JAMAL UDDIN AFGHANI AND HIS SPIES IN GREAT GAME

Jamal ud Din al Afghani

SUEZ CANAL CONTROL OF A STRATEGIC ASSET AND REVOLT AGAINST OTTOMAN CALIPHATE VICEROY IN EGYPT

In Egypt, the Oxford movement centered on the creation of a “reform” movement of Islam, known as the Salafi, / Wahabists to serve the Illuminati in protecting their growing interest in the Suez Canal, which would later become crucial to the shipment of their oil cargo to Europe and elsewhere.

In 1854 and 1856, Ferdinand de Lesseps had obtained concessions from Said Pasha of Ottomons Caliphate, the viceroy of Egypt,

who authorized the creation of a company for the purpose of constructing a maritime Suez canal open to ships of all nations. The canal had a dramatic impact on world trade, playing an important role in increasing European penetration and colonization of Africa.

British needed the Suez Canal as it was a vital Strategic Interest of British Raj as it was shortest route for Navy Ships and British Raj to Control the Indian Sub-Continent and also Afghanistan the  Prize and Center of Earth on Map , that would enable total World Domination and control of Silk route and also the Asian and Middle Eastern Continent .

It linked the Europe with the Asia and Middle east via the Suez canals and only in 15 Days the Ships and Military Might of Britain could come and control the Indian Subcontinent up to Afghanistan the jewel in the crown of British Empire .

In 1875, the mounting debts of Ottomon Calphate Said Pasha Viceroy of Ottomans and his Successor Ismail Pasha, forced him to sell Egypt’s share in the canal to the British.

Thus, the British government, under Benjamin Disraeli, financed by his friend, Lionel Rothschild, squired nearly half the total shares in the Suez Canal Company, and though not a majority interest, it was for practical purposes a controlling interest.

SUEZ CANAL EGYPT

A commission of inquiry into the failing finances  in 1878, led by Evelyn Baring, First Earl  Lord Cromer, and others, had compelled the Ottomon viceroy into ceding his estates to the nation, to remain under British and French supervision, and accepting the position of a constitutional sovereign.

The Angered Egyptians united around Ahmed Arabi, revolt that ultimately provided a pretext for the British to move in an “protect” the Suez Canal, followed by a formal invasion and occupation that made Egypt a colony. Without the Suez Canal British East Indian company who has not assumed control of India and Afghanistan till 1857 was not possible .

 

JAMAL UDDIN AFGHANI AND HIS BAND OF BRITISH SPIES STARTED FAKE ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS  

 

The agent provocateur revolt against Ismail Pasha Viceroy of Ottomon Caliphate of Turkey  was organized by movement of Jamal ud Din al Afghani, the founder of the so-called Salafi “ Wahabi reform” movement in Islam. Jamal uddin Aghani was the person through which the British mission acted to, not only subvert Egyptian rule, but to spread its occult influence throughout the Middle East and Indian Sub continent extending to Afghanistan and Iran.

 

Edward G. Brown
dressed as Persian

Throughout his forty-year career as a British intelligence agent, Jamal ud al Afghani was guided by two British Islamic and cult specialists, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Edward G. Browne.^[4]

 

Edward Scawen-Blunt

 

Edward Scawen-Blunt in Pilgrimage to NajdE. G. Browne was Britain’s’ leading Orientalist of the nineteenth century, and numbered among his protégés at Cambridge University’s Orientalist department.

Harry “Abdullah” St. John B. Philby, a British intelligence specialist behind the Wahhabi movement.

Wilfred S. Blunt, another member of the British Orientalist school, was given the responsibility by the Scottish Rite Masons to organize the Persian and the Middle East lodges. Al Afghani was their primary agent.^[5]

 

St John Philby British MI6 British Spy in Saudia Arabia as Abdullah.

DISLODGING OF KING OF PERSIA/ IRAN SHAH QAJAR  IN GREAT GAME AND BAHAI IRANIAN WAHABISTS 

Very little is known of Jamal ud Din al Afghani’s origins. Despite the appellation “Afghani”, which he adopted and by which he is known, there are some reports that he was a Jew.^[6] On the other hand, some scholars believe that he was not an Afghan but a Iranian Shiah. And, despite posing as a reformer of orthodox Islam, al Afghani also acted as proselytizer of the Bahai faith, the first recorded project of the Oxford Movement, a creed that would become the heart of the Illuminati’s one-world-religion agenda.

In 1845, Jamal uddin Aghani  family had enrolled him in a madrassa (Islamic school) in the holy city of Najaf, in what is now Iraq.

There, Jamal Uddin Afghani was initiated into “the mysteries” by followers of Sheikh Ahmad Ahsai. Sheikh Zeyn ud Din Ahmad Ahsai was the founder of the Shaikhi school.

Ahsai was succeeded after his death by Seyyed Mohammad Rashti, who introduced the idea of a “perfect Shiah, called Bab, meaning “gate”, who is to come.

In 1844, Mirza Mohammad Ali Shirazi  claimed to be this promised Bab, and founded Babism, among whose followers Afghani also may have had certain family connections.^[7] 

One of the Bab’s followers, Mirza Hoseyn Ali Nuri, announced that he was the manifestation the “One greater than Himself”, predicted by the Bab, assuming the title of Baha Ullah, meaning in Arabic “Glory of God”.

Baha Ullah was descended from the rulers of Mazandaran, a province in northern Iran, bordering the Caspian Sea in the north. These were an Ismaili dynasty, who had intermarried with descendants of Bostanai, Exilarch of the seventh century AD.^[8] Referring to himself, Baha Ullah stated, “The Most Great Law is come, and the Ancient Beauty ruleth upon the throne of David. Thus hath My Pen spoken that which the histories of bygone ages have related.”

Baha Ullah founded the Bahai faith, which drew on a mix of Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, but claimed to supercede all other religions in a “one world faith”.

The principal Bahai tenets are the essential unity of all religions and the unity of humanity. Bahais believe that all the founders of the world’s great religions have been manifestations of God and agents of a progressive divine plan for the education of the human race. Therefore, according to the Bahais, despite their differences, the world’s great religions teach an identical truth.

 

Baha Ullah founder Bahabi Faith

 

However, the Bahais quickly found themselves disliked in  Iran  for their extremism. In 1852, a Bahai leader was arrested for the attempted assassination of the Shah of Persia, Shah Qajar of Iran  after which the movement was suppressed by then Shah Qajar of Iran , and many members were exiled to Arabia Baghdad and Istanbul in Turkey.

Throughout this time, as reports Robert Dreyfuss, the Bahai leaders maintained close ties to both Scottish Rite Freemasonry and various movements that began to proliferate throughout Indian Subcontinent ( Included Afghanistan At that time ) , the Ottoman Empire ( Turkey to Arabia Including all the Gulf States ) , Iran , Russia and even Africa.^[9]

Jamal Udding Al Afghani is thought to be from Asadabad, a town in Persia, near Hamadan, an area of Ismaili settlement.Like the Ismailis before him, Afghani believed in the need of religion for the masses, while reserving the subtler truth of atheism for the elite.

