Everyone in my distant maternal lineage, except myself, went to Aligarh to acquire ilm (knowledge) and to cultivate tehzeeb (culture). All my distant relatives on my mother’s side – those I addressed as Khala (mother’s sister) and Mamu (mother’s brother) – were fervently devoted to Aligarh. On that side of the family, no close relations remained in India after Partition.

A few years of my childhood were spent in Senta, a village in the Bulandshahar district of Western Uttar Pradesh, among my mother’s distant relatives. Senta was then a place where the Syeds formed a significant and insular community. Only later did I realise the possibility of socialising beyond this inherited sphere, recognising that a child of the so-called upper caste could also play with children from the underprivileged castes. We often visited my mother’s relatives in Gulaothi, a neighbouring town that, to us, resembled a miniature Aligarh. Only Aligarh was spoken of there. After Maghrib, as the evening shadows lengthened, girls veiled in black burqas went from house to house exchanging study notes. Some were private candidates for Aligarh examinations, and their twilight excursions were perhaps the only sanctioned escape from domestic confinement. The Syeds of Gulaothi and Senta inhabited a closed socio-symbolic world, inwardly coherent yet hermetically sealed.

Recently, when the poetry collection of Syed Natiq Gulaothi arrived at the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind) via Nagpur for publication, I wondered whether a printed copy might still be sent to some Syedzadas of Gulaothi. No one could suggest even a single name. 

Although I had long heard of the chhota and bada mahals of Gulaothi, I never saw them, neither when they stood tall nor after their decay. The devastation of Laila’s palace in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column mirrors the fate of such homes in independent India.

Aasman Mahal tha ek Syedon ki basti mein,
Asman nahin Saheb, ab mahal kahan hoga!
(There was an Aasman Mahal in the habitation of the Syeds,
What to speak of the palace now, when even the sky itself is gone?)

– Dasana Station ka Musafir, Akhtar ul-Iman

What remains now is merely a parable of dispossession and the faint glow of decline. The glow for the elite, paradoxically, grew stronger because of Partition. And why be surprised by the destruction of Laila’s house if some residents supported Pakistan, and their properties were marked as ‘Enemy Property’? The outcome was unavoidable. You can’t have the cake and eat it too; the saying is not even understood by Muslims in India now!

‘Aapda mein awsar’ is, in fact, the most fitting phrase to understand the aftermath of the Partition of India in another way. Our renowned and much-discussed theorists working on Muslim Pasmandas and Other Backward Classes have never even considered this central point. Had the Partition not taken place, the Muslim Ashraf would not have abandoned their privileges, whose base was the caste system, and the Hindu elite would have followed the footsteps of their fellow Muslim travellers of the same class, drawing strength from Muslim landlords. The Partition isolated the Hindu aristocracy. We could not have witnessed the transformation among Hindus that we see today if the elite character of Muslim society had not been destroyed due to the Partition. 

In that scenario, AMU would undoubtedly have remained a preserve of upper-caste Muslims in undivided India. We have never read Sunlight on a Broken Column through the right lens. We often fail to interpret history accurately, regardless of whether we are on the Left or the Right. Both sides have been and remain superficial, and even their best minds suffer from a detached retina when it comes to reading history.

I must have been about eight or nine when I left the world of the Syeds and arrived in the arid landscape of Sikandrabad, also in the Bulandshahar district of Western Uttar Pradesh. The afternoons there were scorching, the roads extremely rough beneath my feet, and the nights interminably long and, of course, dark. To me, Aligarh was then a luminous abstraction, a realm of the Syeds, radiant yet beyond reach. I did not forge close ties with the few Syed households in Sikandrabad, and later, no Syedzada ever became a friend, for reasons rooted solely in my own social locality.

This piece of writing is neither a genealogical reflection nor an apology for the Syeds. I would ask my friends not to inquire into the origins of my surname, Farouqui, or to speculate about any connection to Syed ancestry. It was bestowed upon me by Mukhtar Usmani, a Makhdoomzada of Delhi.

My concern here is not with caste, title, or lineage. What preoccupies me is the narrowness of social imagination, the deeply internalised structures of exclusion, and the cultural atrophy born of genealogical essentialism. The problem does not lie in descent but in the persistence of enclosure, in the way social segregation ossifies into epistemic habit and reproduces what may rightly be called an inherited epistemic inertia.

My paternal grandmother’s younger brother, Syed Muhammad Sadiq, spent many years at Aligarh but never completed his graduation. We had heard that he lived in a room adjoining that of Muhammad Ayub Khan, the future Field Marshal of Pakistan, and that they were friends. Sadiq, proud of his Sada’t lineage, was nonetheless indifferent to Aligarh, to Pakistan, and even to Ayub Khan. He passed away in 1981.

My first journey to Aligarh was in 1985, accompanied by Shakil Bhai, who also had no connection with the Syeds. For many years, he remained an essential part of my life. When I was in the 11th standard, he left Aligarh permanently to return to Sikandrabad and live with his parents. I admired him deeply at that time, but years later, when I reached JNU, I realised that he had remained exactly where he was when I left him in Sikandrabad – he had refused to move on.

My stay in Aligarh lasted only one night, yet that single night was enough to shatter a myth I had believed since childhood. Although Shakil Bhai had left the university long before, his room remained in his possession, an old relic, an echo of the traditions of old Aligarh. It was there that I bought my first book on the history of English literature from a Hindu bookseller’s shop within the university campus, which had previously been burnt down during the 1979 demonstrations by Muslim students demanding the restoration of AMU’s minority status.

