The Project of Respectability : Changes in Language

Textbooks in British India

1. Introduction

It is well known how languages, and especially the discourses to which they give access, privilege a certain world view. School textbooks, especially those of history and social studies, but also those of languages and literature which are our focus, project a certain world view. We are not talking merely of those deliberately ‘ideological’ texts written by individuals, corporate bodies or groups in order to privilege and disseminate their views. We are talking of all texts which, being the products of a certain culture, carry the world view of that culture, however unconsciously. This world view influences the reader and brings about changes in his or her world view. In this article, then, let us go a step further and try to relate what changes have come in language teaching textbooks – literature textbooks fall in this category – taught to the Muslims of north India and Pakistan in the past many centuries. The aim is to suggest that the British embarked upon a major project of making the textbooks taught traditionally to Indian Muslims ‘respectable’ and ‘useful’. In both projects they were joined by Indian reformers who had converted to some aspects of the dominant British, modernist world view. Thus, a change in the traditional texts of South Asian Muslims went along, and was the consequence of profound ideological changes brought about by modernity.

2. The Function of the Traditional Texts

Arabic and Persian were the major languages taught to students in medieval India. Arabic was used in more formal domains before the Mughal period but even under the pre-Mughal sultanate period, Persian was the major subject of study. The texts which dominated in the field of language studies were either grammatical, literary or didactic. The grammatical texts in Arabic al-Misbah by al-Mutarrizi (circa. 13C); Al-Kafiya Fi Nahw by Abu Umro Usman ibn al-Hajib (circa. 13c); Nahw-e-Meer by Meer Syed Sharif al-Jarjani (circa. 14c) etc---which have been taught from the 13th century onwards were contingent upon a world view in which change was perceived as being potentially threatening. The golden age of Islam, it was felt, lay in the past and change could only be deterioration at best or heresy (bida’h) at worst. Hence, the subject of linguistic studies (grammar), literary studies (traditional romances with mystic undertones) and the ways they were acquired (memorization) – all served a conservative function. Grammar was meant to make it possible for Indian Muslims to understand classical Arabic in which the Quran and other religious texts were written. Along with recitation, it was to enable them to preserve the linguistic forms, spoken and written, of Quranic Arabic – the sacred language which must be pronounced exactly right.

The literary texts in Arabic too served the same purpose. Whether prose or poetry, they belonged to a great tradition, an approved canon, which preserved the authority of the past. The classical Arab attitude towards rhetoric, the use of linguistic devices to create beauty and power, was meant to be preserved and perpetuated. Texts like the Saba Mu‘allaqat (by pre-Islamic poets dating from the 7^th century) and the Maqamat al-Hariri (by Abu Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hariri.circa. 12 C) were exemplars of that attitude and were, therefore, important. The first was a model of poetic excellence which survived the great revolution of Islam in Arab literary culture. The second, as we have seen, retained its eminent position in Arabic literature because it too appealed to the Arab fascination with eloquence; with beauty and fluency in language; with rhetorical embellishment – in a word, with the Arabic language itself. This love for Arabic was, of course, a pre-Islamic attitude but it was perpetuated as it also received the blessings of the Muslim theologians, literary people and other powerful opinion-moulders among Muslims. The reason, as we have seen, was that Arabic was the language of the Quran and therefore a symbol of Islam and religious identity itself. Thus the literary canon and the attitudes on which it was based were preserved against change. That is why even now the madrassas insist on teaching grammatical texts which, being written in Arabic couplets, do not help students to learn how the language functions but actually hinder that understanding by the mere fact that they have to be memorized which takes much energy and time.

Interestingly enough, Aurangzeb Alamgir, who is now seen as a symbol of Islamic orthodoxy, did not see much utility of teaching Arabic. In a passage from Francis Bernier (1826: 176-177), Aurangzeb proves himself to be a paedagogic radical: he wanted to learn languages, and other subjects, to exercise power. He was not interested either in interpreting religion as a scholar or manipulating the sacred word like a priest [1]. As for the perpetuation of Arabic as a symbol of Muslim identity or a continuation of the past, Aurangzeb could hardly be expected to consider that as justification for a general study of the language. He was, after all, secure in his power and such symbols are needed by communities when they lose power.

The Persian writings were initially part of a heterodox movement, that of the Islamic mystics (sufis), when they emerged out of Iran in the 13th and 14th centuries. The earliest sufis belonged to the ascetic tradition. Among them were Hasan al-Basri (642-728), Rabi‘ah ‘Adawiyah of Basra (d. 801?); Fuzail ibn Ayaz (d. 803), Ibrahim ibn Adham (d. 782), Zu an-Nun Misri (d.859), Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 874) and Abul Qasim al-Junaid Baghdadi (d. 910) who reacted against the opulence and tyranny of rulers preferring seclusion, retirement and self-imposed poverty instead [2]. Later, the sufis developed the ideas for which they are known nowadays – the ideas of love of God (ishq); annihilation of one’s self in the essence of God (fana); mystic or intuitive knowledge of God (ma’rifah); the continuity of the creator and the created sometimes translated as ‘Unity of Being’ and pantheism (Wahdat al-Wujud); and nonconformity with the letter, or literal interpretation of, the Islamic law (following tariqa’h rather than the sharia’h). These ideas were expressed in the Persian ghazal and the Urdu ghazal which was based upon it. They were also used by writers of famous romances – Sheereen-Khusrao, Yusuf-Zulaikha, Sohni-Mahinwal, Heer-Ranjha and so on – which became both formal and informal literary paradigms for Indian Muslims.

3. The Apparent Radicalism of Traditional Texts

The ideas of love and nonconformity, which are the central themes of Persian texts from the thirteenth century till British times are highly problematic. The central question is how it is that a society which restricted female sexuality and mobility, denied the right of marrying for love to all young people, and insisted upon conforming to tradition, gave such central place to literary texts celebrating just the opposite? We are not talking here of the eroticism of the pre-Islamic era which exists in works like the Saba Mu’allaqat. If these poems celebrate the beauty of ‘wide hipped’ desert maidens one could say that they were written in pre-Islamic times and are part of the literary canon not because of, but despite, their erotic references possibly because the urge to value the past is too great to exclude them from the canon. Moreover, the Arabic in which they are written is valuable as a model of the Quranic Arabic besides being of literary significance in its own right. Eroticism is a minor issue and one to which we will come later. At the moment let us deal with what is far more paradoxical – the presence of nonconformist, indeed radical, literary texts in a rigidly conformist society.