In addition, Afghani had acquired considerable knowledge of Islamic philosophy, particularly of the Persians, including Avicenna, Nasir ud Din Tusi, and others, and of Sufism.

Evidence also proves that he possessed such works, but also that he showed interest in occult subjects, such as mystical alphabets, numerical combinations, alchemy and other Kabbalistic subjects. Also demonstrating Afghani’s interest in mysticism, of a Neoplatonic type, is a twelve-page treatise on Gnosticism copied in his handwriting.

SIR AGHA KHAN -1  AND PARTITION OF INDIA AND AFGHANISTAN BASED ON WAHABIST PRINCIPALS OF  BIDAT / PURITY / PAKISM AS DURRAND AND RADCLIFFE LINES BY INDIA WAHABIST MOVEMENT

There is much controversy as to Afghani’s activities during the period of 1858-1865. However, according to one biographer, Salim al Anhuri, a Syrian writer who later knew him in Egypt, Afghani’s first travels outside of Iran were to India. It was there, he maintains, that Afghani acquired his heretical bent.

His studies in religion, relates Anhuri, led into atheism and pantheism. Essentially, Afghani believed in a philosophy akin to Lurianic Kabbalah, of a natural evolution of the universe, of which the intellectual progress of man was a part.

AGHA KHAN -1

 

In 1866,  Jamal uddin Afghani appeared in Kandahar, Afghanistan, less than two decades after the unsuccessful attempts of the British, in league with  Sir Aga Khan -1.

Sir Agha khan-1  was one of British Agents who was Trying to topple the Government of Shah Qajar Dynasty in Iran who was a Problem for the British in Great Game .

Sir Agha khan-1  had run away from Iran to Afghanistan in Kandahar and was Made Governor a few Months after 1878 2nd Anglo Afgan War of 1878 ,

Another of his British Spies and a Fellow Agha Khanis under Sir Agha khan-1  with deep connections to Bahai and Babi Movement  ,  who was also responsible for His Efforts in Rebellion against Iran King Shah Qajar with his Partner and had to run away from Iran to Afghanistan and Baluchistan in Protection of British Raj who were Behind them, First in Macmohan House in Baluchistan and then in Sindh Jhirk town Near Karachi Pakistan Area  in a oldest British Cantonment .

Sir Agha khan-1  was installed by the British Agents and made Governor of Kandhar  by British Army after Second Anglo Afghan War 1878,  they Tried to occupy it by force and they were Pushed back by the Afghans Second Anglo Afghan War in 1878 and via Amir Sher Ali Durrani King of Afghanistan efforts .

Sir Agha Khan -1 was forced to flee Afghanistan and jump from Window to save his life , and he was at that  time Accompanied by the Famous British Kashmiri Spy Lal Din or Agha Hassan Jan Kashmiri 

Sir Agha Khan-1  ran to Baluchistan to British Commissioner at Ziarat Protection at Mac Mohen House ( Jinnah Residence Latter )  where he hid there and ultimately he was Re -Located to Jhirk town Sukkar Sindh , Near Thatta and where the oldest and First British Cantonment in Pakistan is situated .

He started his Agha Khani Movement Initiation from British Cantonment of Jhirk town Sindh and Sir Jinnah the Man who Partitioned india and his Father was his Disciple  in there as well in the British Cantonment . The villa of Sir Agha Khan-1  , also Situated in oldest British Cantonment on soil of Pakistan .

He converted a Local Hindu Rajput to Ismaili known as Mr Poonja  father  of Sir Jinnah Founder of Pakistan and Sir Agha khan-1 was also founder of Muslim League to Partition India ,

Poonja who was father of Sir Muhammad Ali Jinnah and he is currently Buried there in a Marked Grave and was very Loyal Follower of British Agent Sir Agha Khan-1 . Sir Jinnah also was Born and Educated in Jhirk town in British school and not in Karachi as Fake History has been Created to Hide the Real Facts by Punjabi Establishment running Pakistan and so was his Classs Fellow who was latter responsible to make First English School in Karachi .

According to And, according to a report, from a man who must have been with Jamal uddin Afghani with the local government, Jamal uddin Afghani was:

…well versed in geography and history, speaks Arabic and Turkish fluently, talks Persian like an Irani. Apparently, follows no particular religion. His style of living resembles more that of an European than of a Muslim.^[13]

At the end of 1866, Jamal Uddin Afghani became confidential counselor of Durrani King Muhmmad Azam khan , the ruler in Afghanistan Durrani King Amir Muhmmad Azam Khan . That a foreigner should have attained such a position so quickly was remarked upon in contemporary accounts.

Some scholars have speculated that Afghani, then calling himself “Istanbuli”, was, or represented himself to be, a Russian agent able to obtain for Azam Russian money and political support against the British, with whom Azam was on bad terms.

When Durrani King Muhmmad Azam khan , lost the throne to one of his rival, Durrani King Muhmmad Sher Ali khan , he was suspicious of Afghani, and Durrani King Muhmmad Sher Ali khan , had him expelled from his territory in November 1868.

Throughout his stay in Afghanistan, Jamal uddin Afghani had maintained ties to the Agha Khani and   Bahais, British Freemasons, and certain Sufis based in India, where he also met with Nizari Muslims.

According to British intelligence reports of the time, during his repeated travels to India, Afghani went by the name of Jamal ud Din Effendi.

It is then that would visit the Agha Khan -1, the leader of the Agha Khanis   ( Not Proper Ismailis. but Deviants some consider then to bahai then Ismailis of Egypt )  And, despite posing as a Sufi Sheikh of the Mawlavi order, or Mevlevi, who follow the very influential Iranian mystic and poet of the thirteenth century, Jalal ud Din ar Rumi, he was also proselytizing for the Bahai faith, purportedly having been sent on such a mission by Baha Ullah himself.

One of such report, dated 1891, is from an unnamed Indian Muslim, acting as a British agent, who pretended to become a Bahai in order to gather more information, and reads:

The following is the substance of a statement made by an apparently well informed person, as to the real objects of the presence in India of Saiyid Jamal-ud-din  Afghani , who is described by the informant as a Persian, but who calls himself a Turk of Constantinople:-

In the city of Akka (Acre) shore now lives one Husen Ali, a Turk, who calls himself Baha-ullah Effendi alias Jamal Mubarik [the Blessed Beauty].

This man declares all religions to be bad, and says that he himself is God. He converted a number of people and collected them at Baghdad. About four years ago they rebelled against the Shah, but they were suppressed and gradually withdrew from Persia to Turkey in Asia.

