What Aligarh gave the Republic, and what it still owes
The flag goes up at Jashn Mahal a little after half past nine, and by ten most of us would be holding tea and talking about something else entirely. That's fine. That's what these mornings are for. But this year I want to hold the thought a little longer, because 15 August 2026 is our 80th Independence Day, and 79 completed years is a strange age for a country to be. Old enough that nobody living remembers it any other way and young enough that the arguments of 1947 haven't finished.
Aligarh is older than the Republic by seventy years, which is the part people forget.
In 1875 Sir Syed Ahmad Khan opened a school at Aligarh. By 1877 it was the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. What he was doing looks obvious now but may not have been so obvious then, and it was certainly not popular. 1857 had gone badly for his community, and the instinct afterwards was to pull inward, to hold the modern world at arm's length and wait for it to lose interest. Sir Syed argued the exact opposite. Learn the sciences. Learn English. Sit the same examination as everyone else and compete on it.
He was called a heretic. Fatwas were issued against him, but he kept going. That, more than anything else Aligarh has produced, is what I keep returning to. The courage wasn't in raising money for a college. It was in telling your own people something they did not want to hear, and staying in the room afterwards. In 1920, the college became a university by legislation. Sir Syed had been dead for twenty-two years and never saw it.
There is a list, long enough. A President of India, Zakir Husain, a Vice President, Hamid Ansari, Ministers, Judges, Generals, Poets, some actors everyone's heard of - it could fill a page. You'd be politely impressed, and you'd have forgotten it by evening.
I'll skip it, because lists of alumni prove that talented people passed through a place. They don't prove the place did anything.
The harder claim, which I think holds better, is that A.M.U.'s real contribution to India is the several lakh graduates nobody has heard of. The ones who were the first in their family to finish anything. A boy from a small town in eastern UP whose father ran a shop and who came back a doctor. The schoolmasters, the engineers, the clerks, the officers. That machinery ran for a century and a half, quietly, in a country where most of the population had no access to any of it, and it ran for Hindus and Muslims and everyone else who got admission here.
There's a second contribution people miss. Aligarh made teachers, and those teachers went out and built other institutions. Departments elsewhere carry Aligarh's fingerprints. Its medical college has been the tertiary hospital for a large part of western UP for decades, treating people who could never have paid a private rate. Its engineering college is among the older ones in the country.
And a third, which is uncomfortable and which I'd rather claim than duck. In the years before Partition, A.M.U. was on every side of the argument. Some went with the Congress, some with the League, some with neither. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai came out of that world and then served free India as a Union minister. A campus that produces people on opposite sides isn't a campus with a single position but a campus where people argued. I'll defend that any day rather than pretend there was unanimity.
NIRF 2025 placed AMU tenth among Indian universities and nineteenth overall. In 2024 it was eighth and sixteenth. That's a slip. Small, but in the wrong direction, and I'd rather say it myself than have it said to me. NAAC grades the university A+. It's an Institution of National Importance under the Seventh Schedule. Those are respectable numbers for a public university carrying a very large campus and a very large obligation. They are not the numbers of an institution that has finished its work.
The off-campus centres at Malappuram, Murshidabad and Kishanganj are the most interesting thing AMU has done in decades, and hardly anyone talks about them. The idea is simple: take the university to districts that have nothing, instead of asking those districts to send their children hundreds of kilometres to Aligarh. That model should be expanded, and the alumni network should be paying for it.
The language and manuscript scholarship is a national asset that the country undervalues. Urdu, Persian, Arabic, and a library holding material most universities would build an entire department around. India needs people who can read those languages for its diplomacy, its archives, and its own history. There are very few places left that can train them properly.
The alumni themselves are the largest unorganised resource A.M.U. has. Aligs run businesses in the Gulf, hold chairs in Britain and North America, sit in Indian boardrooms. Almost none of that is converted into endowment, research funding, or placement pipelines. Other universities around the world figured this out years ago.
And the demographic that most needs a university that already knows how to teach first-generation learners is growing, not shrinking. A.M.U. has a century and a half of practice at exactly that problem.
But faculty vacancies sit unfilled for too long, and the appointment process is slower than any serious university can afford. Research output measured against IISc, JNU or BHU doesn't flatter us. Campus politics periodically becomes campus shutdown, and teaching weeks are lost that nobody gets back. Placements are weaker than the brand suggests, which is a polite way of saying the brand is doing work the outcomes aren't.
Then there's the alumni problem, which is mine as much as anyone's. We spend more energy on remembering Aligarh than on funding it. Reunions, poetry, the old songs. I enjoy all of it. But it is not a strategy, and nostalgia has never paid a professor's salary.
The external hurdles are real too, and I won't pretend otherwise. The question of the university's minority character is still unresolved. In November 2024, a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court set aside the 1967 reasoning that had blocked the claim and laid down fresh tests, then sent the actual determination back to a regular bench. That decision is still awaited. Whatever it turns out to be, no institution can plan a future while a foundational question about its own character sits in litigation. Funding is uncertain, and the university keeps being handled as a political symbol by people who have never walked its hallowed campus.
The political weather isn't neutral, but grievance isn't a plan. A university that spends more time explaining its position than publishing its work will lose the argument even when it happens to be right.
An association like ours may not be able to do much, individually. But something, together, is very achievable. Career counselling for Gorakhpur students who will never see A.M.U. but need to know what CUET is and when to sit it. Scholarships, small ones, given early, where the money decides whether a child continues. Pushing our own sons and daughters towards the sciences and towards research rather than only towards a safe job. And being honest with the university when it needs honesty more than it needs applause.
Sir Syed's bet was that education would do more for his people than protest would. We are 79 years into the Republic, and I still argue he was right. The trouble with that bet is that it doesn't stay won. Every generation has to place it again.
The flag goes up at half past nine. Come and stand for it.
Jai Hind.
Comments