If placed in their historical context, the ideas of love and nonconformism come from the sufis. The idea of love existed as a central sufi idea even in the early period of the self-denying sufi recluses. Thus Rabi’ah Basri is said to have rejected Hasan Basri’s proposal for marriage on the plea that she had ‘become naughted to self and exist only through Him’ [3]. In early sufi poetry, such as that of Rabia and Zu an-Nun Misri the ‘allegory of love in frankly erotic imagery is used to express gnostic meaning’ [4]. Ibn al Arabi (1165-1240), a great sufi master and one who is associated with having developed the concept of wahdat ul-wujud, used the language of love for the mystic’s desire for union with the immanent deity. His symbol for the deity is a beautiful young girl while the lover speaks in a male voice. In Persian poetry, for reasons explained by me in another article, the symbol for the deity, the Beloved of the sufi poet, became a beautiful, adolescent boy while the lover speaks as a grown man [5]. In Punjabi and Sindhi love tales, however, the Beloved is a grown man while the lover, the sufi poet, speaks in the voice of a woman [6].

Love in sufi symbolism stood for the desire for renouncing the world in order to annihilate one’s self in God. The poetry on love also uses other words which have esoteric meanings. A list of these words is given by Mahsin Faid Kashani (c. 17 C) in Risala-i-Mishawaq quoted by Arberry [7]. In this, wine (sharab) stands for the ecstatic experience due to the revelation of God which destroys reason while the down on adolescent boys’ cheeks (khatt), an attribute of beauty, stands for the manifestations of Reality in spiritual forms. The sufi was so oblivious of the world that he did not care for its norms of conduct. He renounced wealth, the love and support of other human beings and even risked his life for love. Thus sufi versions of the romantic tales of love passion disdain societal norms. The lovers meet before marriage (Sohni and Mahinwal) and even if one is married to someone else (Heer and Ranjha). And in this enterprise, apparently of illicit sex, all the great sufi saints support the lovers [8]. This nonconformity comes from the fact that at the symbolic level the sufi poet was talking about the reason–destroying passion for God. He was talking about transcending conventional behaviour precisely because such passion was experienced by the mystic not the ordinary, worldly, man. Thus non-conformism was valued as a higher form of behaviour than conformity if it was seen as being part of mysticism.

This brings us to the connection between non-conformism and mysticism which is another theme of Persian (and Urdu) ghazal. Among the ideas which gave birth to this connection was that of malama (blame). Some of the sufis deliberately brought blame upon themselves so that the public would not revere them to the point of creating a personality cult. The desire for invoking opprobrium rather than adulation comes from sincerity (ikhlas) because spiritual sincerity was inconsistent with any show of piety [9]. The malamati sufi did not actually deviate from the sharia’h though he appeared to do so. The sufis’ spiritual path was called the tariqa’h, equated with form without the spirit. The follower of the tariqa’h, then, could be seen as the kind of sufi who does not follow the sharia’h in appearance but only because his spiritual eminence has made him absorb its essence. In the sufi texts written in India, especially in the ghazal, the dogmatic priest was derided and condemned for lack of spiritual depth and narrow-minded literalism. The sufis celebrated indifference to conventions, differences of social status and even differences of religious sect and religion itself. Thus they extend their blessings to Hindus and Muslims, Shias and Sunnis, landlord and serf – in a word, to all human beings. The ghazal, therefore, apparently celebrates heterodoxy and radicalism but may be interpreted to represent the gnostic quest for God.

4. Radicalism in the Service of Orthodoxy

In short, the theme of heterodoxy and radicalism of Persian poetry do not have the meaning which such themes would have in modern, secular literature. They are not meant to revolt against, or deviate from, spiritual values in the name of free will or self-fulfilment. Instead, they are meant to endorse so true a spirituality, so complete a dominance of the true faith, as to hold the mundane world in indifference or contempt. But even so, the celebration of love and beauty (jamaliyat) and wine (khamariyat) did become autonomous discourses. Whatever their origins, they served the mundane purpose of giving pleasure to a male dominating, phallocentric society. This was one way in which this poetic discourse, so radical in its themes, was co-opted and made to support the system of the distribution of power.

The other way in which this came about was the conventionalization of the unconventional. Poetic discourse was separated and sealed from ordinary life just as religion itself was. Thus, in the world of poetic discourse one enjoyed stories about love which defied societal norms; in real life daughters were killed for trying to elope with their lovers. The passion in the poetry was either a symbol, or an embellishment appropriate for that discourse, or a reality so elevated about ordinary mortals as to be completely irrelevant for real life situations. The authority of the king over his subjects; the feudal lord over his serfs; the father over his wives and children; the grownup over the child stayed intact no matter what egalitarian ideals the priest or the poet talked about. Both were to be listened to, and even deferred to, but only in limited domains. Equality was fine while saying prayers in the mosque but it could not make the poor man dare marry, or even sit down, in the presence of his social superiors. Poetry, then, became a convention itself. It became emasculated. It became a grandiose illusion of radicalism and was never taken as anything more than form. Thus, Persian poetry became part of the ideology of paternalism and resignation to arbitrary power which led to non-questioning acceptance of the powers that be.

This point needs further elaboration. The world view of medieval Muslim India can be characterized as the magical world view. In this cause and effect are not obvious linkages. Events occur, as it were, according to unknown causes. Disaster is not far off and is averted, if it is, by the grace of God. The power of God is not only unquestionable but also inscrutable. Thus, one cannot rest content in the illusion that one has deserved a reward. If the reward comes, it is because of God’s grace not one’s merits. Likewise, earthly power too is inscrutable. One’s rulers, or feudal superiors, may appear to punish one unjustly but this may be part of one’s fate or a test of one’s piety by God. The beloved of the ghazal, both in Persian and Urdu, is apparently fickle, indifferent and even cruel to the lover. At the realistic level this might appear to be so because she is a secluded lady unable to gratify her lover. Conventionally, however, she is a courtesan, at least in India, which makes it unlikely for her to be faithful to a particular lover. The beloved is also often presented as a boy. If this is really so then a normally constituted boy would be unable to respond to his lover’s amorous advances. At the mystical level the Beloved, being God, appears to be indifferent because the ways of the deity are inscrutable. Moreover, the separation between God and man can only end by the death of the latter. That is why the sufi speaks of death as ‘visal’ – union with the beloved. An interesting insight into these several interpretations of the convention of depicting the beloved as indifferent and inscrutable is that it could refer to the nature of absolutist power. As the article on ‘Islamic Arts’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it: the ghazal could refer to ‘the remote despot, the wisdom of whose schemes must never be questioned by his subjects’ [10]. Since cause and effect were not connected, one could not make the connection between a system of bad governance and one’s sufferings under a particular powerful person. The sufis had taught renunciation of the world or indifference to it because the world was bad. Persian literature confirmed that the world was bad but it too did not encourage political activism or questioning. Instead, it diverted one’s attention to the rarified realm of the world of love and the spirit. The message was that it was not in this imperfect world that either reward or goodness or bliss or even change were to be sought. They existed for the faithful; for those who were indifferent to this world; in another world. Such an attitude does not make for political activism which, of course, was in the interest of the arbitrary rule of medieval kings and feudal lords.

