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Nehrus are believed to have migrated, Noar, or Naru, in Badgam district and the other near the small town of Tral. Another claim says that the family came from the Rainwari area on the outskirts of Srinagar. (A famous family, as is well known, suddenly gets many ancestors.)

However, it is certain that the Nehrus were part of the Mughal court and had some zemindari rights over a few villages. But by the generation of Mausa Ram Kaul and Saheb Ram Kaul, Raj Kaul’s grandsons, the inheritance had dissipated, perhaps in direct proportion to the decline of Mughal power. Mausa Ram’s son, Lakshmi Narayan, shifted his loyalty and became the first vakil of the East India Company, which had acquired a formidable presence by now at the Mughal court. His son, Ganga Dhar, became a kotwal (chief constable) in the police at a very early age and held that job when the Mutiny reached Delhi in 1857. Ganga Dhar Nehru was only thirty;. And it was that holocaust which, after a century and half, forced the descendants of Raj Kaul to leave the city which they had adopted.

From the ‘feeble, cowardly and contemptible’ Emperor Farrukh Siyar to the no less feeble, cowardly and contemptible Bahadur Shah Zafar, the Nehrus served as bureaucrats to the kingdom. Their fortunes vacillated with the uncertainties of the time; it was an age when emperors died of that very fatal epidemic called intrigue, and the court was a bedlam of climbers using every weapon known, from conspiracy to poetry, to usurp a little more from the collapsing treasury of a debilitated empire. Those aristocrats with any desire for calm kept away from Delhi; others, with more ambition, like the Marathas and Jats, extracted a heavy price in return for letting the Mughal facade remain; yet others, invaders from Persia, came, looted and returned. And slowly, from the east, the troops of John Company worked their way up, their de facto power transformed by degrees into de jure authority.

The last Great Mughal, Aurangzeb, died on 3 March 1707, with the confession of faith on his lips and the burden of pessimism in his heart. From his death-bed he wrote to his son Azam: ‘I came alone and am going alone. I have not done well to the country and the people, and of the future there is no hope.’ His three living sons, Muazzam, Muhammad Azam and Muhammad Kam Baksh, immediately began fulfilling their father’s prophecy- By early 1708 Muazzam had killed his two brothers on two battlefields, Azam at Jajau near Agra in June 1707 and Kam Baksh near Hyderabad in 1709. Bahadur Shah, as he titled himself, might have maintained the empire, but he died of natural causes on 27 February 1712 — the last to die thus in a long while. His heir Jahandar Shah killed three brothers for the throne, then allowed his courtesan Lal Kumari to rule so that ‘violence had full sway. It was a fine time for minstrels and singers and all the tribes of dancers and actors.’ Using two powerful satraps, the Sayyid brothers, Farrukh Siyar strangled Jahandar Shah in the Red Fort in 1713; then the Sayyid brothers finished him in the same way. The brothers made and killed two more kings until Muhammad Shah brought a measure of stability. Stability, that is, for himself, not the empire. He dedicated himself completely to political inaction and pleasure. Every regional power helped itself to a part of the empire: Deccan went to Nizam-ul-Mulk; Awadh became semi-independent under Saadat Khan; Bengal went to Murshidabad and via Siraj-ud-Dowla to the English; the Marathas took west and central India; the Jats established their kingdom near Agra; the Rohillas founded Rohilkhand north of Ganga; the Sikhs took Punjab. Foreign invaders trooped in to loot the treasure of glorious generations, beginning with Nadir Shah. Within thirty years the achievements of two centuries had been squandered. In 1739 Nadir Shah entered Delhi in triumph and, infuriated at the sight of his dead soldiers who had been killed by some overambitious citizens, ordered a great massacre. He left with all the crown jewels including the Kohinoar and the Peacock Throne; a total of 15 crores of rupees in cash, jewels, 1,000 elephants, 7,000 horses,10,000 camels, 500 builders and masons, 100 eunuchs and countless slaves looting India then became a bit of a habit. Ahmad Shah Abdali, who succeeded Nadir, did it constantly between 1748 and 1767.

