On 25 February 1921, the Awadh Khilafat conference met in Lucknow, followed by the Muslim League session in March 1922, when the Subjects Committee passed, against Jinnah’s wishes, Ansari’s resolution on a national pact to ensure Hindu-Muslim unity. S. Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan: AllIndia Muslim League Documents (Karachi, 1969), Vol. 1, pp. 572–3.

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood (16) Nadwi, Karawaan-e zindagi, Vol. 1, pp. 72–3. (17) Harcourt Butler, cited in P.D. Reeves, ‘Lucknow Politics: 1920–47’, Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City (New Delhi, 1997), p. 215. (18) Francis Robinson, ‘The Re-emergence of Lucknow as a Major Political Centre, 1899–early 1920s’, Graff (ed.), Lucknow, p. 203. (19) Reeves, ‘Lucknow Politics’, pp. 216–17. (20) Pant-Joshi, ‘The Choice of a Capital’, p. 244. (21) SWJN, Vol. 2, p. 58. (22) Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant, Vol. 11, p. 274. (23) Kidwai, Swaraj: How to Obtain it, p. 40. (24) Raja of Mahmudabad, ‘Some Memories’, in Philips and Wainwright (eds), Partition of India, p. 393; Khaliquzzaman, Pathway, p. 93. (25) Pandey, Ascendancy of the Congress, pp. 91–2. (26) To R. Bridgeman, 5 December 1928, SWJN, Vol. 3, p. 120. (27) To Jagdish Prasad, 4 June 1930, Home Deptt., Police, File no. 151, 1930, UPSA. (28) Quite a remarkable graphic account of the parties and receptions is provided in, Sheikh Siddiq Ahmad, Tarikh Anjuman-Hind, Vol. 3, pp. 181–393. (29) R.V. Vernede Papers, Box IV, Centre for South Asian Studies. (30) Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 18. (31) ‘I have never looked upon Aligarh or UP’, wrote the Aga Khan in midJanuary 1936, ‘as the leadership of Islam but I do understand here with its geographical position midway between Pakistan and Bengal how important it is that the Congress should not capture our “Centre”. Now for this I propose to follow your suggestion and go once to Aligarh from 6 to 7 February, talk things over with the people on the spot and then come to Delhi.’ The Aga Khan to Fazli-Husain, 14 January 1936, Ahmad (ed.), Letters of Fazl-i-Husain, p. 481. (32) Indian Recorder (Calcutta), April-June 1932, p. 250. (33) Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan, Vol. 2, p. 267. (34) H.T. Lambrick, in Philips and Wainwright (eds), Partition of India, pp. 512– 13. Page 26 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood (35) Khaliquzzaman, Pathway, p. 131. (36) J. Stubbs Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge. (37) Haig to Linlithgow, 19 December 1938, Basudev Chatterji (ed.), Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1938 (New Delhi, 2000), Part 2, pp. 1541–2. (38) The powerful Unionist leader in Punjab had this to say: ‘In actual practice, the work Jawaharlal wants done in the provinces is more or less the same as the programme the Unionists have set before themselves to execute. I doubt whether he will get workers outside the range of the Unionists to carry out his programme in the Punjab’. To Durga Das, 16 April 1936, in Ahmad (ed.), Letters of Fazl-e-Husain, p. 519. (39) One night he dreamt of Shakuntala Jaspal’s (later wedded to Anwar Jamal Kidwai) ‘hair flowing on her shoulder like a jogin, and Anwar Jamal looking bewildered, talking incoherently but smilingly’. Jafri, Lakhnau ki paanch ratein, p. 57. (40) Qazi Jali Abbasi, Kya din the (New Delhi, 1985), 94–105. (41) Abbasi, Kya din the, ibid., p. 15. (42) Home Deptt., Police (I), 3/33/40, NAI. (43) Harijan, 7 June 1942, CWMG, Vol. 82, p. 352. (44) To Rafi, 18 July 1945, ibid., Vol. 87, p. 250. (45) FR, first half of August 1945, H.J. Frampton Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge. (46) FR, 2nd half of May 1946, ibid. (47) R.D. Bharadwaj, ‘Kisan Solidarity with Congress Ministries’, National Front, 22 March 1938; Towards Freedom, 1938, Part 2, p. 1478. (48) FR, 2nd half of May 1946, Frampton Papers. (49) Raja of Mahmudabad to Jinnah, 7 June 1937, SHC. (50) Nehru to Padmaja Naidu, 2 March 1938, SWJN, Vol. 13, p. 696. (51) 13 September 1938, Towards Freedom, Part 2, p. 1577. (52) The Nawab of Chattari to Maurice Hallet, 18 October 1944, MSS.EUR. E251/65, Hallet Papers, British Library, London.

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood (53) D.P. Hardy Papers. (54) Haig to Linlithgow, 8 April 1938, Haig Papers. (55) Raja of Nanpara to Jinnah, 21 September 1945, SHC. (56) Jinnah to ‘Raja Saheb’, 28 September 1945, ibid. (57) Ziauddin to Khaliquzzaman, 27 December 1945, SHC. (58) Raja of Mahmudabad to Jinnah, 16 December 1943, ibid. (59) Hallet to Wavell, 5 October 1944, Hallet Papers. (60) R.G. Casey to Wavell, 17 December 1944, ibid. (61) Wavell to Casey, 1 January 1945, ibid. (62) Raja of Mahmudabad, 7 December 1940, SHC. (63) To Jinnah, 23 July 1945, ibid. (64) FR, 1st and 2nd half of September 1945, Frampton Papers. (65) To Wavell, 30 April 1946, TP, Vol. 7, p. 392. (66) FR, 2nd half of April 1946, Frampton Papers. (67) Wavell to Pethick-Lawrence, 22 November 1946, TP, Vol. 9, p. 139. (68) Darling, At Freedom’s Door, pp. 169–70. (69) F. Wylie to Wavell, 21 November 1946, TF, Vol. 9, p. 128. (70) Quoted in Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 358–9. (71) Speech at the AICC, 9 August 1947, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 3, p. 134. (72) A.A. Suroor, ‘Kuch yadein kuch batein’, Naya daur (Lucknow), OctoberNovember 1994, pp. 21–3. (73) Zaidi, Apni-yadein, pp. 108–9. (74) Courtesy Masoodul Haq, a former resident of Rudauli. (75) C.M. Naim, Ambiguities of Heritage: Fictions and Polemics (New Delhi, 1999), p. 80. (76) UP District Gazetteers: Bara Banki, p. 58. Page 28 of 31

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood (77) Census, India, 1961, Beliefs and Practices Associated with Muslim Pirs in the Two Cities of India, Delhi and Lucknow (New Delhi, 1961), pp. 17–19. (78) Interview with Anand Narain Mulla, Farogh-e Urdu: Ehtisham Husain number (Lucknow), February 1974, p. 267. (79) For example Maulanas Safi and Aziz, Hakim Natiq, Nawab Babban, Bekhud Mohani, Hakim Ashufta, Yas Yagana, and Siraj Lakhnavi (Chakbast died in 1926, while Mirza Jafar Ali Khan, ‘Asar Lakhnavi’ was employed elsewhere). (80) Kamal Ahmad Siddiqi, ‘Taraqqi-pasand tehrik aur Lakhnau’, Qamar Rais and S. Aashoor Kazmi (eds), Taraqqi-pasand tehrik: pachas-sala safar (New Delhi, 1987), pp. 247–59. (81) Sajjad Zaheer, ‘Report on the fourth All-India Progressive Writers’ Conference’, Partha Sarathi Gupta (ed.), Towards Freedom; Documents on the Movement for Independence in India 1943–1944 (New Delhi, 1997), Part 3, pp. 2483–4 (82) Hasrat Mohani (Unao), Firaq Gorakhpuri (Allahabad), Saghar Nizami (Meerut), Rashid Jahan (Aligarh), and Ahmad Ali (Allahabad) came from UP; Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Mian Iftikharuddin (1907–62) travelled from Punjab; and Abdul Aleem (1905–76), the Jamia-, Aligarh- and Berlin-educated teacher of Arabic from Aligarh, was also present. Anand Narain Mulla, Majaz, Mahmuduzzafar, son of Dr. Saiduzzafar, Principal of King George Medical College, Ismat Chughtai, then a student at Isabella Thorburn College, Ali Sardar Jafri, and scores of Lucknow-based writers and activists were present. Public figures like Jayaprakash Narayan, Yusuf Meharally (1903–50), Indulal Yagnik (1892–1972), and Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay (1903–88) turned up at the Rifah-e aam club to express their solidarity. (83) Geetanjali Pandey, Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Prem Chand (New Delhi, 1989), p. 7. (84) Amongst them were Professors V.S. Ram, V.K.N. Menon, D.P. Mukerjee, the economist, Radhakamal Mukerjee, the English professor N.K. Siddhantha, the historian Radha Kumud Mukherjee, the philosopher, N.N. Sengupta, the botanist, Birbal Sahni, and the physicist, Wali Muhammad. (85) Ansar Harvani, Before Freedom and After (New Delhi, 1989), pp. 18–19. (86) Haig to Linlithgow, 23 December 1938, Towards Freedom, Part 2, p. 1545. (87) Amongst them were Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz and his younger brother Ansar Harvani, Sibte Hasan, the writer Rashid Jahan, Ali Jawad Zaidi, graduate of Lucknow University (1937), the Hindi writer Yash Pal, Farhatullah Ansari,

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood Hayatullah Ansari, Abdul Aleem, and Ahmad Ali. The last two taught at the Lucknow University. Jafri, Lakhnau ki paanch ratein, p. 37. (88) Jafri, Lakhnau ki paanch ratein, p. 39. (89) Courtesy Natasha Talyarkhan. (90) Raza Ali, Amaal-nama, p. 151. (91) Communication from Natasha Talyarkhan, 4 June 2001. (92) Roland W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (London, 1975), p. 631. (93) Interview with Mr. Rallia Ram, a close friend of Anwar Jamal, 3 January 2002. (94) Telegram, SHC. (95) Dariabadi, Aap-biti, p. 264. (96) Kidwai, ‘An Unsung Hero’, pp. 88–9. (97) Anwar Jamal Kidwai, ‘Pathology of Pakistan’, Twentieth Century (Allahabad), March 1940, p. 139. (98) The Times Educational Supplement, 1 November 1968, p. 962. For his other articles see 25 October 1968, p. 901; 1 November 1968, p. 962; 8 November 1968, p. 1022; 15 November 1968, p. 1084; 22 November 1968, p. 1152. Natasha Talyarkhan sent me her father’s articles, Anwar Jamal’s addresses, and his letter to a friend (Sethi) about the Soviet Union. She also furnished much information about her mother. (99) To Jim, 23 November 1982, Mass Communication Centre (MCC): General Correspondence with the U.G.C. and others. File no. 133. (100) M.S. Swaminathan to Madhuri R. Shah, Chairman, University Grants Commission, 24 March 1981, MCC: General Correspondence with the U.G.C. and others. File no. 133. (101) York University committed its contribution as $325,710. (102) Beveridge to Kidwai, 22 June 1982. (103) To Jim, 23 November 1982. (104) To Jeff Cohn, Deptt. of History in Art, Victoria, 1 February1984, Jamia-York Collaboration’, File no. 133–B/Colb/MCC, 1982.

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Political Activism in Lucknow and its Neighbourhood (105) To Rasheeduddin Khan, 17 August 1982, File no. 201, vice-chancellor’s office, Jamia Millia Islamia. (106) Robinson, Islam and Muslim History, pp. 1–2. (107) Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, p. 527. (108) Peter Geyl, Debates with Historians (London, 1955), pp. 263–4. (109) Kidwai, ‘An Unsung Hero’, p. 107. (110) A.J.P. Taylor, Essays in English History (London, 1976), p. 74.

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In the Shadow of Partition

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

In the Shadow of Partition Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords The partition of the Indian subcontinent triggered one of the largest movements recorded in world history, with about 8 million Sikhs and Hindus leaving Pakistan to settle in India and 6–7 million Muslims moving to the so-called ‘God’s own country’. Some 500,000 Hindus and Sikhs arrived in the United Provinces during 1947–48, most of them settling in the Dehra Dun, Agra, Kanpur, Saharanpur, Lucknow, and Meerut districts. Today, the demographic crisis in West Bengal’s border districts can be attributed to migration. Numerous forces were at work in Bara Banki district in particular, and in Awadh society in general. This chapter examines exile, dislocation, and resettlement in the region. More generally, it explores how the Partition affected Muslim families in Awadh, their fragmentation, their anxieties of living in a society bruised by violence, and their sense of loss and deprivation. Keywords:   Partition, Pakistan, India, Muslims, United Provinces, Awadh, Bara Banki district, exile, dislocation, resettlement

He [G.B. Pant] asked me whether I favoured partition, and I told him emphatically ‘No’. He appealed to me then not to agree to a decision for partition. I pointed out that I could not go against the will of the people. … He regretted the fact that we were leaving in June 1948, at such short notice, and said that if two or three years ago we could have announced a date five years ahead for our departure everything could have been done in a much more orderly manner and smooth way and with less risk of violence on our departure.

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In the Shadow of Partition [Mountbatten’s interview with Pant, 3 May 1947, TP, Vol. 10, p. 590.] The poor soul who was killed was my brother. Walking along the road, I saw his lifeless body By an open drain. He was hidden in the darkness, And he had no friend Except the moistened eyes of the night. He was an ordinary man Whose life was like that of others. His days were simple, his nights colourless. At the break of dawn, he would go out On his daily routine, And return home when evening fell. His griefs were small, and so were his hopes, As if his entire universe had shrunk to an egg. (p.246) People say: What’s in a name? A name is given to children by their parents. That’s how my brother got his name, So he could have an identity. This very identity led to his destruction. Now he has gone taking his identity with him. Now he is neither a Hindu nor a Muslim. He’s just a corpse, dead and lifeless.

[Munibur Rahman, ‘Name’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 18, Part 2, 2003.] Karen ge ahl-e nazar taaza bastiyaan abaad Meri nigah nahin soo-e Kufa-o-Baghdad. [Towards Kufa and Baghdad I look no more New dwellings men of vision will doubtless inhabit.]

[Muhammad Iqbal] The subcontinent’s partition witnessed one of the largest movements recorded in world history. About 8 million Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan to settle in India, while about 6–7 million Muslims moved to the newly created ‘God’s own country’.1 About half a million Hindus and Sikhs came to UP during 1947–48, most settling in the Saharanpur, Meerut, Dehra Dun, Agra, Kanpur, and Lucknow districts.2 Between 1947 and 1951, nearly 30,000 refugees arrived in Lucknow, mainly from West Pakistan. They constituted up to 5 per cent of its population.3 Cold statistics apart, ‘the gravest and most painful testimony of the modern (p.247) world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer, is the testimony of the dissolution, the

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In the Shadow of Partition dislocation, or the conflagration of community’. This is how Anis Kidwai summed up the idea in Azadi ki chhaon mein: I wanted to get the stray children who came to the Old Fort camp for milk and food and to look for their parents, sent to a school or to Jamia Millia. Although I hadn’t yet talked to the Jamia authorities about it, I was certain that they would not refuse to take them. Our Muslim brothers at that time conceived of Pakistan as nothing less than an earthly paradise. But it was a paradise in which they could not hope to find servants, and so they took their children with them, thinking that they would do. Perhaps they also thought that a Muslim child should not be left behind in this country of unbelievers … .4 Important studies exist on Punjabi migrants from Pakistan, and the estimated one million Bengali Hindus who moved from East Pakistan to India between 1947 and 1949 and saw themselves more as ‘citizens of Partition’ than as members of a nation.5 Today, the roots of the demographic crisis in West Bengal’s border districts are traced to migration, the most important element in the structure of events in 1947.6 Even so, UP and Bihar were exceptional in terms of the size of the exodus to Pakistan; yet, there have so far been few detailed studies. Though figures are either disputed or not readily available, by early 1950 over 200,000 Muslims quit their homes and lands in north-western UP for Pakistan.7 In Shahjahanpur, over 25,000 Muslim emigrants waited in transit camps.8 (p.248) The Muslim population in the cities declined by 10 per cent between 1941 and 1951 owing to the migration of urban Muslims to Pakistan, as well as the influx to UP of Hindu and Sikh refugees from that country.9 Civil servants and professionals—lawyers, journalists, and teachers from established educational institutions—were amongst the Muslim emigrants.10 Many migrated from Bara Banki district, but except for the 475 persons leaving tahsil Fatehpur,11 the exact figures are not known. Previously, I have drawn pen portraits of three persons from a family to delineate the social and political histories of a region. In each chapter we see a wide variety of forces at work in Bara Banki district in particular, and in Awadh society in general. In this, the last chapter, the presentation centres on exile, dislocation, and resettlement in the region. More generally, I discuss the Partition’s impact on Muslim families in Awadh, their fragmentation, their sense of loss and deprivation, and their anxieties of living in a society bruised by violence.

I Gardish-e rang-e chaman12 ‘The Death of a City’

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In the Shadow of Partition For a while the authorities tried to preserve an appearance of normalcy in UP, as if there were no threats of Hindu-Muslim violence. Indeed Lucknow, Bara Banki, and other neighbouring districts had escaped the fury of violence.13 Still, rioters pillaged several qasbas, forcing their residents to move to the city. While future events decreed varying fates for those caught in the crossfire of mutual hate, most fled in panic. Others, inspired by Iqbal’s verse—Hai tark-e watan sunnat-e mahbub ilahi (Migration is (p.249) a happy tradition of the Messenger of God) —crossed over deliberately when the catastrophe came. The road to Pakistan was rough and rugged, but wide open. Some stayed back because it was not possible to leave, or because they did not want to leave.14 Many, whose voices are now being recovered from the subcontinent’s dusty archives, hoped to eventually return to their ancestral home.15 Some actually did. Most others found refuge and employment in Pakistan. Major General Shahid Husain left behind a divided family: ‘The way things are shaping out,’ he prophesied on 27 August 1947, ‘it may become difficult to travel between the two countries. I hope and pray this does not happen. I have too much at stake with my mother and other relations in Lucknow’.16 The Hardoiborn civil servant, Saiyyid Hashim Raza (b. 1910), a graduate of Canning College, wrote: ‘Although my home was in the UP, I opted for Pakistan’.17 His father had been one of the first five judges of the Awadh Chief Court in 1926; his brother Saiyyid Kasim Raza had joined the Imperial Police Service in 1921. The father of C.M. Naim (a renowned Islamic scholar who has recently retired from the University of Chicago) was ‘honorary magistrate’ as well as the ‘special railway magistrate’. Two of his four sons went across the border, followed by other young men within his extended family. This happened in most ashraf families, in what was locally called javaar, their own special region: ‘The sons and sons-in-law were moving away; the relatively younger in age were moving away; the men, more than (p.250) the women were moving away. And yet our life still seemed to move along on an even keel’.18 Life did not, in fact, move along on an even keel. For one, several places were depleted of their intellectual resources. Prominent professionals from the Saiyyid families in Motikpur preferred to live in Pakistan.19 The Rudauli-born taluqdar of Baria, Aftab Ahmad Siddiqi (b. 1914), a patron of learning, moved to Dhaka. Shah Wudud Ahmad, editor and proprietor of Maarif, a theological journal, settled in Karachi. But Shah Muinuddin Ahmad Nadwi (1903–74), his father, continued serving Azamgarh’s Dar al-musanniffin, founded by Shibli Numani and nurtured by Saiyyid Sulaiman Nadwi, a product of Phulwari Sharif and Darbhanga’s Madrasa Imdadiya. Estranged from their immediate surroundings, such individuals found the going tough. Hence, they moved to Lucknow, Aligarh, and Delhi. Quite a few, notably Irshadul Haq Siddiqi’s family, sought refuge in Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia. His kith and kin, part of the great biradari network, followed suit.

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In the Shadow of Partition It was a calculated risk to leave or stay put in Hindustan. Some were clearly nervous; the ambivalence and predicament of the others have been beautifully portrayed in the film Garam hawa, in Attia Hosain’s magnum opus, Sunlight on a Broken Column, in Rahi Masoom Reza’s Hindi novel Aadha gaon, and, more recently, in Abdus Samad’s Dawn of Dreams. What popular and scholarly literature reveals is that the Partition symbolized much more than the division of land, or the drawing and redrawing of borders. It implied or led to the people’s displacement from a milieu that had been theirs to a land of glorious uncertainties. As Anwar Ahmad, the protagonist in Dawn of Dreams, justifies his decision to continue living in India, he tells his friend: ‘We are not going to be the only ones here. There will be lakhs and crores like us. Besides, your parents’ graves are here, your heritage, your ancestral home and property, your childhood, your memories … how many worries are you going to carry with you?’20 That may well (p.251) explain why some leading League activists, despite their grandiloquent rhetoric, hesitated to forsake their homeland. Khaliquzzaman took the pledge of dedication to India when the midnight hour approached, and spoke in the Constituent Assembly on constitution-making not only for the minorities but also for the country at large.21 Zahirul Hasnain Lari (1907–72), secretary of the UP Muslim League Parliamentary Board in 1946, intervened on major issues in the same assembly before migrating to Pakistan in 1950. On the other hand, Nawab Muhammad Yusuf, president of the Agra Province Zamindars’ Association and a dogged critic of the Congress, stayed. Nawab Muhammad Ismail Khan, the inspiration behind the League’s revival in UP, had told Haig in 1939 that there really was little prospect of any accommodation between Hindus and Muslims. Pointing to their cultural and ideological incompatibilities, he concluded that it was difficult for the two communities to coexist owing to the barrier created by the exclusive Hindu social system.22 At the time of Partition, however, he informed Major General Shahid Hamid, then private secretary to Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, that ‘there were still too many Muslims who were unable to go to Pakistan’. He therefore decided to ‘look after the people who stood by him and voted for him’.23 The Raja of Mahmudabad was the one who was perhaps more sensitive to the ambiguities of nation building in Pakistan. Having politely refused the offer of Nehru and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), governor of UP (1947–49), to live in Lucknow, he preferred living in Iraq and not in Pakistan. Meeting him at Karbala in August 1951, Hashim Raza recalled their student days in Lucknow (1928–32), the lawn tennis matches on the court of Butler Palace, and the meetings of the The Dragon, an exclusive club.24 The Raja, whose transformation from a premier Awadh taluqdar to a darwesh reminded him of Gautam Buddha renouncing his throne, returned to Karachi in 1957, 10 years after Pakistan’s birth.25 Living in London (p.252) thereafter, he recalled the general sense of gloom and despondency pervading the two newly-created nation-states; ‘instead of the joy Page 5 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition and expectancy which should have been ours after these years of struggle there were only premonitions of impending conflicts and a promise of future struggle.’26 Generally speaking, landed Muslim families in Awadh realized that they were not being spared the cataclysm, and were therefore frightful of the changes that were taking place around them. As the authentic representatives of liberal ideology, for which some had created solidarities across the regressive religious mentalities, they hoped to insulate their qasbas from the stridency of Hindu and Muslim zealots. This did not happen, and for two reasons. First, they were unable to act in concert. This made them especially vulnerable to communal propaganda. Second, many of them were swept by the two-nation theory, lived through the movement for a Muslim homeland, and to some extent compromised with it. They could not therefore denounce it from alpha to omega without repudiating their own involvement. At the same time, there were those who remained wedded to the concept of composite nationality, and, regardless of the adverse fortunes of their class, hoped for a better future in free India. The zamindar Anwar Ahmad in Abdus Samad’s novel is not just a fictional character but representative of a group that lived through the trauma of the Partition and Independence. ‘That is how’, he told the patwari: I, Anwar Ahmad will survive … what will happen to my children, how will I manage the household expenses? Then listen. God provides for everyone. If He could make zamindari an excuse to give our daily bread without our having to move a finger, then He can find many other ways to provide for us. And I’m grateful to Him that by withdrawing manna from heaven, He has given our children a chance to participate in the struggle for existence. Now the bread they are going to eat will not be made of simple wheat, it will be mixed with their sweat, and you should know that bread made from sweat is very thick and full of strength.27 My point is a simple one: to argue that the Islamic vocabulary was used with great effect but that it was by no means the sole motivational language of the Pakistan movement. Both in 1947 and later, there were numerous (p.253) vocabularies of motives, which were both distinctive and conflicting. Thus, the single-minded devotion to the Pakistan idea expounded by the publicists and religious preachers is more a myth than a reality. As people debated their future in mosques, shrines, orchards, and havelis, they discovered the very different meanings they themselves attached to the events unfolding around them. Likewise, when the split occurred amid mounting communal tension and escalating violence, they chose their final destination owing to several considerations. Not for every muhajir had India suddenly become dar al-harb, enemy country, and the land of infidels. Not for every muhajir in Karachi did Pakistan become dar-al Islam.