At another level, the mental energies of the intellectuals were absorbed by literature which became a convention-ridden domain in India. The themes were fixed, the rhyme and rhythm were a strait jacket and the institution of immediate acceptance by one’s peers in the poetry recital (the mushaira) saw to it that one could not deviate much from the conventions. Moreover, the aesthetic and erotic gratification which this literature gave made it a male preserve. It belonged to the world of gentlemen, a world which excluded both the poor working classes and respectable women. Courtesans, however, could cultivate literature to please their aristocratic clients. An exclusive elitist preserve like this could not in its essence be revolutionary. It was based upon exclusiveness. Its language, Persian, was a foreign language. Its themes were exclusive. They were couched in metaphors and allusions which were foreign to the people. And precisely because it was so exclusive, it became an identity marker of the elite, which was predominantly Muslim but also included martial and educated Hindus. The taste for this kind of poetry gave a sense of solidarity to this elite and helped to consolidate its class power.

This elite, as we have seen, was mostly Muslim and male. Thus, literary texts generally ignore the fact that they were produced in India, a country where most people were not Muslims. The referents in the ghazal are from Iran. Local colour is absent. The stories in Persian take place in exotic lands but the world of magic depicted in them precludes the possibility of realistic representation of any country. This literary fashion ignores the Hindus and their culture. The message which emerges is that only Muslim culture is worth writing about. This has the effect of maintaining the cultural dominance, and hence the power, of the ruling Muslim elite in India.

This Persian literature also maintains the power of the male over the female. It was, after all, created by people who were born in a culture which believed not only in the intrinsic superiority of the male but also the congenital corruptibility and inferiority of women in general. In Bahar-e-Danish, a book which was taught to students from the 17^th till the end of the 19^th centuries, the four wives deceive their husbands to fornicate with their lovers. In Sa’adi’s didactic couplets in the famous Karima which all schoolboys had to read, the wise man was advised not to trust women. In short, the message of the texts was that, being susceptible to lust, folly, deceit and betrayal, women were to be controlled by men.

Being the product of a male dominant, phallocentric culture and written by males, this literature appealed to mens’ aesthetic and erotic susceptibilities. We do not know whether these texts functioned like the cinema or the erotic magazines of today but in a society which practiced segregation of the sexes, they must have served some such function. After all there are legends of people falling in love with females in fiction. A certain Hafeez Ullah of Kashmir fell in love with Sheereen when he was reading about the scene in which she takes a bath in the tale of Sheereen and Khusrau [11]. Convention ordained that feminine beauty was to be described according to a certain formulaic manner. Thus all women, or all those who were possible sex objects, were beautiful and this beauty was of a certain kind: long black tresses, long eyelashes, large beautiful eyes, a small mouth, a mole or dimple on fair cheeks, a slender neck, hard rising breasts, narrow waist, wide hips, slender legs, tapering fingers, and a smooth, fair, skin. In the ghazal kissing and embracing are mentioned and meeting the beloved (visal) is desired. However, physical union is not described nor are tabooed words used. In the tales, such as Bahar-e-Danish, physical union is referred to though in metaphorical language but tabooed words are not used. In some texts, like the famous Bagh-o-Bahar, vulgar words (kus = vagina; koon = buttocks), now tabooed in textbooks, are used. In general, it was part of convention to describe scenes of drinking, sexual indulgence and the fun and frolic of young lovers. This was not iconoclastic or radical because it was a literary convention. This was how life was and the writer merely described it. Such descriptions reinforced the idea that women were mere playthings, or frail of character. They created, or helped sustain, the existing social reality; a social reality which made men believe that they should guard and control women. Writers, like readers, were part of a system which worked without anybody’s conscious knowledge. They did not know that they worked together to maintain male domination but that is how systems of knowledge always work – without conscious awareness of what world view they perpetuate.

Another aspect of medieval literary texts which might appear radical to the reader, especially the modern reader, is that they include what contemporary readers would call a ‘gay’ sensibility. Many texts refer to beautiful boys as possible objects of men’s love and lust. As mentioned earlier, the beloved of the ghazal is addressed by the male pronoun and has down (khatt) on the face but also has female attributes [12], but there are texts which specifically and unambiguously refer to beautiful boys. Muhammad Akram Ghanimat’s Masnawi Nairang-e-Ishq with its boy hero whom men and women both fall in love with is a case in point.

So are Sa’adi’s tales about religious men and tutors falling in love with beautiful boys in the Gulistan. It would be a misunderstanding to interpret such references as radicalism. They were based on the medieval, Muslim conception of love and beauty. The conception was that beautiful boys (amrad) and women were both attractive for men. Such beardless boys were not men (mard) but in a category by themselves (amrad) which, like women, was a category of beings which men could desire and penetrate. The role of the beautiful boy, then, was that of a female; not necessarily a female surrogate but that of an alternative to the female. This was not only true of the Muslim world but also the Roman and the ancient Greek one [13]. Indeed, the change from regarding a man who desired women or boys as normal (but lustful or sinful) to one who was ‘sick’, ‘effeminate’ or ‘abnormal’ occurred sometime during the transition from the pre-modern to the modern world view in the West [14]. Since such a transition had not taken place in India, the texts here treated boy-love, called amrad parasti, as part of love.

This being so, no theory of abnormality was evoked to explain the emotional or sexual desire of a man for a beautiful, beardless boy. What was abnormal, and most contemptible, was for a grown man, a mard, desiring another man as women do. This was considered unnatural because ‘real’ men could not desire to be penetrated. They could only desire to penetrate. The latter desire was natural even if it was sinful and the sex of the object of desire did not make it unnatural though, according to the ulema, it did make it more sinful. Whether such an attitude towards the act of penetration was consciously connected with ideas of male dominance, male power and the capability of penetration as part of this power can only be conjectured. However, the fact is that whereas in the modern West romantic or sexual relationships of men with boys are seen as subversive of the established order, in the medieval (Muslim) world they were not. Rich and powerful men kept seraglios of both concubines and catamites and literature celebrated their taste in both however much the ulema might condemn them for sinful lust. In short, boy-love was as much a convention of literature as love for women and was in no way seen either as being radical or subversive of the system of power distribution.

