A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Delhi

339 Pages·2008·2.929 MB·English

by  Mushirul Hasan

Title Pages
A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in
Nineteenth-Century Delhi
Mushirul Hasan
Print publication date: 2007
Print ISBN-13: 9780195691979
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195691979.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) (p.ii) A Moral Reckoning (p.iii)
(p.iv) A Moral Reckoning
(p.v)
YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001
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 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
Page 1 of 2
Title Pages
by Oxford University Press, New Delhi
© Oxford University Press 2003
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2005
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: 978-0-19-569197-9
ISBN-10: 0-19-569197-0
Typeset in Charter 9.5/12 by Jojy Philip
Printed in India by De Unique, New Delhi 110 018
Published by Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001
Access brought to you by:
Page 2 of 2
Dedication
A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in
Nineteenth-Century Delhi
Mushirul Hasan
Print publication date: 2007
Print ISBN-13: 9780195691979
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195691979.001.0001
Dedication
(p.vi) To the late Edward W. Said, an intellectual par excellence, for relentlessly
supporting the eminently just cause of the Palestinian people.
Marg-i-Majnoon pe aql gum hai Mir
Kya diwane ne maut pāai hai
Access brought to you by:
Page 1 of 1
Plan of Shahjahanabad in 1700
A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in
Nineteenth-Century Delhi
Mushirul Hasan
Print publication date: 2007
Print ISBN-13: 9780195691979
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195691979.001.0001
Plan of Shahjahanabad in 1700
(p.ix)
(p.x)
Plan of Shahjahanabad in 1700
Access brought to you by:
Page 1 of 1
Preface
A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in
Nineteenth-Century Delhi
Mushirul Hasan
Print publication date: 2007
Print ISBN-13: 9780195691979
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195691979.001.0001
(p.xi) Preface
Books exist in Urdu on Muhammad Zakaullah (1832–1910), the historian, Nazir
Ahmad (1836–1912), Urdu's first novelist who spoke to his readers in terms of
the highest thought of his time, and Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), founder of
the Aligarh Muslim University. The literature on Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
(1797–1869), Khwaja Altai Husain Hali (1837–1914), and Muhammad Husain
Azad (1830–1910) has also grown, and they are already well-known figures, if
not as widely read as they deserve to be. However, remarkably little has been
written about their attitudes and behaviour towards one another, their responses
to the onset of British rule, their experience of living through the 1857
Rebellion, their own reappraisal of culture and identity, and, above all, their
lives, theories, and activities. I have found it profitable to collect from their
speeches and writings of a lifetime some of the little straws that sometimes show
which way the cultural wind was blowing.
Without providing a route-map, the plan of this book rules out the narration of
political history beyond the barest skeleton. Simply put, we analyse, as a glance
at the table of contents will show, the great variety of views permeating some
sections of the Muslim intelligentsia in Delhi during the second half of the
nineteenth century. We deal with other themes only sporadically, and that too in
order to illuminate the background of thoughts of an age. Without claiming to
having unearthed a great many hitherto-unknown facts, I do claim to have
arrived at a more adequate description of well-known and characteristic events
and personalities than have most extant studies of Delhi.
(p.xii) One does not assume that literary views and their representation as
such is the principal guide to the understanding of any society, but they do yield
a richer and more authentic portrait of social life than historians have been able
to sketch from an investigation of official sources. It is my hope that the
following seven chapters will validate this. I have been pushing this agenda as a
Page 1 of 5
Preface
source for the history of mentalities (India Partitioned: The Other Face of
Freedom, two volumes, 1995; Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since
Independence, 1977; Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in
India, with M. Asaduddin, 2002), but we need to research much more
extensively on the highly complex relation between literary texts and social
reality of this period. The critical use of these texts awaits careful scrutiny.
Who is an intellectual? An individual endowed with the ability to raise questions,
confront orthodoxy and dogma, and define, represent, and articulate new
thoughts and perspectives. This is what Edward W. Said (1935–2003), himself a
renowned public intellectual and to whom this book is dedicated, remarked in
his 1993 Reith Lectures:
There is a danger that the figure or image of the intellectual might
disappear in a mass of details, and that the intellectual might become only
another professional or a figure in a social trend. What I shall be arguing in
these lectures takes for granted these late-nineteenth century realities
originally suggested by Gramsci, but I also want to insist that the
intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot
be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent member of
a class just going about his/her business. The central fact for me is, I think,
that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for
representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude,
philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge
to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place
it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and
dogma (rather than to produce them) … and whose raison d'etre is to
represent all those people and issues that arė routinely forgotten or swept
under the rug.