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In the Shadow of Partition Rashid, a resident of Lucknow, told V.S. Naipaul that his brother had done well in his studies in India, and then in the United States. Returning to India, he failed to secure a job for six months. He tried his luck in Pakistan and found one right away.28 Such was the experience of many graduates. They were lured to Pakistan because it was easier to secure employment: they had relatives and ‘contacts’ to help them and they were educationally at an advantage in comparison with much of the population in their new country.29 For some prominent senior citizens, notably the celebrated Urdu poet Josh Malihabadi and his literary bete noire, Niyaz Fatehpuri, Pakistan was merely an opportunist’s dream. The well-being of their family and children outweighed all other considerations, including the recognition they received from the government of free India.30 While Josh migrated to Pakistan in 1956, Niyaz did so on 31 July 1962 accompanied by his third wife. The ‘unconscious candour’ of the former’s autobiography—Yaadon ki baraat—reveals the opportunism, fickleness and, above all, vulnerability of a great literary mind.31 (p.254) This meant that virtually every household in Awadh split up. Parents stayed back, sons and daughters departed. Hasrat Mohani lived all his life in Unao, but his daughter, Naima, migrated to Karachi. On his return from Haj, his last, Hasrat visited his daughter in October 1950 for a mere fifteen days. ‘Like your children, friends, and relatives’, wrote Choudhry Muhammad Ali’s friend from Lucknow, ‘my people are dispersed like pearls in Pakistan. They do not return; I visit them once in three years’.32 Sometimes, it was the other way round. Whereas Aizaz Rasul, Constituent Assembly member, and her husband Nawab Saiyyid Aizaz Rasul commuted between Lucknow and Sandila, other family members went to Pakistan. The Raja of Mahmudabad left but not his brother, Maharajkumar Muhammad Amir Hyder Khan. The inmates of Dolly Bagh, from where one could gaze at Lucknow, had no more dinner parties, no more bustle for social occasions. Khaliquzzaman, the astute and ambitious politician, bid adieu to his friends, but uncle Muhammad Nasim lived and died in Lucknow in 1953. Jinnah persuaded Muhammad Wasim, Nasim’s eldest son, to leave. But his two brothers, the Oxford-educated Muhammad Habib (1889–1971) and Muhammad Mujeeb, stayed out of conviction rather than convenience. Mujeeb defended the Congress Muslims, who believed positively in coexistence and cooperation with the non-Muslim majority. According to his belief, their attitude made the Muslims reconsider their cultural and political functions as a community, and fortified their faith in personalities who would represent ‘not communalism but faith, not numbers but values, not multitudes but effectiveness’.33 Farangi Mahal’s learned men went their separate ways. Jamal Miyan, who had tasted electoral success by defeating Jamilur Rahman Kidwai from Baragaon in the 1946 elections, departed. But so many of his relatives stayed. The son of Page 7 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition Maulana Muhammad Shafi, Nasim Ansari (b. 1928), whose sisters married not only outside the family but also outside the community, studied medicine in Calcutta and London, and retired as professor of surgery from Aligarh’s Muslim University’s Medical College. Mufti Muhammad Raza Ansari (1917–90), grandson of Maulvi Salamatullah, had been involved in radical nationalist activity, inviting (p.255) opposition within the family and forcing him to resign from the madrasa. In 1943–44, he edited Manzil, a pro-socialist magazine. That is when the government banned Naya adab, the organ of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Later in life, he wrote biographies of Mulla Nizamuddin and Shah Abdur Razzaq and compiled the fatawa of Mufti Abdul Qadir. Hayatullah Ansari edited, after a stint with Hindustan, the daily Qaumi awaz.34 Finally, Anwar Ansari studied psychology, and headed its department at Aligarh’s Muslim University until his premature death in 1978.35 He and his younger brother Junaid Ansari had welcomed Subhas Chandra Bose at the Lyall Library Hall in Aligarh. With the abolition of zamindari and the drying up of funds from the princely states of Rampur and Hyderabad, Farangi Mahal’s Madrasa-e nizamia was reduced to taking financial help from the Lucknow municipal corporation.36 Even the building housing the madrasa crumbled.37 Still, Muhammad Abdul Qadir, the venerable scholar, kept the fire burning until his death on 24 August 1959. His devotion to the legacy of his pir-o-murshid, Abdul Bari, was such that, despite the paltry sum of fifty rupees that he received from the madrasa, he refused the job offer from the Aligarh Muslim University. This was in 1950. In 1945, he had already refused, for the same reason, to join the Bhopal State as its qazi, a position set up for him by Khaliquzzaman, the members of whose family were murids of the Farangi Mahal ulama.38 Whether it was Mahmudabad House, Dolly Bagh, or Farangi Mahal, the parting of ways was painful; for all concerned, it disrupted life’s normal (p.256) rhythm. This is illustrated by Choudhry Muhammad Ali’s melancholic exchanges with his daughter in Karachi. Once the train from Lucknow’s Charbagh railway station carried his children to the Muslim haven, fear and panic seized Muhammad Ali. Hima, Salman, Kajjan, and Chhabban departed, leaving the 65-year-old Miyan Jaan—an expression of affection/reverence used by his children—clinging to his fractured memories. The blow was a harder one than it would have been to many writers. Even allowing for his self-dramatization, Muhammad Ali composed like a soul in torment. On 8 August 1951, he wrote, ‘Habibullah is dead; poor Wasim [Muhammad] has passed away; Khaliq [Khaliquzzaman] has departed. The world isn’t the same any longer. Only the Shia Conference survives with the turbaned men in full flow. My own agnosticism—Herbert Spencer-like—is intact’.39 The estates were disappearing, poverty loomed large on the horizon, and the plight Page 8 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition of the taluqdars/zamindars worsened.40 Gandhi, who he did not admire but whose obituary he wrote for his daughter,41 brought freedom to the people but enslavement to the landed class. ‘Listen,’ Muhammad Ali told a friend in Banaras, using the imagery familiar to him: I was never the kamkhwab of Banaras or Tanda’s jamadani. I was merely a plain dupatta … But even that is gone, with each thread falling apart. While the weaver of Fate had woven it nicely, the ill-tempered washerman of Time has given it early wrinkles. Now, the dupatta requires darning. Consider, however, the heaven’s curse. While the dupatta dried up under the burning daylight of Jeth [the second month, May-June, in the Hindu calendar], the hot wind of opposition covered it with (p.257) dust. All the other garments hanging alongside were consigned either to the Pakistan bank [ghat] of the dead or laid at the graveyard [qabaristan].42 Muhammad Ali lived in a solitary world of his own imaginings, peopled by phantoms as fierce as he wished them to be. Exaggerating the ruin brought to his class by the post-colonial regime, he spent sleepless nights thinking of the dark days ahead, the crumbling havelis, or the imagined death of friends and relatives.43 What made his life a torment were the democratic system and the rule of the ignorant and unwise majority.44 Pant ‘is about to sound the deathknell of zamindari. Palaces will wither away and registers (bahi-khate) will disappear in thin air’.45 To Niyaz Fatehpuri, who was contemplating hijrat after his third marriage, he confided: On 1 July [1951], Dhotu Beg Pant of the Congress—the angel of doomsday in politics—will blow the horn of death for the zamindari. That very day our children will grow old; the idols in our palaces will be brought down from the pedestal; and our ledger books will fly around like cotton pods. The fear of the great doomsday has added to my preoccupation.46 Muhammad Ali would gaze at Hima’s picture, his eyes growing damp. Soon, he would gather himself and sit down to write to her: ‘The estates survive, but the termites have struck at their roots’. He did not mind their disappearance, but could not come to terms with the moneylender, the blackmarketeer, and the bribe-loving official—all stalking the countryside.47 Such complaints, prejudices, and suspicions were commonplace in Awadh’s landed class and the emerging urban bourgeoisie. A deep fissure, so they contended, split open the traditional society, creating gulfs that nothing would ever bridge. They felt as if they were hemmed in on all sides by a fast-multiplying and fast-encroaching bania class, as well as the refugees from West Pakistan. In a UNESCO survey conducted in Lucknow in 1951, a large number of Muslims thought that ‘the refugees were out to create disturbances and riots, as they wanted to take revenge on Muslims

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In the Shadow of Partition (p.258) and to take their property’. The same study reported that their presence disturbed communal relations in an otherwise peaceful Lucknow.48 Muhammad Ali ate, drank, laughed, distributed medicines to the poor, recited couplets in the company of friends, read books,49 and played bridge until the crack of dawn.50 He traveled frequently and maintained his contacts with friends. Even so, decline, decay, and death are the very stuff of his story. On most nights he had trouble falling asleep. He would toss from side to side, then get up, light a lamp, set up his table, and sit down to write. ‘These days’, he told his daughter, ‘I have been very unhappy. I still am.’51 In his declining years, conscious of ineluctable immortality, he wrote, ‘I am weak and ailing. Death is at my doorsteps’. Chali aao goriya dheere dheere (referring to death at the doorstep).52 Amid dark clouds of domestic sorrow, he saw the glitter of the Diwali lamps and heard the cacophony of noises, but dreaded the ‘unbounded darkness’, the ‘limitless wintry night’. ‘The falling stars on the firmament, seem like magical moving pots on fire’.53 Separated from his children, distraught by the eclipse of his social and moral order, and weakened by the stroke he suffered in 1952, the Choudhry wrestled with the past and, at the same time, tried hard to negotiate with the postPartition decade until his death in 1959. He had his young second wife, her sister, and the children to keep him company. His musahib (companion, or aidede-camp) Hakim Niamat Rasul of Bara Banki, the ageing manager Naushad Ali Khan, and the loyal servant Miyan Mithoo listened to his tale of woes. ‘That breed of retainers’, remarked Aizaz Rasul in her memoirs, ‘has completely disappeared’.54 Muhammad Ali had many tales to tell, some reflecting his own anxieties over the social levelling effect of zamindari abolition. One of them was this: a baqqal regularly visited the dispensary that he ran from his haveli and would, as had been the common practice, squat on the floor. When (p.259) he called on him at the haveli, it was only a day after zamindari abolition. Muhammad Ali offered him his chair, and he himself sat on the floor. ‘Until yesterday, the chair belonged to me; today, it’s all yours,’ he said to him with anguish writ large on his face. Thereafter, he wrote out the prescription and walked him to the gate.55 Though caustic in his comment, this was Muhammad Ali’s style of negotiating with the present. Suddenly, the bustling haveli quietened, the hangers-on vanished, the poets moved out with their tattered divans (collections of poetry), and the tawaifs and tabalchis (tabla players) went their way. Only the Asafi Imambara, where Muhammad Ali’s father Ahsan Rasool (d. 1885) was buried, came alive, and that too during Muharram with cries of Wa Muhammada—kushta shud Husain, Wa Muhammada—kushta shud Husain (Alas Prophet, Husain has been martyred). Muhammad Ali sat close to the pulpit (mimbar) listening to the plight of Husain Page 10 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition and his seventy-two companions at Karbala. It was the Majlis-e sham-e ghariban, the night of the beleaguered and oppressed. In the final moments of his narration, the speaker described in his high-pitched voice how the enemy’s dagger pierced Husain’s heart and how he fell off the horse’s (zuljana) back. In a voice choked with emotion, he then described how the enemy launched its brutal assault on the surviving women and children, including Husain’s young daughter Sakina, and how sister Zainab emerged from the confines to brave these attacks. At that juncture, Muhammad Ali may well have realized that the imam’s cruel fate symbolized the catastrophe brought upon his class that was virtually held hostage by the leaders of free India. His lips quivering, he may well have uttered the cry Ya Haider-e karrar waqt-e madad ast (Oh Hazrat Ali, this is the time for you to help). But the chanting of Ya Husain, Ya Husain may well have drowned his cry, as the audience carried the tabut on their shoulders to its resting place. Overwhelmed with grief, he would say to his musahib standing nearby—Woh chiragh zalimon ne bujha diya—and then proceed to quote the opening verses of Sauda’s elegy: Friends, listen, for the Great Creator’s sake, Give a fair-minded answer, for Haider’s [Hazrat Ali’s] sake Was that a place for the Prophet to kiss, Or for tyrants to slash with daggers?56

(p.260) II Is taraf sath aasmaan aur us taraf ek natawaan Tum ne karwat tak na li duniya ko barham dekh kar The seven skies on one side and a feeble person on the other; You did not turn over in your sleep to see the world turn upside down.

[Yas Yagana] Respectable Muslim society across the board, or such part of it that stayed in India, shared Muhammad Ali’s loneliness, degradation, and despair.57 Everything around them was part of a now completely vanished world. As the new democratic regime fell in place, they were overwhelmed by the sudden and unexpected turn of events. They could not reconcile themselves to the lack of respect for them in society, shared a contempt for the politicians, and resented the officialdom into which they could not gain admission. Suspended between two worlds, out of place everywhere, and always in agony, their lives suddenly turned short, nasty, and brutish. Zamindari abolition was the last straw. For a time the taluqdars clutched at the hope of creating a single class identity, common to both Hindus and Muslims, and in this context they even spoke of their contribution to the making of free India. These were empty words. For a time they kept intact safed-poshi, or the taluqdari lifestyle, by selling precious jewels, gold, and silverware. Bonds, issued Page 11 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition by way of compensation for the land confiscated from them, also came in handy. Soon, time and cash ran out. Soon, the mahajans (moneylenders) and sahukars (moneylenders with large capital) descended on the estates with their bahi-khate to take hold of the havelis, bazaars, and mango groves. Soon, the ‘vulgarity of bureaucratic India’, an expression Acharya Narendra Deva used to describe the misuse of power by the executive and judicial officers in Usmanpur (Bara Banki), became increasingly evident in UP’s rural hinterland.58 Threatened by Hobbesian chaos, the ‘new men’, coarse and rustic, offended finer sensibilities. The influx of refugees destroyed what the taluqdari class valued, their symbols and traditions, their culture, and their lifestyle. Hazratgunj in (p.261) Lucknow, with its new signboards and garish shops, when compared with their staid English counterparts, stopped being whitewashed. The roads were dirtier. The whole atmosphere changed,59 the past ruthlessly eclipsed by the present: ‘Think of the days when Lucknow was Lucknow; now this is no city at all. All sorts of riff-raffs have settled here—Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Dilliwalas—and distorted the lingua. They have polluted the air.’60 With the Gomti polluted and the Sham-e Awadh darkened by the lurking shadow of the strangers, there were no places to frequent, no thoroughfare worth visiting. ‘Stepping on the road,’ wrote Shahabuddin from 11, Mall Road in Hazratgunj, ‘I spot new and unfamiliar faces and then move on with my eyes fixed to the ground. The people [a term applied disdainfully to the refugees] speak Sindhi, Punjabi, Bengali, and Sanskritized Hindi. Alas, I’m a stranger in my own land: Chaman me ja na sehra me thikana/Kahan ur jaen lekar ashiana. ‘There is no place for me either in the garden or in the desert/Where can I go to build my nest?’61 The same sentiment is more or less typified in and candidly summed up by Mujeeb: I remember my own reaction when I visited the Uttar Pradesh Assembly. It was, I believe the inaugural session. There were crowds of people in the visitors’ galleries and the hall, but hardly a face that was known to me. I was simple-minded enough to ask a man standing next to me where the chief minister was, and I got in reply a reproachful look and the remark, ‘Can’t you see he is sitting there?’ I felt extremely uncomfortable. I could not spot anyone dressed like me, the language spoken around was not the Urdu which I thought was the language of Lucknow, the cultural metropolis of Uttar Pradesh, and there seemed to be no one within sight worth talking to. I left the assembly building with a feeling of mingled panic and disgust.62 Writing in the 1880s against the background of the ‘lost heaven’ of the Delhi culture, Muhammad Husain Azad had written about its destruction and Lucknow’s desolation. ‘Some of their authoritative people are under the ground, some wandering helplessly from door to door’, he added. As for Lucknow, it ‘is like other cities, like cantonment bazaars …’63 In the (p.262) 1950s, too, there was little to celebrate. Lucknow had become a shadow of its former self, wrote Page 12 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition Josh Malihabadi from his vantagepoint in Karachi. Nakhas, once the cradle of Lucknow’s culture, looked gloomy. In Muhammad Husain’s phraseology, some old man was left like ‘a dying autumn leaf of a tree’, but the fiery and rebellious Yas Yagana and Majaz were dead; ‘such pearls are buried under the earth’.64 Assuming a false continuity of events and ignoring the transition between one generation and another, a bewildered Josh turned in the Banswali Sarai heading towards Chowk. Gravely disturbed, he wrote: Chowk me qadam rakha to kaleja tham kar reh gaya (As I stepped into Chowk, I missed a heartbeat.) Jalti hui shammon ko bujhane wale Jeeta nahin chhorenge zamane wale Lash-e Dehli pe ye Lucknow ne kaha Ab hum bhi hain kuch roz me aane wale.65 O ye the extinguisher of burning candles The people of the world won’t leave you alone. Seeing the corpse of Dehli, Lucknow said: ‘We’re coming to join you soon.’

One can hardly fault the nostalgic strain in people’s memories, for they invariably recaptured a moment in their lives and invoked friends and places to recreate their past. Urdu prose and, indeed, poetry—from Mir Taqi Mir to Ali Sardar Jafri—is replete with such examples. In the process, however, they invented new forms of cultural difference in the urban landscape, and, for this reason, the images of Muhammad Ali, Shahabuddin, and Josh Malihabadi were imperfectly focused on reality. They illustrate the ambiguities of a class that knew all about the existence of a new political regime, but was decidedly illequipped to cope with the new hierarchy of those that mattered and the concomitant changes that ensued. That explains, in part at least, why the taluqdars ultimately exited the stage. Having grown up in the atmosphere of colonialism, with their notion of stability being the unquestioned axiom, they could not adapt to the new reality. Through much of colonial rule, the linchpin of (p.263) their regime was a debilitating terror that any move to dismantle it would result in civil war. Though this fear subsided after the zamindaris withered away, the inflated notion of both the taluqdars/zamindars and their regime were exposed as fragile figments of their imagination. The 1950s very considerably transformed the country’s political structure; and yet not as much as the sanguine observer might have anticipated in the mid-1940s. The hierarchical society had been reconstructed, but only on the foundations of formal equality. The world beyond Nakhas and Chowk existed, but not for the landed gentry and the service families. This was cultural arrogance, pure and simple, of a class that had lost its patrons and had, consequently, failed in its desperate bid to retain privileges. When eventually this dream world began to crumble, they conjured up romanticized images of Awadh’s ‘husk’ culture, emptied of its vital core,66 and wanted to imprint too much of their own mind Page 13 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition upon the shape of events. They had no understanding of themselves and their place in the sun: a clearer consciousness of who they were and what they were trying to do. The vitality of high culture had been sapped once the qasbas lost their social and cultural autonomy; its roots were gradually eroded once the sources that supported and sustained them dried up. Consequently, the qasbas lost both their individuality and raison d’être, and became just a part of, and indistinguishable from, the populous, untidy, and undistinguished urban landscape. Notice how a local poet, Nazmi Siddiqi of Rudauli, captures the mood in the following stanzas: Rudauli-wretched and sorrowful, bare-headed, clothes in tatters as a destitute in her prime as a worm-eaten book stacked in a forsaken niche. Revolution bemoans in a chorus. Even now I visit this desolate world amidst the setting moon and the stars and the gleeful dawn where the vivacious wine goblets clink as evil spirits rubbing on the shoulders of the wind. (p.264) It is true that nothing in the world remains the same but nobody knows when the dingy night shall end.67

Likewise, Saiyyid Ali Muhammad Zaidi and Hameeda Salim revisit Rudauli to bemoan the decline and eventual death of the old order.68 Writes Hameeda: We—brothers [the Urdu poet Majaz and the Congress Socialist politician Ansar Harvani] and sisters—were born in the lap of feudalism with its pomp and glitter, its grace and refinement. Outwardly, though, decadence had set in turning the feudal order weak and hollow. On social and religious occasions, family feuds surfaced. Besides, litigation in courts was the favourite preoccupation of the taluqdars and zamindars. The collapse of feudalism was thus imminent. Today, you find nothing but the ruins of majestic gates in Rudauli, debris of the baradaris [twelve-door summerhouse] and the sahdaris where the zamindars once lived in resplendent splendour. The present-day ruins were once the sites of urs, qawwalis on barah-wafat and shab-e barat [full moon in the month of Shaban, in which the destinies for the coming year are fixed, celebrated with fireworks], and also the milad mehfils. Delicacies like halwa were made of pure ghee and sweetmeat balls, weighing as much as half a kilogram, were distributed.69 Similar accounts, mostly written in Urdu over the last two decades, lament the passing of the old order and the consequent decline of qasbas. Their common refrain is: the Nawabi and taluqdari lifestyle and outmoded ideas and beliefs Page 14 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition contributed to the Aakhri Bahaar (The Last Spring). (p.265) Whether it is AlAbbasi’s history of Amroha, Zaidi’s Tarikh-e Rudauli, Mirza Jafar Husain’s chronicle of Lucknow, or Hosh Bilgrami’s memoirs, such explanations represent what the writers, mostly nurtured in a qasba culture and a witness to its steady decline, constructed as a painful reality and presented it as such.

III Patjhar ki awaaz Sound of the Falling Leaves

Though the Kidwais have left behind no accounts, the Partition disrupted their family ties with their kith and kin, not just in Masauli and Baragaon but all over Bara Banki. Quite a few joined the long trek to Karachi.70 Still, the Kidwais, in particular, did not lose out as much as the other Muslim families in Bara Banki or its environs. For one, their limited holdings had caused them to look, well before the final denouement, beyond their village or district. They sensed the winds of change after the passage of the UP Tenancy Act, and the more enterprising among them drifted out of their ancestral village to study at Lucknow and the Aligarh Muslim University. More often than not, this meant that they could no longer manage to maintain an economic independence, however tenuous. For their dependants, too, chances of employment in the village diminished and grew more uncertain. Consequently, they worked, including the women, to acquire new skills, and join the race for jobs in a competitive market. They seized the new opportunities with both hands, even if the price was long periods of exile from their village or qasba. Only a few stewed in their own juice, and sat around listlessly bemoaning the loss of authority and ascendancy in the countryside. It was this listlessness that hastened their decline and estrangement from the immediate surroundings. In a Hobbesian world of violence, as afflicted virtually the whole of (p.266) north India, it was no smooth sailing for either the Kidwais or any other Muslim family in UP. Their plight was the price they paid for supporting the Pakistan movement. They had to reckon with, for example, Hindu nationalism.71 Demagogic right-wing Hindu politicians worsened their situation, already uneasy and uncertain. Hindu-Muslim tension mounted over cow-slaughter: in Wazirgunj (Lucknow), Saidanpur (Bara Banki), Banaras, and its neighbouring districts.72 Ayodhya, only seventy miles from Bara Banki, was in the throes of a major controversy following the installation of Ram’s images in a sixteenth-century mosque. This ominous development threatened the survival of Muslim places of worship and the secular personality that India sought to acquire after Independence and Partition. Nehru voiced his indignation: ‘I can’t go to my province, I am angry with Pantji even. I would not have minded if there was bloodshed even Congressmen in it [sic].’73 He chided K.K. Nayar (1907–77), the district magistrate, for disobeying government orders. ‘I think it is a great pity’, he told Katju, ‘that this man, Nayar, was not tried publicly as he is altogether a Page 15 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition bad hat.’74 Vallabhbhai Patel, the home minister, conceded that the Ayodhya controversy had been raised at a most inopportune time, both from the point of view of the country at large and of UP in particular.75 Muslim leaders were, on the other hand, engaged in debating the future of the Muslim personal law. Husain Imam, the Bihar lawyer-politician, and Hasrat Mohani refused to agree to any change. Hasrat, who was painfully aware of the Hindu communal backlash, struck a firm note when he declared: I would like to say that any party, political or communal, has no right to interfere in the personal law of any group. More particularly I say this regarding Muslims. There are three fundamentals in their personal laws, namely, religion, language, and culture, which have not been ordained by human agency. Their personal law regarding divorce, marriage and inheritance has been derived from the Koran and its interpretation recorded therein. If there is any one, who thinks that he can (p.267) interfere in the personal law of the Muslims, then I would say to him that the result will be very harmful.76 Although this statement reflected the cultural anxieties of north India’s Muslims generally, the belief expressed in it served as the cornerstone of Muslim politics in the decades to come. While the issue of Muslim identity became inextricably linked with the sacrosanct character of the Muslim personal law, it fed into the larger Hindu communal campaigns centred on the demand for a uniform civil code, and the rejection of the policy of ‘Muslim appeasement’ adopted by Nehru’s government. Urdu’s future, too, became a contentious issue under the provisional government itself. As the modern historian Christopher R. King points out, the mainstream Hindi movement in UP was based on the superiority of Hindi and its inseparable connection with Hinduism, and on the idea that Hindi was irrevocably different from Urdu. ‘No spirit of compromise, of adjustment, of partial assimilation to the benefit of Hindi and Urdu came to the fore. Rather, the movement was based on a spirit of win or lose, of no compromise, of the complete differentiation of Hindi from Urdu, or of the complete assimilation of Urdu to Hindi. Urdu had no right to exist in India, and was a usurper of Hindi’s rightful place, just as Muslims had no right to exist in India, and were usurpers of Hindus’ rightful place’.77 The first major controversy was triggered in January 1947, when Muslim leaders apprehended that the recommendations of the All India Radio Hindi-Urdu Standing Advisory Committee were designed to make Hindi the principal cultural language of north India by dislodging Urdu altogether from its preeminent position. The insinuation may have been misplaced in this specific case, but the truth is that the UP Congress steadfastly opposed Urdu. It was therefore Page 16 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition not surprising that Urdu became its first target after the Partition, a point Tej Bahadur Sapru poignantly made. ‘By all means learn Hindi’, he told the UP Congress leaders whose attitude towards Urdu pained him, ‘but do not forget that Urdu is not the language of the Muslims. Hindus have made very material contribution to (p.268) it and people in Rohilkhand and the western part of the Provinces are not accustomed to understanding the Hindi that is spoken in the eastern part’.78 Nobody heeded his advice. In fact, strong views were expressed even against Hindustani.79 The question of Urdu, Nehru wrote, ‘affects the Muslims psychologically more than almost anything else’. He pointed out that ‘our general policy has not been fitted in with our declared educational aims and has undoubtedly created a deep sense of frustration among the Muslims’.80 A language spoken by so many had a certain vitality, ‘and creating an impression that we are against it must hurt those large numbers of people and make them feel that we are against something that they cherish’.81 Though recognized by the Constitution and widely spoken, Urdu had no status, not even that of a full-fledged language. In the Constituent Assembly debate on 30 January 1948, some Hindi protagonists even resented that the post office clerks in Delhi were required to possess a working knowledge of Urdu.82 Indeed, the Urdu script disappeared from the courts, government offices, and road signboards. This was not all. Denied primary or secondary education in their mother tongue, Urdu-speaking children in Lucknow and Bara Banki became fearful of their job prospects.83 In UP, the ideological storm centre of the Pakistan movement, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh, the governments took definite steps to discourage Urdu, withdrew aid to Urdu schools, and launched aggressive campaigns against Urdu in many places. The results are there for everybody to see. C.M. Naim bemoans that Urdu was, at best, the language of high culture for the vast majority of (p.269) urban Muslims, particularly men, more particularly in northern India. ‘It is they who feel culturally most threatened by the state antagonism to Urdu. They may be the people most of whose elders not too long ago raised the cry of Muslim nationalism and created Pakistan, but must the “sins” of the fathers be visited upon the children?’ Seeing Urdu’s future in India in the popularity of ghazal singers is ‘macabre—as macabre as the “muslim” set designs of the ghazal shows on Indian television’, five minutes of daily news in Urdu in Lucknow, and an additional Urdu programme of thirty minutes each week.84 Hostility to Urdu went hand in hand with denying Muslims jobs in the government and the army. At the time of the Partition, 2,110 commissioned officers and 3,424 Viceroy’s commissioned officers, later called junior commissioned officers) went to Pakistan. And because the vast majority of them were of Pakistan domicile they were not therefore entitled to opt for India.85 Page 17 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition Even though 215 Muslim commissioned officers and 339 VCOs chose India, the percentage of Muslims in the armed forces, which was 32 per cent at the time of the Partition, dwindled to just two.86 They were squeezed out both of the services and even of the Congress organization in UP and Bihar.87 The government in Lucknow eliminated most Muslims from the state police forces, reducing their numbers from approximately half to less than 5 per cent.88 Moradabad’s district magistrate informed the Prime Minister about the government’s order restricting Muslim recruitment to services to 14 per cent. This worked out unfairly in areas where the Muslim population was very considerable, as in Moradabad where it was 40 per cent or more.89 Rafi told Nehru about the Muslim (p.270) officers being dismissed from the railways in Kanpur.90 Nehru stated: ‘I can hardly conceive of thousands of persons being dismissed except under some general rule of thumb, which has little application to the individual’.91 No wonder the experience left so many of them gloomy, misanthropic, and bitter. The possibility of reaching the coveted destination existed, but not assured. Indeed, to reach it was the lot of only a few who ventured to travel this road. Lari, the chief advocate of statutory reservation for Muslims, complained in the Constituent Assembly on 8 November 1948 that barely 5 per cent Muslims had been recruited to the services during the previous year. He stated: ‘If you take into account their discharges and dismissals it will be 75 per cent, but if you take new recruitment—it is hardly 5 per cent.’ This was followed by an acrimonious debate. ‘What did your leaders do in Pakistan?’ Vishwambhar Dayal Tripathi asked. To this, Lari replied, ‘We never said that Muslims in these parts are going to migrate to Pakistan. We are the children of the soil and as such we claim the rights of citizens of India.’92 ‘An Honourable Member’ advised Hasrat, a key figure in the anti-colonial campaigns from his student days, to go to Pakistan. The poet retorted: ‘You may go to Hindukush and settle there from where you have come. Why should we go? We have come from Central Asia.’93 Majority coalitions, such as they existed in the aftermath of the Partition, castigated minorities and minority visions in an attempt to impose conformity. As long as they refused to abandon their distinct way of life, they were to be shunned. Worse even, periodic waves of xenophobia led to outbreaks of violence against them. In this scheme of things, leading Congress stalwarts like Pant, Tandon, and Sampurnanand tolerated particularistic affinities and identities when confined to the private sphere, but rejected them (without of course stating their position publicly) as a basis for both legal rights and status conferred by the constitution or as a principle of state policy.94 According to them, the very vocabulary upon which to articulate (p.271) and negotiate claims for cultural and political recognition—‘minorities’, ‘communities’, ‘pluralism’—ran directly counter to their exclusionary notions of nation, citizenship, equal rights, and social equity. Pant told the Constituent Assembly:

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In the Shadow of Partition Those who, in the olden days were obsessed by the idea of separation have not been able to shed it off even now, [Honourable Members: Hear Hear] and the ghost of ‘two nations’ seems to be lingering somewhere, even within the precincts of this very august Chamber.95 Amidst the general collapse of order and the murderous violence raging in the Punjab, UP, and Bengal, Patel spewed venom against the Jamiyat al-ulama, finding it more dangerous than the League. He chastized Azad for being untrustworthy, ‘despicable’,96 and ‘dangerous’.97 He accused Rafi of taking bribes and issuing licences, and Asaf Ali (1888–1953) for being in the British government’s pay.98 Outside party and government circles, he and his right-wing Hindu allies widely portrayed the image of a nation torn between hostile, segregated Muslim groups. Two Urdu dailies, Milap and Pratap, published from Delhi and widely circulated among the Hindu and Sikh refugees in Lucknow and the qasbas, carried on an intensive propaganda of hate and violence against the Muslims. Hence, the government demanded a security of Rs 3,000 from Pratap while Milap’s publication was banned for three months.99 A cabinet minister recorded that one had to secure the Home ministry’s permission to take any Muslim on board an aeroplane. On one occasion, he obtained Rafi’s permission with some difficulty in order to rescue Husain Imam.100 On 28 November 1948, the Leader (Allahabad) published a (p.272) report on letters from Pakistan to their Muslim relatives in India being heavily censored. Muslims were told to go to Pakistan, and vulgar remarks were passed against their women in the streets. The head of Lucknow’s Nadwat al-ulama discovered, after returning from Medina in July 1948, that Muslims were receiving all sorts of unsolicited advice.101 In some places they felt particularly vulnerable.102 In Kanpur, for instance, the Defence of India and the Arms Act were applied to them; Hasrat Mohani, the man representing the constituency, protested that Muslim homes were searched and ‘even if a kitchen knife was found in [a] house, the Arms Act was applied and [the person] was sent to jail’.103 All this made the UP Muslims feel as if they were sitting on a razor’s edge. Husain Imam therefore appealed to the Constituent Assembly members ‘to forget and forgive the past’. Finding it painful to be reminded every day that Muslims brought Pakistan into existence, he reminded them: In its [Pakistan’s] creation the Congress was as much a party as anybody else. In that spirit I request that Muslims should not be regarded as hostages. They should be regarded as citizens of India with as much right to live and enjoy the amenities of India—the land of their birth—as anyone else.104

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In the Shadow of Partition Chastized for having gone too far in indulging the League demands, Nehru protested that UP’s atmosphere had changed for the worse. With Tandon and Tripathi fomenting tension, the communal temperature rose steadily. Though Nehru himself did little to curb their activities, he constantly warned chief ministers of communalism invading the minds and hearts of those who had been the pillars of the Congress in the past.105 Rafi had told his journalist friend after Gandhi’s ashes were immersed at Triveni in Allahabad, ‘Jawaharlal has performed the last rites not only of Gandhi but of Gandhism as well. Now that the master has gone, there will be no one to discipline the crowd. The High Command is dead.’106

(p.273) IV Ye dagh dagh ujala ye shab-gazida sehar ‘This much stained radiance, this night-bitten morning’

[Faiz Ahmad Faiz] The Kidwais were, doubtless, apprehensive of the fragile nature of the secular consensus, but they managed to emerge unscathed from the Partition’s trauma. The point is not that the preferences or predilections of individuals necessarily differed, but that historically derived social contexts presented them with a different set of opportunities and incentives. Confronted with the need to legitimize their own leadership after the Partition, they wove a national narrative that incorporated the vocabulary of twentieth-century nationalism and the traditional allegiances recognizable to the qasba inhabitants, but always within the framework of their own familial history. Their greatest asset, one that aided their steady progress, was that Mumtaz Ali, Wilayat Ali’s father, had been conscious of the spirit of the new century in which he had come of age. He therefore placed much hope in the power of education to foster family pride. To him, a shared experience among mixed and diverse students infused greater meaning into the learning process and in the shaping of Wilayat Ali’s personality and world-view. This paid dividends. Education facilitated access to an enlarged opportunity structure, and to intergenerational mobility in twentieth-century India. The family of Mushir Hosain Kidwai (married to the daughter of Nisarur Rahman of Baragon) and his brother Maqbul Hosain Kidwai also laid emphasis on education. Mushir’s only son, Mubashir Hosain Kidwai, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar from the Middle Temple in 1921. He rose to become a judge of the Allahabad High Court in 1947. Midhat Kamil, Mustafa Kamil, Anwar Jamal, and their sister Anis Kidwai made the transition from a feudal world to a ‘modern’ era with ease. Though their father Wilayat Ali had died young, they coped with the harsh realities of life under Rafi’s tutelage. Eventually, they succeeded by dint of their own energy without being passive recipients of handouts from the state. Indeed, if one were

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In the Shadow of Partition to document the career trajectories of Muslim families in Awadh who sought to improve their lot, the Masauli Kidwais will certainly be listed amongst them. (p.274) Although their relatives were haunted by the curse of zamindari abolition and the memories of bygone glories, all was not lost. They knew that the end of the zamindari prerogative affected others as well, especially the Rajputs who lambasted the Congress government for liquidating the system that had sustained their ancient hegemony. They would have also known, a point Paul Brass, Elizabeth Whitcombe and Thomas Metcalf underscored in the 1970s, how many taluqdars had adjusted successfully to the new situation, using their capital and their holding as the basis for intensive cultivation in ‘agro-industrial complexes’ in their former estates.107 Making a virtue of necessity and using the very downfall of the Old World as an opportunity for readjustments, Wilayat Ali’s family moved to Lucknow early in life. They were in the thick of things as students, attending conferences and mushairas, hobnobbing with radical poets, writers, and public men. Here, in this bustling city, they discovered that the road to success lay open to those who wished to take it. In free India they did not break with the past, but started on a fresh footing. Soon, they became part of Lucknow’s élite, mingling with politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats—all embarking on a tortuous journey from a colonial to a democratic state. They could also now be seen to be affluent, and occupy a social position roughly commensurate to their wealth. Ultimately, they gradually moved out of UP’s confines, as had been Rafi’s trajectory, accepting whatever positions came their way. We, thus, see Midhat Kamil Kidwai serving as Ambassador in Sudan and Saudi Arabia, and finally retiring as Chief Secretary of Jammu and Kashmir. Anwar Jamal was information officer at the Indian High Commission twice from 1947 to 1948; press attaché for six months in Rome in 1949, and for a year and a half in Ankara and Istanbul from 1949 to 1951. He returned to his former position in London from 1951 to 1953, before being posted back to India in January 1954. In April 1955 he joined Saiyyid Mahmud and C.S. Jha (b. 1909) in the Cultural Committee at the AsianAfrican Conference held at Bandung. We notice, moreover, Anis Kidwai performing, with her characteristic élan, in the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, from 1956 to 1968, and as member of (p.275) the All-India Congress Committee (1954–57). She was also associated with the Friends of New Kashmir Committee, started by Mridula Sarabhai on 10 December 1952 to counter the anti-Sheikh Abdullah propaganda.108 She, of course, felt that Nehru, Rafi, and many others were hopelessly mistaken in their appraisal of the Kashmir situation.109 In retrospect, she was dead right. The Masauli Kidwais had risen to affluent positions by dint of hard work and frugality, but for the most part they had found success through the favourable odds offered by the Partition, that is, the flight of professional Muslims from UP Page 21 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition and Bihar. In addition, Rafi was the passport to service, though he himself did not allow relatives to flaunt his name. Still, even a distant relationship proved to be a good enough testimonial for entry into politics, business, and government employment. The Kidwais of Baragaon, too, basked in Rafi’s glory, and gained leverage through their close and extensive family networks. More numerous and influential in public life than their kinsmen in Masauli, they clustered together to form a stable and coherent family with a strong sense of community, excluding others from family and marriage contracts and securing honorific and munificent positions for themselves. Between 1881 and 1910, only one marriage took place outside the Qidwara.110 For a time, the same spirit of exclusiveness that prevailed in landed families governed them. But a great deal changed over time. The marriage pattern also changed: from 1941 to 1970, out of the 10 married men, only three were wedded within the family and the rest outside the biradari.111 There was no flowering of exceptional talent in the secular arts, sciences, and professions; yet, the main difference that set them apart from the other landed groups was their capability in adapting to the prevailing environment and to the social situation offered to or imposed upon them. Local and provincial political arenas offered plenty of space for manoeuvre. Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai’s long-standing association with the Congress brought some rewards, though he, an old war-horse, (p.276) deserved much more than what came his way.112 His wife, a woman of piety and closely connected with social work, was nominated, at Nehru’s initiative, to the Rajya Sabha twice, though death cut short her second term.113 Similarly, Jamilur Rahman (b. 1901) was elected unopposed to the UP assembly in 1952. He had been district Congress president at the time of the 1937 elections, and an activist during the Quit India movement. Finally, Sheikh Nisarur Rahman and his son, Fazlur Rahman (1891–1953), a poet and lawyer, kept the Congress flag flying in the Bara Banki district.114 Jamilur Rahman and son Rizwanur Rahman guaranteed Congress support in a region that had been the party’s stronghold for decades. In the Lok Sabha, Muslims held about 4 per cent of the seats after the 1951–52 elections (22 out of 500), though they performed a little better in the next election. This was partly due to Nehru asking the state election committees in September 1951 to put up Muslim candidates in adequate numbers.115 Today, however, with the exception of Mohsina Kidwai (b. 1932), who has held ministerial positions in Lucknow and Delhi, the ever-changing world of UP politics has eclipsed the Baragaon Kidwais’ political fortunes. As professionals, however, they have fared reasonably well. Quite a few study or hold teaching positions at the Aligarh Muslim University, the University of Delhi, and the Jamia Millia Islamia. In Atiya Habib Kidwai’s study ‘Generation IV: 1941–1970’, 65 per cent of the men were educated at Aligarh, the highest number and proportion in any generation, and more men studied at the Delhi University than at the Lucknow University.116 Quite a few are employed in the corporate sector that is otherwise closed to most qualified Muslims. Their chief patron has been A.R. Page 22 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition Kidwai (b. 1920), currently a member of the upper house in parliament after his ouster from Calcutta by the BJP-led government in New Delhi. Starting as a graduate from the Jamia Millia and serving as a member and chairman of the prestigious Union Public Service Commission, a high powered recruiting body for the central services, he occupied the Governor’s (p.277) House in Patna (1979–85 and 1993–98) and Calcutta (1998–99). Initially, he made his way up the ladder through the patronage of Zakir Husain (1897–1969), then vice-president of the Republic. Not all the Kidwais qualified for the positions they obtained, but with the ranks of professional Muslims depleted in UP, it was easy pickings for some. Loyalty to the Congress and allegiance to Nehru bolstered their job prospects. Soon enough, the better educated found places in free India’s expanding bureaucracy. This was the surest way of preserving family dignity threatened by the loss of land. Yet the Masauli Kidwais were neither the sole beneficiaries nor can we describe their relationship with the Congress in purely instrumentalist terms: they used Nehru and the Congress as much as the first prime minister used them and Congress Muslims elsewhere. But after more than five decades of Independence, their erstwhile Congress patrons have virtually disappeared in UP, once their principal stronghold. Instead, caste-based parties, such as the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the protagonist of a Hindu rashtra, now occupy the political space. Some Masauli Kidwais have made their peace with them; others, still living in the faceless village of Baragaon, survive uneasily in the shadow of the past. While UP’s political landscape has changed, the social and economic indicators suggest a slow and tardy pace of development. The Bara Banki district, too, has suffered like the rest of the state,117 while Masauli, the home of Wilayat Ali and, Rafi, is yet to taste the fruit of progress. Behind the green fields are hidden stories of official negligence and of hardship and misery. Rafi’s mausoleum radiates authority. Close to it is a school named after him that catches the eye. But the 300 students taught by half a dozen teachers have no proper classroom or playground. One’s gaze then catches a local ‘surgeon’ (jarrah) performing an ‘operation’ on a young girl with his crude and blunt instruments. That is because Masauli, gleefully described as a qasba by my local guide, has no primary health centre. A doctor arrives periodically from Bara Banki, but she carries no medicine for the sick. A few years ago, a senior Congress politician held a prayer meeting at Rafi’s mausoleum, but he instead extolled the virtues of Muhammad Rafi (p.278) (1924–80), Mumbai’s celebrated playback singer.118 The barber and the washerman directed me to Rafi’s ancestral house which I accessed through a narrow, muddy, and dirty bylane—a monumental testimony to civic neglect. Next to it is another quarter belonging to Imtiaz Ali’s family. It is falling apart, while Page 23 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition its inmate, a lazy-looking retired government servant, seemed oblivious to his surroundings. I went out to the roof of the house to take in the view. The sky was sprinkled with stars. A sudden stillness had fallen over Masauli. Just a few dogs barked. I left for Bansa, the site of Shah Abdur Razzaq’s shrine, the next morning with the distinct impression that Rafi, the man who left his strong imprint on national and state politics, had fast receded into history. Meanwhile the people of Masauli meditate every day on the vicissitudes of time before falling asleep. Memories of Partition have faded; the antagonisms that it inspired are almost forgotten. Among the dreams and illusions, the fictions and myths, the violence and peace, the conflict and resolution, this story, too, has its place. You’ve murdered Sauda, it’s said— If it’s true, oh cruel one, what do you say about it?

This is the end of the story, although there is a postscript. Notes:

(1) Before 15 August 1947 there were 13 million Hindus and 1.6 million Sikhs in the provinces and states which were included in Pakistan and about 42 million Muslims in the provinces and the states that acceded to India. Before the 15th some 5 lakh Hindus and Sikhs crossed the border into India, and some 7 to 8 lakh from the 15th August upto the first week of September. The Military Evacuation Organization evacuated 28 lakh Sikhs from Pakistan to India and 29.5 lakh Muslims from India to Pakistan upto the end of January 1948. Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates, 30 January 1948, Vol. 1, no. 1, p. 581. (2) Census of India, 1951, UP, Part 1–A—Report (Allahabad, 1953), p. 59, & table 50. (3) Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Delhi, 2002), p. 211. (4) Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 1; Anis Kidwai, ‘Children’. Translated by Ralph Russell. The Annual of Urdu Studies, Number 17, 2002, p. 86. (5) Gautam Ghosh, ‘God is a Refugee’: Nationalism, Morality and History in the 1947 Partition of India’, Social Analysis (Department of History: Adelaide, no. 42, 1, 1998); Paul R. Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in the Punjab, 1946–47: means, methods, and purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2003, pp. 71–101. See, also, papers presented at a seminar held at Chennai on 2–4 March 2001, on ‘Displaced People in South Asia’. The IndoDutch Programmes on Alternatives in Development sponsored the seminar. Page 24 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition (6) Bhaskar Chakrabarty, ‘Living with the Partition: Collective Memory and the Politics of Illegal Migration in Eastern India’ (Occasional Paper 5: Department of History, University of Calcutta). (7) Nehru to Sampurnanand, 21 October 1950, SWJN, 2nd srs, Vol. 15, Pt 1, p. 295. (8) Jain, Rafi, p. 75. (9) Brass, Language, Religion and Politics, p. 144. (10) The Urdu writer and poet, Khalilur Rahman Azmi, describes the sense of isolation this led to. Islam Ishrat, Khalilur Rahman Azmi: Taraqqi-pasandi se jadidyat tak (Patna, 1988), pp. 25–6. (11) UP District Gazetteers: Bara Banki, p. 57. (12) Title of Qurratulain Hyder’s novel on Lucknow. (13) Ralph Russell explains the absence of rioting in Lucknow to ‘the Lucknow man: the kind of religious zeal which could impel a man to kill another of a different faith was not perhaps so much wicked and immoral as ungentlemanly and uncultured.’ ‘The Urdu ghazal in Muslim society’, South Asian Review, Vol. 3, no. 2, January 1970. (14) Outside UP, this was true of, for example, the family of Fazl-e Husain. See, B.K. Nehru, Nice Guys Finish Second (New Delhi, 1997), p. 179; for Delhi see Pandey, Remembering Partition, pp. 199–200. (15) The government of India was split on the issue of allowing people to return to their birthplaces. Nehru, in particular, was pitted against Patel, K.C. Neogy (1888–1977), and Mohanlal Saxena, who were distinctly opposed to any traffic across the India-Pakistan border. Nehru protested, especially after receiving complaints from Rafi, but did not press the issue beyond expressing pious sentiments about people having full freedom to travel or settle down in different countries, even when they were not very friendly with one another. Nehru to Mohanlal Saxena, 5 February 1950, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 14, Pt 1, p. 212. (16) 27 August 1947, Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, p. 240. Auchinleck brought his family to Rawalpindi in September 1947. (17) Raza, Hamari manzil, p. 62. (18) Naim, ‘Two Days’, p. 81. (19) These included Shahanshah Husain (b. 1914), a medical doctor, Zakia Khatoon (b. 1921), a graduate of Isabela Thorburn College, and Alima Khatoon (b. 1926), also a graduate. Mehdi, Rajaz Mehdi fi tarikh Zaidi, pp. 70–5. Page 25 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition (20) Abdus Samad, Dawn of Dreams (Khwabon ka savera). Translated from the Urdu original by Mehr Afshan Farooqi (New Delhi, 2001). (21) Tan and Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition, p. 55. UP’s governor believed that the Muslims in his province, including their leader, Khaliquzzaman, did not believe in Pakistan. Record of meeting between Wavell, Cabinet delegation and provincial governors, 28 March 1946, TP, Vol. 7, p. 42. (22) Haig to Linlithgow, 25 July 1939, Haig Papers. (23) 15 August 1947, Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, pp. 230–1. (24) Raza, Hamari manzil, p. 197. (25) V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies (London, 1990), p. 375. (26) Raja of Mahmudabad, ‘Some Memories’, Philips and Wainwright (eds), Partition of India, p. 389. (27) Samad, Dawn of Dreams, p. 13. (28) Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies, p. 367. For the division of families in the armed forces, i.e., the case of Major Yunus Khan and Sahibzada Yaqub Khan in Rampur, see Omar Khalidi, ‘Ethnic Group Recruitment in the Indian Army: The Contrasting Cases of Sikhs, Muslims, Gurkhas and Others’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 74, no. 4, Winter 2001–2002, and Sher Ali Pataudi, The Story of Soldiering and Politics in India and Pakistan (Lahore, 1983 edn). (29) C.M. Naim, ‘Urdu Education in India: Some Observations’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 1995, p. 158. (30) For Niyaz Fatehpuri, Aqeela Shaheen, Niyaz Fatehpuri, p. 40–1, and Amir Arfi, Niyaz Fatehpuri (New Delhi, 1977), pp. 47–50. (31) For an English translation of excerpts from his chapter ‘My Ordeal as a Citizen of Pakistan’, Hasan (ed.), India Partitioned, Vol. 2, pp. 196–206. (32) Shahabuddin to Muhammad Ali, 4 June 1957, Goya dabistan khul gaya, p. 350. (33) Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, pp. 440–1; For Muhammad Wasim and an excellent description of his household in Lucknow, see Edib, Inside India, pp. 100–13. (34) He was the son of Wahid-Allah, a disciple of Haji Waris Ali Shah. (35) Son of Maulana Muhammad Aslam, he married in a Ghazipur-based gentry family. His wife Ghazala (d. 2001) taught at the Teachers’ Training College in Aligarh. Soft and suave, she was part of the radical group at the Aligarh Muslim Page 26 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition University that included the five Zaidi sisters, the late Sabira, an educationist, Zahida, a poet and professor of English at Aligarh, Sajida, also a poet and educationist, Shahida, proficient in Russian, and Khadija (Buyya), also a translator from Russian into Urdu. They were the descendants of Altaf Husain Hali of Panipat. (36) Ansari, Bani-yi dars-e Nizami, p. 214. (37) Raza Ansari lamented in 1973: Lutf-e maazi ki jo yaad thi baqi dil me Usko bhi tere taghaful ne mita kar chhora 910 Fond memories of the past that enlivened the heart Your indifference wiped them all out.

(38) Mufti Muhammad Raza Ansari, Mufti saheb (Lucknow, 1959), pp. 15, 17. (39) To S. Husain Zaheer, 8 August 1951, Goya dabistan, p. 65. (40) To Hima Begum, 5 June 1950, ibid. 185–6. (41) ‘Please accept my condolences for Gandhi. It is said that Socrates was made to drink a bowl of hammlock [sic], Jesus was crucified, and Gandhi was shot at. The world hasn’t progressed much [sic]. However, those who poisoned Socrates were effaced from the world. Those who crucified Jesus remain shelterless for the past nineteen hundred and fourteen years. How do I prophesize the fate of the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh and Hindu Sabha. Agreed that the world has remained unchanged, and yet no other nation would have treated Gandhi the way we have. Those who murdered Gandhi have killed defenceless people, dishonoured helpless women. It’s possible that such a wretch could have taken birth in Pakistan. But to suspect such a person—without his having committed such an act—is to shame the descendants of Adam.’ To Hima, 7 February 1948, ibid., p. 99. (42) To Maulana Himayatul Hasan, 4 July 1951, ibid., p. 224. (43) To Chhabban, n.d., ibid., pp. 29–30. (44) To Hima, November 1947, ibid., p. 83. (45) To Niyaz Fatehpuri, n.d., ibid., p. 109. (46) Ibid. (47) To Hima, n.d., ibid., p. 91. (48) Varshney, Ethnic Conflict, p. 211.