The medieval literary texts were not puritanical though they claimed to endorse a high moral order. Indeed, because of their use of the imagery and language of love, they were probably a source of aesthetic, emotional and sexual gratification. That is why the stricter ulema were against all kinds of literature but such ulema were, after all, only a very small minority. Even after the puritanical movements pioneered by Shah Waliullah and the Wahabis, they remained a small proselytizing minority though one which gained influence over the middle class as Muslim political power decreased. Other men – and the readers were mostly men – enjoyed literary texts because they combined the mystical and the moral with sensual delight and intellectual entertainment. The Persian texts, then, served to keep the male power wielders entertained. This may be another reason why they were taught for centuries.

A paradigmatic Arabic text which has several erotic passages is the Alf Laila Wal Lail (The Thousand Nights and One Night). It was translated by Richard Burton (1821-1890), Victorian orientalist, traveller and spy[15], into English for the entertainment of Victorian men. The book was well known in India though it is not mentioned as a textbook before the British era. The symbolic significance of Alf Laila is described by Abdulwahab Bouhdiba, a scholar of sexuality in Islam, as follows:

But we can now see that at the level of everyday life and at every level of social life the sacral and the sexual support each other and are both engaged in the same process: that of the defence of the group. This ethic of marital affection based on a frenetically lyrical vision of life leads to a veritable technique of Eros that is itself indissociable from its religious base. Just as there is a religious ritual, there is an erotic ritual and each parallels the other. Arab eroticism, then, is a refined, learned technique whose mission is to realize God’s purpose in us. It is therefore a pious, highly recommended work. Indeed it is a matter of helping nature, concretizing life in its most beautiful, most noble aspects and realizing the genetic mission of the body[16].

Another explanation offered by Bouhdiba, and one which may be more convincing for modern readers, is that the whole narrative is mujun. The term mujun comes from the Arabic root ma ja na which, in the words of Bouhdiba, signifies ‘the art of mixing the serious and the lighthearted, pretended austerity, true banter’. It is ‘the art of referring to the most indecent things, speaking about them in such a lighthearted way that one approaches them with a sort of loose humour. In principle mujun ought not to go beyond words. In fact it is fantasy presented through words. It is oneirism, collective experience and liberation through speech’[17]. In short, one purpose of the erotic was to keep men from becoming humourless and dour. It was, in this sense, a safety device against puritanical zeal which was present in Muslim societies but which became a powerful force only when these societies lost political power from the eighteenth century onwards.

This erotic aspect of literature was, however, disquieting for some of the more puritanical ulema who suspected not only poetry and fiction but also music. Thus Aurangzeb Alamgir, who was a strict Muslim, banned music[18]. However, so much was Persian literature a part of the Indian elitist ethos that it flourished even under Aurangzeb and remained an indicator of education, good taste and gentlemanly upbringing right till the early twentieth century. However, being romantic and erotic, men were apprehensive of women having access to it. The only women who could, and sometimes did, read literature were the courtesans of the urban centres of India whose occupation was to provide intellectual entertainment in addition to aesthetic and sexual gratification to elitist males. Respectable ladies were not taught to read and write not only because these skills would have empowered them, but also because the classical texts used in the schools had an erotic and amorous side from which women were to be protected. In other words, the very eroticism of the texts made them a male preserve. It further reinforced the idea that only elitist males were responsible enough to read them with profit. Women could not derive benefit from them not because there was something intrinsically wrong with them [the texts] but because they were meant to be enjoyed and benefit readers with a certain level of intellectual and moral maturity and these, by definition, were gentlemen.

The texts were taught through translation and memorization. The informal medium of instruction was the language both pupils and teachers understood best. However, the explanation in the margins was in the official, or formal, medium of instruction which was Persian. The test of one’s knowledge was the ability to memorize and then quote verses in Persian or refer to the texts in one’s writing and conversation. Memorization reinforced the idea that the learning of the past was so authentic, so correct, so authoritative that it could not be improved upon or analysed to be reflected upon. It had to be preserved and reproduced. Memorization is a legacy of the age of orality. As Milman Parry tells us in his study of the Homeric epics, oral literature used many mnemonic devices including constant repetition so as to enable the text to be stored in the human memory easily. This means that the new, the original, the deviant or the heterodox is not at premium. What is valued is the old, the conventional, the familiar. As Notopoulos tells us:

Oral poetry of all nations, it has been shown, is essentially composed of fixed, stereotyped clichés or formulas, ranging all the way from phrases or fixed epithets to whole lines and even whole passages [19].

The most important mental faculty, then, is memory rather than analytical skill.

The ‘learned’ person in South Asia too was one who could quote from past authorities, embellishing the conversation with appropriate lines from famous poets, rather than one who analysed texts in order to come to new conclusions. This conservative bias of pre-modern teaching prevented knowledge being used to question feudal and imperial power. Convention and conservatism were embedded in the whole enterprise of acquiring education. So, even if the literary texts appeared to contain heterodox messages, they were taught in such a manner that

their function was no more than to be memorized for display of erudition in conversation and writing.

Most writing for educated people, other than clerics or poets, was epistolary and this followed rigid rules which upheld the conventions of society. These conventions were governed by the contemporary hierarchy of power. The key determiner of the form of address one had to use was social status and rank. Thus a letter to one’s father or social superiors would use very elaborate forms of address (alqab-o-adab). The language of all writing was literary, idiomatic and ornate. Aurangzeb’s letters in Dasturu-l-Aml, collected by Raja Aya Mal in 1743, have been described by their editor as follows:

The King was very fond of figurative language, the compiler takes the opportunity of giving in this preface the real meaning of the peculiar expressions used by the king [20].

Scholarship consisted in deciphering meaning and creating intricacy. It did not consist in creating new ideas. New ideas are subversive and threaten to change the system; the insistence on a rigid, conventional form and memorization created a fixation on tradition which kept new ideas at bay.

5. British Attitudes to Indian Texts

The British conquest over India brought an agricultural, medieval, despotic society in contact with modernity. Modernity was manifestly powerful technologically, administratively and, above all, militarily. And it was assumed, both by Englishmen and Indian reformists, that it was also culturally and morally superior. Education was the major modernising project. The British felt that it was a civilizing force which would impress the natives with their intellectual and moral superiority and hence legitimize their rule. The Indians had ambivalent perceptions of it: on the one hand, it was felt to be instrumentally useful; and on the other, it was potentially threatening since it could disrupt the basic norms and values, the world view, of their society. One response to this dilemma, especially of the Muslim reformers of north India whom we shall mention in more detail later, was to allow the males to empower themselves through Western education while making it incumbent upon the females to preserve tradition[21]. Thus, modernity was to be appropriated; yet warded off from the essential self. This project of the appropriation of modernity brought about changes in world view which made the Persian classics unacceptable among the Indian Muslims; marginalized Arabic texts and, in the field of language studies, brought in two new contenders in the field: Urdu and English. Let us see how the Persian classics lost their place in the curricula of South Asian Muslims.