If dissent is the raison d'être of intellectuals, one can comfortably argue that
Sayyid Ahmad, Ghalib, Nazir, Zakaullah, and Azad were among the leading
dissenters. Besides, if the intellectuals' task is to represent all those people and
issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the carpet, then we see them
doing that artfully either with the production or distribution of knowledge.
Therefore, it will be well worth the necessary space to detail at length the
reasons for such an opinion.
Yet ‘Muslim intellectual’ or ‘Muslim intelligentsia’ is an internally contradictory
concept and somewhat inconsistent with the general tenor of my own arguments
against categorizing persons or groups as ‘Muslim (p.xiii) nationalists’. In this
work, however, I use these terms for convenience to simply denote the
emergence of a group, especially after 1857, that either wrestled with or stood
for the community's reform or islah. Though, in fact, there are many amongst
them to whom these descriptions are not strictly applicable, their concerns
Page 2 of 5
Preface
were, in the main, though not always in their entirety, different from those
engaged in studying, instructing, interpreting, or analysing the shariat or Islamic
law. Moreover, while some aspect of doctrinal Islam played a part in shaping
their conceptual world, as in Nazir Ahmad's Al-Huquq wa al-Faraiz (Rights and
Duties), the shariat, notwithstanding all the sanctimonious posturing, did not
inform their world-view. Thus, while upholding its sanctity, he accepted interest
(sud) on the monies he lent to shopkeepers in the old city. He even defended a
practice that some might say violated the Koran. To such persons, language,
family, kinship, or biradari networks mattered, along with the social and cultural
setting of Delhi's multicultural society. Like Aziz in E.M. Forster's A Passage to
India, they would have longed to compose a song of the future that would
transcend religious boundaries. The same cannot be assumed about Delhi's
ulama drawn from mainstream theological schools.
Hali, one of Urdu's most gifted writers in the nineteenth century, complained
that Urdu writers scarcely furnished information about people's date of birth,
their ancestry, or their social background. The lacuna still exists. Much
confusion exists, for example, over Nazir Ahmad's date of birth: it ranges from
21 September 1833 to 6 December 1836. This makes research time-consuming
and its presentation complicated. Although I have tried to overcome this
problem, readers may find a date or reference to a quotation still to be missing.
With its biographical and explanatory notes, however, one hopes that this book
will be reasonably accessible to specialist and non-specialist readers alike, and
that the variety of primary and secondary materials will enhance our
understanding and contribute to the clarification of the issues at hand.
Ironically, the widely prevalent practice of quoting poetry at public platforms did
not go down well with Hali, who had himself written a long Urdu poem
(Musaddas) in 1879. Ideally, he wanted prominent persons to take to delivering
religious sermons and ‘useful’ lectures at prestigious public gatherings. I
venture to disregard Hali's advice in order to let the reader know that in his own
days it was more or less customary to recite Urdu and Persian verses and quote
from the Koran and Hadis (Traditions of the Prophet). Educated persons, in
particular, flaunted their appreciation and understanding of poetry, and most
aspired to the ability of at (p.xiv) least being able to string meaningful words
together into a verse (Muhammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims, London, 1967, p.
510).
It is true that the novelist Nazir Ahmad disclaimed being a poet, but Barbara
Metcalf, the historian, wrongly suggests that he dismissed the poetry of love,
however symbolic, ‘in favour of utilitarian prose and poetry’ (‘Maulana Ashraf Ali
Thanavi and Urdu Literature’, in Christopher Shackle, ed., Urdu and Muslim
South Asia: Studies in honour of Ralph Russell, Delhi, 1991, p. 98). I greatly
doubt whether he ever drew that distinction. We probably do not know enough.