In 1764 the Jats removed the silver roof from Rang Mahal, and in 1787 the Rohilla chief Ghulam Qadir Khan blinded Shah Alam II while his men dug the floors of the Red Fort in search of buried treasure. In 1788 the Maratha Scindias made the Mughal their protectorate, before Delhi passed into British control in 1803 after the Maratha wars. In the west Arthur Wellesley captured Ahmadnagar on 12 August, defeated Daulat Rao Scindia arid Raghuji Bhonsle at Assaye, north of Aurangabad. on 23 September and completed the rout by 15 December. In the north Lord Lake captured Aligarh, Delhi and Agra, routing the Scindia’s northern armies in September at Delhi and in Alwar in November. By the treaty of Surji-Arjungaon on 30 December, Scindia renounced all his claims on the Mughal emperor. Henceforth, that formality would remain with the British. The blind Shah Alam II was now under the control of the Company. As Sir Thomas Munro wrote: ‘We are now the complete masters of India, and nothing can shake our power, if we take proper measures to confirm it.’ The Grand Mughal was formally demoted by the British from emperor to king; a civilian colony was established within Shahjahanabad and a military cantonment beyond The Ridge. The administration was under a British Resident. There was peace. The blinded Shah Alam died (1803) in bed, a luxury few Mughal princes had experienced of late. So did Akbar Shah II, after thirty-one powerless years, in 1837. It was his successor Bahadur Shah II who, much against his will, was forced into an unexpected spasm of heroism before he died, writing beautiful if pathetic verse in a gaol in Burma, yearning for six yards of his motherland for a grave. He didn’t get it.

The last flicker of an imperial flame lit more than 300 years before illuminated the country on 11 May 1857 when at about seven in the morning a parry of mutineeers crossed the Yamuna on a bridge of boats. Simon Fraser, the commissioner, was in bed. Hutchinson, the collector, was already in court, dealing with a criminal case, along with police officer Mainuddin Hasan of the Paharganj police station. Captain Douglas, the British officer posted to Bahadur Shah’s court, was receiving Munshi Jivanlal 

It was actually the Emperor who was the first to learn that a revolution was at the door; he could, literally, hear its clamour. He told Captain Douglas to go to the window and tell them to take their patriotism elsewhere. The last scion of the great Mughals had long since surrendered all pretensions. But the people of Delhi were in another mood that day. A rumour had swept the city that the Shah of Iran had called upon them to revolt and would come to help. Though the British quickly secured the Calcutta gate, the citizens threw open the Rajghat gate and let in the mutineers from across the river. The first casualty was Dr Chamanlal, an Indian Christian standing in front of his dispensary. The Emperor, in utter panic, appealed to the British to save him from patriotism. But there were no European troops in Delhi; the Sepoys, based in Rajpur, refused to obey their commander Brigadier Graves. Fraser, Douglas and Hutchinson were all to die soon, as were Jennings (the chaplain), his daughter Miss Jennings and her friend Miss Clifford. Two Anglo-Indian youths working in the telegraph office finally sent out the word which was to alert Punjab and the eventual saviour, Brigadier John Nicholson; they tapped an urgent message to Ambala, Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar: ‘The Sepoys have come in from Meerut and are burning everything — Mr Todd is dead, and we hear several Europeans. We must shut up.’ That final touch of Indian English is classically authentic.

The Sepoys had been inspired by the tradition that Company rule would end in the moth year after Plassey, but romance had no chance against British drill and discipline. History was against them. Even the Emperor’s queen Begum Zeenat Mahal and his closest adviser Hakim Ahsanullah Khan were in league with the British. By 20 June the officers of John Nicholson’s column were dining in ‘the Elysium of the Dewan Khaas’. Captain Hodson ordered three princes, Mirza Moghul, Mirza Khizr Sultan and Mirza Abu Bakr, huddled in a bullock cart, to take off their clothes and then personally shot them dead. Twenty-one princes were hanged. Bahadur Shah opted for total silence; British sightseers would come to peer at this old man dressed in white, sitting crosslegged on a charpoy in the courtyard, while two attendants fanned him with peacock feathers, impotent emblems of sovereignty. When an English soldier came to look at this pathetic left-over, Bahadur Shah would bow and salaam and say, ‘Ban khushee...' (‘I am so happy ...')

