Starting in the late 1970s, a group of American historians published a series of works that introduced a new trend in South Asian Islamic historiography. By eschewing the teleological reference to the 1947 partition of India and the emergence of two nation-states in the form of India and Pakistan, these American scholars focused on social histories of the movements and institutions that played a central role in the development of a pan-Indian Muslim consciousness in the colonial India. Among these scholars, Barbara Metcalf worked on the Deoband seminary, and the wider reformist movement that flowed from it, while Gail Minault studied the Khilafat Movement, and the lives and careers of people associated with it. Coming from the same scholarly tradition, David Lelyveld set for himself the task of prowling the archives of Aligarh College in his book, Aligarh’s First Generation, with the goal of examining the role played by Aligarh in enabling members of the Muslim elites to transition from the sharif culture of the Mughal era to the impersonal, procedural political culture of the British Raj.

Taken together, these scholarly works came to locate the origins of Muslim political and communal consciousness in two educational reformist movements that manifested themselves in the establishment of two institutions of learning: Dar-ul-Uloom Deoband and the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, also known as the Aligarh College. Through their instruction, recruitment, fundraising activities and mobilisation of alumni networks, the Deoband seminary and the Aligarh College emerged as two major, albeit very different, socio-cultural responses from the Muslims of India in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion. Lelyveld’s book is an attempt to understand the latter.

Published in 1978, Aligarh’s First Generation is a fascinating blend of history, sociology and biography, with the stated goal of evoking “the lives of actual people in concrete situations”. Lelyveld undertakes this study with the premise that colonial rule shaped the social identities of colonised groups, who in turn sought to reshape colonial institutions to bring them closer to their religious and cultural values. One example of this process of social transformation is Aligarh College, a British-style institution that was brought closer to Islamic values by its Muslim educators and administrators.

A remarkable feature of Lelyveld’s monograph is that even though his inquiry is centered on the institution of Aligarh, the background that he builds to explain the workings of this institution yields fascinating insights about the contemporary social milieus of industrial Britain and pre-industrial India. According to Lelyveld, starting in the early 19th Century, Britain had become a society of atomistic individuals where participation in the system was “determined by particular skills in fulfilling specialised roles”. This society, driven by collaboration or competition among free individuals, was in sharp contrast to the kinship-based social fabric of India where profession, class and moral attributes were determined by birth. This contrast allows Lelyveld to approach Aligarh as a microcosm of a world that enabled its inhabitants to transition from pre-industrial to industrial culture: from Persianate culture of authority, deference and familial connections to the new British culture of “voluntary participation, personal achievement and non-familial cooperation”. Aligarh, then, was a colonial mechanism for carrying out “transitions of identity and loyalty” by isolating the young from their familial world and encouraging them to forge new, non-familial associations. At one level, the book is an inquiry into how this abstract ideal of transition played out in the real world of post-Mutiny India.

Lelyveld sketches out four models of unpacking the complexity of Indian society, and the place of Muslims in it: the colonial, the Victorian liberal, the Mughal and the Islamic. Essentially, in his formulation, the Aligarh generation was the first among Muslims to appeal to Victorian liberal ideals of representative government, which entailed learning the English language, acquiring knowledge of law and skills of political activism, and organising around the colonial category of “Indian Muslims”. But the crucial point to note is that, in this appeal to Victorian liberal ideals, the exclusivity of sharif culture embodied by this generation of Muslims survived this transition, as this class went from privileged access to the Mughal court to an equally privileged access to British rulers. As Lelyveld notes, this drive to maintain access and privilege – largely through the institution of kachehri in the early colonial period – is beautifully demonstrated by Nazir Ahmad’s novel Mirat ul Uroos (The Bride’s Mirror) in which  a young man forges for himself a path of upward mobility by making connections and friendships with government officials, and currying favour with British officers in search for employment opportunities.