What we know is that Shaikh Abdul Qadir (1874–1951), editor of Observer and
Page 3 of 5
Preface
Makhzan, recalled once listening to Nazir Ahmad's entire lecture in verse, while
Mirza Farhatullah Beg (1884–1947), one of his pupils, spent hours listening to
couplets he recited. When another of his pupils lost the sense of the verses'
metre, Nazir Ahmad, unable to bear the spectacle (bhai mujh se to sheron ke
gale par chhuri phirte dekha nahin jata), suggested that he visit a courtesan's
parlour to receive proper training. Indeed, his poetic effusions were a far cry
from the shehar ashobs, or from Mirza Rafi Sauda (1713–81) and Mir Taqi Mir
(1722–1810) bewailing the fallen greatness of the city. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, even part-time poets like Nazir Ahmad represented a
continuation of north India's vibrant cultural ethos in north India. This book on
Delhi's intellectuals seeks to capture that spirit.
I have not used the linguists' diacritical marks over and under letters, but
followed the established English usage of Urdu titles and names in books and
journals. Translations of Urdu verses are, unless otherwise indicated, from Ralph
Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature: A Select History (London, 1992), and
Aijaz Ahmad (ed.), Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu (Delhi, 1994).
I would like to thank a few people for their help. Professor Asghar Abbas's
knowledge of the sources proved to be vitally important. Farrukh Jamal's home
in Redbridge, Essex, offered refuge to me on a number of occasions, especially
when I researched my previous book entitled From Pluralism to Separatism:
Qasbas in Colonial Awadh (2004). I am grateful to him, his wife Naheed, and
their children for their warm hospitality. I am also much obliged to Irfan
Mustafa, Srivastava Sahib, and Roy Sahib, at whose house in Willesden Green,
London, I lived in the mid-1980s.
I have incurred many debts: to Zoya, for ceaseless support, understanding, and
encouragement; to Margrit Pernau, for collaborating with me in writing the
introduction to Zakaullah of Delhi by C.F. Andrews; to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi,
for his meticulous reading of the final draft; to (p.xv) Christina Oesterfeld, for
helping me out with the chapter on Nazir Ahmad; to C.M. Naim and Shamim
Hanafi, for occasional advice and suggestions; to Nonica Datta, for sharing with
me her knowledge about the Arya Samaj; to Manzar Khan, Nitasha Devasar and
the editors, for their many kindnesses, large and small; to Satish Saberwal for
his remarks on the manuscript's preliminary version; to Muhammad Asaduddin,
Mujib Alam, Javed Ahmad Khan, Rashmi Doraiswamy, Rakhshanda Jalil, and
Naqi Husain Jafri for helping me with transliteration, translation, and proof-
reading; to Bhashyam Kasturi, Shyamal Roy, Amrit Tandon, and Etee Bahadur
for preparing the index; to Sayyid Hasan Jamal Abidi, for placing the resources
of the Zakir Husain Library, Jamia Millia Islamia, at my disposal; to Sushma
Zutshi and Nuzhat Kazmi, for the maps; to Jamal Malik, for the two photographs
on Madarsa Ghaziuddin; to Masroor Ahmad Khan, for the photographs on Ajmal
Page 4 of 5
Preface
Khan's family; to Adil Tyabji, for his meticulous editing; and to Muhammad
Shakir, for his role as an energetic and responsible research associate.
A grant from the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) facilitated a
research trip to London. My association with the National Institute of Oriental
Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris as Professor Invite, and my three-
month stay at Maison Suger enabled me to rewrite a major part of this book. For
their kindness and hospitality, I am especially grateful to Jean Alfonso Bernard,
author and retired diplomat; Christophe Jaffrelot, Director of the Centre
d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales; Jean Luc Racine, a political scientist;
Eric Meyer, a specialist on Sri Lanka; Annie Montaut, a linguist; Gille Tarabout,
director of the Indo-French Programme in Social Sciences; and Anne Vergati, a
sociologist. Over the years Maison des Sciences de l' Homme has extended much
scholarly support.
MUSHIRUL HASAN
February 2005
Access brought to you by:
Page 5 of 5
Ghalib's Delhi
A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in
Nineteenth-Century Delhi
Mushirul Hasan
Print publication date: 2007
Print ISBN-13: 9780195691979
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195691979.001.0001
Ghalib's Delhi
(p.xvi)
Ghalib's Delhi
Access brought to you by:
Page 1 of 1