The Sikh soldiers with the Company found some justification for plunder in their famous popular prophecy that the Khalsa would reach Delhi one day. Among those they murdered were an uncle and a cousin of a man called Sayyid Ahrnad Khan. Christian priests justified the butchery of Delhiites as proper retribution for the death of Mr Jennings, the chaplain. On 21 September, C. J. Griffiths found the streets ‘deserted and silent, they resembled a city of the dead’. The poet Ghalib wrote: ‘Here there is a vast ocean of blood before me; God alone knows what more I have still to behold.’ Even as late as 31 October, Sir William Muir (lieutenant-governor, North-Western Province) received a report saying: ‘Delhi is still standing in all its magnificence. . . but the houses are desolate and plundered. The wretched inhabitants have been driven out to starve.

One family to suffer this fate was the Nehrus. After 150 years of fluctuating fortunes, they were on the road, with nothing salvaged but their lives - and that too barely. It was, strangely, Ganga Dhar’s belief in the English language which saved the family. He and his wife Jeorani, two sons, Bansi Dhar and Nand Lal, and two daughters, Patrani and Maharani, were among the countless refugees trudging towards Agra when suddenly they were stopped by British soldiers. Kashmiris are very fair, and the soldiers thought that one of the daughters was a kidnapped English girl. The consequences are not too difficult to imagine. But thanks to the fact that Ganga Dhar had taught his sons English they were able to communicate with the soldiers and convince them that they were mistaken. One of the more important things the British had done was to sanction a grant in 1823 to Delhi College (founded in 1792 near Ajmeri Gate to provide a conventional Islamic education) to begin classes in the English language. There were two Kashmiri Pandits, Mohan Lal and Ram Kishan Haksar, in that inaugural class of six. In 1843 Ganga Dhar Nehru joined the English classes himself, and from the very beginning of their education he put English on the curriculum of his two sons, Bansi Dhar and Nand Lal. This single act was to save the Nehrus, both physically and financially. Those who had learned Persian to serve the Mughals understood better than others that they would have to know English to serve the new master on the horizon.

Survival was a great struggle in Agra; and to compound the misery Ganga Dhar died at the very young age of thirty-four in 1861. Jeorani was shattered; worse, she was six months pregnant when her husband died. On 6 May 1861 was born the first Nehru to become a national hero of India. Motilal. Bansi Dhar got a job as a ‘judgement-writer’ in the Sadr-Diwani-Adalat at Agra. lie would to rise to subordinate judge in the judicial service.

If English saved Bansi Dhar, then an Englishman rescued Nand Lal. Principal Anderson of Agra College used his influence to put Nand Lal on the payroll of Raja Fateh Singh, prince of a small state, Khetri, in Rajasthan. Nand Lal began as a teacher, then became private secretary and ended up as diwan, or prime minister, of the state. The family enjoyed a life of comparative ease which the position in Khetri brought. The growing and vivacious Motilal had the good fortune of learning from Qazi Sadruddin, the tutor of Raja Patch Singh, and became proficient in Arabic and Persian even before he entered his teens, when he went to Kanpur, where his brother Bansi Dhar was posted, to join the local high school Motilal’s English was a little awry, but he had no shortage of confidence. The twelve-year-old wrote to H. Powell Esq., the headmaster:

I respectfully beg to inform your honour that I am quite prepare for the examination of both classes i.e. 4th and 5th. Perhaps you know that when I informed to the Principal for my promotion in the 4th class, he refused and said, ‘the other boys have also right as you have?’ Therefore now, I wish to he promoted in the 4th class by my own power.