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In the Shadow of Partition (49) To his daughter he strongly recommended reading Nirad Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London, 1951). (50) To Hima, 11 December 1948, 19 February 1949, Goya dabistan, pp. 68, 164. (51) To Hima, 16 December 1948, ibid., p. 70. (52) To Hima, 24 August 1958, p. 392, and, to Qazi S. Muhammad Tahir, 12 February 1958, ibid., p. 381. (53) To Hima, n.d., ibid., p. 149. (54) Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, p. 19. (55) Zaidi, Apni yadein, p. 35. (56) Azad, Aab-e hayat, p. 155. (57) Rasul, From Purdah to Parliament, pp. 114–6. (58) Joint Statement (with Ram Manohar Lohia) on Zamindari Abolition, 27 December 1949, Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva, Vol. 3, p. 426. (59) Rashid, quoted in Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies, p. 367. (60) Qurratulain Hyder, Mere bhi sanamkhane (Lahore, 1949), p. 68. (61) To Muhammad Ali, 4 June 1957, Goya dabistan, p. 350. (62) Mujeeb, Indian Muslims, pp. 410–11. (63) Azad, Aab-e Hayat, p. 93. (64) Josh Malihabadi, Yaadon ki baraat (New Delhi, 1992 enlarged edn), p. 92. (65) Ibid., p. 91. (66) D.A. Low, introduction to Soundings in Modern South Asian History, ed. D.A. Low (Berkeley, California, 1968), p. 9. (67) Ye Rudauli ye maqaam-e fikriya khaana-kharaab Sarbarehna chaak damaan jaise muflis ka shabaab Jaise zeb-e taq-inisyaan karmkhurda ek kitaab Inqilab-o-inqilab wa inqilab-o-inqilab Aaj bhi is khan-e weeran me hota hai guzar Dubte hain chand tare, muskarati hai sehr Qahqahon ke jam-o-meena bhi khanakte hain magar Page 28 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition Jaise badruhon ki awaazen hawa ke dosh par Ye haqiqat hai ke duniya me taghayyur hai zuroor Kaun jaane kab shab-e zulmaat ko milta hai noor.

(68) Salim, Hum saath the, and the poem of Zaidi is quoted therein. (69) Ibid., p. 26. For Zaidi, Apni yadein, pp. 343–7. (70) Asad Ali, the hockey player from Baragaon, settled in Pakistan in his old age; Jalil A. Kidwai of Juggaur, a poet, worked for the Information ministry in Delhi before joining the same department in Karachi; the pilot Faud Shahid Husain (d. 1987) of Gadia, the eldest son of Shahid Husain (1878–1924) who practiced at Allahabad under Motilal Nehru before moving to Lucknow, served the Pakistan Air Force. Rishad Shahid Husain, his younger brother, joined the Indian Foreign Service and lived in Lucknow. (71) In the first election held in 1952, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh finished second to the Congress in three of the four state assembly constituencies. It received 20 per cent of the popular vote in two and 30 per cent in the third. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict, p. 210. (72) Muhammad Ali to Hima, November 1947, Goya dabistan, pp. 83–4. (73) 14 September 1950, Inside Story of Sardar Patel, p. 413. (74) Nehru to Katju, 22 January 1952, SWJN, 2nd srs., Vol. 17, p. 398. (75) Patel to G.B. Pant, 9 January 1950, Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, Vol. 9, p. 310. (76) 2 December 1948, Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. 2, p. 759. (77) For correspondence on this subject, Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, Vol. 4, pp. 69–73. Christopher R. King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (New Delhi, 1994), p. 189. (78) ‘To Nehru, 2 December 1948, Bunch of Old Letters, p. 520; Acharya Narendra Deva’s speech at Urdu Society, 2 October 1948, Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva, Vol. 3, p. 78; Dariabadi, Aap biti, p. 20. (79) Rai, Hindi Nationalism, p. 113. (80) To Ravi Shankar Shukla, 20 March, SWJN, 2nd srs, Vol. 25, p. 227. (81) Nehru to Chief Ministers, 20 September 1953, ibid., Vol. 23, p. 142, cited in Parthasarathi (ed.), Jawaharlal, Vol. 3, pp. 375–81.

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In the Shadow of Partition (82) Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates, 30 January 1948, Vol. 1, no. 2, p. 51. (83) Aizaz Rasul stated that the forty million Muslims in India would find it extremely difficult to learn Hindi in the Devanagri script. She wanted 15 years for the changeover. Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, pp. 306–7. (84) C.M. Naim, ‘The Situation of the Urdu Writer: A Letter from Bara Banki’, December 1993/February 1994’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 1995, pp. 121, 123. (85) Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative), Debates, 3 February 1948, Vol. 1, no. 4, p. 164. (86) Omar Khalidi, ‘Ethnic Group Recruitment in the Indian Army’, pp. 530, 534. (87) Among the Congress delegates from Bihar, there were only five or six Muslims out of over four hundred. Some of the oldest Congress Muslims, including Saiyyid Mahmud, failed to get elected. Nehru’s note to the General Secretary, AICC, 22 April 1954, SWJN, New srs, Vol. 25, p. 169. (88) Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, N.J., 1997), p. 288. (89) Nehru to Pant, 19 January 1952, SWJN, 2nd srs, Vol. 17, p. 397. (90) To N. Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, 25 May 1949, SWJN, 2nd srs, Vol. 11, p. 236. (91) Ibid., 31 May 1949, p. 240. Patel told the Jamiyat al-ulama delegation that the home ministry circular was concerned with communists and the railway strike, and that it was not the intention to deal with Muslims as such. (92) Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report (Second rpt., 1989), Vol. 7, pp. 300–1 (93) Ibid., p. 918. (94) This point is missed in several studies, though a recent publication draws attention to their linkages with Hindu nationalism, and to the local Congress committees’ endorsement of their militaristic protection, exemplified in the formation of the Hind Rakshah Dal of the Hindu community. William Gould, ‘Congress Radicals and Hindu Militancy: Sampurnanand and Purshottam Das Tandon in the Politics of the United Provinces, 1930–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 36, 2, July 2002, pp. 650–3. (95) 8 December 1948, Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, p. 915. (96) 2 September 1949, Inside Story, p. 406.

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In the Shadow of Partition (97) 26 September 1950, ibid., p. 421. (98) 2 September 1949, ibid., p. 405. (99) Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates, February 1948, Vol. 2, no. 3, p. 319 (100) Gadgil, Government from inside, p. 180. (101) Nadwi, Karawaan-e zindagi, Vol. 1, p. 343. (102) Nehru to B.C. Roy, 18 May 1950, SWJN, 2nd srs, Vol. 14, Part 2, p. 295; Nehru to Pant [tel.], 11 April 1950, pp. 267–8. (103) 2 December 1948, Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. 7, p. 759. (104) 8 November 1948, ibid., p. 304. (105) To G.B. Pant, 17 April 1950, SWJN, 2nd srs, Vol. 14, Part 2, pp. 293–4; Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation, pp. 146–7. (106) Das, From Curzon to Nehru, p. 279. (107) Reeves, Landlords and Government, p. 324; Elizabeth Whitcombe, ‘Whatever Happened to the Zamindars’, E.J. Hobsbawm (ed.), Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner (Delhi, 1990); T.R. Metcalf, ‘Landlords Without Land: The UP Zamindars Today’, Pacific Affairs, Spring/Summer, 1978. (108) Nehru, of course, disapproved of Mridula’s activities in Kashmir. To Rafi, 19 July 1953, SWJN, New srs, Vol. 23, pp. 291–2. On the ‘Friends of New Kashmir Committee’, see Aparna Basu, Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel without a Cause (New Delhi, 1996). (109) Nehru to Mridula Sarabhai, 3 August 1953, SWJN, New srs, Vol. 23, p. 308. (110) A.H. Kidwai, ‘Rural-Urban Nexus’, p. 245. (111) Ibid., p. 248. (112) His wife Siddiqa Kidwai (1914–58) was Rajya Sabha member from Delhi from 1956 to 1958. (113) For her profile, Salahuddin Ahmad (ed.), Dilliwale (Delhi, 1992), pp. 498– 506. (114) Nisar’s other son, Riazur Rahman, authored the history of the Kidwais in 1987. (115) D.E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, N.J., 1963), p. 419. Page 31 of 32

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In the Shadow of Partition (116) A.H. Kidwai, ‘Rural-Urban Nexus’, pp. 247–8. (117) Rama Nand Singh, Integrated Rural Development and Model of Spatial Organisation in Bara Banki and Deoria Districts: A Comparative Study (Gorakhpur, 1997). (118) Courtesy: Professor S.R. Kidwai, son of Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai and formerly Professor of Urdu, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune Mushirul Hasan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords Little is known about the impact of the Partition on culture and social structure in Awadh. Nevertheless, the histories of a locality can be better understood by studying lives. Indeed, the Kidwais’ historical experience in Masauli reveals the engagement of a family and class with their colonial and post-colonial predicaments. The lives of the Masauli Kidwais offer a glimpse into qasbas, both past and present. In general, official identifications in the census alone were not enough to reify or solidify identities. The Kidwais and many other families in the Bara Banki district in the United Provinces interactively created meanings and identities which shaped their lives. Keywords:   Awadh, Kidwais, Masauli, qasbas, families, Bara Banki district, United Provinces

That bright and lively girl, Zarina, was the first to leave with me. She was chatting merrily, and as she got out of the car she encountered a middleaged Sikh in the street. She let go of my hand and at once went up to him and hugged him. He kissed her and asked where she was going. I told him, ‘She’s well now and I’m taking her to Jamia. She’ll go to school there and when we find her relatives she’ll leave.’ He was very pleased. He hugged her again and gave her some sweets and then went away off. I asked her who he was but she didn’t know. He was just ‘Baba’ to all the children. People told me, ‘This compassionate mortal keeps coming here. The children all run to hug him. He loves them. Gives them sweets. Laughs and chats with them and then goes off again.’ This true representative of humanity comes into this world of sorrow and distress and gives out love

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Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune without regard for religion or community. If only all of us were so generous! I’m sorry I couldn’t even find out his name … . Anis Kidwai, ‘Children’,1 This summer the battle was lost before it began. The desolation it brought was the visible expression of desolate hearts. The tainted wind blew hot and cold from blazing homes, and carried the dust of devastated fields, and the dead… . Attia Hosain, ‘After the Storm’,2 (p.280) Historical turning points can have extremely long-lived consequences. Over five decades is time enough to evaluate the impact of the Partition on certain Muslim families in Awadh, but not to trace its effects on the deeper patterns of culture and social structure in the region. Even so, it is through a study of the lives we have discussed that one can meaningfully explore the histories of a locality. Indeed, the historical experience of the Masauli Kidwais unfolds the engagement of a family as well as a class with their colonial and post-colonial predicaments. In the words of Choudhry Muhammad Ali, the taluqdar of Rudauli and a long-standing and valued family friend: We have lived under several British monarchs. We have seen Hindustan, Pakistan, Gandhi, Jinnah (May peace be upon him), the division of India, the two World Wars, and the destruction caused by them. Yet, we have remained safe and secure in Awadh. Of course, the changes taking place around us have been traumatic, but still … . What happened in Hiroshima is similar to the holocaust at Amritsar and Lahore in 1947. Nonetheless we, in Awadh, have remained all right.3 In this change of mood, a great deal was lost, though something also was gained. The hope of recovering the privileges was lost. The gain, if any, was a new submission to laws and regulations that were, at first, repugnant but later negotiable. At the same time it would be wrong to infer, from the reactions of Choudhry Muhammad Ali’s class, an abandonment of former beliefs and distrust of the new order. Some of their prejudices, mirrored however imperfectly by him, remained with them, and still remain in the surviving members of their families. If the process of historical study is to carry us from the general to the particular and from the abstract to the concrete, then the Masauli Kidwais provide an entrée into the qasba world, both past and present, which is still largely unexplored. Their career illustrates how history throws open some paths and closes off others, how identities are layered, fluid, situationally negotiated constructs, and not neatly tied to places in an unproblematic way.4 Generally speaking, official identifications in the census alone did not reify or solidify Page 2 of 3

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Gardish-e-dauran: Vicissitudes of Fortune identities. They remained multilayered, and the Kidwais, (p.281) like many other families in the Bara Banki district, interactively created meanings and identities which shaped their lives. As Clifford Geertz wrote, drawing on Max Weber, ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.’5 Notes:

(1) Translated by Ralph Russell, The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 17, 2002, p. 92. (2) Alok Bhalla (ed.), Stories About the Partition of India, Vol. 2, p. 101. (3) To Raja Sahib Salempur, n.d., Goya dabistan, p. 96. (4) Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Islam, Communities and the Nation: Muslim Identities in South Asia and Beyond, (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 19–23. (5) Cited in Laura Dudley Jenkins, Identity and Identification: Defining the Disadvantaged (London, 2003), p. 5.

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Appendix

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

(p.282) Appendix

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Appendix

Table 1: Towns and villages in the tahsils of Bara Banki district Tahsil

Total number of towns and villages

Towns and villages with population between

1–199

200–499

500–999

1,000–1,999 2,000–2,999 3,000–4,999 5,000–9,999 10,000– 14,000

Nawabaganj

390

82

151

107

36

7

5

1

1

Haidergarh

372

100

136

92

34

6

4

–

–

Ramsanehig hat

630

123

234

180

76

10

5

1

1

Fatehpur

676

261

261

143

41

5

8

2

–

2,068

566

782

522

187

28

22

4

2

Total

Source: District Census Statistics, N–W Provinces & Oudh: Bara Banki District(Allahabad, 1895), p. 7.

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Appendix (p.283)

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Appendix

Table 2: List of taluqdars holding land in Bara Banki district, 1903 No.

Name of Taluqdar

Caste

Name of Taluqa Parganas in which situated

Villages

Revenue Assessed

1

2

3

4

6

7

1 Raja-i-Rajgan Sir Jagatjit Singh, GCSI

2 Maharaja Sir Partab Narain Singh, KCIE 3 Raja Ali Muhammad Khan

Sikh

5 Kapurthala

Brahman

Ayodhya

Sheikh

Mahmudabad

Bhitauli, Bado Sarai

Whole

Part

Rs.

Muhammadpur

48

0

11991

Rudauli, Dariabad, Satrikh

14

2

12740

Fatehpur, Kursi, Ramnagar, Muhammadpur, Dewa, Nawabganj

83

51

82963

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Appendix

No.

Name of Taluqdar

Caste

Name of Taluqa Parganas in which situated

Villages

Revenue Assessed

1

2

3

4

6

7

4 Raja Tasadduq Rasul Khan, CSI

5

”

Jahangirabad

Nawabganj, Siddhaur, Dewa, Partapganj, Fatehpur, Bado Sarai, Satrikh, Ramnagar, Muhammadpur, and Haidergarh

94

67

132547

5 Raja Muhammad Sadiq Khan

Pathan

Nanpara

Nawabganj

1

0

2150

6 Raja Kazim Husain Khan

Sheikh

Paintepur

Fatehpur, Kursi, Muhammadpur

37

11

27193

7 Raja Bhagwan Baksh Singh

Amethia

Pokhra Ansari

Haidergarh

21

9

28623

8 Raja Rameshwar Bakhsh Singh

Amethia

Birsinghpur

Haidergarh

0

2

420

9 Raja Indra Bikram Singh

Panwar

Itaunja

Kursi

1

0

1100

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Appendix

No.

Name of Taluqdar

Caste

Name of Taluqa Parganas in which situated

Villages

Revenue Assessed

1

2

3

4

6

7

10 Raja Raghuraj Bahadur Singh

5

Surajbansi

Haraha

40 Mir Muhammad Husain

Saiyyid

Purai

41 Muhammad Ismail

Sheikh

49

21

64530

Rudauli

2

4

2862

Shahabpur

Partabganj

0

1

1470

Bisen

Usmanpur

Siddhaur, Satrikh

3

4

5450

43 Chaudhri Muhammad Ali

Khanzada

Amirpur

Rudauli

7

22

9770

44 Musammat Shahara Begam

Saiyyid

Ahmamau

Dewa

2

5

5376

”

Ranimau

Dariabad, Rudauli

11

9

9918

46 Muhammad Husain Khan

Surajbansi

Neora

Basorhi, Mawai, Rudauli

1

26

8124

47 Dargahi Khan

Bhatti

Unchgaon

Subeha

1

0

40

42 Muhammad Ibrahim Khan

45 Thakur Janki Parshad Singh

Dariabad Bado Sarai

Khanzada

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Appendix

No.

Name of Taluqdar

Caste

Name of Taluqa Parganas in which situated

Villages

Revenue Assessed

1

2

3

4

6

7

48

Muhabbat Rai

Bhale

Lilauli

49

Sheoratan Singh

Sultan

Panhauna

50

Musammat Dilraj Kunwar

Kayasth

5 Fatehpur

8

3

4669

Subeha

3

0

1530

3

22

7746

Siddhaur

0

11

578

Muhammadpur Muhammadpur, Bado

Bais

Sarai and Ramnagar

51

Saiyyid Raza Husain

Raikwar

52

Mohsin Ali

Ahbans

Kotwara

Dewa, Nawabganj

4

0

4605

53

Musammat Fatim-un-nissa

Sheikh

Jasmara

”

3

1

3900

54

Talib Ali and Sajid Ali

”

Ghazipur

Kursi

5

1

9144

55

Musammat Rukmin Kunwar

”

Dinpanah

Haidergarh, Satrikh

4

2

2967

56

Maulvi Rafi-uddin

Brahman

Tirbediganj

Dewa, Ramnagar

1

14

4009

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Appendix

No.

Name of Taluqdar

Caste

Name of Taluqa Parganas in which situated

Villages

Revenue Assessed

1

2

3

4

6

7

57

Thakur Sukhmangal Singh

58

Babu Ram Singh

59

Chaudhri Mehdi Hasan Khan

60

Musammat Bhagwan Kunwar

61

Musammat Bibi Mehri

5

Sheikh

Mirpur

Haidergarh

2

0

2728

Amethia

Ramnagar

”

3

0

2670

”

Parewan

Basorhi, Mawai,

4

46

12618

Bhatti

Akhiapur

Nawabganj and Rudauli

1

0

2175

Mawai

1

0

3006

Barauli

Bais

Sikh

Pali

Partapganj

Yakutganj Source: Bara Banki: A Gazetteer, 1904, pp. xxxix–xlii.

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Appendix (p.284) (p.285) (p.286)

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Appendix

Table 3: Pargana-wise population by religion and occupation, 1895 Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

19

Thana Nawabganj Parga 237 na Fatel ganj

7,237 35,62 19,68 18,94 30,89 1,720 31,74 6,873 *1 1 4 0 3 8

24,74 2,197 588 5

3,053 1,973 4,010 2,00

Parga 147 na Satrik h

4,703 24,65 13,61 12,04 21,08 595 0 4 3 4

21,56 3,036 – 3

16,76 1,187 860 3

1,430 1,578 3,288 100

Parga 334 na Nawa bganj

12,76 67,65 35,36 32,09 64,01 3010 9 0 7 2 0

49,06 18,17 *431 3 5

31,96 5,734 1,643 7,723 4,910 6,978 5,80 1

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

1

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

273

931

1,100 2,115 70

Parga 134 na Dewr a

4,017 23,71 13,20 11,41 33,89 821 8 0 4 3

28,61 3,103 – 0

17,87 716 0

Parga 46 na Daria bad

3,617 15,46 7,891 7,678 15,10 568 9 1

11,01 4,633 *3 1

9,117 1,047 150

Total, 898 Than a Nawa bganj

243

1,70, 324

98,18 82,16 163,1 6,723 134,6 30,87 *435 5 9 41 05 1

2,309 880

19

1,588 50

103,1 10,50 2,940 16,41 10,30 16,98 10,00 46 1 4 4 8

Thana Zaidpur

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

2

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

19

Parga 177 na Sidba ur A

6,665 33,46 17,03 16,38 32,36 1,199 23,71 9,749 *2 9 8 9 0 8

19,52 2,217 569 6

4,472 2,074 3,099 1,51

Parga 355 na Sidba ur B

18,79 68,21 34,52 33,69 65,90 2,314 58,34 9,868 *1 9 7 0 1 3 8

46,10 3,463 734 9

4,356 4,160 7,211 2,18

Total, 532 Than a Zaidp ur

19,46 101,6 51,01 50,08 98,26 3,123 82,06 19,61 *3 4 86 0 0 3 6 7

65,63 5,680 1,303 8,828 6,234 10,31 3,69 5 0

Thana Kursi Parga 418 na Dawa

9,981 54,85 28,72 26,12 53,24 1,399 46,59 8,253 – 1 3 8 2 8

40,69 2,203 462 3

2,491 2,477 4,650 1,87

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

3

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

19

Parga 385 na Kursi

7,888 45,04 23,59 21,44 43,34 1,595 36,97 8,067 *1 2 8 4 7 4

32,62 2,147 535 0

1,631 2,117 4,139 1,53

Total, 803 Than a Kursi

17,89 99,89 58,32 47,57 96,58 3,994 83,57 16,32 *1 0 3 1 2 9 2 0

73,31 4,350 997 3

4,122 4,584 9,889 3,40

Thana Ramnagar Parga 214 na Bhila nli

3,888 21,00 11,16 9,938 20,52 570 9 1 6

48,27 2,821 *3 3

Parga 411 na Ramn agar

15,72 86,21 45,64 40,57 82,54 3,664 73,29 12,83 *153 3 3 1 2 9 3 7

18,05 433 7

114

54,54 4,789 742 9

236

390

1,480 38

6,184 3,874 12,69 3,39 5

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

4

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

5

7

8

9

10

11

Parga 50 na Bulo Sirni

1,982 0,981 5,032 4,829 9,432 409

8,587 1,274 –

Total, 675 Than a Ramn agar

21,39 117,1 61,83 55,39 113,5 4,643 100,0 16,93 *156 3 73 4 9 30 95 2

13

14

6,972 430

15

16

17

18

134

581

463

1,130 14

79,57 5,052 990 8

19

7,901 4,733 15,30 3,91 5

Thana Fatehpur Parga 285 na Moha mma dpur

5,811 33,44 17,69 15,74 32,65 792 4 9 5 2

30,22 3,221 – 3

25,15 1,249 238 7

1,094 1,100 3,578 96

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

5

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

19

Parga 656 na Fateh pur

17,76 104,9 54,57 50,42 102,4 3,558 82,69 22,17 *130 8 99 3 6 41 4 5

71,47 4,934 1,107 6,661 6,775 10,63 3,41 3 6

Total, 941 Than a Fateh pur

23,57 138,4 72,27 66,17 134,6 4,350 112,9 25,39 *130 9 43 2 1 93 17 6

96,63 6,183 1,345 7,765 7,935 14,21 4,37 0 4

Thana Tikaitnagar Parga 73 na Bado Sarai

8,056 14,99 7,597 7,397 14,54 450 4 4

11,27 3,721 – 3

9,890 967

197

1,280 1,137 1,221 330

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

6

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

19

Parga 579 na Daria bad

19,77 102,8 52,84 50,00 59,67 3,276 89,14 13,33 *351 4 45 2 3 0 4 0

66,26 6,460 1,484 6,910 6,203 12,73 2,750 9 1

Total 652 Than a Tikait nagar

22,82 117,8 60,43 57,40 114,1 3,726 100,4 17,05 *351 0 39 9 0 14 17 1

76,16 7,427 1,681 8,190 7,340 13,95 3,080 9 2

Thana Ramsanchig hat Parga 80 na Daria bad

2,310 11,91 6,056 5,859 11,59 318 5 7

11,67 836 9

–

8,484 487

156

755

502

1,270 201

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

15,03 2,041 – 9

13

14

13,25 818 8

15

16

17

162

1,137 673

19

Parga 83 na Nawa l Maho laru

3,613 17,68 8,789 8,941 17,02 657 0 3

2,640 695

Parga 453 na Suraj pur

11,89 63,95 32,18 31,81 61,73 2,217 59,86 4,076 *20 6 6 7 9 9 0

41,94 2,392 795 2

3,431 2,101 8,149 1,940

Parga 142 na Basar ul

4,911 21,44 13,13 12,31 22,93 1,590 18,86 6,067 *10 6 2 4 6 9

16,78 1,023 268 4

2,051 856

2,463 970

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

1

2

7

Total, 758 Than a Rani Saurh ighat

5

7

8

9

10

11

22,73 117,9 69,06 58,93 713,2 4,782 104,3 18,62 *30 0 97 4 3 13 47 0

13

14

15

16

17

19

83,48 4,820 1,381 7,371 4,162 13,92 3,766 8 2

Thana Bhilsar Parga 43 na Darib ad

537

2,368 1,324 1,244 2,494 74

2,541 27

–

Parga 574 na Ruda nji

23,78 116,2 56,70 59,56 112,1 4,147 88,48 27,71 *74 1 74 9 5 27 6 4

1,881 72

24

34

65

457

35

80,90 5,430 1,406 6,970 5,610 11,78 4,072 8 8

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

8

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

Parga 148 na Nawa l Mabo lara

4,631 22,17 10,83 11,34 21,49 675 4 3 1 9

19,70 2,465 *3 6

Total, 765 Than a Bhils ar

28,94 141,8 68,86 72,15 136,1 4,896 110,7 30,20 *77 9 16 6 0 20 33 6

13

14

16,69 663 0

15

16

17

194

1,093 493

19

2,414 630

99,47 6,165 1,714 8,097 6,168 14,65 4,737 9 9

Thana Haidargarh Parga 453 na Itaida rgarh

12,59 68,94 34,36 34,58 66,25 2,688 63,49 5,440 *5 4 4 2 2 6 9

44,29 4,111 1,055 4,187 5,062 7,448 2,784 7

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Appendix

Name of Pargana Social Num ber

1

9

2

Population

Religion

Occupation

Num ber of inhab ited sites

Num Total ber of inhab ited house s

Males Femal Resid Visito Kirdu Mela es ents rs a mma dans

Other Agric Trade Profe Artisa Meni s ulturi rs ssion ns als sts and als Bank ers

Labo Other urers s

3

4

6

12

18

5

7

8

9

10

11

13

14

15

16

17

19

Parga 480 na Subel a

11,19 67,59 28,19 29,39 56,07 1,517 52,10 5,483 – 5 1 6 5 4 6

40,40 1,833 439 3

3,594 2,094 7,521 1,707

Total, 938 Than a Itaida rgarh

23,78 136,5 62,55 63,97 122,3 4,205 115,6 10,92 *5 9 35 8 7 30 05 3

84,70 5,944 1,494 7,781 7,156 14,96 4,491 0 9

Total 6,959 312,9 1,130 577,1 653,7 1,090 39,95 943,7 185,9 1,228 811,4 57,22 13,84 74,59 68,82 123,4 41,60 distri 98 ,906 16 91 ,955 1 40 39 08 8 6 3 2 08 2 ct Barba nki District Census Statistics, N.W. Provinces and Oudh. Bara Banki District (Allahabad, 1895), pp. 16–17.