… the Aligarh generation was the first among Muslims to appeal to Victorian liberal ideals of representative government, which entailed learning the English language, acquiring knowledge of law and skills of political activism, and organising around the colonial category of “Indian Muslims”. 

Lelyveld’s methodology includes corroborating information in biographical and autobiographical texts of Aligarh’s early graduates with colonial administrative records, and vice versa. Sprinkled throughout this account of the lives of Aligarh students is a stimulating discussion on child-rearing. Lelyveld contrasts the experience of child-rearing in sharif households to the experience of enrolled students being ‘raised’ inside the four walls of Aligarh College. The characteristics of an Aligarh graduate are then contrasted with the figure of an adult male who inhabits the kachehri milieu of colonial India in the hope of making new connections, getting an apprenticeship and ultimately landing a government job. Through this comparison, Lelyveld seeks to demonstrate that, for a colonial subject, identity is not a static, given category; it is instead learned, assumed and achieved in a particular moment in life, in a particular space like that of the college or the kachehri. He then connects this thesis on identity to the larger arc of the development of Muslim social identity and political solidarity in colonial India. According to Lelyveld, this social identity was first brought to the fore by the colonial category of “Muhammadans” in the British census; then carried forward by the kachehri milieu in which literate Muslims, previously unfamiliar with one another, came to collaborate on the basis of shared interests; then sustained by the rise of Muslim-run educational institutions, literary and scientific societies and print publications, developments in which Aligarh and its alumni played a significant role.

A major contribution of this book is an explanation of educational decline among the Muslims of India leading up to the middle of the 19th Century, and the need for a figure like Sir Syed to advocate for learning of English language and adoption of English model of education. Lelyveld’s discussion of the sharif culture in previous chapters allows him to answer this question: up until the 1860s, Muslim ashraf families used to look down upon the mechanical, uniform and functionalist education imparted in British-run schools. Their alternative to British schools was private education for their children, in which children were raised with ashraf attributes of polite conversation, elaborate mannerism and skills of personal dealings, attributes that enabled them to thrive in the kachehri milieu. But in the 1860s, under pressure from sections of Bengali and Punjabi Hindus, the criteria for government employment – and by extension position in the kachehri – started to become more and more merit-based. As a result, a class of educated Hindus who had accepted British-style education and were now armed with the English language and procedural knowledge, came to stand at a clear advantage vis-à-vis the graduates of traditional educational institutions. It is at this point, when British education got directly linked to government employment, that the ashraf of North India revisited their attitudes towards English education, and the need for institutions like Aligarh College was born.

In the eyes of Aligarh graduates, then, the purpose of the College was to fight on two fronts: to achieve parity with the Englishmen in terms of education, competence and skills, and to use those skills to mobilise the Muslim community (or the Muslim elites) to strive for parity with the Hindus in government employment and positions of power. Lelyveld notes that the ideas, plans and deliberations that went into defining the objectives for Aligarh College ultimately helped define Muslims as a distinct community. In his own words, “The organisational methods and styles used to win backing for the college were later turned to a new world of Indian party politics”.

While Lelyveld grants the obsolescence of Persian education and sharif attributes a central place in his analysis of the development of Muslim solidarity, he also seeks to balance it out by taking into account the role of communal memory, recent past of Muslim rule in the subcontinent, and the idea of a Muslim qaum as defined by ancestry and Mughal culture. One of the later chapters of the book is devoted to the role of sporting activities – especially Cricket – at Aligarh College in fostering collaboration and team spirit among students, as they learned to play the English game within a setting of highly specialised rules and formalised protocols. In the final chapter, Lelyveld demonstrates how Aligarh graduates, armed with knowledge of literature and history, skills of oratory and techniques of political organisation, laid claim to the leadership of the newly envisaged Muslim community of India. More than four decades after its publication, Aligarh’s First Generation remains an essential read for anyone interested in South Asian history and the emergence of Muslim consciousness in the subcontinent.

The writer is a student of South Asia studies, currently enrolled in a master’s programme at Dartmouth College