Motilal did not do very well after matriculation in Muir College at Allahabad; but then academic achievement is not a family trait. The teachers at Muir included scholars like Augustus Harrison, W. H. Wright, Pandit Adityaram Bhattacharya and Maulvi Zakaullab. Nand Lal served in Khetri till 1870, when his patron Raja Fateh Singh died. The heir dropped his father’s advisers., inevitably, and Nand Lal returned to Agra, qualified as a lawyer and started practice at the Sadr-Diwani-Adalat. When the High Court moved from Agra to Allahabad in 1866, he followed. From the ruins of Delhi to hunger in Agra to power in a tiny desert principality of Rajasthan to the bourgeois comfort of a lawyer’s life in Allahabad was the journey of one lifetime. But from here the Nehrus were to radiate across the subcontinent and then across the world, taking the name of Allahabad our of India’s religious texts and into world history. The British made Allahabad the capital of the North-Western Provinces (as the United Provinces were called till 1901) in 1858, and the city acquired a university and the High Court, and automatically witnessed a revival.

Motilal was married in his teens, as was the norm. He had a son soon after, but both mother and son died in childbirth. He continued his education, but gave up the examination for a degree after sitting for the first paper, in the mistaken belief that lie had done badly. Jawaharlal writes about his father’s young days: ‘He was looked upon as one of the leaders of the rowdy element in the college He was attracted to Western dress and other Western ways at a time when it was uncommon for Indians to take to them except in big cities like Calcutta and Bombay.’ Motilal now shifted to law and found a natural talent for it; he was first in the vakils’ examination. In 1883 he started practice at Kanpur under a senior who was a family friend, Pandit Prithinath Chak. In 1886 he moved to Allahabad to join his elder brother; and the very first case he argued won him praise. Emotionally, Nand Lal embraced his younger brother in the court room itself. By then Motilal had been married again, to the beautiful Swamp Rani from Lahore, with her ‘Dresden china perfection’ (to quote the son’s description). Their first child, a son, did not survive — the second child Motilal had lost. A sharper tragedy followed, in April 1887, at the still young age of forty-two, Nand Lal died, leaving behind his wife Nandrani, two daughters and five sons. Bansi Dhar’s job forced him to live elsewhere, and quite suddenly 25-scar-old Motilal was catapulted to the very crucial position in Indian society of head of the family. Within two years, the joy he had so often sought from fortune entered his life. At eleven—thirty at night on 14 November 1889 (the seventh day of Marghshirsh Badi 1946 by the Hindu Samvat calendar), Swarup Rani gave birth to a boy. And this child, Motilal’s third son, by his second wife, survived.

Motilal called him Jawaharlal, a name which his son never quite liked.

Culture and Conflict in the Nineteenth Century 

Perhaps the finest achievement of the Mughal Empire was the culture that it moulded. Dr Henny Sender has explained this very well in his essay on the Kashmiri Pandits (collected in R. E. Frykenberg, ed., Delhi through the Ages, 1986):

The Mughals considered themselves Islamic rulers ... But their ruling ethos was non-communal and led to the emergence of a cross-communal service class. This was a development actively encouraged. Akbar’s successors continued his tradition of drawing upon differentiated symbols of legitimacy to serve as Hindu Maharajah and Padishah-i-Islam simultaneously. Cleavages rested on class rather than religious lines; prevailing standards were aristocratic rather than communal. Among those who participated in the court culture, communalism was regarded as bad manners.

As the historian B. N. Pande put it in an essay: ‘Destiny had ordained that the Mughals would play this unifying role. So strong was this tradition among the Mughals that even Aurangzeb could play the bigot only half-heartedly, and with considerable restraint.’

The great philosopher-king of Indian unity was Akbar, son of a Sunni father and a Shia mother, born in the house of a Hindu prince and brought up in the midst of Sufis. The intellectual reasoning and moral sentiments released by his concept of din-e-Elahi (‘the religion of God’) found their true apostle in the man who failed to be king, Akbar’s great-grandson, Dara Shikoh, who was a Sufi, spent long years in Kashmir translating the Vedas and Upanishads into Persian and preached that the only difference between the Hindu doctrine of Advaita and the Muslim-Sufi traditions was one of terminology. But 43-year-Old Dara Shikoh lost the wars of succession to 39-year-old Aurangzeb, and history took a different turn. Yet it says some thing about the political policies of the Mughals that the grandmother and great-grandmother of the man who has come to symbolize Muslim bigotry, Aurangzeb, were Hindu Rajput princesses from Jaipur.