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Appendix (p.287) (p.288) (p.289)

Table 4: Genealogy of Qazi Kidwa’s family

Source: Riaz-ur-Rahman Kidwai, Biographical Sketch of Kidwais of the Awadh (Aligarh, 1987), Annexure IX. (p.290)

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Appendix

Table 5: Fairs in Bara Banki district, 1903 Tahsil

Pargana

Town or village

Name of fair

Date

Average attendance

Nawabganj

Pribatwan

Basant Panchmi

2000

”

Bansa

Shah Abdur Razaq

Shawwal 3rd –6th

30000

”

Rampur

Katki Ashan,

Kartik Puraumashi

15000

Badail

”

”

3000

”

Paisar

Dasehra

Kuar Sudi 10th

4000

”

Tera Daulatpur

Gharib-ullah Shah

Every Monday

400

”

Majitha

Narga Deota

Asarh Puranmashi

25000

”

Mushkinagar

Kailaspuri

Kuar Puranmashi

2500

”

”

”

Every Tuesday

500

”

Udhauli

Dhanusjag

Aghan Badi 5th

5000

Safdarganj

”

Aghan Sudi 5th

5000

”

Partabganj

”

Aghan Sudi 8th

800

”

Damaura

”

Aghan Sudi 10th

800

”

Palhri

”

Aghan Puranmashi

500

”

Manpur

”

Aghan Sudi 5th

400

”

Satrikh

Hazrat Sahu Salar

Jeth Puranmashi

15000

”

”

Urs Imam Ali

Jumad-us-Sani 17th

500

Nawabganj

”

”

Nawabganj

Partabganj

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Appendix

Tahsil

Pargana

Town or village

Name of fair

Date

Average attendance

Satrikh

Kotwa

Katki Ashnan

End of Kartik

5000

”

Zaidpur

Dasehra

Kuar Sudi 10th

3000

”

Bhanman

”

”

2000

”

Dewa

”

Kuar Puranmashi

2000

”

”

Haji Sahib

Shaban 17th

25000

Nawabganj

”

Hazrat Shah Mina

Shawwal 15th

500

”

”

Amir Ali Shah

First day of Jeth

500

”

Pind

Dhanusjang

Aghan Sudi 7th

5000

”

Godaha

”

Kartik Puranmashi

2000

”

Jata

”

Aghan Sudi 5th

700

”

”

Katki Ashnan

Kartik Puranmashi

900

Kheoli

Narsingh Deo

Jeth Puranmashi

5000

”

Danyalpur

Gursagar

Kartik Puranmashi

1000

”

Sandauli

Makhdum Shah

First week of Jeth

700

”

Jasmara

Pir

Jeth Puranmashi

60

”

Gokulpur

Mahabir

First Tuesday in Jeth

200

”

Jabri Khurd

Jangali Shahid

First day of Jeth

50

”

Tendula

Gandhmaya

Jeth Puranmashi

200

”

”

Dewa

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Appendix

Tahsil

Pargana

Town or village

Name of fair

Date

Average attendance

”

Sahara

Augan Pir

First week of Baisakh 300

”

Daurahra

Urs Imam Sahib

First day of Chait

400

”

Gursail

Debji

Kartik and Baisakh

1500

Puranmashi ”

Bhagauli

Mahadeo

Aghan Badi 14th

2500

”

Baddupur

Murat Swami

Every Full Moon

2500

”

Manjhgawan

Hazrat Makhdum Sahib

Shawwal 16th

2000

Lodhaura

Lodheswar Mahadeo

Aghan Badi 14th

15000

”

”

Phagun Badi 14th

30000

”

Fatehpur

Ramnagar

Fatehpur

Ramnagar

Ganeshpur

Dasehra

Kuar Sudi 2nd–15th

4000

(c. concluded)

(c. concluded)

Saadatganj

”

Kuar Sudi 5th

5000

”

”

Jhula

Sawan Puranmashi

5000

”

Bado Sarai

Naglila

Bhadon Puraumashi

4000

”

Kintur

Madar Sahib

Shawwal

1000

”

Sardaha

Dhanusjag

Aghan Puranmashi

1500

Bardari

”

Aghan Sudi 5th

2000

”

Baraulia

”

”

1500

”

Udhia

”

Kartik Sudi 2nd

3000

”

Bado Sarai

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Appendix

Tahsil

Pargana ”

Name of fair

Date

Average attendance

Rudauli

Zohra Bibi

First Sunday in Jeth

60000

”

Makhdum Shah

Jumad-us-Sani 12th

50000

Abdul Haq

to 15th

Bhitauli

” ”

Town or village

Rudauli

” ”

Kaithi

Katki Ashnan

Kartik Puranmashi

1000

”

Daryabad

Dasehra

Kuar Sudi 10th

5000

”

Tikaitnagar,

”

”

3000

”

Amrahra

”

”

1000

”

Eganpur

”

Kuar Puranmashi

6000

”

Kotwa

Jagjiwandas

Kartik and Baisakh

50000

”

”

Every other full moon 2000

”

”

”

Chait Sudi 9th

4000

”

”

”

Kuar Sudi 9th

2000

”

Kamiar

Dhanusjag

Aghan Sudi 5th

3000

Sikri Jiwal

”

Aghan Sudi 11th

1000

”

Gokula

Katiki Ashnan

Kartik Puranmashi

2000

”

Sikraura

Kanslila

Kuar Puranmashi

1000

”

Tilwari

Makar Ashan

Magh Anawas

3000

”

Ramsanehighat

Daryabad

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Appendix

Tahsil

Pargana

Town or village

Name of fair

Date

Average attendance

”

Amauni

Amauni

Kartik Puranmashi

3000

”

Saimasi

Dasehra

Kuar Sudi 10th

300

”

”

Dhanusjag

Aghan Sudi 5th

400

”

Saidpur

”

”

400

”

Dasehra

Kuar Puranmashi

300

Sunba

Kamakhia Devi

Chait and Kuar

1000

”

Mawai

”

Sudi 7th-9th ”

Dharauli

Dasehra

Kuar Sudi 10th

12000

”

Surajpur

Neora

”

Kuar Puranmashi

500

”

Basorhi

”

Dhanusjag

Aghan Sudi 5th

400

”

Makhdumpur

Naglila

Bhadon Puranmashi

600

”

”

Hatia

Last week of Asarh

500

”

Paighambarpur

”

Shawwal 2nd to 6th

500

”

Basorhi

Jumman Shah

Id-ul-Fitr

200

”

”

Hazrat Jalal Shah

Shawwal 11th

200

”

Ghuswal

Aulia Shahid

Last week of Asarh

1000

”

Haidergarh

Dasehra

Kuar Sudi 10th

20000

Ausaneswarghat

Katki Ashnan

Kartik Puranmashi

12000

Haidergarh

Haidergarh

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Appendix

Tahsil

Pargana

Town or village

Name of fair

Date

Average attendance

”

”

Sheoratri

Phagun Badi 14th

15000

”

Siddhaur

Dhanusjag

Aghan Sudi 5th

12000

”

Siddhaur

Source: Neville, District Gazetteer (Barabanki).

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Appendix (p.291) (p.292) (p.293) (p.294)

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Appendix

Table 6: Bara Banki’s population according to religion and scheduled castes, 1951 Tract

Total Population

Hindu

Sikh

Jain

District total

1264204

1036143

365

974

–

–

Rural total

1181105

993805

171

220

–

Tahsil Fatehpur (R)

320328

264788

108

209

Tahsil Haidergarh (c.R)

227567

201981

25

Tahsil Nawabganj (R)

258669

214277

Tahsil 374541 Ramasanehi ghat (c.R) Urban total

83099

Buddhist

Zoroast-rian Muslim

Christian

Scheduled castes (included under the religions)

226676

46

341207

–

186905

4

334047

–

–

55222

1

79563

–

–

–

25560

1

78365

15

–

–

–

44377

–

79235

312759

23

11

–

–

61746

2

96884

42338

194

754

–

–

39771

42

7160

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Appendix

Tract

Total Population

Hindu

Sikh

Jain

Urban noncity

83099

42338

194

754

Buddhist

–

Zoroast-rian Muslim

–

39771

Christian

Scheduled castes (included under the religions)

42

7160

Source: Uttar Pradesh District Gazetteer (Bara Banki, 1951), p. 293.

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Appendix

Access brought to you by:

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Bibliography

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

(p.295) Bibliography (p.295) Bibliography Private Papers

Mohamed Ali Papers, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. M.A. Ansari Papers, Jamia Millia Islamia. All India Congress Committee Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library [NMML], New Delhi. Abdul Majid Daryabadi Papers, NMML. H.J. Frampton Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies [CSAS], Cambridge. H.G. Haig Papers, MSS. EUR. F. 115, British Library, London. Maurice Hallet Papers, MSS. EUR. F. E251, British Library. Rev. D.P. Hardy Papers, CSAS. Shamsul Hasan Collection, Karachi, Pakistan. H. Orange Papers, CSAS. Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, NMML. J. Stubbs Papers, CSAS. R.V. Vernede Papers, CSAS. Page 1 of 24

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Bibliography Unpublished Government Records

Records of the UP government under the following headings: General Administration, Education, Police, Revenue, UP State Archives, Lucknow. Board of Revenue Records, UP State Archives, Lucknow. (p.296) Official Reports

Administration of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh, April 1882– November 1887 (Allahabad, 1889). Annual Report of the Administration of the Province of Oudh, 1872–73 (Lucknow, 1873). Anson, G.W. Handbook of Tahsil Mohan-Auras, District Unao (Cawnpore, n.d.). Bara Banki: Supplementary Notes and Statistics to Vol. xlviii of the District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (Allahabad, 1915). Census of India, 1911: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Vol. 15, Report (Allahabad, 1912) Census of India, 1921: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Vol. 16, Report (Allahabad, 1923). Census of India, 1951, UP, part 1–A—Report (Allahabad, 1953). Census, India, 1961, Beliefs and Practices Associated with Muslim Pirs in the Two Cities of India, Delhi and Lucknow (New Delhi, 1961). Chamier, F.E.A. Report of the Regular Settlement of the Bara Banki District (Allahabad, 1879). Chatterjee, A.C. Notes on the Industries of the United Provinces (Allahabad, 1908). Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates. Nos. 1–2, 1947–48. Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report, Vol. 7. District Census Statistics, N.-W Provinces and Oudh: Bara Banki District (Allahabad, 1895). District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh: Supplementary Statistics: Bara Banki District, Vol. xlviii (Allahabad, 1915). District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh: Supplementary Notes and Statistics: Bara Banki District, Vol. xlviii (D)(Allahabad, 1935). Page 2 of 24

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Bibliography Grierson, George A. Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. ix, part 1 (Calcutta, 1916). Hope, C. Final Report on the Revision of Settlement in the Bara Banki District (Allahabad, 1899). Macandrew, Major I.F. Review of the Settlement of Eleven Pergunnas in the District of Roy Bareilly effected in the years 1863–66 (Lucknow, 1867). Millert, A.F. Report on the Settlement of the Land Revenue of the Sultanpur District (Lucknow, 1873). Nevill, H.R. Bara Banki: A Gazetteer, Vol. xlviii (Allahabad, 1904). Nevill, H.R. Hardoi: A Gazetteer, Vol. xli (Naini Tal, 1904). Nevill, H.R. Muzaffarnagar: A Gazetteer, Vol. iii (Allahabad, 1903). Nevill, H.R. Sitapur: A Gazetteer, Vol. xl (Lucknow, 1923). Nevill, H.R. Sitapur: A Gazetteer, Vol. xliii (Allahabad, 1928). Oudh: Papers Relating to (Lucknow, n.d.). (p.297) Owen, L. Final Settlement Report of the Bara Banki District, Oudh, 1930 (Allahabad, 1931). Report on the Administration of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 1914– 15 (Allahabad, 1916). Report on the Police Administration in the Province of Oudh, for the year 1871 (Lucknow, 1872). Report on the Working of the System of Government: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 1921–28 (Allahabad, 1928). Report Upon the Progress of Education in the Province of Oudh, 1868 (Lucknow, 1889). Review of the Management of Estates in the Court of Wards or under the Taluqdar’s Relief Act in Oudh, for the year ending 30th September (Allahabad, 1888). Review of the Revenue Administration of the Province of Oudh, for the year ending 30th September 1886 (Allahabad, 1887). Sharma, Pandit Brij Chand. Final Report on the Settlement of Land Revenue in the Lucknow District, Oudh 1926–28 (Allahabad, 1930).

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Bibliography The Imperial Gazetteer of India: The Indian Empire, Vol. 1 (Oxford, New edn, 1907). The Imperial Gazetteer of India: The Indian Empire, Vol. 4 (Oxford, New edn, 1908). Uttar Pradesh District Gazetteers: Bara Banki (Allahabad, 1964). White, Edmund. Report on the Census of the N.W.P. and Oudh (Allahabad, 1882). William, J.C. Census of India, 1869, Oudh, Vol. 1. Published Speeches, Writings, and Correspondences

Ahmad, Waheed (ed.). Letters of Mian Fazl-e-Husain (Lahore, 1976). Chatterji, Basudev (ed.). Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1938, part 3 (New Delhi, 2000). Chopra, P.N. (ed.). Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel: 1936–50 (New Delhi, 2001). Choudhary, Valmiki (ed.). Dr. Rajendra Prasad Correspondence and Select Documents (New Delhi, 1984). Das, Durga (ed.). Sardar Patel’s Correspondence: 1945–50 (Ahmedabad, 1973). Datta, V.N. and B.E. Cleghorn (eds). A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics: Being the Selected Correspondence of the late Dr. Syed Mahmud (New Delhi, 1974). Egner, Robert E. and Lester E. Dononn (eds). The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903–1959 (London, 1961). Gopal, Sarvepalli (ed.). Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund: New Delhi). (p.298) Gupta, Partha Sarathi. Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1943–44, part 3 (New Delhi, 1997). Mansergh, Nicholas (ed.). The Transfer of Power 1942–47 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office: London). Nanda, B.R. (ed.). Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant (New Delhi, 1997). Nehru, Jawaharlal. A Bunch of Old Letters (New Delhi, 1958). Parthasarathi, G. (ed.). Letters to Chief Ministers 1954–1957, 5 Vols. (Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund: New Delhi, 1988).

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Bibliography Pirzada, S. (ed.). Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 2 Vols. (Karachi, 1969). Sharma, Hari Dev (ed.). Selected Works of Acharya Narendra Deva, 4 Vols. (Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi). Bibliographies, Glossary, and Dictionaries

Abidi, S. Sartaj Alam. Urdu Sources on Modern India, 1885–1947 (New Delhi, 2002). Dehalvi, Maulvi Saiyyid Ahmad. Farhang-e Asafiya, Vol. 3 (New Delhi, 1974). Dehkhuda, Ali Akbar. Lughat nama, Vol. 38 (Tehran, 1960). Kakorvi, Maulvi Nurul Hasan. Nurul lughat (New Delhi, 1919 rpt). Wilson, M.H. Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms (London, 1855). Newspapers and Journals [English]

Comrade (Delhi) Indian Recorder (Calcutta), April-June 1932 Islamic Culture (Hyderabad), July 2001 Modern Asian Studies (Cambridge) New Era (Lucknow) The Annual of Urdu Studies (University of Wisconson, Madison) The Times Educational Supplement, 25 October 1968, 1, 8, 15 & 22 November 1968 Twentieth Century (Allahabad). Journals [Urdu]

Farogh-e Urdu: Ehtisham Husain Number (Lucknow), February 1974. Fikr-o-Nazar: Namwaran-e Aligarh (Department of Urdu: Aligarh Muslim University), January 1987–July 1988. (p.299) Gagan (Mumbai), 1975. Guftugu: Taraqqi-pasand adab Number (Mumbai), Vol. 1, August 1980. Naqoosh: Shakhsiat Number (Karachi), ed. Tofail Ahmad, January 1955. Naqoosh: Makatib Number (Karachi), ed. Tofail Ahmad, November 1957. Page 5 of 24

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Bibliography Naya daur (Lucknow), February-March and October-November 1994. Saughat (Bangalore), September 1995. Urdu adab (New Delhi), ed. Aslam Parvez, July-August-September 2001. Dissertations/Theses

Laws, Rama Amritmahal. ‘Lucknow Society and Politics, 1856– 1885’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of South Wales, Australia, 1979). Books/Articles [English]

1. Autobiographies and Memoirs Abbas, K.A. I am not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi, 1977). Ali, Mohamed. My Life: A Fragment. An Autobiographical Sketch of Maulana Mohamed Ali. Edited and annotated by Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi, 1999). Ali, Salim. The Fall of a Sparrow (New Delhi, 1985). Azad, A.K. India Wins Freedom: An Autobiographical Narrative (Bombay, 1959). Chaudhuri, N.C. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London, 1951). Chughtai, Ismat. My Friend, My Enemy: Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits. Translated and introduced by Tahira Naqvi (New Delhi, 2001). Gundevia, Y.D. In the Districts of the Raj (Hyderabad, 1992). Habibullah, Jahanara. Remembrance of Days Past: Glimpses of a Princely State during the Raj (New Delhi, 2001). Hamid, Major General Shahid. Disastrous Twilight: A Personal Record of the Partition of India (London, 1986). Harvani, Ansar. Before Freedom and After (New Delhi, 1989). Kaul, B.M. The Untold Story (Bombay, 1967). Khaliquzzaman, C. Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore, 1961). Kirpalani, S.K. Fifty Years with the British (Hyderabad, 1993). Menon, V.K.R. The Raja and After: Memoirs of a Bihar Civilian (New Delhi, 2002). Mishra, D.P. The Nehru Epoch: From Democracy to Monarchy (New Delhi, 2001).

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Bibliography Naqvi, Saeed. Reflections of an Indian Muslim (New Delhi, 1993). Nehru, J. An Autobiography (London, 1936). Panikkar, K.M. An Autobiography (Madras, 1957). (p.300) Rasul, Begam Qudsia Aizaz. From Purdah to Parliament: The Memoirs of an Muslim Woman in Indian Politics (New Delhi, 2001). Singh, Karan. Autobiography (New Delhi, 1994). 2. Biographies: Books and Essays Andrews, C.F. Zakaullah of Delhi (New Delhi, 2003) With Introductions by Mushirul Hasan and Margrit Pernau. Andrews, C.F. ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan’, Eminent Mussalmans (Madras, 1926). Ansari, Nasim. Choosing to Stay: Memoirs of an Indian Muslims. Translated from Urdu by Ralph Russell (New Delhi, 1999). Ayde, Shivaji Rao. Message of Ashiana (Calcutta, 1962). Basu, Aparna. Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel without a Cause (New Delhi, 1996). Chopra, P.N. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai (Agra, 1960). Digby, Simon. ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (1456–1537): The Personality and Attitudes of a Medieval Indian Sufi’, Medieval India: A Miscellany, Vol. 3 (New Delhi, 1975). Furbank, P.N. E.M. Forster: A Life (Oxford, 1979). Gandhi, Rajmohan. Patel: A Life (Ahmedabad, 1990). Gandhi, Rajmohan. The Rajaji Story (Bombay, 1984). Gopal, S. Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Volume two: 1947–1956 (New Delhi, 1979). Hasan, Mushirul. A Nationalist Conscience: M.A. Ansari, the Congress and the Raj (New Delhi, 1989). Jain, A.P. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai: A Memoir of His Life and Times (Bombay, 1965). Jaunpuri, Mumtaz Husain. ‘Munshi Sajjad Husain’, Nuqoosh: Shakhsiat Number (January 1955). Kaif, S.S. Chakbast (New Delhi, 1988).

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Bibliography Kamath, M.V. Points and Lines. Charat Ram: A Biography (New Delhi, 1994). Khan, Iqtidar Alam. ‘Sheikh Abdul Quddus Gangohi’s Relations with Political Authorities: A Reappraisal’, Medieval India: A Miscellany, Vol. 4 (New Delhi, 1977). Khan, Shaharyar M. The Begums of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India (London, 2000). Kidwai, A.J. ‘An Unsung Hero of Freedom Struggle: Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’, Islam and the Modern Age, May 1993. Kidwai, M. Hashim. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai (New Delhi, 1986). Kidwai, Riazur Rahman. Biographical Sketch of Kidwais of Avadh (Aligarh, 1987). Metcalf, B.D. ‘Nationalist Muslims in British India: The Case of Ajmal Khan’, Modern Asian Studies, 19, 1, 1985. (p.301) Metcalf, B.D. ‘Hakim Ajmal Khan: Rais of Delhi and Muslim ‘Leader’, R.E. Frykenberg (ed.), Delhi Through the Ages: Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society (New Delhi, 1986). Pandey, Geetanjali. Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Prem Chand (New Delhi, 1989). Passin, Herbert. ‘The Jeevan-Dani: A Profile of Jayaprakash Narayan’, Encounter, June 1957. Rani, Radha. ‘The Great Humanist of Our Times’, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, 1970: A Souvenir (Lucknow, 1970). Rau, M. Chalapathi. Govind Ballabh Pant: His Life and Times (New Delhi, 1981). Raza, Saiyyid Hashim. Our Destination: An Autobiography (Karachi, 1991). Sahai, Raghupati. ‘Reminiscences of Prem Chand’, Twentieth Century (Allahabad), December 1936. Sampurnanand. Memories and Reflections (Bombay, 1962). Sarabhai, Mridula. ‘Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, 1970: A Souvenir. Sehgal, Anil (ed.). Ali Sardar Jafri, The Youthful Boatman of Joy (New Delhi, 2001). Shah, Haji Saiyyid Ghafur. The Blessed Lord Haji Hafiz Syed Waris Ali Shah of Dewa, Bara Banki, India (Calcutta, 1912). Page 8 of 24

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Bibliography Shankardass, Rani Dhavan. Vallabhbhai Patel: Power and Organization in Indian Politics (Hyderabad, 1988). Siddiqi, Zameeruddin. ‘Sheikh Abdul Quddus of Gangoh and Contemporary Rulers,’ Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 31st Session, Varanasi, 1969. Srivastava, A.L. The First Two Nawabs of Awadh (Agra, 1954). Wolpert, Stanley. Jinnah of Pakistan (New York, 1984). 3. General: Books and Articles Abul Fazl Allami. The Ain-e Akbari. Translated from the original Persian by Colonel H.S. Jarrat, Vol. 2 (1978 rpt). Ahmad, Imtiaz (ed.). Caste and Social Stratification among Muslims in India (New Delhi, 1978). Alam, Muzaffar. The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48 (New Delhi, 1986). Alam, Muzaffar. ‘Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation and Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society’, S. Gopal and R. Champakalaskhmi (eds), Tradition, Dissent and Ideology (New Delhi, 1996). Alam, Muzaffar. ‘Religion and Politics in Awadh Society 17th and early 18th centuries’, Anna Libera Dallapiccola and Stephanie Zingel-Ave Lallemant (eds), Islam and Indian Regions, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1993). Alam, Muzaffar. and Seema Alavi (eds). A European Experience of the Mughal Orient (New Delhi, 2001). (p.302) Ali, Darogah Haji Abbas. An Illustrated Historical Album of the Rajas and Taluqdars of Oudh (Allahabad, 1880). Ali, Meer Hasan. Observations on the Mussulmans of India: Description of Their Manners, Customs, Habits and Religious Observances, 2 Vols. (London, 1832). Ali, Mohamed. Thoughts on the Present Discontent (Bombay, 1907). Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (New Delhi, 1995). Amin, Shahid. and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds). Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, 1996). Amin, Shahid. ‘Post-colonial towns called Deoria’, Sarai Reader: 1 (Delhi, 2001).