Baha-ullah is now under surveillance at Akka, which is called “Az Maksud” [Ar Maqud, a common term among Iranian Bahais for the Holy Land] by the converts.

Balla-ullah’s agents go about to all countries and endeavour to persuade people that he is visited by messengers of God, and that his converts will become rulers of the earth.

Baha-ullah’s son, Muhammad Ali, came to Bombay on this mission, and then returned to Akka. Agents are appointed everywhere,

Saiyid Jamal-ud-din Afghani is one of these agents. He came to Kailaspur and stayed 10 days with me. He told me all about Baha-ullah and his own mission, and proposed to appoint me as his agent, and asked me to go with him to Bombay to see Muhammad Hassan Ali or Agha Khan -1, .

I agreed to become a disciple of Baha-ullah in order to discover why Saiyid Jamal-ud-din had come to India. I agreed to become his agent for the same reason, and he now often writes to me. I have not got his letters with me, but can produce them if wanted.

He is now in Farukhabad, and I believe that he has obtained a number of converts in India. He has plenty of money and spends it freely, and goes first class by railway. There is in Bombay a man named Agha Saiyid Mirza [Afnan], a merchant of Shiraz, who supplies him plentifully with money.[14]

…On the 21st September 1891, the same informant wrote direct to the General Supdt., T. and D. Department [General Superintendent, Thagi and Dakaiti Department, responsible for monitoring criminals and trouble-makers], as follows:­

“The man Saiyid Jamal-ud-din Shah Afghani is no ‘Rumi,’ he is a man from Astrabad Mazinderan in Persia, and his name is Mirza Muhammad Ali. He is no Muhammadan [Muslim] but a “Babi,” and his head-quarters are at Akka in Palestine./ Israel [15]

Jamal ud Din Afghani then appeared in Istanbul in 1870, brought there by Ali Pasha, himself a Freemason, and Grand Vizier five times during the reign of Sultan Abdul Majid and Sultan Abdul Aziz.

Saiyid Jamal-ud-din Shah Afghanii was severely disliked by the clergy for his heretical views, however. Hasan Fahmi, a leading scholar of his time, and the Shaikh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire, pronounced a Fatwa declaring Afghani a disbeliever, and he was expelled.

In 1871, Afghani went to  Egypt Cairo, sponsored by Prime Minister Mustafa Riad Pasha, who had met him in Istanbul, and who then placed him on a generous salary, and had him appointed to the prestigious Muslim university of Al Azhar.

Initially, Afghani remained strictly orthodox, but in 1878, he moved into the Jewish quarter of Cairo, where he began open political organizing. Afghani then announced the formation of the Arab Masonic Society. And, despite their public profession of orthodox Islam, the members of Afghanis inner-circle evinced their adherence to the Gnosticism of the Ismailis.

Afghani would refer to his Masonic brethren as ikhwan al saffa wa khullan al wafa, in deliberate reference to the tenth century Ismaili brotherhood by the same name.^[16]

With the help of Riad Pasha and the British embassy, Afghani reorganized the Scottish Rite and Grand Orient lodges of Freemasonry, and began to organize around him a network of several Muslim countries, particularly Syria, Turkey, and Persia Iran .

MOHAMMAD ABDUH THE EGYPTIAN PALESTINIAN AND SYRIAN WAHABISTS

^[17] For the next few years he attracted a following of young writers and activists, among them Mohammed Abduh, who was to become the leader of what is often regarded as the “modernist” movement in Islam, otherwise known as the Salafi, and Sad Pasha Zaghlul, self-professed Freemason, and founder of Wafd, the Egyptian nationalist party.^[18]

 

Mohammed Abduh the Egyptian Wahabists

 

After Afghani’s departure from Egypt, his pupil, Mohammed Abduh,, was inexplicably named the chief editor of the official British-controlled publication of the Egyptian government, the Journal Officiel. Working under him was fellow-Freemason, Saad Zaghul, later to be founder of the Wafd nationalist party.

In 1883, Abduh joined Afghani in Paris, and then went to London, where he lectured at Oxford and Cambridge, and consulted with British officials about the crisis in Sudan against the Mahdi.

In Paris and London, Mohammed Abduh, assisted Afghani in administering both a French-language and Arabic journal in Paris, called Al Urwah al Wuthkah, or the “Indissoluble Bond”, also the name of a secret organization he founded in 1883.

Among the members of Afghani’s circle in Paris were Egyptians, Indians, Turks, Syrians, North Africans, as well as many Christians and Jews, and Persian Bahais expelled from the Middle East.

When the French suppressed the Al-Murwah al-Wuthkah,

Mohammed Abduh,, traveled for several years, throughout the Arab world, under various disguises, particularly to Tunis, Beirut, and Syria. In each city, he would recruit members into the secret society of Afghani’s fundamentalism.^[24]

Like his teacher, Mohammed Abduh,,was associated with the Bahai movement, which had made deliberate efforts to spread the faith to Egypt. Bahais began establishing themselves in Alexandria and Cairo beginning in the late 1860. Abduh had met Abdul Baha when he was teaching in Beirut, and the two struck up a very warm friendship, and agreed with his one-world-religion philosophy.^[25]

Remarking on Abdul Baha’s excellence in religious science and diplomacy, Mohammed Abduh said of him that, “[he] is more than that. Indeed, he is a great man; he is the man who deserves to have the epithet applied to him.”^[26]

Mohammed Abduh,, was known for his reformist views about Islam. But, in How We Defended Orabi, A.M. Broadbent declared that, “Sheikh Abdu was no dangerous fanatic or religious enthusiast, for he belonged to the broadest school of Moslem thought, held a political creed akin to pure republicanism, and was a zealous Master of a Masonic Lodge.”^[27]

Like the Ismailis before him, he would advance his students progressively into deeper levels of heresy. To the higher initiates, he would reveal the doctrines of the Scottish Rite and the philosophy of one-world government. However, for those Mohammed Abduh,,deemed were much more disposed, he would introduce to an officer of British intelligence from London.^[28]

From 1888, until his death in 1905, Mohammed Abduh,,regularly visited the home and office of Lord Cromer. In 1892, he was named to run the administrative Committee for the Al Azhar mosque and university, the most prestigious educational institution in Islam, and the oldest university in the world.

From that post, Mohammed Abduh,, reorganized the entire Muslim system in Egypt, and because of Al Azhar’s reputation, much of the Islamic world as well.

In 1899, Lord Cromer, made Abduh the Grand Mufti of Egypt. He was now the chief legal authority in Islam, as well as the Masonic Grand Master of the United Lodge of Egypt.

Lord Cromer was an important member of England’s Baring banking family, that had grown rich off of the opium trade in India and China.

His motive in making Mohammed Abduh,,the most powerful figure in all of Islam was to change the law forbidding interest banking. Abduh then offered a contrived interpretation of the Koran, to create the requisite loophole, giving British banks free reign in Egypt.