The traditions of harmony survived the inconstancy of a ruler or two, and, like the flame which was a favourite image of the poets of the time, Mughal Delhi was at its finest just before the Mughal was finally obliterated and Delhi became a provincial town of British India. This is the era known as the Residency period.

On 29 April 1639, at the precise moment decreed by the royal astrologers, the subahdar of Delhi ordered Shah Jahan’s master architects, Ustad Ahmad and Ustad Hamid, to begin the excavation for the city of Shahjahanabad, which was to be the new capital of the Mughal Empire. On 19 April 1648, again after consulting the astrologers about the most auspicious moment, Shah Jahan entered the Daulat-Khanah-i-Khaas (Hall of Special Audience), sat on a special throne enclosed by a golden railing and inaugurated the capital with great gifts and festivities.

The astrologers had got it right. The city flourished. By the 1820s Thomas Fortescue could record the existence of 52 bazaars inside the walls and 36 mandis outside. A profusion of religious and cultural festivals were more often celebrated by both Hindus and Muslims:for instance, the fair at Hanuman Mandir at Jaisinghpura every Tuesday, or the fair at Kalkaji, next to the temple built by Akhar’s minister, Kedarnath. Everyone went to see Ram Lila held at Shahji’s Tank outside Ajmeri Gate and participated in the happy, riotous Holi and the sparkle of Diwali The Id of Muslims was a traditional day for a display of inter-religious warmth, while in the pageantry of the Moharrum procession Hindus mingled with Muslims. Muslim saints were commonly revered, and the Urs at the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya was attended in vast numbers (as indeed it is to this date). The royal princes were always the chief guests at the celebrations of Basant Panchami, while the Chharrion ka mela was held each year on the estate of the Shia nawabs of Awadh, at Safdarjung’s madrasah (college). Gulfaroshan, the festival of flower-sellers held each year in autumn on the estate of the Raja of Ballabgarh, was linked to both a Hindu temple and a Muslim dargah. By the 1820s more than 100,000 people were attending the festival. This was the period when the poetry of Ghalib, Zaug and Momin took the language of Urdu to unprecedented heights, and the miniatures of artists like Faiz Ali Khan, Jivan Ram, Mazhar Ali Khan, Ghulam Ali Khan and Ghulam Murtaza Khan were in enormous demand. A portrait fo Sir David Ochterlony by Jivan Ram hangs today in the Victoria Memorial, Calcutta. One of the most colourful personalities of Company Raj, Sir David, a Scot, was twice Resident of Delhi, and liked wearing Indian dress, smoking a hookah, watching nautch-girls and taking the air every evening on his elephant accompanied by a large retinue of Indian wives, servants and their families.

It was this ‘composite’ Mughal culture (as the serviceable but rather ungainly phrase goes) which was the inheritance of families like the Nehrus, shaping their habits and their outlook: at one level, creating the preference for the churidar and sherwani over the dhoti, and at another making secularism a part of their natural instincts. To be communal was bad manners, and what could be a greater sin than that? And yet in that environment also lay the seed of a revivalist movement which was to have such enormous consequences that it would lead eventually to the division of the subcontinent — and, implicitly, to the greatest defeat of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, a failure from which neither they nor the subcontinent quite recovered.

All the flowers of the Gulfaroshan, or the durbars for important guests, with processions, elephants, trumpeters, horsemen, foot soldiers and drummers could not hide the fact that the Emperor wore borrowed robes. The insolent young Company officers laughed openly at the cheap and gaudy finery that had now replaced the brocaded velvet from Turkey and the silk from China that in Shah Jahan’s age roofed the Hall of Ordinary Audience (Daulat-Khanah-i-Khas-o-Am), more than seventy feet above the ground, raised on four silver pillars. Now, as Bishop Reginald Heber wrote with some sadness, the Diwan-i-Am was ‘full of lumber of all descriptions, broken palanquins and empty boxes and the throne so covered with pigeons’ dung that its ornaments ware hardly discernible’. The Bishop recalled lines from Saadi:

The spider hath woven his web in the royal palace of the Caesars, The owl standeth sentinel in the watchtowers of Afrasiab.