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Bibliography Ansari, K.H. The Emergence of Socialist Thought Among North Indian Muslims, 1917–1947 (Lahore, 1990). Ansari, K.H. ‘Pan-Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialists’, Modern Asian Studies, 20, 3, 1986. Azad, Muhammad Husain. Aab-e-Hayat: Shaping the Canon of Urdu Poetry. Translated & edited by Frances Pritchett in association with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (New Delhi, 2001). Bamford, P.C. Histories of the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movements (Delhi: Government of India Press, 1925, reprinted 1985). Bayly, C.A. The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1890–1920 (Oxford, 1975). Bayly, C.A. Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983). Bayly, C.A. ‘The Small Town and Islamic Gentry in North India: The Case of Kara’, K. Ballhatchet and J. Harrison (eds), The City in South Asia (London, 1980). Bhalla, Alok (ed.). Stories About the Partition of India, 3 Vols. (New Delhi, 1994). Bhatia, Prem. Reflections Along a Political Journey (New Delhi, 2002). Bhatty, Zarina. ‘Status and Power in a Muslim Dominated Village of Uttar Pradesh’, Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social Statification among Muslims in India (New Delhi, 1978). Bilgrami, Rafat. ‘Some Mughal Revenue Grants to the Family and Khanqah of Saiyyid Ashraf Jahangir’, Medieval India: A Miscellany, Vol. 2 (New Delhi, 1972). Brass, Paul R. Factional Politics in an Indian State: The Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh (California: Berkeley, 1965). Brass, Paul R. Language, Religion and Politics in Northern India (Cambridge, 1974). Brass, Paul R. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, N.J., 1997). Brass, Paul R. ‘The partition of India and retributive genocide in the Punjab, 1946–47: means, methods, and purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 71–101.

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Bibliography (p.303) Brennan, Lance. ‘From One Raj to Another: Congress Politics in Rohilkhand, 1930–50’, D.A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle 1917–47 (London, 1977). Brennan, Lance. ‘The Illusion of Security: The Background to Muslim Separatism in the United Provinces’, Mushirul Hasan (ed.), India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization (New Delhi, 1993). Budauni, Abdul Qadir. Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh. Ed. T. Wolseley Haig. Vol. 3 (London, 1899). Burger, Angela S. Opposition in a Dominant Party System: A Study of the Jan Sangh, the Praja Socialist Party, and the Socialist Party in Uttar Pradesh, India (Bombay, 1969). Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998). Casci, S. ‘Lucknow Nawabs: Architecture and Identity’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 September 2002. Chakrabarty, Bhaskar. ‘Living with the Partition: Collective Memory and the Politics of Illegal Migration in Eastern India’ (Occasional Paper 5: Dept. of History, University of Calcutta). Chatterji, J. Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge, 1994). Chatterjee, Partha and Anjan Ghosh (eds). History and the Present (New Delhi, 2002). Chaudhuri, S.B. Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies 1857–1859 (Calcutta, 1957). Cohn, Bernard S. An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi, 1987). Cohn, Bernard S. ‘History and Anthropology: the State of Play’, Contributions to Study and Society, 22, 4, 1980. Cole, J.R.I. Roots of North Indian Shiism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859 (New Delhi, 1989). Crooke, William. The North-Western Provinces of India: Their History, Ethnology, and Administration (Allahabad, 1897). Crooke, William. The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Province and Oudh, Vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1896). Page 11 of 24

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Bibliography Darling, M.L. At Freedom’s Door (Oxford, 1949). Das, Durga. India: From Curzon to Nehru and After (New Delhi, 1969). Dey, Amit. ‘The Image of the Prophet in the Bengal countryside: 1850–1957’, The Calcutta Journal (Department of History: University of Calcutta), Vol. xxi & xxii, 1999–2000. Dey, S.K. Power to the People? A Chronicle of India 1947–67 (Delhi, 1969). (p.304) Dhanagare, D.N. Peasant Movements in India 1920–1950 (New Delhi, 1983). Dove, Marguerite. Forfeited Future: The Conflict over Congress Ministries in British India, 1933–1937 (New Delhi, 1987). Edib, Halide. Inside India (With an introduction and Notes by Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi, 2002). Edib, Halide. The Conflict of East and West in Turkey (Delhi, n.d.). Elliot, Charles Alfred. Laborious Days: Leaves From the India Record (Calcutta, 1892). Enayat, Hamid. Modern Islamic Thought (London, 1982). Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Poems by Faiz. Trans. With an introduction and notes by V.G. Kiernan (Delhi, 2000 paperback edn). Farooqi, N.B.R. ‘The Legend of Sayid Salar Masud Ghazi’, Islamic Culture, July 2001. Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. ‘The Power Politics of Culture: Akbar Ilahabadi and the Changing Order of Things’, Think India, Vol. 6, No. 1, January-March 2003. Fisher, Michael H. A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British and the Mughals (New Delhi, 1987). Freitag, Sandria B. Collective Action and Community: Public Arena and the Emergence of Communalism in India (New Delhi, 1990). Freitag, Sandria B. ‘Ambiguous Public Arenas and Coherent Personal Practice: Kanpur Muslims 1913–1931,’ Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (Oxford, 1988). Gadgil, N.V. Government From Inside (Meerut, 1968). Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretations of Culture (New York, 1973).

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Bibliography Geyl, Pieter. Debates with Historians (London, 1955). Ghosh, Amitav. ‘The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid in Brooklyn’, Span, September–October 2002. Ghosh, Gautam, ‘God is a Refuge: Nationalism, Morality and History in the 1947 Partition of India’, Social Analysis (Adelaide), Vol. 42, No. 1, 1998. Graff, V. (ed.). Lucknow: Memories of a City (New Delhi, 1997). Habib, S. Irfan. ‘Delhi Tibbiya College and Hakim Ajmal Khan’s Crusade for Indigenous Medicine Systems in Late 19th and early 20th Century India’, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and Feza Gunergun (eds), Science in Islamic Civilization (Istanbul, 2002). Haq, S. Moinul, Islamic Thought and Movements (Karachi, 1979). Hansen, Kathryn. ‘Heteroglossia in Amanat’s Indar Sabha, Mariola Offredi (ed.), The Banyan Tree: Essays on Early Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages (New Delhi, 2000). Hasan, Mushirul. Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1885–1930 (New Delhi, 1991). (p.305) Hasan, Mushirul. Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims Since Independence (London, 1997). Hasan, Mushirul. (ed.), India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, 2 Vols. (New Delhi, 1997 rev. & enlarged edn). Hasan, Mushirul. (ed.), Islam, Communities and the Nation: Muslim Identities in South Asia and Beyond (New Delhi, 1998). Hasan, Mushirul. (ed.). Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (New Delhi, 2000). Hill, John L (ed.). The Congress and Indian Nationalism: Historical Perspectives (London, 1991). Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1994). Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 Vols. (Chicago, 1974). Hourani, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples (London, 1991). Husain, Mahdi. The Rehla of Ibn Battuta (India, Maldive Islands and Ceylon) Translation and Commentary (Baroda, 1976). Page 13 of 24

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Bibliography Husain, S.M.A. Medieval Towns: A Case Study of Amroha and Jalali (New Delhi, 1991). Irwin, H.C. The Garden of India (London, 1980). Israel, Milton. Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Nationalist Struggle, 1920–1947 (Cambridge, 1994). Jafri, Saiyyid Zaheer Husain. ‘Inheritance, Succession and the Customary Law in a Sufi Establishment’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 53rd Session, Warangal, 1992–93. Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1990). Jalal, Ayesha. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (New Delhi, 2001). Kessinger, Tom G. ‘Regional Economy (1757–1857): North India’, Dharma Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 1: c. 1757–c. 1970 (Cambridge, 1972). Khalidi, Omar. ‘Ethnic Group Recruitment in the Indian Army: The Contrasting Cases of Sikhs, Muslims, Gurkhas and Others’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 74, no. 4, Winter 2001–2002. Kidwai, A.H. ‘Rural-Urban Nexus: Theoretical Formulations and a Research Design for Historical Analysis’, K.L. Sharma and Dipankar Gupta (eds), CountryTown Nexus: Studies in Social Transformation in Contemporary India (Delhi, 1991). Kidwai, A.J. ‘Conflict and Consensus in the Non-cooperation Movement’, (p.306) Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1985). Kidwai, A.J. ‘Pathology of Pakistan’, Twentieth Century (Allahabad), March 1940. Kidwai, Sheikh Mushir Hosain. The Miracle of Muhammad (London, 1906). Kidwai, Sheikh Mushir Hosain. Hope (London, 1923). Kidwai, Sheikh Mushir Hosain. Swaraj: How to Obtain It (Lucknow, 1925). Kidwai, Sheikh Mushir Hosain. Pan-Islamism and Bolshevism (London, 1937). Kiernan, V.G. (ed.). Poems from Iqbal (Karachi, 1999 rpt). King, Christopher R. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (New Delhi, 1994). Page 14 of 24

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Bibliography Kozlowski, G. C. Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge, 1985). Kumar, Kapil. Peasants in Revolt: Tenants, Landlords, Congress and the Raj in Oudh (New Delhi, 1984). Kumar, Nita. The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986 (Princeton, N.J, 1988). Kumar, Ravinder. Essays in the Social History of Modern India (New Delhi, 1983). Lapidus, Ira M. ‘Knowledge, Virtue, and Action: The Classical Muslim Conception of Adab and the Nature of Religious Fulfilment in Islam’, Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (California: Berkeley, 1984). Latif, Saiyyid Abdul. The Influence of English Literature on Urdu Literature (London, 1924) Lelyveld, David. Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, N.J., 1978). Lelyveld, David. ‘Eloquence and Authority in Urdu: Poetry, Oratory, and Film’, Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (New Delhi, 1988). Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie. ‘Lucknow under the Shia Nawab 1775–1856’, Anna Libera Dallapicolla and Stephanie Zingel-Ave Lallemant (eds), Islam in Indian Regions (Stuttgart, 1993). Liebeskind, Claudia. Piety on its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times (New Delhi, 1998). Low, D.A. and H. Brasted (eds), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence (New Delhi, 1998). Low, D.A. and H. Brasted (ed.). The Political Inheritance of Pakistan (London, 1991). Mahajan, Sucheta. Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi, 2000). Mahmudabad, Maharaja of. Presidential Address delivered at the Special Provincial Conference, Allahabad, 30 May 1915.

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Bibliography Mahmudabad, Raja of. ‘Some Memories’, C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright (p. 307) (eds), The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935–1947 (London, 1970). Mahmud, S.‘Looking Back’, 1921 Movement: Reminiscences (New Delhi, 1972). Mahmud, Shabana. ‘Angare and the Founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1996. Menon, Ritu and K. Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi, 1988). Menon, V.K.R. The Raj and After: Memoirs of a Bihar Civilian (New Delhi, 2000). Metcalf, B.D. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, N.J., 1982). Metcalf, B.D. (ed.). Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (California: Berkeley, 1984). Metcalf, T.R. Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (California: Berkeley, 1979). Metcalf, T.R. The Aftermath of Revolt (Princeton, N.J., 1964). Minault, Gail. ‘Saiyyid Karamat Husain and Muslim Women’s Education’, Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City (New Delhi, 1999). Minault, Gail. Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1998). Muhammed, Jigar. Revenue Free Land Grants in Mughal India: Awadh Region in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1658–1765 (New Delhi, 2002). Muhammed, Jigar. ‘Madad-e Maash Holders, activities and social contacts: Awadh region under the Mughals, 1858–1748’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 53rd session, Warangal, 1992–93. Mujeeb, M. The Indian Muslims (London, 1967). Mujeeb, M. Education and Traditional Values (Meerut, 1965). Nadwi, S.A. Hasan Ali. Muslims in India (Lucknow, 1980 English edn). Nadwi, S.A. The Musalman (Lucknow, 1977 English edn). Naim, C.M. ‘The Situation of the Urdu Writer: A Letter from Bara Banki’, December 1993/February 1994’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, 1995.

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Bibliography Naim, C.M. Ambiguities of Heritage: Fictions and Polemics (New Delhi, 1999). Naim, C.M. ‘Poet-audience interaction at Urdu Mushaira’, Christopher Shackle (ed.), Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell (New Delhi, 1999). Naipaul, V.S. India: A Million Mutinies (London, 1990). Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, 1991). Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India (New York, 1946). Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Princeton, N.J., 1984). (p.308) Pandey, Gyanendra. The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (New Delhi, 1978). Pandey, Gyanendra. ‘Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh 1919–1922’, Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, 1982). Pandey, Gyanendra. ‘Encounters and Calamities: The History of a North Indian Qasba in the Nineteenth Century’, Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, 1984). Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition (Cambridge, 2001). Pant-Joshi, Kusum. ‘The Choice of a Capital: Lucknow Under the British’, Indu Banga (ed.), The City in Indian History: Urban Demography, Society, and Politics (New Delhi, 1991). Pemble, John. The Raj, the Indian Mutiny, and the Kingdom of Oudh, 1801–1859 (New Delhi, 1987). Pinault, David. Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (New York, 2001). Powell, Avril A. Muslims & Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London, 1993). Qadiri, Khalid Hasan. Hasrat Mohani (New Delhi, 1983). Rahman, Munibur. ‘The Mushaira’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol. 3, 1983. Rai, Alok. Hindi Nationalism (New Delhi, 2001). Ray, R.K. Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927 (New Delhi, 1984).

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Bibliography Raymond, Andre. Arab Cities in the Ottoman Period (Aldershot: Hampshire, 2002). Reeves, Peter. Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of their Relations until zamindari abolition (Bombay, 1991). Rizvi, S.A.A.A. History of Sufism, 2 Vols. (New Delhi, 1983). Rizvi, S.A.A.A. A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isna-Ashari Shias in India, 2 Vols. (New Delhi, 1986). Robinson, Francis. Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860–1923 (Cambridge, 1974). Robinson, Francis. The Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia (New Delhi, 2001). Robinson, Francis. Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi, 2000). Rude, George. Ideology and Popular Protest (London, 1980). Russell, Ralph. The Pursuit of Urdu Literature (London, 1992). Russell, Ralph. ‘The Urdu Ghazal in Muslim Society’, South Asian Review, Vol. 3, no. 2, January 1970. Russell, Ralph. and Khurshidul Islam Ghalib: Life and Letters (New Delhi, 1994). Ruswa, Mirza Muhammad Hadi. Umrao Jan Ada, trans, by Khushwant Singh and M.A. Husaini (Hyderabad, 1982). (p.309) Sadiq, Muhammad. A History of Urdu Literature (Delhi, 1984, 2nd edn). Sadiq, Muhammad. Twentieth Century Urdu Literature (Karachi, 1983). Sanyal, Usha. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870–1920 (New Delhi, 1996). Sarkar, Sumit. Writing Social History (New Delhi, 1997). Saxena, Ram Babu. A History of Urdu Literature (New Delhi, 1990 rpt). Schimmel, A. Gabriel’s Wing (Leiden, 1963). Schimmel, A. As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York, 1982).

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Bibliography Schwerin, Kerrin Graefin V. ‘Saint Worship in Indian Islam: The Legend of the Martyr Salar Masud Ghazi’, Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Ritual and Religion Among Muslims in India (New Delhi, 1981). Sender, Henry. The Kashmiri Pandits: A Study of Cultural Choice in North India (New Delhi, 1988). Shackle, Christopher (ed.). Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in honour of Ralph Russell (New Delhi, 1991). Sharar, Abdul Halim. Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, trans. and ed. E.S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain (London, 1975). Siddiqi, M.H. Agrarian Unrest in North India: The United Provinces 1918–1922 (New Delhi, 1978). Singh, Nand Singh. Integrated Regional Development and Model of Spatial Organization in Bara Banki and Deoria Districts: A Comparative Study (Gorakhpur, 1997). Sleeman, W.H. A Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh 1849–1850, 2 Vols. (London, 1858). Smith, D.E. India as a Secular State (Princeton, N.J., 1963). Stokes, E.T. The Peasant Armed: The Indian Rebellion of 1857, ed. C.A. Bayly (Oxford, 1986). Suhrawardy, S.A.B. A Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story (London, 1945). Tan, Tai Yong and Kudaisya, G. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London, 2000). Tassy, Garcin de. Muslim Festivals in India and Other Essays, trans. and ed. M. Waseem (New Delhi, 1977). Taylor, A.J.P. Essays in English History (London, 1976). Tomlinson, B.R. The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1928–42 (London, 1977). Trevelyan, G.M. Illustrated English Social History (London, 1964). Turner, Bryan S. Weber and Islam (London, 1974). Varshney, Ashutosh. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Delhi, 2002).

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Bibliography (p.310) Watt, Katherine. ‘Thomas Walker Arnold and the Re-evaluation of Islam, 1864–1930’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2002. Weiner, Myron. Party Politics in India: The Development of a Multi-Party System (Princeton, N.J., 1990). Whitcombe, E. Agrarian Conditions in Northern India (New Delhi, 1971). Wright Jr., T.R. ‘Muslim Kinship and Modernization: the Tyabji Clan of Bombay’, Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Family, Kinship and Marriage Among Muslims in India (New Delhi, 1976). Zaidi, A.J. A History of Urdu Literature (New Delhi, 1993). Zutshi, M.L. Gleanings (Allahabad, 1932). Books and Articles [Urdu]

Abbasi, Qazi Jalil. Kya din the (New Delhi, 1985). Abbasi, Mahmud Ahmad Al-Hashmi. Tarikh-e Amroha (Delhi, 1930). Ahmad, Junaid (ed.). Shakhsiat wa waqiat (Bombay, n.d.). Ahmad, Shaikh Siddiq. Tarikh-e Hind Awadh, 3 Vols. (Lucknow, 1937). Alavi, Khalid. Angare ka tarikhi pas-manzar aur taraqqi-pasand tehrik (Delhi, 1995). Ali, Ahmad. Shabab-e Lucknow (Lucknow, 1912). Ali, Muhammad. Goya dabistan khul gaya (Karachi, 1977, enlarged edn). Ali, Muhammad. Mera mazhab (Lucknow, 1951 edn). Ali, Muhammad. Kashkol-e Muhammad Ali Shah faqir (Lucknow, n.d.) Ali, S.R. Amaal-nama (Delhi, 1943). Alvi, N.A. Sukhanwaran-e Kakori (Karachi, n.d). Ansari, A.B.Y. Hasrat Mohani: ek siyasi diary (Malegaon, 1977). Ansari, M. Waliul-Haq (of Firangi Mahal). ‘Firangi Mahal ki ilmi, adabi aur siyasi khidmaat’, Naya daur (Lucknow), February-March 1994. Ansari, Mufti Muhammad Raza. Intikhab-e kalam Hasrat Mohani (Lucknow, 1982). Ansari, Mufti Muhammad Raza. Intikhab khutbat-e Hasrat Mohani (Lucknow, 1988). Page 20 of 24

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Bibliography Ansari, Mufti Muhammad Raza. Mufti Saheb (Lucknow, 1959). Ansari, Mufti Muhammad Raza. Tazkira Hazrat Saiyyid Saheb Banswi (Lucknow, 1986). Ansari, Mufti Muhammad Raza. Bani-yi dars-e Nizami: Ustad ul-Hind Mulla Nizamuddin Ahmad (Lucknow, 1973). Ansari, Hayatullah. ‘Awadh ka Naya Janam’, Naya Daur (Lucknow), FebruaryMarch 1994. Aqil, S.M. Gulauthi (Islamabad, 1998). Arfi, Amir. Niyaz Fatehpuri (New Delhi, 1977). Askari, M.M. Man keestam (Lucknow, n.d.). Bakhsh, Rahim. Tarikh-e wastiya (Amroha, 1904). (p.311) Baqar, S.M. Duniya (Lucknow, 1901). Barni, Z.A. Azmat-e rafta (Karachi, 1961). Bilgrami, Hosh. Mushahidat (Hyderabad, 1960). Bilgrami, S.A.R. ‘Karbala: Aman-o-salamati ki awwaleen darsgah’, Al-Qalam (Karachi), 6, 2001, Dariabadi, A.M. Insha-e Majid (Calcutta, 1991). Dariabadi, A.M. Aap-biti (Lucknow, 1989 edn). Dariabadi, A.M. Maasirin (Calcutta, 1979). Dariabadi, A.M. Chand sawanihi tehrirein (Lucknow, 1985). Dehalvi, A.H. ‘Masih-ul-Mulk Hakim Ajmal Khan’, Salahuddin (ed.), Dilliwale (New Delhi, 1986). Faruqi, S.M. Ahmad. Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Haq Rudauli (Faizabad, n.d.). Faruqi, T. Abdul Majid Daryabadi: ahwal-o-aasaar (Lahore, 1993). Fatehpuri, Niyaz. Man-o-yazdan, 2 Vols. (Karachi & Lucknow, 1949, 1966). Hamid, S. (ed.), Tazkira shora-e Bulandshahr (Bulandshahr, n.d.). Haq, Abdul. Chand humasr (New Delhi, 1999 rpt). Husain, Intizar. Ajmal-e azam (Lahore, 1995). Page 21 of 24

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Bibliography Husain, Mirza Jafar. Qadeem Lakhnau ki aakhri bahaar (New Delhi, 1998, 2nd edn). Husain, Muhammad Abrar. Maasir al-masih (Hardoi, 1976). Husain, Mushtaq (ed.). Makatib-e Sir Saiyyid Ahmad Khan (New Delhi, 1960). Husain, Saliha Abid. Jaane walon ki yaad aati hai (Delhi, 1972). Husain, Saliha Abid. Awaaz-e dost: Abid Husain ke khutut Saliha Abid Husain ke naam (New Delhi, 1994). Hyder, Qurratulain. Mere bhi sanamkhane (Lahore, 1949). Hyder, Qurratulain. ‘Yildirim aur Turkey’, Suraiya Husain (ed.), Saiyyid Sajjad Hyder Yildirim (Aligarh, n.d.). Imamuddin. Barkaat-al auliya (Delhi, n.d.). Jafri, Ali Sardar. Lucknow ki paanch raten (Faizabad, 1964). Jafri, Ali Sardar. Shakhsiat aur waqiat jinhon ne mujhe mutaasir kiya (Bombay, n.d.). Jafri, Rais Ahmad. Auraq-e gumgushta (Lahore, 1968). Kakorvi, Amir Ahmad Alvi. Safar-e saadat yani roznama-e haj (Lucknow, 1933). Khan, Anwar Husain. Choudhry Muhammad Ali: hayat aur khidmaat (Lucknow, 1992). Khan, M.U. Yadgar-e salf: tarikh-e bara basti Afghanan (New Delhi, 1998, 2nd edn). Khan, Yusuf Husain. Yaadon ki duniya (Azamgarh, 1967). Kazmi, A. (ed.). Taraqqi-pasand tehrik: pachas-sala safar (New Delhi, 1987). Kazmi, M.A. Nizami Budauni (Badaun, 1949). Khaliq, I.K. Manzilain gard ke manind (Karachi, 1999). (p.312) Khurshid, A.S. Sahafat: Pakistan aur Hind mein (Lahore, 1963). Kidwai, Anis. Nazr-e khush guzre (New Delhi, 1974). Kidwai, Anis. Azadi ki chhaon mein (New Delhi, 1975). Kidwai, Anis. Ab jin ke dekhne ko (New Delhi, 1980).

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Bibliography Kidwai, Anis. Ghubar-e karawaan (New Delhi, 1983). Kidwai, A.S. Chand tasveer neekan (New Delhi, 1989). Kidwai, M. Salim. Aleem sahib (Aligarh, 1995). Kidwai, S.R. ‘Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai’, Salahuddin (ed.), Dilliwale (New Delhi, 1986). Kulliyat-e Saiyyid Maqbul Husain (Lucknow, 1939). Lal, Munshi Brij Bhushan. Tarikh-e Daryabad (Lucknow, 1925). Maasir al-Ikram (Hyderabad: Deccan, 1910). Makatib-e Bahadur Yar Jung (Karachi, 1967). Malihabadi, Josh. Yadon ki baraat (New Delhi, 1992 enlarged edn). Mehdi, S.M. Rajaz Mehdi fi tarikh Zaidi (Lucknow, 1962). Mittal, Gopal. ‘Communist Party aur Mussalman’, Gagan (Bombay), 1975. Mohsin, Akhtar Yazdaan. Niyaz Fatehpuri: fikr-o-fan (Lucknow, 1988). Nadwi, Hamidullah. Lakhnau ki leesani khidmaat (Delhi, 1975). Nadwi, S. Sulaiman. ‘Hasrat ki siyasi zindagi’, Nigar (Karachi, 1972). Nadwi, S. Sulaiman. (ed.). Makatib-e Shibli (Azamgarh, 1971). Nadwi, S. Sulaiman. (ed.). Maqalat-e Shibli (Azamgarh, 1972). Nadwi, S. Sulaiman. Kaarawaan-e Zindagi (Lucknow, 1994, 2nd edn). Nikhat, Rukhsana. Saiyyid Murtaza Bilgrami Zubaidi (Lucknow, 1990). Noorani, A.H. Munshi Naval Kishore aur unke khattat wa khush navas (New Delhi, n.d.). Qadiri, K.H. Hasrat Mohani (Delhi, 1985). Rizvi, S. Masud Husain. Lucknow ka awami stage: Amanat aur Indar Sabha (Lucknow, 1957). Rizvi, S. Saghir Hasan Taqvi. Anwar-e Qum: yaani azkar-e saadat (Karachi, 1973). Rudaulvi, Maulvi Fariduddin. Mazhar Haq (Lucknow, 1897). Salim, Hameeda. Shorish-e dauran (New Delhi, 1995). Page 23 of 24

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Bibliography Salim, Hameeda. Hum saath the (New Delhi, 1999). Sandelvi, Maulvi S. Mazhar Ali. Ek nadir roznamcha, ed. Ghulam-us Saqlain. Mujhe kuchh kehna hai apni zabaan se (New Delhi, 1978). Shaheen, Aqeela. Niyaz Fatehpuri: shakhsiat aur fan (Karachi, 1955). ‘Shauq’, Hafiz Ahmad Ali Khan. Tazkira kamilaan-e Rampur (Patna, 1929, 1986 rpt). Sherwani, M.H.R.K. Viqar-e hayat (Aligarh, 1925). Siddiqi, Abul Fazl. Gulaab khas (Karachi, 1992). Siddiqi, Furqan Ahmad. Zila Bijnor ke jawahar (New Delhi, 1991). (p.313) Siddiqi, M.A. Tuhfatul-nisaab (Amroha, 1992). Siddiqi, Saadat Ali. Sambhal ke chand ulama aur mujahidane azadi (Sambhal, 1991). Suroor, A.A. Khwab baqi hai (Aligarh, 1991). Thanwi, Ashraf Ali. Qasas al-akabir (Lahore, 1967). Zaidi, A.A.M. Bara Banki (Lucknow, 1984). Zuberi, M.A. Hayat-e-muhsin (Aligarh, 1934). Zaidi, S.A.M. Apni yadein: Rudauli ki baten (Lucknow, 1977). Zaheer, Sajjad. Roshnai (New Delhi, 1985 rpt).