Of Abduh, Lord Cromer related, “I suspect my friend Abduh was in reality an agnostic,” and he said of Abduh’s Salafi reform movement that, “They are the natural allies of the European reformer.”^[29]

RASHID  RIDA AND SAUDIA ARABIA WAHABIST MOVEMENT 

Rashid Rida

 

 

The Egyptian Salafi wahabi , movement of Mohammed Abduh, then became allied with the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, through another Freemason, Mohammed Rashid Rida,

who, after the death of Afghani in 1897, and Mohammed Abduh, in 1905, assumed the leadership of the Salafis Rida Wahabist , had become a member of the Indissoluble Bond at a young age.

He was promoted through Afghani’s Masonic society through his reading of Al-Urwah al Wuthkah, ( Indissoluble Bond)  which he later confessed was the greatest influence in his life.

Mohammed Rashid Rida, had never met Afghani, but in 1897, he had gone to Egypt to study with Mohammed Abduh,. Though Rida did not share his master’s opinions about the Bahai movement, it was through his influence that the Salafi Wahabi movement became firmly aligned with the State of Saudi Arabia.

FOOTNOTES:

^[1] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 113. [pdf]
^[2]Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, quoted from Paul A. Fisher, Their God is the Devil, pp. 18-19.
^[3] Ruggiu, Jean-Pascal. “Rosicrucian Alchemy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn”.
^[4] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini. p. 118.
^[5]Ibid. p. 123 and 121.
^[6]Ibid. p. 118.
^[7] Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al Afghani”: A Political Biography, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, (1927) p. 87
^[8] David Hughes, Davidic Dynasty.
^[9] Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din “al Afghani”: A Political Biography p. 116.
^[10]Ibid. p. 87.
^[11]Ibid. p. 91.
^[12]Ibid.
^[13]Ibid. p. 45.
^[14 North West Province Special Branch, 29 August 189. quoted from Momen, Moojan, “Jamal Effendi and the early spread of the Bahai Faith in Asia”, Bahai Studies Review, Volume 8, 1998.
^[15] (C.S.B.) Report of D.E. McCracken, dated 14 August 1897, in file Foreign: Secret E, Sept. 1898, no. 100, pp. 13-14; national archives of the government of India, New Delhi.
^[16] Raafat, Samir. “Freemasonry in Egypt: Is it still around?” Insight Magazine, March 1, 1999.
^[17] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 122.
^[18]Ibid. p. 122.
^[19]1941: Iraq and the Illuminati.
^[20] Manly P. Hall (33rd degree mason), “The Phoenix, An Illustrated Review of Occultism and Philosophy”, 1960 The Philosophical Research Society, p. 122
^[21] p. 280
^[22]The Masters Revealed, p. 146.
^[23] Howe, Ellic, Theodor Reuss: Irregular Freemasonry in Germany, 1900-23, 16 February 1978; Grand Lodge of BC and Yukon, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, “Theodor Reuss: Irregular Freemasonry in Germany, 1900-23“.
^[24] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 136.
^[25] Ibid. p. 279.
^[26] Cole, Juan R. I. “Rashid Rida on the Bahai Faith: A Utilitarian Theory of the Spread of Religions”, Arab Studies Quarterly 5, 3 (Summer 1983): 278.
^[27] Raafat, Samir. “Freemasonry in Egypt: Is it still around?” Insight Magazine, March 1, 1999.
^[28] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 136.
^[29] Goodgame, Peter. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Globalists’ Secret Weapon.

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SIR SYED AHMAD KHAN IN GREAT GAME

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan House at 1 Church Road Allah Abad India known as Swraj Bhawan a Museum

SIR SYED AHMAD KHAN ROLE IN GREAT GAME 

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was a teacher in East Indian company and was a Freemason of Indian lodge and he was Part of Indian Lodge , and as well Teacher to Officers of East Indian Company and he used to teach them Oriental Languages like Farsi / Persian , Pashto , Hindi / Urdu/ Punjabi . 

He was one of the Interpreters in Durrand Line Agreement in 1893 and have Been Visiting the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Khyber Agency to Put the stone that Divided the Pashtons Nation into Afghan and Pakistan Pashtons , he was Loyal to British and he also was the one who Wrote a Pamphlet in Praise of British . 

He was also Instrumental in Creating a False Language called URDU which is nothing but Hindi , that has Persian written script instead  of Devanagari Hindi Script of Hindu , for Divide and Rule.

He created the Divide and rule for British Raj  between Muslims and Hindu on Basis of False Ethnicity based on Fake Urdu Language, the Indian Sub continent is now has Millions known as Muhajirs because of his Fake Identity .  who has Forgotten they are Hindustani or Afghan in Descent but consider themselves as Muhajirs / Emigrants settled in Port city of Karachi Pakistan.

He also printed a Pamphlet in Service of British Raj and he also Pointed a lot of Rebels who were active in 1857 and he was awarded the Title of Sir because of his services to British .

According to Anti Qadiani Movement leader  Mr . Atta Ullah Shah Bukhari has written in his Book that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was Selected as Khlifa of Qadiani Sect which he Declined in the Last Moment and then Mirza Ghulam Ahmad a Cleric from courts in Sialkot Punjab was Selected instead of him .

His son was made First Indian Judge as  and he and His Family was always Rewarded by the British for his Role in Durrand Line as Interpreter form British as trusted loyal  and also Later in Formulating the Partition of India Plan .                          

 

 

Nawab Mohsin Ul Mulk Sir Syed Ahmad Khan with his son Syed Mehmood Ahmad Judge of British Raj Court Right to Left

 

MYSTERY OF SWARAJ BHAWAN RESIDENCE OF SIR SYED GIFTED BY THE BRITISH RAJ 

by Author David Lelyveld: 

David Lelyveld, author of ‘Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India’, is Professor of History and Associate Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, William Paterson University, New Jersey .

This article is about Estate of sir Syed Ahmad Khan a Kashmiri Descendant Opportunist  working in Allah Abad India  and his Role in Durrand Line Partition of India and Suppressing the 1857 Freedom Fight or War of Independence and Subduing Muslim for his British Masters , who worked as Servant of East India company and had been a Loyal Servant to East India company and British Raj ,

Sir Syed got the Title of Sir for his services in Subduing the 1857 Rebellion , Independence movement against British and also crushing the Muslim resistance and for his services he was awarded an Estate measuring on 20 Acres Land, on 1 church Road Allah Abad , it was Property Confiscated from 1857 Freedom Fighters who Dared to Rebel against the British . 

British Viceroy in 1871 Gifted him this Estate just 10 Minutes drive from Governor House of  Sir William Muir Governor of Pakhtunkhwa .