The British started with approval of the major Persian classics. Later, this changed to mere acquiescence though complaints about ‘immorality’ became more frequent. In the end they replaced the classics with new books which had been written by people who, like them, considered the classics immoral. The complaints can be dated roughly from the middle of the nineteenth century when sexual prudery, which became the hallmark of the Victorian age, in England, was just beginning to influence morality in England[22]. H.S. Reid, responsible for education in what is now U.P in the 1850s, called Bahar-e-Danish ‘highly objectionable’ in tone[23]. He felt that the Hindus could learn from the literature of the Muslims as their own literature was even worse but lamented about ‘the indelicacy of many of the popular authors’[24]. Colonel Holroyd, Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab in the 1880s, also found the Bahar-e-Danish ‘of a highly immoral tendency’[25]. By the late nineteenth century, of course, Englishmen in India came to regard the eroticism of the Persian and Urdu classics as proof of the degeneracy and perversity of the ‘natives’ in general and the Muslims in particular. Then came the imperative to change such a scandalous state of affairs.

The desire to change was part of the growing confidence of the British and the feeling that their civilization was superior.

Oriental literature and history, argued the Anglicists, killed the reason. As Gauri Viswanathan puts it:

By the terms of this argument, not only did Oriental literature lull the individual into passive acceptance of the most fabulous incidents as actual occurrences; more alarmingly, the acceptance of mythological events as factual description stymied the mind’s capacity to extrapolate a range of meanings for analysis and verification in the real world[26].

People so incapable of thought might be docile but they remained aliens. Their minds were forever in the control of mullas and pandits. For the British this by itself could be politically dangerous in the long run. In any case they sincerely believed that their system of rule was rational, hence better, for Indians.

Adam seems quite sincere in his report when he pleads for spreading education both because people will appreciate the government if they are educated and because, in any case, it is the moral duty of a good government to spread education and enlightenment[27]. Educated Indians would presumably understand this because their world view would be influenced by the texts they studied and the new British-created discourses they were exposed to. But the Indians would understand this only if their prejudices, which the old texts only reinforced, were removed. Adam echoed the views of many Englishmen when he says that Persian literature was ‘for the purpose of conveying lessons in language’ but not for ‘sharpening the moral perceptions or strengthening the moral habits’. Thus, he opines, those educated in Muslim literature ‘possess an intellectual superiority’ over those educated in Hindu literature ‘but the moral superiority does not seem to exist’[28]. The question was larger than just the teaching of the language; it was one of change in world view.

According to the British author of a report about the teaching of Arabic by rote:

The older system stands for an education based upon religion, for the acceptance of authority, for respect of persons and institutions; the newer system stands for rational teaching , for liberal views, and for the spirit of development and evolution and each system has much to learn from the other[29].

The central concern here is with world view and power. The older world view, based upon the acceptance of traditional institutions and values, reinforced the power of the traditional elite as well as the old, conventional patterns of power distribution. Indeed, the purpose of language-teaching – as indeed of all education – was moral. It was to produce, in Gail Minault’s words, ‘an adult who was competent but modest, aware of his place in the social and administrative hierarchy, but able to speak when it was appropriate and to learn from experience’[30]. The new world view, consisting of Western rationalism and liberal ideas, reinforced the moral and intellectual authority of the British and the Anglicized Indian elite which they had brought into being. Hence the question of which language was taught and how (as a sacred duty as in the case of memorizing the Quran or reading it without comprehension) was really part of world view and power. Modernity, introduced by the British, shifted the emphasis from memorization of texts to an analysis of them. The change took a long time and we are still in various stages of transition, but the idea that one could question old ideas and create new ones was born. This meant that the theoretical grounds for challenging a traditional authority – feudal, colonial, clerical, familial, divine – were laid down.

Besides, the erotic aspects of the Muslim classics were becoming more and more embarrassing for the mid-Victorians. They were not innocent as we know through scholarly writing on their fascination with the erotic but such tastes could not be expressed publicly[31]. In public the appropriate response was prudish.

Above all, they were scandalised by the mention of paederasty (the ‘unspeakable vice of the Greeks’) which was bowdlerized in Greek lessons in English public schools. Not surprisingly they thought of purging such things from the curricula in India too. To bring about such a change was not difficult for the British because they controlled the schools, colleges and the universities. They also influenced, though they did not directly control, the madrassas and the Hindu seminaries which were, therefore, less affected by them. In the schools they introduced new textbooks. The principles on which the textbooks were to be written had been discussed by such eminent British empire builders as Monstuart Elphinstone and Lord Moira. In 1815 Moira had said that village school masters should be supplied ‘little manuals of religious sentiments’ but without reference to ‘any particular creed’. Elphinstone, in a report of 25 October 1819, had also recommended that religious sentiment be used as an ally but ‘passages remarkable for bigotry or false maxims of morality might be silently omitted’ [32]. In short, the idea was to use reverence for religion to restrain Indians from crime and rebellion without, however, touching upon those aspects of Hindu or Muslim faiths which might create sentiments of hatred or antagonism for the British. In 1830 the school books society reported that it had published textbooks in Bengali (9 in number), Hindi (3), Arabic (2), Persian (5), Hindustani (1) and English (6) [33]. According to a report of 1878 on the vernacular textbooks the textbooks were supposed to include lessons on:

i. Reverence of God, parents, teachers, rulers and the aged.

ii. A simple sketch of the duties of a good citizen, and universally admitted principles of morality and prudence [34].

Textbooks of languages invariably reiterated the subject of the blessings of British rule. Even textbooks of grammar had sentences which propagated the notion of British supremacy and justified colonial rule [35].

The British also set out to change the world view of not only the school textbooks but also creative literature. The Governor of the Punjab, Sir Donald Mcleod, told the senate of the Punjab University how he had written letters for the improvement of ‘native’ literature [36]. Colonel Holroyd, Director of Public Instruction at Lahore, made efforts to make the poets write only on ‘healthy’, ‘natural’ subjects. In a historic poetry session in 1874 in Lahore, Holroyd stated: ‘This meeting has been called to discover means for the development of Urdu poetry which is in a state of decadence today’. He said a new kind of poetry would have to be created since that which existed was not suitable for the classroom. What would be suitable was what he suggested – poems on subjects such as the rainy season. The Anjuman-e-Punjab would hold monthly mushairas in which, instead of reading out ghazals, poets would read out poems on the prescribed subject beginning with the ‘rainy season’ [37]. Holroyd implied that it was the English poetic tradition which had to be held up as the moral ideal. The conquered civilization and its cultural artefacts, the products of its world view, were to be dominated, and at least partly replaced, by the culture of the conquering civilization.