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Glossary

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

(p.314) Glossary (p.314) Glossary Abwab cesses. Adab: etiquette, proper behaviour. Adab-arz: ‘I pay my respects’, or as-salam-alaikum. Aga Khan: title of the head of the Ismailis, known in India as the Khojas. Ahrar: ‘the free’; a political party founded in the Punjab in the 1930s. Ajlaf: literally, ‘the low-born’. Akhlaq: morals, ethics. Alim: learned man, scholar in the Islamic religious sciences; pl. ulama Allah-o-Akbar: God is great. Anjuman: assembly, meeting; e.g. Anjuman-e khuddam-e ka’aba. Ashraf: ‘the high born’, i.e. Saiyyids and Sheikhzadas. Auqaf: charitable endowments, a pious foundation, pl. of wakf Page 1 of 7

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Glossary Bania: Hindu trader, moneylender, merchant. Charkha: spinning wheel. Chowk: market place. Dar al-harb: lit. ‘the abode of war’. Dar al-Islam: lit. ‘the abode of Islam’. Dar al-ulum: lit. ‘the abode of science’, e.g. the Dar al-ulum at Deoband. Dargah: a Muslim shrine; seat of the head of an order or its branches. Darshan: site; visiting a holy man or site. (p.315) Dastan-goi: story-telling. Dhoti: garment; wrap-around cloth worn by men, mostly Hindus. Divan: a collection of poetry; in Mughal times the name of the chief revenue official. Diwali: the Hindu festival of lights. Doha: two-lined verses in meters (in Hindi). Faqir: an ascetic, Hindu or Muslim beggar. Fatawa: pl. of fatwa, a religious decree, or a legal counsel. Fatiha: the name of the first Surah of the Koran. Ghazal: celebrated poetic form in the Persian, Turkish and Urdu traditions, usually a short love-poem not longer than 14 verses. Ghazi: a hero, a warrior, fighter for the true faith. Hadith (c. hadis): lit. ‘a saying’; Prophetic traditions. Haziqul Mulk Haziq, expert, and ul Mulk, of the country. An honorific title conferred on Hakim Ajmal Khan. Id: Page 2 of 7

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Glossary the feast of fast-breaking at the end of Ramazan, Id ul-fitr; the feast of offerings, Id al-adha. Idgah: place where the community performs the Id prayers. Imam: prayer leader. Imambaras: lit. ‘the enclosure of the Imams’; place for commemorating Muharram. Indar Sabha: musical comedy by Amanat. Insan-e Kamil: the Perfect or Ideal Man. Izzat: respect, honour. Jagir: land revenue assignment. Jagirdar: an assignee with the right to collect the state revenues from a specified area, in Mughal times in lieu of a salary from the royal treasury. Jajmani: a system of exchange of produce and services in a patron-client relationship. Jamiyat: an association or conference, as the Jamiyat al-ulama. Jehad: ‘an effort, or striving’, i.e. in the interest of the spread and defence of Islam. Julaha: weaver. (p.316) Kalima: the profession of faith. Karinda: landlord’s agent. Khalifa: a successor, viceregent or deputy. Khanqah: a monastery of the Sufi or darwesh. Khilafat: the office of the Khalifa. Lakh: one hundred thousand. Madaris: Page 3 of 7

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Glossary plural of madarsa, on madrasa; a Muslim school. Majlis: mourning assembly, especially during Muharram. Maktab: ‘a place where writing is taught.’ A primary school commonly attached to a mosque. Mansabdar: the holder of a civil and/or military appointment, graded according to a decimal ranking system, within the Mughal imperial service. Marsiya: elegy. Malguzari: revenue, revenue demand. Mauza: village. Mela: fair, exhibition. Millat: religious community. Miryasi: male member of the singing caste. Miryasin: female member of the singing caste. Miyan: in India a term of respect; ‘master’, ‘good sir’. Mohalla: subdivision of a city; a ward or a quarter of a city; neighbourhood. Muafidar: a revenue-free tenure holder. Muharram: lit. ‘that which is forbidden’, hence anything sacred. It is the name of the first month of the Muslim calendar. It is observed to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husain, the grandson of the Prophet. Mulla, Maulvi or Maulana: a Muslim doctor of law. Murid: lit. ‘one who strives’; a disciple of a pir. Murshid: lit. ‘one who guides aright’; spiritual guide. Mushaira: an assembly of poets. Nadwat al-ulama: institution founded by Maulana Shibli Numani at Lucknow in 1894. Page 4 of 7

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Glossary (p.317) Nawab: title given to dignitaries, especially regional rulers; also, an honorific plural of a Naib. Nazrana: present, premium. Pargana: a traditional grouping of villages for revenue purposes; smallest administrative unit; a sarkar could contain twenty to sixty parganas; in British India smaller in area than a tahsil (see tahsildar). Pir: a Sufi teacher or director. Qabaristan: graveyard. Qawwali: Muslim hymn or devotional songs sung in praise of the Prophet, his family, and the Sufi saints. Qazi: a judge. Raiyyat: peasant, tenant cultivator. Rasad: utility goods and services made available to the district authority when on tour. Salam: greetings. Sabha: association. Saiyyid: used to denote the descendant of the Prophet Mohammad. Sanad: deed conferring taluqdari right over land. Safed poshi: aristocratic or gentlemanly existence. Sarkar: the first grade of subdivision of a Mughal province; an administrative unit. Sheikh: a term used to denote a religious teacher; also one of the four caste divisions among Indian Muslims. Originally, a designation of those Muslims who claimed to be descended from the first or second Khalifa or from the Prophet’s uncle. Sharif: the noble or high castes—Saiyyid, Sheikh, Mughal, and Pathan. Shia: Page 5 of 7

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Glossary ‘party’, the party of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet. The Shias claim that the first three Khalifas usurped his right to be the first Khalifa. Sharia: the path to be followed; the divine law based on the Koran. Silsilah: a chain, an order. Sir: right to land, mostly revenue-free. Subah: province. Sufi: a Muslim mystic, usually part of an established order (silsilah). (p.318) Swaraj: rule over self; self-government. Tabarra: condemnation; especially of the first three Khalifas (Abu Bakr, Umar and Usman) by the Shias. Tahsil: subdivision of a district. Tahsildar: revenue officer of a tahsil or subdivision of a district, larger than a pargana. Taluqdar: recipients of proprietary rights, after 1858, from the British. Taravi: special evening prayers during the month of Ramzan (Ramadan). Tazia: lit. ‘a consolation’. Replicas of the tomb of Husain and his companions brought out during Muharram. Tazkira: biography: memoirs of eminent men of letters. Thakur: Rajput landlord. Ulama: plural of alim: learned men, scholars in the Islamic religious sciences. Urs: wedding or marriage festivities. It has come to be used as a term for the ceremonies observed at the anniversary of the death of a saint (pir or murshid). Wahdat al-wujud: the unity of being, existential monism. Waqf: lit. ‘standing’. An endowment or property dedicated to charitable uses and the service of Allah. Page 6 of 7

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Glossary Wasiqadar: the recipient of a pension from a loan to the East India Company or the Government. Yogi: a Hindu ascetic. Zakat: alm-giving. Zamindar: a landholder. Zenana: women’s part of a Muslim household.

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Index of Place Names

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

(p.319) Index of Place Names (p.319) Index of Place Names Afghanistan 53, 54, 64, 216 Agra 43, 73, 246 Ahrauli 45 Aligarh 12 n. 38, 19, 33, 56, 63, 64, 65, 66, 73, 77, 78, 79, 86, 102, 103, 108, 113, 114; students’ strike at 118, 117, 120, 214, 226, 250, 255 n. 35, 276 Allahabad 8, 23, 73, 92, 100, 103, 110, 111, 117, 131; 213, 214, 215, 217, 221, 223, 231, 234 Amethi 9, 11, 13 Amritsar 73 Amroha 10 n. 28, 12, 111, 265 Ayodhya 88, 111, 124, 224 Awadh 3 and n.7, 5, 29, 389, 90; annexation of 97; educated elite of 99; historic fusion of the Indian and Muslim identity in 86, 90, 91; Muslim households split up in 254; landed families in 252; literary record of 115; Muslim population in 8, 9 n.26, 10 n.28, 13, 23, 25; pluralism in 124; qasba life in 26, 30, 37 and n.137, 38 and n. 139, 43, 44, 83, 85; Sufi shrines in 127; ulama families of, under British rule 92, 95, 98, 104, 119, 122, 120, 125 n. 6, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 213, 214, 231, 248, 263, 273, 280 Azamgarh 223 Bahraich 9, 14, 72, 85, 87 n. 3, 89, 93, 126, 127 n., 137, 182, 188, 226, 236, 126

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Index of Place Names Bahramghat 94 Banaras 25 n. 92, 43, 72, 111, 126 n. 10, 128, 215, 223, 226, 256, 266 Bansa 4, 90, 128 and n. 16, 130, 131, 132, 160, 278 Bara Banki 3, 5, 6 and n.16, 16, 32, 55, 55, 58, 71; and Khilafat protest 76; communalism in 230; Congress in 276; hartal in 72; Kidwais of 87; kisan movement in 150; migration from 248; non-cooperation in 74; population in 9; rebellion of 1857 in 93; Saiyyids in 9; school in 98; (p.320) taluqdari estates in 7–8 and ns 17–18, 88, 90, 93, 101, 115, 119, 126, 128, 137, 149, 150, 156, 164, 165, 179, 188, 196, 213, 219, 236, 258, 260, 265, 266, 268, 277, 281 Baragaon 4, 29, 54, 76, 195, 109, 160, 25, 273, 277; Kidwais of 275, 276 Bareilly 18, 73, 183, 188 Baroda 18 Bengal 30, 38, 59, 67, 195, 227, 229 Bhado Sarai 6 Bhatauli 6 Bhatwamau 4, 36, 41 Bhayara 4, 72 Bhopal 18 Bhopal State 19, 163, 255 Bihar 18, 74, 229; exodus from 247; 268, 269, 275 Bijnor 4, 191 Bilehra 4, 7, 8 n.19 Bilgram 4 n. 9, 10; Sufis of 12–13; Saiyyids of 18, 42; 23, 25, 32, 43, 44, 127 Bombay 37, 59, 117, 175, 203, 212, 231 Budaun 9, 89 n. 12 Calcutta 43, 92, 109 n. 92, 117, 118, 140, 180, 200, 254, 276, 277 Cambridge 19, 234, 273 Chhindwara 119, 120, 165 Chishti 89, 90 Constantinople 54, 61, 63, 107 Dariabad 6, 20, 42, 43, 85, 90, 91, 93; 1857 revolt in 94, 126, 128, 143, 236 Delhi 29, 63, 65, 87, 89, 111, 120, 146, 165, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 191, 209, 212, 220, 228, 239, 250, 261, 263, 268, 271, 276 Deoband 18, 100 Page 2 of 5

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Index of Place Names Dewa 6 and n. 6, 85, 88, 89, 91, 128, 130, 230, 260 Dewa-Sharif 129 Dhaka 65, 89 Doab 10 n. 28, 18, 120 Faizabad [Fyzabad] 4, 7, 9, 26, 36, 39, 72, 87 n. 3, 92, 128, 129, 158, 214, 226 Farrukhabad 4 Fatehpur 6, 89, 92 Gadia 3, 7, 29, 37, 42, 72, 88 [taluqa], 90 Gangoh 18, 110 Ghazipur 223, 255 Gonda 7, 155, 236, Gopamau 4 and n. 9, 13, 44 Gorakhpur 7, 45, 70, 95, 223 Haidergarh 6, 7, 9, 25 n. 98, 85, 91 Haraha 8 Hardoi 4, 19, 25 n. 98, 43, 93, 99, 114, 125 n. 125, 120, 128, 149, 219, 249 Hyderabad 18, 19, 44, 99, 111; Nizam of 120, 175, 255 Jagdishpur 85, 91, Jahangirabad 7, 85, 89, 91, 93, 219, 21 Jalali 18 Jaunpur 87 n. 3, 92, 126 Juggaur 4; Sheikhs of 88, 89, 95; Ahmad Ali ‘Shauq’ from 116 Kakori 19 Karbala 36, 37 and n. 141, 38 and n. 141, 40, 47, 251, 259 (p.321) Kanpur 36, 73, 96, 109, 218, 223, 226, 246, 270 Karachi 253, 254, 256 Kashmir 205, 206 and n. 178, 235, 275 and n. 108 Khairabad 9, 13, 43, 91, 126, 136 Kursi 6 and n. 16, 74, 93 Lahore 63 London 1, 33, 75; round table conferences in 178, 243, 235, 251, 254 Lucknow 3 and n. 7, 4, 7, 8, 9, 16, 17, 19 n. 68, 20, 25, 27 and n. 102, 28, 30, 35 n. 129, 36, 38. 40, 42, 43, 58, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 73, 77, 92, 95, 96, 98, 101, 103; -based writers 232 n. 82; changing fortunes of 213–14; humour in 104, 105, 114, 120, 116, 119, 124, 125, 128 n. 15, 139, 141, 142 and n. 70, 145, 149, 155, 158, 159, 164, 165, 168, 190, 192, 198, 199 n. 142, 200, 209, 213; Khilafat conference in (1920); 217 and n. 15, 218, 219, 220; poets and writers in 231; principal political arena in 221–2; Students’ Federation 222; taluqdars in 224; Quit India Movement in 223, 226, 227, 234, 235, 236, 246, 248, 250, 251, 254, 255, 257, 261, 263, 265, 269, 271, 274, 276 Page 3 of 5

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Index of Place Names Mahmudabad 4, 7, 8 n. 19, 36, 42, 93, 96, 224, 226 Mahewa 4 Malihabad 98 Masauli 3, 4, 29, 88, 90, 92, 94, 121, 160, 183, 211, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278 Mecca 16 Meina 16 Meerut 43, 227, 228, 246 Mirzapur 92 Mohalla Sufiana 156 Mohan 4 n. 9, 9, 35 and n. 129, 43, 74 Moradabad 191, 269 Motikpur 25, 98, 250 Muhammadpur (pargana) 6 Muzaffarnagar 44 Najaf 36 Nanautah 18 Nanpara 224, 226 Nawabganj 6 and n. 13, 8 n. 19, 9, 43, 74, 88, 93, 124 Nirauli 25 North Western Provinces 25, 31, 32, 213, 215 Paintepur 93 Pakistan 46, 49, 163, 227, 229, 230; Anwar Jamal Kidwai on 237, 246; exodus to 247; migration of urban Muslims to 248, 249, 250; Khaliquzzaman and the Raja of Mahmudabad migrate to 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 266, 269, 270, 272 Panipat 9, 24 n. 87, 71, 110, 255 Patna 60, 277 Pihani 43, 44 Pirpur 226 Pratapgarh 148, 188 Punjab 73, 222 n. 38 Qadirpur 98 Rae Bareli 4, 11, 13, 26, 45, 72 n. 56, 149, 187, 236 Rampur 10 n. 28, 11, 172, 174, 175, 255 (p.322) Ramnagar 6, 8, 91, 93 Ramsanehighat 6 Rasauli 4, 5, 89, 95; Maulvi Khalilullah 101, 128 Rasulpur 219 Rausagaon 128 Rudauli 6, 13; Abdul Haq’s shrine in 22, 32, 33, 42, 45, 71, 74, 84, 90, 91, 93, 98, 110, 122, 124, 127 and n. 12, 129, 130, 145, 146 n. 85, 148, 154; history of 134; landed families in 137, 138; revolt of 1857 in 94; Sufi shrines and saints in 134, 135; Page 4 of 5

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Index of Place Names Suhrawardy order in 135, 136; writers and poets in 139–40; 155, 156, 227, 231, 250, 263, 280 Saharanpur 18, 73, 110, 246 Saidanpur 42, 115, 266 Saifpur 35 n. 139 Salempur 219, 220, 224, 227 Salon 13 Sandi 43 Sandila 20, 35, 43, 99, 113, 114, 125, 128 n. 15, 220, 254 Satrikh 7, 22, 88, 89; Sarfaraz Ali of 96; 126, 127 n. 12 Shahbad 25 n. 89, 39, 44, 99, 114 Shahjahanpur 73, 95, 109, 113, 191, 247 Shahbad 25 n. 89, 39, 44 Shahpur 72 Siddhaur 6, 85 Sihalwi 16 Sirhind 9 Sitapur 4, 43, 44, 145 South Asia 1, 2; post-modernist narratives on 3; Islam in 27 Subeha 6, 7 Surajpur 8 Tripoli 60, 61 Turkey 52, 60, 61 and n. 17; Red Crescent Mission to 62; 63, 162 and n. 145, 163, 164, 175, 234 Unao 4, 6 n. 14, 26, 35 n. 139, 149, 150, 219, 254 United Provinces [UP] 3 and n. 7, 7; 38, 99, 102, 149, 156, 194, 198, 195 and n. 108, 218, 219, 220, 223; communalism in 228–9, 272; communal riots in 73; Congress delegates from 214; Congress volunteers in 188; exodus from 247; influx of refugees to 248; kisan movement in 71, 84, 86; refugees settled in 246; silent revolution in 98; Tenancy Act 46, 260, 261, 265, 266, 269, 275 Wardha 197 Zaidpur 41

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General Index

From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh Mushirul Hasan

Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780195693232 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195693232.001.0001

(p.323) General Index (p.323) General Index Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad 57 ‘Aabkash’, Muhammad 90 Abbasi, Qazi Jalil 222 Abdullah, Farooq 205 and n. 171 Abdullah, Saiyyid [Urdu writer] 141 Abdullah, Sheikh Muhammad 205 and n. 171, 206 and n. 178, 275 Ab jinke dekhne ko 58 Adab 167 Ahmad, Aziz 27 Ahmad, Maulvi Nazir 32, 120, 170 Ahmad, Muhammad 14 Ahmad, Mumtaz 91, 93 Ahmad, Tofail 13 Ahmad, Ziauddin 103, 227 Ahmed, Shafi 56, 74, 76, 154 Akbar 10, 13, 35, 74, 90, 126, 161 Akbarabadi, Nazir 21, 105, 106, 140 Aleem, Abdul 233 n. 87 Al-Hilal [Calcutta] 118 Ali, Agha Shahid 146 Ali, Ahmad 152, 233 Ali, Ameer 77 Ali brothers 63, 70, 71, 75, 107, 109, 119, 159, 160, 165, 167, 169, 177, 217 Ali, Choudhry Muhammad [of Rudauli] 45, 47, 58, 121, 122; attends All-India PWA conference 231; early education and life of 143–4 and n. 74;

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General Index exchanges with daughter 256; ’s hooqa 139 n. 57; friends of 147; Wilayat Ali stimulates 148; writings of 141–2 and ns 68, 70; literary skills of 145; Muslim women and 146 and n. 85; reading habits of 147, 149, 150, 151; Sajjad Zaheer’s description of 152; and Angare 153; and the unfolding of political events in the 1940s 154, 155, 256, 257, 258, 264, 280 Aligarh Muslim University 62, 220, 255, 265, 276 Ali, Hazrat 36, 39 and n. 144, 259 Ali, Imtiaz 180, 278 Ali, Saiyyid Mazhar 20 Ali, Meer Hasan 25; on Hindu-Muslim similarities 26–7 and n. 102. (p.324) Ali, Mohamed 19, 33 n. 122; on ‘communal consciousness’ 34; on ‘mutiny’ 95 n. 45, 46, 53, 60, 61, 68, 70, 79, 80; on Urdu 106, 196 and n. 87, 112, 117, 118; meets Wilayat Ali 119 and n. 129, 120, 121, 159, 165, 216, 236 Ali, Muhammad Ali [of Lahore] 33, 77 Ali, Mumtaz 170, 273 Ali, Nawab 76, 104 Ali, Sayyid Mahfuz 19, 25 Ali, Shaukat 64, 74, 107, 160, 165, 196 Ali, Shujat 91, 92, 97 Ali, Saiyyid Raza 235 Ali, Wilayat [Kidwai] 4, 28, 51, 58, 59, 65, 76, 78; and his group 122; and his writings 79–84; and contemporary political stir 66; and Hasrat Mohani 66; and Congress-League concordat 67, 91, 96, 98, 99, 101; and Mohamed Ali 119–20; early education of 102, 103; establishes his reputation as a writer 118; graduates 104, 106, 111, 113; in Bansa-Sharif 131; on Raja Gulam Husain 121, 130, 141, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 160, 164, 165, 166, 170, 179, 182, 186, 232, 273, 274, 277 Allah 22 Allahabadi, Akbar 29, 33, 71, 80, 105, 106, 115 All-India Nationalist Muslim Party 187, 196 All-India Progressive Writer’s Conference 151 ‘Amanat’, Sayyid Agha Hasan 20 Amin, Shahid 47 Andrews, C.F. 170, 171, 174 Page 2 of 17

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General Index Angare 152, 153 Anis, Mir 39, 40 and n. 150, 211 Anjuman-e khuddam-e ka’aba 64, 155, 156, 164, 216 An-Nizamiya 62 Ansari, Aziz, 176 Ansari Faridul Haq 176 Ansari, Hayatullah 111, 231, 233 n. 87, 255 Ansari, Mufti Reza 111, 254–55, 255 n. 37 Ansari, Mukhtar Ahmad 3, 51, 63, 72 n. 61, 74 n. 69, 107, 159, 162 and n. 145; and the Young Turk Revolution 163, 164, 167, 170, 173; career and profile of 175–9, 184, 189; opposes civil disobedience 195, 196, 208, 211, 217 n. 15 Ansari, Shaukatullah 176 Ansari, Zohra 161, 176 Arnold, T.W. 102, 103, 113, 161 Arya Samaj 25 n. 89 ashraf 14, 39, 41, 46, 249 Ali, Asaf 271 Asaf-ud-Daula 158 Asrar-e khudi 107 Asr-e Jadid 114 Auliya, Nizamuddin 89 Aurangzeb 23, 88, 89, 161 Awadh Akhbar 99 Awadhi 92 [dialect], 125 and n. 3 Awadh Punch [Lucknow] 19, 80, 83, 99, 142 Azad, Abul Kalam 61, 72 n. 61, 117, 118, 147, 159, 167, 169, 171, 177, 186, 193, 205 n. 171, 202, 208, 229, 271 ‘Azad’ Muhammad Husain 158, 159, 261 Azadi ki chhaon mein 56, 58, 247 Azmi, Kaifi 37 n. 137, 222, 231 (p.325) Babur 10, 161 Bairagis 131 Bakhsh, S. Khuda 40, 157 Bahadur, Raj 202 Balkan Wars 164 Bambooque 51, 119 n. 129 Banerjea, Surendranath 117 Baqar, Saiyyid Muhammad 32, 45 Barani, Ziauddin Ahmad 119 and n. 129 Bar Id 160 Barelwis 21 Bari, Abdul 64, 70, 72 and n. 81, 74 n. 69, 108, 109, 110, 111, 216, 255 Basant 125 Basit, Abdul 176 Battuta, Ibn 12 and n. 38 Bayly, C.A. 14, 24 Beck, Theodore 102 Besant, Annie 119, 144, 165, 186 Page 3 of 17

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General Index Bhar 87 n. 3 Bhargava, Gopi Chand 205 Bhopali, Barkatullah 64 Bi Amma [Abadi Bano Begum] 53, 79 Bijnori, Abdur Rahman 12, 160, 162 Bilgrami, Hosh 265 Bilgrami, Mir Ghulam Ali Azad 9, 23 Bilgrami, Saiyyid Ali 19 Bilgrami, Saiyyid Hosain 18 Blunt, W.S. 162 Bose, S.C. 198, 255 Bostan 103 Brahman [s] 8, 26, 196; Nazir Akbarabadi jibes at 106 Braudel, Fernand 3 Browne, E.G. 162 Butler, Harcourt 213, 217 Calcutta killings 228 Canning 15 Canning College 12, 249 Campbell, Colin 95 ‘Chakbast’, Brij Narain 15, 155, 158 Chamier, F.E.A. 12; on Rudauli 94; 134 Chand, Prem 230, 232 Chandra, Baba Ram 71, 72 and n. 56, 148 Chattari, Nawab of 225 Chetty, Shanmakhen 204 Chishti 89, 90, 110 Chishti, Khwaja Muinuddin 87 Chishti, Sheikh Abdur Rahman 130 Christianity 23 Chughtai, Ismat 49, 232 n. 82 Cohn, Bernard S. 15 Communal Award 178, 179 Communism 222 Communist Party of India 48 and n. 174, 223 Comrade [Calcutta: Delhi] 51, 65, 79, 80, 81, 100, 118, 121, 156, 169 Congress, Indian National 59, 66, 67, 87, 150, 151, 161, 163, 164, 172, 185, 186, 188, 189, 194; Lakhnavis and 214, 219, 223; ministry 225, 229, 269, 170; and Partition 272, 274; in Bara Banki 276, 277 Congress Muslims 3, 182, 194, 196, 208, 254, 277 Congress Parliamentary Board 197 Congress Socialist Party 197, 198 Congress Socialists 190, 191 Constantinople 54, 61, 63 Page 4 of 17