In 1817 Akbar Shah II sat on the Mughal throne, a pitiful bearer of a great name. The old empire was dead, and the new one, adolescent and cheeky, was growing. Akbar Shah was a puppet confined to the Red Fort, commanded by captains of the Company army and surrounded by high-born relatives who would often gather on the rooftops of the fort and scream at the citizens passing below, ‘Ham bhookey marte hain!’ (‘We are dying of hunger!’) Those in this penniless nobility who had some sense gave unto the Emperor that which was his due — loyalty — and unto the British that which they wanted — paid service.

Khwaja Farid was one such person. He worked for the British in Calcutta, Burma and Iran before taking on the impossible job of managing Akbar Shah’s finances, a task which needed both dexterity and imagination. His daughter, Aziz al-Nisa, married a Sufi mystic, Mir Muttaqi, who became a recluse, and their son, Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817—98), was brought up by the grandfather in the family haveli. The methods were traditional. The boy was banned from playing with children on the street to prevent any corruption of the chaste language he learned at home, and education was Urdu, Persian and mathematics after dinner. In addition, he acquired Arabic from an uncle and oriental medicine from a friend. Sayyid Ahmed did not try to learn English, although Delhi College was offering lessons by now; he shared the common Muslim prejudice against the West. His entertainment was true to his class; there were regular, if unpublished, visits to the kothas of Delhi for a spot of poetry, music and prostitution. But family circumstance soon ended the pleasures of youth. His brother, father and grandfather died in quick succession. To earn a livelihood, Sayyid Ahrned Khan joined the British judicial service as a reader (like Ganga Dhar Nehru) and later became a munsif or junior judge.

The man changed dramatically. Suddenly the plight of the Muslim elite began to dominate his thoughts; his own experience mirrored the downfall of the race. He took his first refuge in history, recreating the romance of the Mughal Empire in books which are also superb examples of Urdu prose. Asar al-Sanadid, a survey of Delhi’s monuments, came out in 1842; his translation of Abul FazI’s Ain-i-Akbari in 1855. Along with this arose questions in his mind about the future of the community, and the quest for an answer. Inverting the logic, he came to a conclusion. Only the British had shown the ability to destroy Muslim power; therefore, if the Muslims wanted to recover their place in the sun, they had to learn the ways of the English. Upon receiving a copy of Sayyid Ahmed’s translation the poet Ghalib had taunted him, ‘Put away the Ain-i-Akbari and examine the Englishman.’ Sayyid Abmed took the advice with a dedication its giver had never intended. He became a fanatic devotee of the British.

At the time of the Indian Mutiny, Sayyid Ahmed was posted in Bijnor, given to the British by the rulers of Awadh in 1801. On 20 May 1857 Nawab Mahmud Khan, his sympathies with the Mutiny, seized control. Massacre was the most likely fate of the small British community there, headed by the collector, a man named Shakespeare. The Nawab immediately offered a place in his new administration to Sayyid Ahmed, but he not only saved the lives of all the Britishers but also turned the offer down with the words, ‘By Cod, Nawab Sahib, I say that British sovereignty cannot be eliminated from India.’ It was either treason or foresight or both. Anyway, Sayyid Ahmed’s point was proved, and his faith in the supremacy of the English doubly reinforced. He did not hide this admiration; some of his unctuousness is embarrassing even at this distance. It was not as if he did not suffer during the Mutiny When he returned to Delhi in September that year he found his house looted and his mother dying; she had been surviving on grain meant for horses and had not tasted a drop of water for three days. An old servant of the family died in front of him, and his mother survived only another month. But no matter. The British had found their ‘foremost loyal Mohamedan’.