Indeed, when I reached the bookshop, what immediately came to mind was the shop of English books owned by Mr Bhatia in Bhisham Sahni’s extraordinary story Ahm Brahmāsmi. One translation of the title might be ‘I am the Divine Flame.’ The author indicated otherwise within the story itself, insisting that it was not the correct translation. The owner of the Aligarh bookshop was a gentleman. Nothing was common between the two, the owners or the shops, one in a cantonment in the story and the other within the university campus of AMU. The owner in the former was a toady, a mental slave of the English rulers, while the latter was a gentleman. 

I later translated the story into Urdu, with the author’s permission, and retained the title Ahm Brahmāsmi, despite the editor’s insistence on replacing it with Anal Haq. Gillian Wright did an excellent translation of the story into English, with the same title as I did.

But where were the Syeds in Aligarh? Where was their Aligarh? No traces of that old world remained by then. Whatever lingered into the early 1970s had vanished entirely by 1985. I last visited Gulaothi in 2005; its Syeds had hardly changed over the past 25 years. Reflecting on the early 1970s, when I used to visit Gulaothi often, it seemed as if they were living in the 1940s, breathing the same air in 2005 that their ancestors had inhaled before Partition.

I remember visiting a senior’s room at AMU with Shakil Bhai during that unforgettable trip in 1985. The senior directed his junior in the outer chamber: ‘mehman tashreef laye hain, chai pesh ki jaye (guests are here; some tea must be served).’ I still remember the feudal tone. The tea did arrive, but none of the tehzeeb or grace associated with Gulaothi or Senta tea was evident. The renowned civility of the Syeds, once given to Aligarh, had long vanished.

I did not even consider applying to AMU. The choice was intentional and without resentment. Other options, which I discovered and developed myself, appealed to me more.

What I could never understand was the pride with which Muslims of underprivileged castes claimed association with Aligarh in independent India. Perhaps they wished to erase the Syed, the elitist past, and silence that memory altogether. Their association seemed not cultural but utilitarian, focused solely on the benefits that Aligarh could offer. These are concessions, nothing else.

Professor Iftikhar Alam Khan, author of Sir Syed: A Private Life (Sir Syed Daroon-i Khana), initially written in Urdu, comes from an enlightened family in Qayamganj, Farrukhabad district, known for its longstanding commitment to education. He served as Professor of Museology at AMU and is the younger brother of historian Iqtidar Alam Khan, as well as the son of the esteemed poet Ghulam Rabbani Taba’n, a prominent figure in the Progressive literary tradition and the Progressive Writers’ Association.

There is a long and complex history behind the translation of this book, which I will recount elsewhere. I met Iftikhar Alam Khan twice: once in Qayamganj in 1997 and later at his home in Aligarh in 2003. I am certain he does not remember either of those meetings. Professor Mohammad Sajjad of AMU’s History Department suggested the title for the English edition and maintained a keen interest in the translation.

Shafey Kidwai was a constant source of encouragement, as were Professor Asim Siddiqi of the English Department and Professor Mohammad Sajjad of the History Department. Asim Siddiqi reviewed the translation at the author’s request and remarked that it was worthy of publication. I had submitted the translated text to the author for approval, who had, in turn, shared it with Siddiqi. The exact text Siddiqui approved was the one I later submitted to the Oxford University Press.

Ironically, I never reviewed the final PDF to verify my text, and my 30-page ‘Translator’s Note’ was omitted. The proof did not reach me in the usual manner, nor did the edited text. The text was sent to me solely to address a few queries that editors could not resolve. I simply did that: Jeevan hai paiman na koi jiski sab shartein hon puri! Taking life as it comes is entirely appropriate in the case of this publication.

The most regrettable incident was the accidental omission of Iftikhar Alam Khan’s name from the book’s title as the author of the original book. The mistake was identified during the pre-booking process for Amazon at the last moment. Fortunately, the error was identified in time, although its correction delayed publication, as the title pages had already been printed and the book had to be rebound. I remain grateful to the UK team of OUP for intervening promptly and rectifying the error.

OUP’s systems are now quite complex. I pointed out the mistake in time to both my editors in Kolkata and Chennai, but neither of them knew who would actually correct the error, and the book was sent for printing without being corrected. The problem between the offices of OUP was similar to a jurisdiction issue in police FIRs, where the focus is not on the crime but on the technicalities, a bureaucratic maze of puzzles.

India today shows little respect for books; publishing houses are closing down one after another or being acquired by large corporate entities. Aligarh has also not escaped this intellectual decline – books are discussed there without being read. It is an old tradition. I do not doubt that my translation will face similar treatment.

Now that my task is complete, I can state without affectation that I have read extensively on Aligarh and Sir Syed and am acutely aware of both the scope and the limitations of this scholarship, particularly in light of the political and emotional perspectives of Muslims towards the phenomenon called Aligarh. To describe them as ‘limited’ would indeed be charitable. 

In my omitted Translator's Note, I had tried to draw parallels between the Sir Syed movement in North India and the Anjuman-i Islam in Bombay. Both were elitist and initiated by the loyalists of the Sarkar-i-Englishiya, almost simultaneously, meaning in the aftermath of 1857; however, their approaches were completely different. The Bombay movement was cosmopolitan in nature and therefore worked on school education. Now one can see the network of schools for Muslims by Muslims across Maharashtra, let alone Bombay. At the time of the Reorganisation of States, some areas affected by this movement became part of Karnataka, and we can see the impact of education among Muslims there. To insist on a university is nothing but a completely blurred vision of education, and without any understanding of the dynamics of societies. If empowerment has something to do with it, its ladder begins with primary education and progresses gradually through secondary and senior secondary education.

This is my fourth book published with OUP globally, and that alone is a distinction enough. This reflection is offered not as nostalgia but as an inquiry into the socio-intellectual morphology of a world that has all but disappeared. 

Ather Farouqui is the general secretary of Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), an organisation established by Sir Syed in 1882.

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