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In a liberal vein

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Date: 2003-10-10

It was an opportunity to watch a tradition at play that I missed but I did manage to get a peep into it from a distance. A retired history professor at a university, keeping up with a mid-century lifestyle, cycling to the centre every morning there to chat, discuss, examine and analyse historical problems.

This then is a receding liberal culture clinging tenaciously on to old tenors of scholarship, of writing and publishing books to refute arguments and rebut differences, of spending supernumerary time in the study or at the academic centre. Welcome to Iqtidar Alam Khan of the Aligarh Historical Society, a more shrivelled version of the more famous Aligarh School of Historians.

Iqtidar Alam Khan works from a tiny study in his house in Aligarh. It is a colony composed almost entirely of retired or serving university lecturers and associates. His children are doctors or scientists who share few of his academic concerns but bought him a computer long ago.

It stands shrouded with a sheet, almost like a corpse, in one corner of the study while an old lamp lights the main worktable, when there is no power cut.

These days the UP electricity minister in the new cabinet, the son of Kalyan Singh, is an Aligarh representative so the power situation has improved. Iqtidar Alam Khan still works by hand, meticulously working on the proofs of his new book, an extensive overview on the firearms and gunpowder supply and production side in early medieval and modern India.

It is a great lacuna in that field, as the supply of firearms and gunpowder is a hotly contested issue in analysing the so-called swift Turkish victories over North Indian rulers. He had already sent the second batch of proofs but is not sure whether they have reached the Oxford University Press office, so has written back to them. All this happens by snail mail.

He promises to get on the computer for the next book but knows himself that nobody would take him seriously. Perhaps he draws security from that assurance.

Students of history honours would be familiar with Iqtidar Alam Khans name from their study of Akbar. He wrote a famous and much quoted paper on the principles of succession among Chaghtai Turks. It is the thing about Aligarh Historians. I have written cursorily about them before.

Mohammed Habib, K A Nizami, Noorul Hasan who subsequently became the educational minister when the CPI joined hands with the Congress, Satish Chandra, Irfan Habib, I A Khan and Shireen Moosvi.

Many of them found themselves working in or around Akbar. As Nehru was the inspiration behind a certain shade of pink in politics, that shade drew its legitimacy from the patron figure of Akbar. The one ratified the other. Out of that emerged the Aligarh School.

Socialist, committed to depicting the Mughal Empire as a centralising empire that methodically usurped surplus, fervently opposed to spiritual or religious factors in the study of history and highly interventionist in contemporary debates about history and in its opposition to Hindutva.

But before its own emergence it had to duck many a fatwa and calls for ostracisation from within the university in the name, this time, of maligning Islam or being anti-Muslim.

It is today a doubly maligned group. Led primus inter pares by Irfan Habib and including Shireen Moosvi, Iqbal Ghani Khan (who was recently murdered for political reasons) and others it stands for little more than secular-fanaticism in the eyes of many distant surveyors. But there are histories of struggle behind it that can only be ignored by very simple-minded critics.

One, to carve out a liberal, left of centre space for like-minded scholars in a milieu that became identified with political separatism immediately before and after independence and with social conservatism and obscurantism thereafter. To continue to apply liberal methods of selection and procedure for instance in a space where nepotism and favouritism have been dominant for over two decades.

Crucially to sustain scholarship in a time when academic position has become a global enterprise and placement in a small university the death knell of ones career. But above all to churn out new works in a small town in a social perspective where they are being atrophied for lack of fresh supply.

If it were merely about the insertion of Marx in a Muslim University it would be nothing. If it were about free enquiry and reasoned debate it would be no better than Qum, the freest and the most liberal of Iranian seminarian towns that also took a leading part in the 1979 revolution. It is about coming from a UP qasbah in mid-century India to what was then the most imposing university in the state and finding the whole world there.

It is about staying put, in order to grow. From Ghazali to Marx, from Gadamer to Abul Fazal from Joshi to ASI, why not. There is much wisdom, as Tai Pei would tell you, in staying on.