Governor Pakhtunkhwa William Muir , who had promised him this House in 1867. This House was Named Syed Mehmood House Named after his son Syed Mehmood Ahmad a Barrister at that time. 

Indira Gandhi was Born to Nehru in the same house while it was later occupied by Moti Lal Nehru after it was bought by them from Syed Mehmood Son of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. 

SIR SYED ESTATE SYED MEHMOOD AHMAD MANZIL  “”SWARAJ BHAWAN”” IS NOW A MUSEUM : 

Last January, I visited Swaraj Bhawan, the original Anand Bhawan ( Sir Syed Ahmad House ) , in Allahabad, which Pandit Motilal Nehru gifted to the Indian National Congress in 1930 when he built his new house next door.

Both houses are now museums that display the Indian nationalist movement as well as the carefully crafted adaptation of British colonial lifestyle that characterised Nehru family life.

Swaraj Bhawan features a rather breathless sound-and-light tour from room to room, though you have to move quickly to keep up with it. If you fall behind, you’re left standing in the dark. The tour starts at the entrance to what I take to be the original bungalow of a complex of connected buildings. On the left, there is a horse-drawn carriage, minus the horses.

On the right, there is the following inscription: “Swaraj Bhawan originally belonged to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the 19th century Muslim leader and educationist.

At the house-warming party, Sir William Moor(Muir),  hoped that this large palatial home in Civil Lines of Allahabad would become the cement holding together the British Empire in India.

Paradoxically, the house was bought by Moti lal Nehru in 1900, and went on to become a cradle to the Indian Freedom Struggle which was to destroy British rule in India.” Now epigraphy, the interpretation of inscriptions, is one of the many gaps in my training as a historian.

For the past eight months, however, this particular inscription has occupied a good deal of my time and attention. My question is not only whether there is any truth to it as a description of events in time past, but more, what is it trying to say about the nature of India’s colonial experience and the place of a significant “Muslim leader” in relation to Indian nationalism?

The statement in the inscription was not entirely new to me. I had come across a very similar account some years ago in the biography of Jawaharlal Nehru by the journalist M.J. Akbar.[1] Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t take it seriously.

For one thing, academic that I am, I was put off by the failure to cite a source. The misspelling of the name of the British official, Sir William Muir, indicated that the author could not have based this on the sort of documentary research that historians rely on.

Now here was the same story, inscribed on the site itself, complete with misspelling, presumably put there when Swaraj Bhawan became a museum in the mid-1990s, a few years after M.J. Akbar’s book.

As it happens, I had visited Swaraj Bhawan about 25 years earlier. I was taken there by the late Professor S. Bashiruddin, the former librarian of Aligarh Muslim University, to meet a member of the Nehru family, who had converted much of it into an orphanage.But I don’t remember that anything had been said about a connection with Syed Ahmad Khan.

So, frankly, I was skeptical about the truth of the inscription. I knew from my earlier research on Syed Ahmad Khan[2] that he had never lived in Allahabad, and I was sure that I would have come across something if he had such an extensive property there,

since he was by no means a wealthy man and pretty much had to live on his salary political pension of Rs 200 a month for so-called ‘Mutiny service’.

ESTATE OF SIR SYED AHMAD KHAN DUE TO HIS LOYALTY TO BRITISH RAJ AND GOVERNOR PAKHTUNKHWA: 

To pursue my inquiry, I knocked on the door of S.P. Mall, the Deputy Director of Anand Bhawan ( Swraj Bhavan) , to see if he could tell me more about the source for the inscription, other than M.J. Akbar.

He very kindly showed me an essay by Bishambhar Nath Pande, a well-known historian and public figure, entitled ‘The House where India was Born: Swaraj Bhawan: an Irony of History’, which in turn was derived from Pande’s earlier book,[3]

The relevant passage in the Allahabad book states:

After inflicting vengeance on the participators of the rebellion of 1857 the British administrators realised that it had been very wrong on their part to have punished the entire Muslim population for the uprising.

They greatly realized their mistake and began to adopt a favorably policy towards that important minority in order to have an undisturbed rule in India. Their eyes rested for this purpose on Sir Syed Ahmad khan.

The Lieutenant-Governor of the NWFP / Pakhtunkhwa as well as the Governor-General of India often used to take Sir Syed in confidence and constantly approached him for advice on matters concerning the state.

In 1867 Sir Lieutenant-Governor of the NWFP / Pakhtunkhwa William Muir, wrote to Sir Syed: ‘As you Sir Syed are often needed at Allahabad for important consultations and as you feel inconvenience during your short [sic] visits to this city it is proposed that you may have your own Kothi constructed at Allahabad.

That would enable you to prolong your visits at the Provincial Capital. For this purpose I have got a site selected measuring 20 acres of land at a 10 minutes drive from the Government House a.’ at 1 church Road Known as Swraj Bhavan. 

There is a footnote here: ‘Sir W. Muir’s Confidential Dispatches, Imperial Records.’ Pande goes on to say that Syed Ahmad accepted the offer and by 1871 a house was built on the land, which Syed Ahmad named Mahmud Manzil after his son. Pande goes on:

The formal ceremony of the occupation of the Kothi proved a great success.  Sir William Muir, the chief guest on the occasion, replying to the toast said: “I have every hope that ‘Mahmud Manzil’ ( SWARAJ BHAWAN ) would prove a great cementing center for the consolidation of the British Empire in India.”

There is then another footnote: ‘The Pioneer, July 18, 1871’. Finally, Pande says that the house was later occupied by Syed Mahmud, when he became Justice of the Allahabad High Court,

and was then sold in 1892 to Rai Bahadur Permanand Pathak, who sold it to Pandit Moti lal Nehru for Rs 20,000 in 1898.

There is then a third footnote: ‘The Municipal Building Records’. Here, then, was a more substantial source, but I still had problems with it. For one thing, Pande had clearly confused NWFP, the North West Frontier Province, with the NWP, the North Western Provinces, actually it was NWFP/ Pakhtunkhwa services of Sir Syed Ahmad khan in Durrand line .

BIRTH PLACE OF NEHRU DYNASTY IN SWRAJ BHAWAN ESTATES OF SIR SYED AHMAD KHAN:

For another, William Muir did not become Lieutenant-Governor of the Norther West Provinces until 1868, not 1867.

With the exception of the reference to The Pioneer, the other references were distressingly imprecise. It would take more substantial primary documentation to make me believe that the British government had given this huge mansion in Allahabad to Syed Ahmad Khan.

Mall suggested that the place to look for such sources was the Nagar Mahapalika, the municipal office building in Allahabad.

When I went to the Nagar Mahapalika, I was fortunate enough to be directed to B.B. Banerjee, Additional Commissioner, a PhD in history, who cordially heard my story and offered to help get to the truth of the matter.

