Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: Modernity and some misses
Mutineers were hanged, Bahudar Shah Zafar had been exiled to Rangoon: the 1857 uprising against the British was crushed. What crystallised in its wake was a feeling of deprivation — ehsaas-e-mehroomi — among Indian Muslims.
A Hindustan was lost, so was Persian’s role in administration and education. The people’s sense of ‘civilisational’ pride suffered an irreconcilable blow. The angrez was the enemy. And their ways, repulsive — to be avoided at all costs.
The antagonism was mutual. The sahebs saw Muslims as the catalysts of
the uprising.
Lord Edward Ellenborough, then a bigwig governor-general in India, didn’t mince his words: “It cannot be ignored that the Muslim nation is, due to the nature of its religion, our serious enemy. So our real plan is to please the Hindus.”
On the plan, Mountstuart Elphinstone jumped, "Divide and rule! This is a slogan we have to rely on in running India.”
Macaulay had compiled his Minute On Indian Education and, just like that, English and Western education were put at the heart of the British project to ‘govern the savages’.
To be fair, and as the subject for this Time Capsule also pointed out, native languages were not ‘rich’ enough to carry the semantics of science. They still can’t. There is virtually no economic incentive in doing hard science in, say, Punjabi.
The Indian Muslim was angered and bereaved.
But they were still Indian, or Hindustani — Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan, right?
Anyways, as the so called ‘Hindus’ were observed to be quickly adapting to the English ways, it was a one-sided match.
Those identifying with Islam, with time, felt left out — they were lagging behind as the sense of antagonism kept them away from the ‘enlightenment’ of rational education.
Enter our protagonist, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, keenly observing the shifting tide. It must be kept in mind that his aristocratic background privileged him access to both traditional Islamic education and the reformist notes of science.
A towering figure among the Muslims of North India, he brought about what can be called a renaissance — the Aligarh Movement.
For him, science reinforced Islamic beliefs, as Islam embraced reason and rationalism.
He saw mastering English and science as crucial for Muslims to reclaim their socio-economic and political standing in India.
Despite facing harsh criticism and even some fatwas from conservatives, who accused him of siding with the angrez, Sir Syed founded the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, a milestone that signalled the Muslim community's support for his vision, with much of its funding coming from their contributions.
The college later evolved into the Oxbridge-inspired Aligarh Muslim University, emerging as the leading institution for Muslim education.
But, through this churning, he also left behind the complex legacy of what is known as the two nation theory — a national myth that became the bedrock of the Lahore Resolution (1940), which gave birth to Pakistan.
He perhaps was the first modern figure to articulate that ehsaas-e-mehroomi into a polemic that Indian Muslims were a separate nation. Religion was firmly put at the centre of what a nation constituted.
In a region bound for the Westminster style of democracy, the rule of the majority, the other, the Hindu, would almost certainly mean that the Muslim perpetually felt left out.
Hegel defined the fundamental human state of being as a relation between self and the other. And herein lies the conundrum of identities.
There is no self without the other. And in the formulations of South Asia, the other for a Hindu is mostly a Muslim, and vice versa.
Here, religious identity as the plot line of national myths reigns supreme for whatever you call religion remains very much the opium Marx talked about.
The myth of Pakistan rests on this drug, and India, too, is fast becoming a junkie with the septic syringe of Hindu nationalism.
This particular identity marker is, precisely, what is hampering South
Asia’s realisation of the very rationality of ‘psychic unity of humankind’,
as espoused by the rational science Sir Syed vouched for.
So much for Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan.