He now launched his movement to restore Muslim fortunes with British patronage. In 1860 appeared The Loyal Mahomedans of India. Sayyid Ahmed was even willing to use God in this crusade; he published a commentary stressing the similarities between Christianity and Islam. He did not mince words. He wrote: 'Without flattering the English, I can truly say that the natives of India, high and low, merchants and petty shopkeepers, educated and illiterate, when contrasted with the English in education, manners and uprightness, are as like them as a dirty animal is to an able and handsome man.' And so the Muslim salvation, he believed, lay in an English education. From this conviction came his greatest achievement, the foundation of the Mahomedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh in 1875 (the same year incidentally when Swami Dayanand began the Arya Samaj in Bombay). The foundation-stone of. the college was laid by the Viceroy himself.

This disciple of the British became hero to the elite of a community which had lost its pride and confidence after a century of stagnation; whose leaders had degenerated from emperors to caricatures; whose poetry had collapsed from philosophy to self-deprecation or lament; whose vision was so debilitated that when asked to surrender self-respect in return for bread it happily did so. For a pat on the back and a knighthood, Sayyid Ahmed Khan happily denounced the bravery of those numerous Muslims who fought the British in the wars of 1857. lnevitably he could not resist becoming a bit of a caricature himself, wearing English clothes after his knighthood in 1888 and acquiring a knife and fork for his table. (But he still did his writing sitting on the floor.)

Sir Sayyid’s most important influence on the future lay in the fact that he gave respectability to the idea of Muslim—British co-operation and interdependence — an idea which was anathema before 1857. It was a policy which his descendants would carry to far greater and more insidious lengths. A necessary element of this equation was that it had to operate, to a lesser or greater degree, at the expense of the Hindus. It was a policy which limited itself to sectional advantage. At one point Sir Sayyid even opposed the induction of Indians into the Civil Service because it would only bring ‘Bengali babus’ to the top and not Muslims. It was not as if Sir Sayyid was vigorously anti-Hindu; he was simply indifferent to their interests. His vision was controlled and conditioned by the religious divide, the only relieving feature being that he was utterly sincere and dedicated to the Muslim cause. Consciously or unconsciously, he created the groundwork for community-based politics, with all its attendant consequences. It is no surprise that his college at Aligarh became the intellectual cauldron for the ideas which later created Pakistan. He himself articulated the arguments which became constants in discussions about Muslims till 1947.

It is important to remember that Sir Sayyid was concerned only about the Muslim elite; and so he was largely their hero. He was firmly anti-democratic. Why? First: ‘Men of good family would never like to trust their lives and prosperity to people of low rank, with whose humble origins they are well acquainted.’ Second, under universal franchise the Muslim would be outvoted — for the Hindus, of course, would vote only for Hindus, and the Muslims only for Muslims. Since the population of Hindus was four times as much as the population of Muslims, the latter would be destroyed. ‘It would be like a game of dice, in which one man had four dice and the other one.’ It was such thinking which, with the ready help of the British, directly led to the demand for separate electorates and eventually to a separate country The British needed Sir Sayyid, and he frequently had to visit the capital of his province, Allahabad. He bought a house there, from the government, for Rs 20,000. Sir William Moore, who attended the house-warming party, hoped in his speech that this large, palatial house in the Civil Lines of Allahabad, in the neighbourhood of the bungalows and administrative offices of governors and civil servants, would become the cement holding together the British Empire in India. Strangely, quite a different fate awaited this home. Sir Sayyid’s son found the bungalow to be a bit of a white elephant and sold it off to Raja Ram Kumar Parmanand of Moradabad. In 1900 a brilliant new luminary from the legal world was looking for a residence to match his rising status and wealth. Price was no object. His eye fell on this sprawling bungalow, now run down, with even a raja unable to maintain it. Although not a very religious man, the lawyer did find some comfort in the fact that the address, Church Road, was situated near the Bhardwaj Ashram, next to the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna, a spot associated with episodes in the epic Ramayana. He bought the house for Rs 19,000 and named it — upon the advice of his friend, the poet Akbar Allahabadi — Anand Bhavan, the House of Joy.

The name of the lawyer was Motilal Nehru. And the house which was once conceived as a cementing institution of the British Empire became, as much as any house could claim such distinction, a cradle of the Indian revolution which removed the British from the sub-continent.

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MJ Akbar completes ** One Year+ ** Blogging on the Web! 
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Started on: September 28, 2004 | Updated: September 13, 2006