6. The Indian Reformers’ Crusade Against Obscenity

Those who joined Holroyd, and other English reformers of his views, were some of the most brilliant literary figures of the day – notable among them were Mohammad Hussain Azad and Altaf Hussain Hali (1837-1914). Frances Pritchett tells us how Azad and Hali discredited the themes, values and ideas of the old literature of Urdu (and by implication Persian) and recommended new, essentially Victorian, models [38].

Javed Majeed argues that Hali and Sir Syed appropriated modernity in Urdu literature despite their ambivalence towards it [39]. The argument which follows draws upon the work of both Pritchett and Majeed but emphasizes the discrediting of established literary texts and the world view which had created them in the first place.

Mohammad Hussain Azad in his Aab-e-Hayat (1880), an epoch-making history of Urdu literature, regrets that Urdu should be so full of exaggeration and empty rhetoric. Like Hali he too finds the description of the beloved unnatural and reprehensible and implies that Urdu literature should change its normative, thematic and linguistic basis. Azad hints that the younger generation, which commands both Eastern and Western tradition, might be able to change the hackneyed and decadent ideas and themes of Urdu poetry [40].

Hali too proposes change. His model too is the ‘natural’ language and literature of England. Indeed, he mentions many English poets as models to be emulated. In his Muqaddama-e-Sher-o-Shairi (1893), which Pritchett calls ‘by far the most influential work of Urdu literary criticism ever written’ [41], Hali finds fault with the poetic diction; poetic technique; theme and, above all, the eroticism of the old poetry. Such is his puritanism that he does not only content himself with condemning the description of boyish beauty but goes on to proscribe even descriptions of feminine beauty (on the grounds that if she is a wedded wife it is mere shamelessness to advertise her charms and, if she is not, one is revealing one’s own vices) [42].

So contemptuous of traditional literature was Hali that he went so far as to deliver the following vitriolic diatribe against it in his Musaddas(1879):

Vo sher o qasaid ka napak daftar

Afoonat men sandas se jo hai badtar

Zameen jis se hai zalzale men barabar

Malik jis se sharmate hain asman par

Hua ilm o deen jis se taraj sara

Vo ilmon men ilm o adab hae hamara

(That obscene collection of poems and panegyrics,

Which is more noisome than a dunghill,

Which shocks the denizens of the earth,

Of which the angels in heaven are ashamed,

Which has ruined both learning and religion –

That is the sort of literature we have [43].

Moreover, Azad and Hali were not alone in their contempt for the old literature. Sir Syed, another reformer, in his letter of 10 June 1879 to Hali acknowledging the receipt of his musaddas (excerpt out of which lampooning the old literature is given above) agrees with his scathing condemnation of the old poetry. He then goes on to praise Hali’s musaddas as follows: ‘It is surprising that themes have been expressed without exaggeration, lies, far-fetched similies which are the pride of our poets and poetry’ [44]. Another famous contemporary, Nazeer Ahmad, says in one of his lectures that Persian literature could ‘sow the seed of iniquity’ in a child and make him licentious. He added that he was saved from its bad influence because he had studied it from his own father [45]. In his fiction, he expressed his anti-Persian literature ideas clearly. Indeed, he is said to have based his famous novel Taubat un Nusuh (1873) on Doniel Defoe’s The Family Instructor (1715) in which the mother burns offerding books and novels[46]. The protagonist, Nusuh, becomes a reformer and rails against obscene literature. In a climatic scene he enters his son Kaleem’s room and burns his books in the courtyard. Among the books which are destroyed are: Fasana-e-Ajaib, Qissa Gul Bakaoli, Araish-e-Mehfil, Masnavi Meer Hasan, Bahar-e-Danish and several volumes of Urdu ghazal [47]. As Pritchett puts it: ‘The rejection of the old poetry (and prose) was thus enacted in a literal form as well, as a gesture of violent, deliberate physical destruction’ [48]. In the same novel another character, a schoolboy called Aleem, tells his father, Nusuh, that he was once asked by a priest to read Bahar-e-Danish:

That day’s ill starred lesson was so indecent and frivolous that reading it aloud in that crowd of people was difficult for me [49].

Even the Gulistan, that archetypal text, was not fit for ladies. Nusuh blackens out one fourth of it when he teaches it to his wife [50].

Another reformer, Mumtaz Ali (1860-1935), is known for his pioneering role in Urdu journalism for women. He founded the weekly newspaper Tahzib un-Niswan in 1898 in Lahore in partnership with his wife Muhammadi Begum. But Mumtaz Ali too wonders whether Meer Amman’s Bagh-o-Bahar, easy though it’s simple Urdu style may be for learners, is ‘appropriate for either boys or girls’. Eventually, Mumtaz Ali does allow Meer Amman despite his misgivings but he is not so tolerant of novels [51]. Syed Husain Bilgrami, a famous personality from the princely state of Hyderabad Deccan, attacked Urdu literature as ‘course, pernicious, and unclean’ – references no doubt to the amorous and erotic aspects of this literature – and suggested that it was a product of aristocratic (nawabi) culture [52]. Some Hindus based their case against Urdu during the Urdu-Hindi controversy on the alleged corrupting influence of Persian and Urdu literature. Testifying before the Education Commission in 1882, Babu Haris Chandra says that ‘these are the letters which teach us Gul, bulbul, sharab, piyala, ishk, mashuq and ruin us’ [53]. This was not a charge which the supporters of Urdu, who were mostly Muslims could refute. Indeed, so apologetic was the attitude of the upholders of the new literature that, like the British, they were either silent about the erotic aspects of the classics or dismissed them as trash. They derived these attitudes, as McDonald argues, from the Arnoldian values of the curricula, especially the literary curricula, introduced by the British. These values, as well as an anxious concern with the revival of religious vitality and identity, gave the reformers their ‘appreciation of the moral quality of personal conflict, both external and internal, into which the members of the educated elite were plunged’ [54]. However, the Muslim modernist reformers of Central Asia (the Jadids), who had not been brought upon Arnoldian values, expressed educational views which were very similar to those of their reformist counterparts in India. They too felt that the study of romantic poetry in the maktabs ‘was the cause of widespread pederasty in Central Asia’[55]. In short, Muslim elites in contact with the modernity of the West were in a situation of a crisis to which they responded in similar ways.