After I had returned across the Aluminum Curtain to the United States, he sent me an email attachment that he had scanned for my benefit — the relevant pages from B.N. Pande’s Allahabad book. I wrote him back my thanks but said that I would still hope to find something more like a primary source.

When I had the opportunity to return to Allahabad, I visited Commissioner Banerjee and he was able to locate a relevant document, after all, in the Municipal Records: the Register of Government Property (Nazul) in Charge of Nagar Mahapalika of Allahabad.

There, at serial no. [4] in the village of Hashimpur, otherwise known as 1 Church Road, settlement no. L 35 A.B. was apparently the relevant property, or at least a piece of it, 2 bighas and 9 bis. I was informed there are 20 biswa to a bigha, and 32 biswa to an acre, that is, considerably less that the amount of land mentioned in Pande’s book.

One other problem was that the entry was dated 24 October 1910 (G.O. No. 3518/XI-28E) and that the occupying tenant was listed as Jawaharlal Nehru.

There was no information about the earlier history of the property. Perhaps I would have more luck at the Collectorate, but I decided to put that off for later.

When I returned to Delhi in January, I called on B.R. Nanda, former Director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Library and the author of “The Nehrus”, which was one of my models for a possible history of the family of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.

BR. Nanda told me that his book on the Nehrus had been vetted by no less a person than Jawaharlal Nehru himself. The book states that the house was purchased from Kunwar Permanand, but Nanda said that he had never come across any connection with Syed Ahmad Khan.

Just as I was about to dismiss the story as a total fabrication, however, I came across a little commemorative essay in the Nehru Library by Indira Gandhi, who was born in the house, that says, “As far as we know, the house belonged originally to Mr Justice Syed Mahmud son of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan who sold it to Raja Permanand of Moradabad, Judge of Shahjahanpur, from whom it was bought by my grandfather, Pandit Motilal Nehru, in 1900.”[5]

Indra Gandhi Born at Swraj Bhawan House of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and his Son Mehmood Ahmad

Here, then, was an independent source for the connection with Syed Mahmud, the son of Syed Ahmad Khan. It gave me reason to believe that there was at least some connection and that it might be worth pursuing the matter further.

In June, on the way back to India, I had the opportunity to visit the British Library in London and managed to find a few more bits relevant to my inquiry.

For one thing, I discovered that Syed Mahmud was living at a different address, 7 Elgin Road, in 1879.[6]

Furthermore, I came upon an annual publication called Thacker’s Directory on the open shelves in the India Office reading room. For every year after 1882 and well into the twentieth century,

Thacker’s Directory provides names and addresses of people living in the Allahabad Civil Lines.

I discovered from this source that Syed Mahmud did indeed live at 1 Church Road in 1885 and 1886; then again in 1891, and 1893 and 1894.

It is listed as vacant the following year, then from 1896 to 1899 was occupied by Kunwar Permanand, Pleader of the High Court.

It was then vacant again in 1900, but occupied continuously after 1901 by Motilal Nehru, also a Pleader of the High Court.

Moti Lal Nehru Father of Jawar Lal Nehru and Grandfather of Indira Gandhi

So there definitely was some connection, via the son, between the Nehru home and Syed Ahmad Khan, though it still was a good distance from the claims of M.J. Akbar, B.N. Pande and the inscription at the entrance to Swaraj Bhawan.

When Syed Ahmad Khan himself came to Allahabad in 1886 to serve on the Public Service Commission, however, he stayed in a different house with another relative, though in the same area.[7]

There was still no evidence that the land and house had been given outright to Syed Ahmad Khan in the late 1860s or early 1870 , It was, finally, at the Nehru Library in New Delhi that I found documents that provide solid evidence about the history of the house at 1 Church Road that came to be known first as Anand Bhawan and, later, Swaraj Bhawan.

It turned out that there were two very fat and complete files in the private papers of Motilal Nehru.[8] It is a long, complex story,

but briefly here is the relevant information about the connection between the house and the family of Sir Syed:

In 1858, the Allahabad Collector issued a parwana that authorised , Shaikh Fayyaz Ali of Allahabad to receive an “estate” with an annual income of Rs 1,000 in compensation for losses sustained during the “Mutiny”.

The UP and National Archives have hundreds of such cases of land confiscated and awarded in the aftermath of the rebellion, and this is one of them.  Incidentally, Syed Ahmad Khan turned down such an estate and received instead his monthly “political pension”.[9]

Shaikh Fayyaz Ali, like many other Muslims, did not have to wait for the British to change their policies and attitudes to get such an award.

What he finally got in 1861 was property of over 16 bighas in a village called Fatehpur Bishwa at the eastern edge of Allahabad’s large military establishment.The land was revenue-free. In addition, he received an adjoining piece of 2 bighas 9 biswa in Mauza Hashimpur. 

On this property he built a bungalow, known as Bungalow Fatehpur Bishwa No. 1 Church Road (Syed Mehmod Manzil ) .

When he died in 1873, his children were still minors, so his property was administered by the Court of Wards.In 1888, at the request of his heirs, the Court of Wards authorised the Allahabad Collector to sell the property. It was under these circumstances that Syed Mahmud, a Justice of the Allahabad High Court, purchased the house for Rs 9,000 in 1888.

On the basis of the information in Thacker’s Directory, we can surmise that Syed Mahmud had lived there previously as a tenant. 

Six years later, in 1894, Syed Mahmud sold the property to Raja Jaikishen Das, a close family friend, for Rs 13,250.

The sale deed gives details of alterations and additions that Syed Mahmud had made while he was owner.  Kunwar Permanand, a former student of the M.A.O. College, Aligarh, was Jaikishen Das’s son who bought it from him. 

MISSING LINKS THAT NEEDS FURTHER RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATIONS:

 There is, however, one remaining mystery: where do the quotations come from that B.N. Pande cites to establish his alternative story about the origins of the house?

I regret to say that I have searched and searched in the National and Uttar Pradesh Archives as well as the India Office Records, and cannot find anything like ‘Sir W. Muir’s Confidential Despatches, Imperial Records’.

Muir’s papers are in Edinburgh, and maybe some day I’ll take a look. Dr Avril Powell of the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, who knows these papers best of all, has expressed her doubts that such a document could be found there.

As for the quotation from The Pioneer for July 18, 1871, I’m afraid it isn’t there (Both the Nehru Library and the British Library have full microfilm sets of The Pioneer).I can only conclude that if such documents and quotations exist at all, they must be about other people, other property and on other dates. Anyway, I can’t find them.

SIR SYED BRITISH LOYAL AGENT AND BENEFICIARY OF THEIR REWARDS : 

This leads us to, probably, the most interesting question: why has this story been concocted and so prominently displayed? What purpose does it serve? One might start with the seeds of truth that could make the story plausible. For one thing, the ESTATE  was indeed owned, if only briefly and certainly at the hands of the British authorities, by Syed Mahmud, the son of Syed Ahmad Khan.