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General Index Constituent Assembly 270, 271, 272 Cotton, Henry 103 Crooke, William 25 Dargah [s] 12, 22, 230 Dariabadi, Abdul Majid 33, 34, 70, 90, 109, 144, 152, 153, 160, 236 (p.326) Darling, Malcolm: on Rafi Ahmed Kidwai 210, 211 Das, C.R. 74, 77, 186 Das, Durga 55, 203, 205, 206 n. 178, 208 Daudi, Shafi 196 Deoband 23 n. 81, 34, 175 Deobandis 21, 175 Desai, Mahadev 170 Deshmukh, C.D. 204 and n. 168 Deva, Acharya Narendra 59, 190, 192 Dey, S.K. 204 Digby, Simon 135 n. 42 Diwali 25, 126, 131, 258 Dussehra 126 Duty Society 113 Edib, Halide 52, 62, 73, 161, 175, 178, 184 Elliot, C.A. 6 and n. 14, 26 Ellis, Havelock 147, 152 Family histories 1, 2; of Kidwais 4 Farangi Mahal 16, 64, 70, 77, 108 n. 91, 109 and n. 94, 110, 111, 128, 150, 216, 242, 254, 255 Farhang-e Rashidi 11 Fatehpuri, Niyaz 33, 142, 144, 145 and n. 82, 231, 253, 257 Fasana-e Azad 116, 117, Fazl, Abul 23 First World War 59, 117, 164 Forster, E.M. 61 Freitag, Sandria B. 24 Furet, Francois 1 Gandhi, M.K. 57, 59, 68, 74 and n. 69; advocates Khilafat cause 69, 70, 72 n. 61; Ajmal Khan on 72; and his early campaigns 60; describes Hasrat Mohani 66; M.K. Kidwai on 73; on Mazharul Haq 75; on S.R. Kidwai 76, 77, 154; speech at Ghatkopar by 167; visits Panipat 71, 169, 170, 171 and n. 17, 173, 177, 195, 201, 216, 217, 222, 237, 240, 242, 243, 256 and n. 41, 272 Gandhi-Irwin Pact 188 Gangohi, Abdul Quddus 13, 135 and n. 42 Gangohi, Rashid Ahmad 175 Geertz, Clifford 17 n. 63, 40, 281 Page 5 of 17

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General Index Ghalib, Mirza Asadullah Khan 111, 118, 141, 158 ghazal 21, 269 Ghazi Miyan Salar Masud 126, 137 Ghazna, Mahmud of 87 n. 1 Ghiyasul Lughat 11 Ghori, Shahabuddin 6 n. 14, 87 Ghose, Aurobindo 117, 144 Ghubar-e Karawaan 56, 58 Gita 136, 144 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna 59, 161 Golwalkar, M.D. 226 Gomti 7, 229, 261 Gujral, I.K. 238 Gundevia, Y.D. 183 Gupta, C.B. 190, 191 and n. 99, 192, 222 Habib, Muhammad 254 Hadis 13, 31 Haider, Ghaziuddin 136 Haider, Nawab Nasiruddin 21, 155 Haig, H. G. 184, 189, 222, 251 Hailey, Malcolm 219 Haksar, P.N. 239 Hali, Altaf Husain 31, 158, 168, 255 n. 35 Hallet, M. C. 184 (p.327) Hamdard 119, 120, 121 Hamid, General Shahid 180, 251 Haq, Fazlul 67 Haq, Maulvi Abdul 9, 120 Haq, Mazharul 60, 74, 165, 186 Haq, Muhammad Abdul 31 Haq, Sheikh Abdul [Makhdoom Saheb] 13; ’s shrine in Rudauli 22, 135 and n. 41, 136, 137 Hardinge 171 and n. 17 Harvani, Ansar 57, 222, 233 n. 87 Hasan, Raja Amir Hasan [of Mahmudabad] 42 Hasan, Imam 38, 39 Hasan, Maulana Mahmud 23, 52, 64, 175 Hasan, Saiyyid Wazir 13, 14, 151, 219 Hima 257 Hindi 20 and n. 68 Hindu Mahasabha 49 Hindu-Muslim riots [violence] 226, 228, 248 Hindu-Muslim unity 26n, 68 n. 38, 69 n. 41, 73, 103, 217 n. 15 Hindu nationalism 266, 271 n. 94 Hindu Sabhas 67 Hindus 25, 26, 57; and Muharram 37, 38 and n. 139; at Haji Waris Alui Shah’s shrine 129, 130 Hinduism 28, 125, 144, 267 Page 6 of 17

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General Index Holi 25, 131 Home Rule 4, 120 Hosain, Attia 250, 279 Husain, Ehtisham 231 Husain, Fazl-e 29, 227 Husain, Major-General Shahid 249 Husain, Imam 36, 37, 38 and n. 141, 39, 40, 41, 47, 52, 259 Husain, Irshad 33, 138 Husain, Karamat 142, 144 Husain, Munshi Sajjad 79, 161 Husain, Raja Gulam Husain113, joins Comrade 118; launches New Era 120, 121, 160, 164 Husain, Saiyyid Ahmad 25 Husain, Zakir 240, 277 Huxley, A. 33 Hyder Quratullain 52, 124 Id 12, 160 Ikhwan al-safa 113 Iltutmish 134 Imam, Saiyyid Hasan 266, 271, 272 Imam, Saiyyid Ali 118 Inayatullah, Maulvi Muhammad 111 Indian National Army 223 Indian nationalism 3, 66, 237 Indar Sabha 19, 20 and n. 69 Iqbal, Muhammad 107, 108, 128 n. 18, 144 n. 80, 152, 158, 164, 246 Irwin, H.C. 26, 130 Islam 15, 21, 30, 33, 34, 61, 78, 89; and A.M. Daruabadi 33, 34; as a source of spiritual solace 108; pluralist forms of 25, 28; qasba ethos and 23; Sufi shrines and 22, 88, 100, 101, 102, 113, 125, 130, 144, 161, 161, 169, 189, 242, 237 Ismail, Maulvi Muhgammad 191 and n. 67 Jafri, Ali Sardar 37 n. 137, 40, 222, 229, 231, 232 n. 233 and n. 87, 223 Jahan, Rashid 152, 152, 233 n. 87 Jain, A.P. 181, 191, 205 and n. 171, 209 n. 193 Jaiswal, Saligram 191 n. 99 jajmani 91 Jalal, Ayesha 48 Jallianwala Bagh 68, 172 (p.328) Jalsa-e tehzib 30, 114, 155 Jama Masjid [Delhi] 53, 68 n. 38, 161 Jamia Millia Islamia 55 n. 5, 147, 157, 175, 176, 235, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 247, 250, 276 Jamiyat al-ulama 172, 270, 271 Jansath 44 Jaspal, Shakuntala 222 n. 38, 234 Page 7 of 17

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General Index Jaunpuri, Abdur Rahman 131 Jawab-e shikwa 108 Jinnah, M.A. 48 and n. 174, 154, 164, 187, 188, 196, 220, 226, 227, 236, 228 Kaaba 52 Kakorvi, Amir Ahmad Alvi 16 Katju, K.N. 205 n. 171, 210, 266 Kemal, Mustafa 52 khaddar 74 and n. 69, 126 Khaksar 224 Khalifa 37 Khaliquzzaman 77, 104, 111, 119, 176, 188, 189, 195, 224, 228; migrates to Pakistan 251 and n. 21, 254, 255, 256 Khan, Aga 220 and n. 31 Khan, Farzand Ali 89, 96 Khan, Hakim Abdul Majid 175 Khan, Hakim Ahsanullah 169 Khan, Hakim Ajmal 64, 70, 72 n. 61, 72; on Gandhi 73; 74 n. 69, 169, 171, 172; character and profile of 173–4; 175, 176, 177, 184, 187, 208, 211 Khan, Hakim Mahmud 168 Khan, Hamidullah 19 Khan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar 75, 78 Khan, Muhammad Ismail Khan 188, 224, 251 Khan, Naushad Ali 89 Khan, Nawab Hamid Ali 175 Khan, Raja Muhammad Amoir Ahmad [of Mahmudabad] 8 n. 19 Khan, Saiyyid Ahmad 30 n. 111, 61, 65, 79, 98; on Urdu 100, 117, 129, 129, 161, 214, Khan, Sikander Hayat 227 Khan, Tasadduq Rasul Khan 89, 148 Khan, Zafar Ali 61, 71, 102, 117 Khanqah 24, 124, 133 Khilafat [agitation; movement; protest] 46, 53, 64, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 109, 156, 159, 172, 173, 177, 186, 237 Khurshidlal 202, 209 n. 193 Kidwai [s] 3, 87, 91, 92, 94, 115, 126 [clan], 121 [family], 265, 275, 276 Kidwai, Anis 29, 56, 57, 58, 74; and Awadhi 92; her education 101 and n. 67; 153–4, 238, 247, 274, 275, 279 Kidwai, Anwar Jamal 53, 55 n. 5, 78, 165, 182 n. 59, 222 n. 39, 232, 244; and Jamia 237–42; in company of radical writers and poets 233; in London 235; last days of 243; on 236–7; reading habits of 236; ‘s activism at Lucknow University 233; ‘s postings 234; welcomes Yasser Arafat 241; 274 Page 8 of 17

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General Index Kidwai, A.R. 276, 277 Kidwai, Jamilur Rahman 254, 276 Kidwai, Khalilur Rahman 134 Kidwai, Maqbul 273 Kidwai, Midhat Kamil 53, 55, 56, 205, 233, 274 Kidwai, Mohsina 276 Kidwai, Mubashir Husain 182, 273 (p.329) Kidwai, Mushir Hosain 29; and pan-Islamism 75–6; on Islam and Bolshevism 35, 36, 64; on Hindu-Muslim unity 72, 113, 120, 144, 220, 273 Kidwai, Mustafa Kamil 55, 182 n. 59 Kidwai, Nisarur Rahman 160, 273, 276 Kidwai, Qazi 87, 88, 89, 91 Kidwai, Rafi Ahmed 28 and n. 106, 55 and n. 5, 57, 66, 76; and air services 202 and n. 158; and Congress leadership 192 and ns 103, 107; and Congress Muslims 196; and public affairs 183; arrest of 74, 223; as communications minister 201 and n. 155; as food and agriculture minister 203–4; as revenue minister 181 and n. 54, 182; assessment of 184, 190; backs S.C. Bose 198; biographies of 58; campaigns in 1937 elections 188; canvassed for Nehru report 105; death of 210; disappointment with Nehru 197; in Congress 185–6; joins Swaraj Party 88, 148, 153, 166, 169, 179, 187; mausoleum of 278; on Congress 193; on Nehru 209–10; on Nehru’s statements and actions 207; philanthropy of 180–81, 182; plots Congress strategy 189, 190, 191; resigns from CWC 199; ‘s forays into Kashmir 205–6; style and political engagements 194, 211, 243, 244; Anwar Jamal Kidwai on 236–7, 249 n. 15, 269, 271, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278 Kidwais 4, 268, 273; impact of Partition on 273, 277, 280 Kidwai, Saidur Rahman 74 Kidwai Sheikhs 88, 89 Kidwai, Shafiqur Rahman 29, 76, 77, 177, 275, 278 n. 118 Kidwatuddin 87 Kipling, Rudyard 212 Page 9 of 17

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General Index Kisan [s] 72; movement 71; Sabhas 72; 224, 225, 230 Kishore, Munshi Nawal 116 Koran 13, 21, 22, 33, 63, 78, 98, 102 and n. 69, 123, 237, 266, 123 Kripalani, Acharya 193, 198, 199, 222 Krishna 19 and n. 68, 20 n, 39, 43, 125, 144; and Shah Abdur Razzaq 131, 132, 133y Krishnamachari, T.T. 204 Kunzru, Ajudhia Nath 214 Ladurie, Emmanuel le Roy 54 Lahore 33 Lakhnavi [s] 16, 213; and the Congress 214, 226 Lakhnavi, Zarif 144 Lakhnavi, Safi 218 Lal, Munshi Brij Bhushan 42, 43, 126 Lari, Zahirul Hasnain 251, 270 Lawrence, John 30 Lelyveld, David 17 Lucknow Pact 67, 68, 69, 88, 69 Lucknow University 111 MacDonald, Ramsay 178 Macdonnel, Anthony 99, 215 M.A.O. College [Aligarh] 61; ferment in 66, 76, 77, 102, 111; life at 112, 114, 159 Madar, Shah 25 Madad-e mash 13 Madaris 124 (p.330) Mahmudabad, Raja of 114, 159, 160, 164, 216, 227, 251 Mahmud, Saiyyid 112, 144, 159, 162, 205, 207, 208, 269 n. 87, 274 Mahmuduzzafar 152 ‘Majaz’, Asrarul Haq 46, 140, 231, 235 and n. 87, 263, 264 Malaviya, Madan Mohan 68 Malihabadi, Josh 231, 253, 262, 263 Maloomat 51, 79, 142 Maniben 200, 206 Manqulat 13 Maqulat 13 Marsiya-khwan 138 Marx, Karl 143, 152 Masauli Kidwais 48, 51, 58, 90, 273, 275, 277, 280; in Congress 276, 277 Mashriqi, Allama 224 Masood, Ross 61, 160 Mecca 16 Medina 16 Meharally, Yusuf 232 Page 10 of 17

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General Index Menon, V.K.R. 202 Mera Mazhab 145 Metcalf, Barbara 18 Mill, John Stuart 32, 33, 78, 147 Mir, Mir Taqi 5, 55, 263 Miryasi 138 Miyan, Maulana Matin 119 Mohani, Hasrat 35, 36, 61, 66 and n. 36, 71, 76, 106; and Farangi Mahal 109 and n. 94; and Muslim personal law 266; 111, 117; on Krishna 131; 154, 159, 270, 272 Mohsinul Mulk 100 n, 112, 120, 215 ‘Momin’, Momin Khan 158 Montagu, Edwin 165 Morrison, Theodore 114 Mughal Empire 44 Mughals 12, 13, 89, 90 Muhammad, Bakshi Ghulam 205 Muharram 18 and n. 139, 21, 25, 26, 37 and n. 138, 38, 39, 40 n. 146, 47, 126 and n. 10, 127, 259; and Shah Abdul Razzaq 131 Muhibb-ullah 136 Muhiuddin, Makhdoom 232 Mujeeb, Muhammad 28, 144 and n. 80, 179, 256, 261 Mulla, Anand Narain 230, 232 n. 82 Mushairas 20 and n. 72 Muslim [s] 3; after Independence 269–72 and the Congress 214; in Awadh 8 Muslim League [All India] 46, 48, 65, 80, 89, 159, 161, 164, 172, 187, 189, 215, 220, 221, 223, 226 Muslim nationalism 50, 269 Muslim women 31, 147, 160, 172 Nadwat al-ulama 27, 45, 100, 103, 111, 171, 215, 272 Nadwi, Saiyyid Sulaiman 71, 250 Naidu, Sarojini 251 Naim, C.M. 249, 268 Naqvi, Saeed 125 n. 6 Narayan, Jayaprakash 202, 203, 232 n. 82 National Herald 200 and n. 147, 225 Naya adab 231, 233, 255 Nehru, Jawaharlal 55, 68, 78, 111, 151, 162, 171, 182, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 n. 107, 193, 195; demands loyalty 207, 208; differs with Saiyyid Mahmud 208; on All-India Nationalist Muslim Party 196, 198, 199 and n. 142, 200 and ns. 147, 151, 201 n. 152, 202, 203, 205 and n. 171, 206; on KMPP 207; (p.331) 210, 217, 222, 223, 223, 235, 242, 249 n. 15, 251, 266; on Urdu 268, 269; Page 11 of 17

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General Index on communalism in UP 272, 275 and n. 108, 276, 277 Nehru, Kamala 208 Nehru, Motilal 74, 77, 186, 187, 195 Nehru report 177, 187, 195 New Era 41, 52, 82, 120, 121, 160 Nigar 145 Nisa, Majidul 181 Non-cooperation 55, 71, 74, 77, 156, 173 Numani, Sufia 146 Numani, Shibli 4 n. 9, 9 n. 27, 65, 78, 103, 120, 161, 215, 250 Ottoman Empire 60, 161 ‘Oudh Policy’ 97 Pal, B.C. 117 Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi 210 Panikkar, K.M. 68 Pan-Islamism 61; and printing press 62–3, 63, 69; M.K. Kidwai and 75, 112 Pant, Govind Ballabh 180, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191n. 99, 198, 209, 210, 218, 221, 245, 257, 266, 270 Parshad, Kunwar Durga 25, 140 Partition 49, 50, 51, 56, 58, 230, 237; impact of 280; of subcontinent 246, 252, 252, 267, 269, 270, 274; Kidwais and 274, 175 Patel, Vallabhbhai 192, 193, 197, 200, 201 and n. 152, 205, 206, 209, 229, 266, 270 n. 91 Persian 33, 157, 158 Polier, Antoine-Lois Henri 168 Prasad, Lalta 25 Prasad, Lachman 25 Prasad, Rajendra 181, 192, 196, 222 Pratap, Raja Mahendra 64 Prince of Wales 72, 74, 217 Progressive Writers’ Movement 37, 231, 233, 255 Prophet [of Islam] 21, 22, 37, 38, 39, 78; on humour 104, 111, 123, 124, 131, 161, 259 Punjab 59, 67, 195, 205, 225, 226 Purdah 31, 33, 172 Qasba [s] 1, 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 15 and n. 54, 23 n. 81, 26, 27, 28, 29; and works on women education 32, 19, 28; as heir of Indo-Muslim culture 17–18; as a cultural and religious unit 16–7; ashraf and ajlaf families in 13–14 and ns. 52–3, 27; Azad Bilgrami on 9; celebration of festivals in 126; composite culture in 5; decline of 43–4, 46–7; feuds in 41–2; Page 12 of 17

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General Index Hindu-Muslim relations in 24–5; Islam and 23; life in 26; origin of the word and description of 10–12, 15 n. 54; learning in 140; popular Islam in 21; pluralism in 141; Saiyyid families in 44; Shia-tinged culture in 39; taluqdars in 15, 51, 97, 98, 99, 14, 120, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128 n. 16, 142, 228 Qasbati: culture 146 n. 85; identity 17; living 29; men 34; 156, 248, 252 Qidwara 88, 275 Quit India movement 223 Qureshi, Abdur Rahman 62 Qureshi, Shuaib 107, 112, 165, 176 ‘Rafians’ 191 Rahman, Munibur 246 Raikars 90 Rai, Lajpat 72 (p.332) Rajagopalachari 77, 201 and n. 152, 204, 206, 222 Rasool, Saiyyid Fazal Rasool, Shah Ghulam [of Barauli] Rasul, Qudsia Aizaz 182, 219, 258, 268 n. 83 Raza, Saiyyid Hashim 249 Razzaq [Banswi], Shah Abdur 130, 131, 132, 133, 255, 278 Reza, Rahi Masoom 250 Rifah-e aam 155, 214, 231, 232n Robinson, Francis 3 n. 6, 108 n. 91, 242 Rowlatt Act 60, 68 and n. 38 Rumi, Jalaluddin 33 Russell, Bertrand 78, 234, 236, 243 Russo-Japanese War (1904) Ruswa, Mieza Muhammad Hadi 95 Sabri order 13, 136 Sachar, Bhim Sen 205 Sadi, Sheikh 140 Said, Edward 3 Saiyyids 8, 9, 42, 140; decay of Bilgram 42; in Amroha 10 n. 28; in western UP 44; of Bilgram 19; of Muzaffarnagar 44, 46, 98, 250 Sajjada-nashin 13, 22 Salamatullah, Maulvi 77, 109, 111, 150, 254 Salar, Sheikh 85, 126, 137; Page 13 of 17

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General Index see Ghazi Miyan Salim, Hameeda 124 n. 2, 125, 137; ‘s description 138, 146, 264 Sampurnanand 28, 270, 271 n. 94 Sanjar, Aga Kamaluddin 169 Sapru, Tej Bahadur 228, 267 Saqlain, Ghulam-us 34, 102, 114, 157 Sarabhai, Mridula 205, 238, 275 and n. 108 ‘Sarshar’, Pandit Ratan Nath 116, 117 Saxena, Mohanlal 188, 249 n. 249 Satyamurti 192 and n. 103 ‘Sauda’ Mirza Muhammad Rafi 104, 158, 259, 278 Savarkar, V.D. 226 Secular nationalism 3, 49 Second World War 46, 48, 49 Seth, Damodar Swarup 190, 203 Shafi, Maulana Muhammad 254 Shah, Haji Waris Ali 129, 230 Shah, Wajid Ali 19 n. 68, 43, 89, 91, 93, 141 Shah Jahan 12, 24, 131 Shakespeare 78, 147 Sharar, Abdul Halim 17, 33, 37, 99, 144; and Muslim Academy 111; on humour 104, 105, 120, 157, 159 Sharia 10, 21, 22, 101, 169 Sharqi 134 [dynasty], 135 [ruler] Shaw, George Bernard 78, 143, 147 Shawwal, Qazi 89 Sheikhzadas 8 Sherwani, Nisar Ahmad 189 Sherwani, T.A.K. 195 Shia [s] 8, 9, 21 n. 75, 27 n. 102, 36; beliefs 47; creed 38, 40, 47, 48, 90, 103; in Progressive Writers’ Movement 37; taluqdars 138 Shia-Sunni munazirah 36 Shia-Sunni polemics 145 Shia-Sunni riots 226 Shia-Sunni tension 224 Shirazi, Hafiz 7, 111 Shraddhanand, Swami 68 Siddiqi, Abdur Rahman 112, 161, 162, 176 Siddiqi, Irshadul Haq 156, 250 Sihalwi, Mulla Nizamuddin (p.333) Muhammad 128 n. 17, 132, 255 Sikhs 46, 48, 78, 130, 229, 246 and n. 1; refugees 57, 248, 271 Simon, John 218 Sindhi, Ubaidullah 64 Page 14 of 17

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General Index Singh, Sardar Narmada 201 Sleeman, W.H. 4 n., 39, 42, 85, 91, 127 and n.140 Socialism 111 South Asia 50, 242, Spencer, Herbert 33, 144, 256 Stalin, Joseph 36 Subhani, Azad 71 Sufi (s) 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 24, 133, 135 n. 41, 139, 154 Sufism 89, 127, 136 Sufi shines 134 Sufi saints 135 Suhrawardy, Salauddin 139 Sunnis 8, 21 and n. 7, 33, 37, 47, 48, 103, 230 Suroor, Ale Ahmad 71, 229 Tagore, Rabindranath 8 Tahzib al-Akhlaq 79 Taluqdars 7 and n. 17, 15, 42, 89, 90, 191, 92, 97, 98, 122, 139; Hameeda Salim on 138; of Narauli 134, Awadh 181; 218, 224 Taluqdari estates 7–8 and n. 18, 15 [sanads] 42, 48; of Sandila 35 n. 129, 149, 150 Tandon, Purshottamdas 154, 190, 191, 192, 193, 198, 199, 270, 271 n. Tarikh-e Amroha 46 Tarikh-e Dariabad 42 Tarikh-e Rudauli 265 Tazias 25, 47, 126 Taylor, A.J.P. 244 Thakurs 8 Thapar, Romesh 239 Tilak, B.G. 161 Tiwana, Khizr Hayat Khan 227 Tocqueville 56 Trevelyan, G.M. 3, 59 Turco Italian War 118 Tyabji family 75 Tyagi, Mahavir 209 Ulama 13; Delhi’s 18, 44, 110, 127, 139; Farangi Mahal 255 Urdu 9, 20, 35, 38, 51, 59, 61, 76, 79, 99, 101, 102, 113, 114, 116, 139, 140, 144, 147, 148; Comrade on 100–1; future of 267–69; humour in 104, 105; Saiyyid Ahmad Khan on 100, 101, 102, 113, 114, 116, 147, 157, 158, 183, 215, 218, 230, 231, 261, 264, 265 Urs 119, 120, 124, 130, 154 Victoria, Queen 22 Vidal, Gore 244 Page 15 of 17

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General Index Viqarul Mullk 8, 120 Vyas, Jayanarayan 205 Wahid, Abdul 25 Waliullah, Shah 39 Wasim, Muhammad 111, 254, 256 Watan 16 Wahdat al-wujud 135, 136 Wasiqadars 214 Wavell 184, 227, 251 n. 21 Weber, Max 45, 142, 281 Wells, H.G. 147 Wilde, Oscar 143 Women’s education 30, 32, 162 Wylie, F. 184 (p.334) Yagana, Yas 3, 260, 263 Yildirim, Sajjad Hyder 16 n. 61, 33, 102, 114, 115 160 Yusuf, Nawab Muhammad 219, 251 Zafar, Bahadur Shah 56 Zaheer, Sajjad 37 n. 137, 64, 151; describes Muhammad Ali 152; 222, 231 Zahiruddin, Maulvi Muhammad on female education 32 Zaidi, Ali Jawad 222, 233 n. 87 Zakariya, Bahauddin 135 Zamindar [Lahore] 118 Zamindari: abolition of 89, 255, 258, 260, 274 Zamindars 7 and n. 17, 71, 91, 98; Hameeda Salim on 138, 148, 149, 180, 224, 252 ‘Zauq’, Shaikh Ibrahim 120 and n. 131 Zohra Bibi 139

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General Index Zul Qarnain 113

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