The crisis of these elites can be summed up in one word: modernity. They had lost power. They had been militarily and politically vanquished. To gain some of that lost power they felt they needed to fall back upon their true faith (hence the hankering for Islamic fundamentalist revivalism). But they also wanted to copy the British model because it was manifestly successful (hence the urge for certain types of modernization). The eroticism of the medieval texts took such a strong beating because it seemed to be disapproved of both by Islam, as interpreted by the ulema of the day, and the British rulers. The emancipation of women, on the other hand, got a mixed response because, while tradition and Islam, as interpreted by Indian ulema, were against it, Western liberalism was not. However, many of the early Muslim reformers were ambivalent towards womens’ emancipation. In very perceptive analytical studies of the way gender impacts on modernity, Partha Chatterjee argues that the Indian nationalist project was built around the need to preserve an essential ‘Eastern self’ in opposition to the ‘Western Other’. Women were an essential part of this problematic because they were part of the ‘self’ and, therefore, had to be educated according to indigenous (Eastern) rather than (‘other’) norms [56]. This meant that women were to be socialized to be good wives and mothers and taught to read religious and other normative texts. Men, on the other hand, were to be taught to acquire Western learning so as to obtain power through (British) employment. With this insight in mind Rubina Saigol analyses the work of Indian Muslim reformers such as Sir Syed and Nazeer Ahmad with reference to the question of what ideas were to be given to women through the process of education. Sir Syed and Nazeer Ahmad, though modernists, agreed in keeping women firmly anchored to the traditional world view of the Indian ashraf. The values of feminine docility, the internalization of male superiority and the primacy of the husband and family over self were part of this world view [57]. In short, nationalism and modernity brought in contradictory and conflicted discourses even from those who were known for desiring change in the name of modernity. Even so, the idea of women’s emancipation stole in through some reformist texts such as the Majalis un Nisa (Assemblies of Women) which Hali wrote in 1874. Although the Majalis discusses nothing more inflammatory than the need to educate women, its theme ‘was radical by the standards of the time’ [58] and it had the potential to influence the world view of Muslims. Precisely for that reason Hali was given an award for the book by the Viceroy and it was used as a textbook in girl’s schools in the Punjab and the United Provinces for many decades to come’ [59]. The British, obviously, approved of texts which could modernize Indians.

7. The Religious Reformers

Apart from the reformers, the ulema too had their agenda of reform the focal point of which was the Islamization of South Asian Muslims who, in their eyes, followed tradition more than Islam (as interpreted by them). Thus, one of the foremost of them, Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi, wrote his Bihishti Zevar to Islamize women (and men too). As Rubina Saigol has pointed out, the Maulana’s major themes are female invisibility and silence. This leads her to the conclusion that the ‘seclusion imposed upon women is designed to preserve the purity of race demanded by a threatened nationalist self’ [60]. However, the imperative of seclusion was much older than the impact of modernity and nationalism. If at all it has anything to do with ‘purity of race’ then it must go back to Muslim rule when upper class Muslim women were, so to speak, besieged by the lower classes most of whom were non-Muslims. An alternative hypothesis I would like to advance is that it is a product of male insecurity which took the form of virtue and purity. Anyway one way of preserving this purity was by controlling the language texts which women were exposed to. Thus, the Maulana excludes all the traditional textbooks of Persian and Arabic in vogue substituting in their place didactic works such as the Urdu translation of Shah Rafiuddin’s Qiyamat Nama (The Last Judgement). As Gail Minault points out, novels and romantic tales are the special objects of the Maulana’s wrath. Among the ‘approximately thirty harmful books are, predictably, a number of novels and romantic tales, including the Dastan-i Amir Hamza (Tale of Amir Hamza), Alf Laila … books of poetry (none are specified; it seems to be a blanket condemnation)’ and so on [61]. The only novel which the Maulana does allow is Nazeer Ahmad’s Taubat un Nusuh which, as we have seen, condemns the very literature the Maulana finds so offensive.

Some books with allusions to love and wine remained a part of the curricula even in the madrassas. Thus the Maqamat and some Arab poetry continues to be taught though erotic portions are either omitted or taught in a manner which makes them appear as exercises in language. The reasons for doing this need not detain us now. Suffice it to say that the British influence discredited most of the traditional texts though some survived in the less noticeable places of mainstream learning – departments of Arabic and Persian in the universities and the Islamic madrassas.

The stage was now set for the exit of traditional language and literary texts. The British did not have to ban them. Indeed, Thomas Arnold, a very enlightened man, reported that not all Persian books but only those which were ‘grossly indecent’ were banned [62]. But the British puritanical definition of indecency was not contested any longer. If anything, Indians became even more prudish than the British. These new attitudes, reinforced by the paradigmatic model of Victorian English literature, can therefore be seen as being indirectly created by the colonial order. However, the new values were internalized quickly and, blessed as they were by the ulema who had always opposed erotic, amorous and even aesthetic products of the imagination, they came to be accepted more as part of Islamist reformism rather than a concession to the dominance of Victorian morality. Nor was it a question of morality alone. Morality was only a part of a larger world view which included other values and assumptions about life such as nationalism and individualism – in short, modernity itself. In short, the British control of education, of which language texts were an important part, initiated a change in the world view of the reformers which created the beginnings of a change in the whole society.

To conclude, language teaching policies are an extension of other policies. They are meant to reinforce systems of belief which directly and indirectly support the system of distribution of power. In medieval India the Arabic and Persian texts supported the arbitrariness of feudal despotism and male domination. During British rule the texts were changed as the medieval world view was replaced, though only in part, by the colonial, Victorian one. The new age encouraged such prudery that, in the name of morality, an attitude of contempt for all Muslim classical literature was created. A new literature, owing much to colonial influence, was created and a transition in world view was initiated among Indian Muslims.

[1] Francis Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire Trans. From the French by Irving Brock. 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1826), Vol. 1, pp. 76-78.

[2] Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 35-50.

[3] Fariduddin Attar, circa. 13C. Tazkirrat ul-Auliya. Trans. From the Arabic. A. J. Arberry (ed & trans). Muslim Saints and Martyrs (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p.51.

[4] A. J. Arberry, Sufism:An Account ofthe Mystics of Islam (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1950), pp. 61-63.

[5] Tariq Rahman, ‘Boy Love in the Urdu Ghazal’, Paidika: The Hournal of Paedophilia Vol.2: No.1 (Summer 1989), pp. 10-27 (p.23). An abridged version is in Annual of Urdu Studies No. 7 (1990), pp. 1-20.

[6] Rama Lajwanti Krishna, Panjabi Sufi Poets A. D. 1460-1900 (Karachi: Indus Publications, 1977), XXVII-XXVIII.

[8] Shareef Sabir (ed), Heer Waris Shah (Lahore: Waris Shah Memorial Committee, 1986), Verses 584 and 586. pp. 378-379.

[10] Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Islamic Arts’, Vol. 22, p. 57.

[11] Mir Abdul Aziz, ‘Kashmiri Zaban’, [Urdu: The Kashmiri Language] Tareekh Adabiyat Vol.14: Part. 2 (1971)

p.187.