It may have been called Mahmud Manzil, although I have seen no contemporary documentary reference to such a name. The house that Syed Ahmad Khan lived in at Aligarh, which had no special name, was originally owned by Syed Mahmud, purchased in 1876 when he was still the only Indian practising as a High Court advocate in Allahabad.

It was given as mehar (bride’s portion) to Syed Mahmud’s wife, Musharaf Jahan Begam, when they were married in 1888, the year Syed Mahmud purchased the house at 1 Church Road Known as Mehmood Manzil ( Swaraj Bhwaan).

It is also certainly true that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was a firm supporter of British rule, though in this respect he was hardly unique in the late nineteenth century. The founders of the Indian National Congress were equally enthusiastic in their support of the British Empire and their wish to be a part of it.

On the other hand, Syed Ahmad Khan, particularly in the decade following the 1857 Rebellion, had made a number of enemies within the British ruling establishment for his forthright criticism of a number of British policies and attitudes toward India and Indians. His writings after the Mutiny were controversial in British circles.

His account of the rebellion in Bijnore, for example, was considered by some to have been written to protect his British mentor, the Collector of Bijnore, Alexander Shakespeare, at the expense of Nawab Mahmud Khan of Najibabad, who, according to some officials, was unjustly convicted as a rebel.[10]

His book on the causes of the Indian revolt received a sharp retort from Richard Temple, who considered parts of the pamphlet to be “rancorous,” and characterized by “some kind of spite or enmity”.[11]

In 1867, the year the British supposedly offered him the property in Allahabad, in fact he was officially reprimanded for the disrespectful tone of his publication, the Aligarh Institute Gazette.[12]

In 1869, Syed Ahmad devoted much of his time in London to writing a refutation of Sir William Muir’s book on the Prophet Muhammad.

On the other hand, he certainly had good friends in high places among the British, including Sir William Muir’s, as well as Sir John Strachey.

It is also true, as I’ve mentioned, that Syed Ahmad was a beneficiary of British largesse in the form of a political pension, although here again he was one of many and hardly among the most prominent.

His friend, Raja Jaikishen Das, who also owned the SWRAJ BHAWAN, received the title of Raja and an estate in Moradabad “suitable to support the dignity of the title.”[13]He also got a large house in Moradabad city, given to him as a matter of “sound policy… to locate in the midst of a large and restless Mussulman population, such a staunch supporter and loyal servant of Govt., and to strengthen the hands of the Hindoo Community…”[14]

There are hundreds of such cases of confiscations and rewards with both Muslim and Hindu victims and beneficiaries, a redistribution of land and power that would be worth detailed research.

What about the idea of the house as a “cementing centre” for the permanence of British rule in India? This is the quote attributed to Sir William Muir and if not by him, then perhaps uttered by someone else on some other occasion.

There is an event that might be considered similar in spirit, if not in detail, to the still undiscovered ESTATE SWRAJ BHAWAN house-warming at 1 Church Road.

When Syed Mahmud returned from England in November 1872, his father hosted a dinner in his honour in Banares, where Syed Ahmad Khan was posted as Principal Sadr Amin / JUDGE IN BRITISH COURTS .

Syed Mahmud had eaten his dinners at Lincoln’s Inn and been called to the Bar, though he had not quite finished a Cambridge degree. The following month, he moved to Allahabad where he became the first Indian advocate to practice before the High Court, a position that was then restricted to barristers, that is, legal practitioners who had been called to the bar in Britain.

A report of the dinner was printed in The Pioneer (December 4, 1872), then reprinted, along with an Urdu translation, in Syed Ahmad’s journal Tahzib al-Akhlaq.[15]

Alexander Shakespeare, formerly Collector of Bijnore in 1857 and now Commissioner of Benares Division presided.

The report claims that the dinner was the first public occasion in which Indians, though apparently no Hindus, “ate at table in common with their European friends.”

There is no mention of whether or not the Indians had to endure English food, but the dinner must have followed British decorum — table clothes, knives and forks, speeches and toasts, presumably non-alcoholic ones.

In responding to Commissioner of Benares Division presided, Sir Alexander Shakespeare wine toast, Syed Mahmud expressed his wish “to unite England and India socially even more than politically. The English rule in India, in order to be good, must promise to be eternal; and it can never do so until the English people are known to us more as friends and fellow subjects, than as rulers and foreign conquerors.” Although he did not use the word, one might call this “cementing”.

This theme of “friendship,” even “love,” — dosti aur muhabbat — between British ruler and Indian subject is a thread that connects the three generations of Sir Syed’s family and underlies much of their hopes and frustrations with respect to the colonial encounter.

In Sir Syed Ahmad’s account of the rebellion in Bijnore, he states that love arose like a flame in his heart (Sir Syed was  Freemason of Indian Lodge and Prominent Member)  to surround his British superiors and protect them from the mutineers.[16]

In Asbab-i Baghawat-i Hind, (‘Causes of the Indian Revolt’), he moves from personal devotion to individuals to a more abstract theory of the relationships between “government”, using the English word, and subjects.

He says that the lack of friendship, love and solidarity between ruler and ruled was one of the root causes of Indian discontent, and places the blame clearly on the British for failing to take the initiative in establishing such a loving relationship.[17]

This aspiration carries forward throughout the later life of Sir Syed but reaches a tragic conclusion at the end of his life with the humiliation of his son Syed Mahmud, who was forced to resign from the Allahabad High Court in 1893 ( same Year as Durrand line when Sir Syed was Translator and chief Advisory at Durrand line Commission)  for failing to observe the procedures and schedules of the court, allegedly because of his heavy drinking.[18]

The famous final page of Forster’s “””A Passage to India””” dramatists the virtual impossibility of real friendship within any system of colonial domination.

LORD MACAULAY FOOT SOLDIER AND IBNUL WAQAT SIR SYED AHMAD KHAN ? 

One may consider the extent to which this idea of colonial “friendship” presupposed a project of acculturation to British social forms in the spirit of Lord Macaulay’s infamous ‘Minute on Education’, as for example in banquets and bungalows, and becomes a strategy for enfranchisement within the British Empire — or, perhaps, in Gandhi’s words, creating an India based on “English rule without the English”.

British Raj Head of East India Company , Lord Maculy Address Outlining his Plan to enslave Pashtuns and Indians as Strategy to British Parliament in 1835.

It was the adoption of English-style clothes, food, table manners and domestic architecture that Nazir Ahmad satirised, perhaps with specific reference to Sir Syed and his son, in his novel Ibn ul-Waqt, published in 1888, the year Syed Mahmud bought the house on Church Road.[19]

The “irony” Pande speaks of is the distance between this aspiration for inclusion within the empire and the formulation of India’s nationalist movement.