[13] K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Ist published, 1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1980); Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Vol. 2 Ist published 1984. Trans. from French by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Book, 1988).

[14] Mary Mc Intosh, ‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems Vol. 16: No. 2 (Autumn 1968), pp. 182-192; Kenneth Plummer, The Making of the Modern Homosexual (London: Hutchinson, 1981); Foucault, op. cit and Tariq Rahman, ‘Ephebophilia: The case for the use of a New Word’, Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 24: No. 2 (April 1988), pp. 126-141.

[15] For a biography see Frank Mc Lynn, Burton:Snow Upon the Desert (London: John Murray, 1990).

[16] Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam Ist published 1975. Trans. From the French by Alan Sheridan (London: Pontledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 139.

[18] Must’ aid Saqi Khan, Maasir-i-Alamgiri: A History of the Emperor Aurangzib-‘Alamgir (r. 1658-1707) 1710. Trans. From the Persian by Jadunath Sarkar (New Delhi, 1986. Lahore. Islamic Book Service, 1976), p. 45.

[19] Milman Parry, L’Epithete Traditionelle dons Homere (1928) In English translation by Adam Parry (ed), The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 1-190. James A. Notopoulos, ‘Mnemosyne in Oral Literature’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association Vol. LXIX: pp. 465-493 (pp. 470-471.

[20] H. M. Elliot and John Dowson (eds), The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians : The Mohammodan Period Vol. VIII. Ist published, 1867 (Lahore: Islamic Book Service, 1976), p. 205.

[21] Partha Chatterji, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Rubina Saigol, ‘The Gendering of Modernity’. In Neelam Hussain, Samiya Mumtaz and Rubina Saigol (eds), Engendering the Nation-State 2 Vols. (London: Simorgh Women’s Resource Centre, 1977).

[22] Alec Craig, Suppressed Books : A History of the Conception of Literary Obscenity (Cleveland, 1963).

[23] H. S. Reid, Report on the Indigenous Education and Vernacular Schools in Agra, Aligarh, Bareli, Etawah, Farrukhabad, Mainpuri, Mathura, Shahjahanpur for the Year 1850-1851. (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1852), p. 54.

[25] Report on the State of Education in the Punjab and Its Dependencies for the Year 1881-82 by Lt. Col. W, R. M. Holroyd (Lahore: Printed at the Central Jail Press, 1882), pp. 35-36.

[26] Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 111.

[27] William Adam, Adam’s Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar, Submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838 edited by J. Long (Calcutta : Printed at Home Secretariat Press, 1868), pp. 297.298.

[29] Progress of Education in India 1992-1927: Ninth Quinquennial Review by R. Littlehailes, C. I. E. Educational Commissioner with the Government of India (Calcutta: Central Publication Branch, 1929), p. 235.

[30] Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars :Muslim Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 20.

[31] Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (London & New York), 1966.

[33] Fisher, ‘Memoir Compiled from the Records of the India Governments ..... 1826’. In A.N. Basu (ed), Indian Education in Parliamentary Papers: Part-I (1832). (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1952), pp. 1-143 (P. 143).

[34] B. S. Goel and J. D. Sharma (eds), A Study of the Evolution of the Textbook, (Delhi: National Council of Educational Research and Training, n.d), p. 243. Appendix 11 ‘ Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine the Textbooks in use in Indian Schools’ (1878).

[35] Frances Singh, ‘Power and Politics in the Content of Grammar Books: The Example of India’, World Englishes Vol. 6: No. 3 (1987), pp. 253-261.

[36] Letter of Donald Mc Leod to Colonel W. R. E liott, Commissioner of Lahore, 7 November 1871. In Proceedings of the Home Department, Punjab Records (Education) December, 1871). Located at the National Documentation Centre, Cabinet Division, Islamabad, Pakistan (Henceforth NDC).

[37] Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness : Urdu Poetry and Its Critics Ist published 1994 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 35.

[39] Javed Majeed, ‘Nature, Hyperbole and the Colonial State: Some Muslim Appropriations of European Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Urdu Literature’. In John Cooper; R. Neller and M. Mohmud (eds), Islam and Modernity : Muslim Intellectuals Respond (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998), pp. 10-37.

[40] Muhammad Hussiain Azad, Aab-e-Hayat [Urdu: The Water of Life] 1880 (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1985), p. 73.

[42] Ibid, pp. 179-182. Also see Altaf Husain Hali, Muqaddamah-e-Sher O Shairi [Urdu: Introduction to Poetry and Poetics] Ist published 1893 (Lahore: Kashmir Kitab Ghar, 1971), pp. 112-113.

[43] Translation from Urdu in Muhammad Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature Ist published 1964. (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1985).

[44] Letter of Syed Ahmed Khan to Altaf Husain Hali, 10 June 1879. In Ismail Panipati (Comp), Maktubat-e-Sir Syed [Urdu] Vol. 1. (Lahore: Majlis-e-Taraqqi-e-Adab, 1962).

[45] Iftikhar Ahmad Siddiqui, Maulvi Nazeer Ahmad: Ahval-o-Asar [Urdu: Biography of Nazeer Ahmad] (Lahore: Majlis Taraqqi-Adab, 1971), p. 36.

[47] Nazeer Ahmad, Taubat un Nusuh [Urdu: The Repentance of Nusuh] 1873 (Lahore: Kashmir Kitab Ghar, n.d), p. 152.

[49] My translation from Nazeer Ahmad, op. cit, p. 83.

[52] Syed H. Bilgrami, ‘Presidential Address at the Fourteenth Meeting of the Mohammedan Education Conference held at Rampur, December 1900’. Quoted from Minault, op. cit, p. 207.

[53] Report by the North-Western Provinces and Oudh Provincial Committee with Evidence Taken Before the Committee and Memorials Addressed to the Education Commission (Calcutta: Suptd. of Govt. Printing, 1884), p. 201.

[54] Ellen E. Mc Donald, ‘English Education and Social Reform in Late Nineteenth Century Bombay: A case Study in the Transmission of a Cultural Ideal’, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 25: No. 3 (May 1966), pp. 453-470 (p.470).

[55] Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia Ist published 1998. (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 171.

[56] Partha Chatterji, ‘The Nationalist Pesolution of the Women’s Question’. In Kum Kum Sangari and Vaid Sudesh (eds), Recasting Women : Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), pp. 233-253.

[58] Dushka Saiyid, Muslim Women of the British Punjab: From Seclusion to Politics (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), p. 67.

[62] In J. A. Richey (ed), Slections from Educational Records: Part II, 1840-1859 (Calcutta: Suptd. of Govt. Printing, 1922), p. 302.