It takes some historical imagination to understand how ideas like “loyalty” to the Queen Empress could have been taken seriously, but I suggest that such emotions, ambivalent and contested as they were, form part of the genealogy of nationalism, the sense of membership in an abstract national community.

When Moti lal Nehru purchased the house at 1 Church Road, he was making a set of symbolic choices that had been anticipated by Syed Mahmud, his elder by eleven years, who had established one model for how to adapt British colonial lifestyle to Indian family life.

Although Moti lal had not eaten his dinners and been called to the British bar, in 1896 he was among the first to take advantage of revised rules that qualified Indian legal practitioners to practice as High Court advocates.That was twenty-five years after Syed Mahmud had broken the barrier as the first Indian advocate in Allahabad.

BOTH FAMILIES OF SIR SYEDS AND NEHRUS  ARE KASHMIRI OPPORTUNISTIC AND HAVING SIMILAR BACKGROUNDS: 

There were, in fact, deeper and more long-standing ways in which the backgrounds of the two families prepared the ground for the cosmopolitan culture that one encounters in the museum displays of Swaraj and Anand Bhawan, or the much more modest Sir Syed House at Aligarh, also a museum now.

The families of Syed Ahmad Khan and the Nehrus had a good deal in common. For one thing, both were descendants of Kashmiri families that had migrated to Delhi in the 18th century to take service in the fading days of the Mughal Empire, and both came to identify with the Indo-Persian culture of the Mughals.

For both families, the failure of a Mughal restoration in 1857(of Which They were accomplices) led to their separation from Delhi and their search for a way of relating to the claims of British rulers to be legitimate successors to the Mughals.

Schooled initially in Persian and Arabic, both Syed Mahmud and Motilal Nehru acquired a comfortable command of English along with their own particular, rather expensive versions of a colonial English lifestyle, although it was only in the next generation that this style extended to the women of their families.[20]

Syed Mahmud’s son, Syed Ross Masud, probably most widely known now as E.M. Forster’s friend and partial model for the character of Dr Aziz in A Passage to India, was in fact a significant educational leader, first in Hyderabad State, where he played a central role in the founding of Osmania University, India’s first European-style university to be conducted in an Indian language, and later as Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University. He was born in 1889, the same year as Jawaharlal Nehru, and went to England at about the same time, the former eventually at Oxford, the latter at Cambridge.

Both became barristers, but neither took up a legal career. What I am leaving out, of course, is that one family was Muslim and the other Hindu. I am also leaving out the fact that Motilal Nehru attended the Indian National Congress meetings in Allahabad in 1888, while Syed Ahmad Khan was mounting his campaign against the Congress, though it took Jallianwalla Bagh, much later in 1919, to turn Motilal into a serious, active Indian nationalist.  Ross Masud, who died in 1937, did not have to face the issues of Partition and Independence.

Those are complex but also more familiar matters. But for now I want to return to the words engraved at the entrance to Swaraj Bhawan.

What this inscription does is to set up Syed Ahmad Khan against the Nehrus as the embodiment of anti-national feeling, the Muslim ‘other’ that helps define the boundaries of the Indian nation.

What I am suggesting is that the two families were not in fact so different after all, that they came from remarkably similar backgrounds and responded to the colonial encounter in remarkably similar ways.

When Jawaharlal Nehru was invited to address the Aligarh Student Union in 1933, Ross Masud preempted this nationalist gesture on the part of the students by meeting Nehru at the railway station and taking on himself the role of introducing him as an old friend.[21] It is probably true that much more united than divided them. They were, in many respects, cut from the same cloth.

 

1. Nehru: The Making of India, by M.J. Akbar, London: Viking, 1988.

2. Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, by David Lelyveld; reprinted New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003.

3. Swaraj Bhawan Congress Centenary Celebration Committee, ed. B.N. Pande; New Delhi: Congress Centenary Celebration Committee, 1985; Allahabad Retrospect and Prospect: A Historical, Cultural, Social, Educational, Industrial, Commercial and Civic Survey of the Town; Municipal Press, Allahabad, 1955.

4. The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal, by B. R. Nanda; New York: John Day, 1963.

5. Motilal Nehru: A Birth Centenary Souvenir, ed. L. R. Nair; Delhi: Motilal Centenary Committee, 1961.

6. The Early Life of the First Student of the M.A.O College; by A.M. Khwaja, Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1916.

7. Leaves from the Life of Al-Haj Afzal-ul-Ulema Nawab Sarbuland Jung Bahadur M. Hameed-Ullah Khan, M.A. (Cantab.), by Al-Haj Mahomed Ullah ibn S. Jung; Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1926.

8. Anand Bhawan Papers, Part II: Subject Files: S. No. 6; Marked as Anand Bhawan Case, 22.7.1912; Papers relating to the assessment of revenue on the area occupied by Anand Bhawan. Papers relating to the previous occupants of Anand Bhawan and its subsequent transfer to Motilal Nehru, Parts 1 and 2, 122 pp.

9. National Archives of India, Home, Public, August 1858 – 202/4.

10. ‘Trial of Mahmud Khan. In re missing documents’, Dept IVA – 2/73 [Box 42, S. No. 45; Inventory List No. 15 (Rohilkhand), U.P. Regional Archives, Allahabad; see also E. I. Brodkin, ‘The Struggle for Succession: Rebels and Loyalists in the Indian Mutiny of 1857’, Modern Asian Studies, VI: 3, 1972.

11. R. Temple, ‘Memorandum’, in Syud Ahmed Khan, An Essay on the Causes of the Indian Revolt, tr. W.N. Lees; Calcutta: Home Secretariat, 1860.

12. NWP/General Proceedings A, 20 July, 1867, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow.

13. Revenue Department Files, Agra Division, Box 3, Serial No. 46, UP Regional Archives, Allahabad.

14. Department IV, File No. 101 of 1862, UP Regional Archives, Allahabad.

15. Vol. 3, No. 18, 15 Shawal, 1286 H.

16. Sarkashi-i Zila Bijnaur, ed. Sharafat Husain Mirza. New ed. Bijnaur: Apna Kitab Ghar, 1992.

17. Ed. Fauq Karimi, Asbab-i Baghawat-i Hind; Aligarh: University Publishers, Muslim University, 1958.

18. Government of India, Home, Judicial (A), February 1893, Nos. 1-29.

19. See Sayyid Sibte Hassan’s Introduction to Nazir Ahmad, Ibn-ul Waqt; Lahore: Majlis-I Taraqqi-Urdu, 1972; the book has recently been published in English as Son of the Moment, tr. Mohammad Zakir; New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002.

20. ‘Three Women in My Family’, by Scherzade Alim, Al-Nisa [Journal of the New Hall for Girls, Aligarh Muslim University], 1999-2000.

21. See Selected Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 6; New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1974; story heard by Professor Irfan Habib from his father, Professor Muhammad Habib.

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