An alternative to ‘loyalist’ and ‘feudal’ Aligarh

Soon after independence, Maulana Azad, the first education minister of the Indian Union, called for a rapid transformation of the colonial system of education—‘shaped by non-nationals in non-national interests’—into a national education system adjusted to the needs of the nation.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, long before independence, some associations and educationists had already experimented with ‘national’ alternatives to colonial education. As early as 1901, Tagore famously established a school in Santiniketan in rural Bengal, which he projected as an ‘indigenous attempt in adapting modern methods of education in a truly Indian cultural environment’.Footnote ¹¹ Around the same time, in North India, the Arya Samaj established schools and colleges that aimed to inculcate a respect for ‘indigenous’ culture.Footnote ¹² Although these institutions did not necessarily oppose the colonial regime, they contributed, through their search for an Indianized form of education, to the development of ‘cultural nationalism’.Footnote ¹³

Other institutions, established in the wake of the Swadeshi (1905–11) and Non-Cooperation (1920–22) movements, had a more explicit anti-colonial character. In Bengal, members of the Swadeshi movement formed a National Council of Education to provide education outside the colonial-sponsored education system.Footnote ¹⁴ In a similar way, during the Non-Cooperation movement, Gandhi encouraged students to leave their schools and universities in order to establish new institutions, free from colonial control.Footnote ¹⁵ In so doing, he aimed to transform schools, regarded as instruments of colonial domination, into sites of political and moral emancipation.

It is in this context of intense anti-colonial mobilization that a few students and alumni from Aligarh's Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College broke away to establish a ‘National Muslim University’, the Jamia Millia Islamia, in 1920.Footnote ¹⁶ Some of them, like the famous Ali brothers, were already active in the Khilafat movement. Others, like the young Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai, joined the mobilization at that time, inspired by Gandhi's call for non-cooperation (see further below). Together, these students and alumni openly challenged the loyalist attitude of Aligarh authorities towards British rule. Their original intention was not to break away from their alma mater, but rather to reform it.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the Ali brothers aimed to transform Aligarh into an all-India Muslim platform, free from government interference.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet, despite their enthusiastic efforts, Jamia's supporters failed to convince the majority of Aligarh authorities to renounce government support. Having failed to reform Aligarh from within, they shifted their base to Delhi, marking a rupture with their mother institution.

In the years that followed, Jamia members consciously sought to distance themselves from Aligarh, seen to be too close to colonial rulers. In a pamphlet meant to introduce Jamia's educational project, its representatives insisted that Jamia education did not qualify students for government service. They added: ‘we regard all employment as servile which is not inspired by some ideal of social service and cooperation’.Footnote ¹⁹ This appeared to be a thinly veiled attack against Aligarh's efforts to prepare Muslim students for government service. Jamia members added, in a defiant manner, that ‘Jamia would rather have no students than adopt English as the medium of instruction.’Footnote ²⁰ Unlike Aligarh, they adopted Hindustani as their main medium of instruction, another way to break away from Aligarh's ‘servile’ attitude.

In parallel, Jamia authorities developed strong ties with Congress leaders, particularly with Gandhi, one of the institution's earliest supporters. Gandhi himself would pay impromptu visits to Jamia, as a friend or a close relative would.Footnote ²¹ He sent one of his grandsons, Rasiklal, to study at JamiaFootnote ²² and his son, Devdas, taught Hindi there between 1928 and 1930.Footnote ²³ Beyond these close personal ties, Gandhi retained significant political influence on the campus, even after the end of the Non-Cooperation movement. Several Jamia members thus followed him when he called for civil disobedience in 1930.Footnote ²⁴ This influence, both personal and political, was clearly visible on the campus. Indeed, Gandhi's portrait hung in the classrooms beside the portraits of Jamia founders,Footnote ²⁵ while students wore the Gandhi cap as part of their uniform, thereby displaying the school's ‘nationalist’ character. Jamia's anti-colonial character was further made explicit in the school's daily assembly meetings, where students sang patriotic songs, and in the annual commemorations of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre or the celebrations of Republic day.Footnote ²⁶ Through these rituals and celebrations, Jamia members proudly asserted their support for the Congress-led movement for independence.

For Jamia members, Aligarh constituted a counter-model not only because of the loyalist attitude of the University's authorities, but also because of the institution's alleged ‘feudal’ character.Footnote ²⁷ In her memoirs, Sughra Mehdi, a former student and professor at Jamia, contrasts this ‘feudal’ character with Jamia's supposedly ‘egalitarian’ ethos. She goes so far as to argue that Jamia formed a ‘classless society’, in which ‘all members were important and equal’.Footnote ²⁸ According to her, everyone addressed each other as ‘mas sahab’ (or ‘master sahab’) or ‘apa’ (elder sister, elder female relative), whether they were teachers, administrators, or fourth division employees. By contrast, she argues, the individuals who came from Aligarh, accustomed to ‘pomp and glory’ (shan-o-shaukat), continued to treat peons as servants.Footnote ²⁹

Of course, this does not mean that there were no inequalities at Jamia. The very fact that Jamia members made a conscious effort to downplay hierarchies between teachers and peons shows that the ‘classless society’ was a project, not a given. Jamia members came from different socio-economic backgrounds. Some of them, especially Jamia's faculty, hailed from highly educated elite families. Mohammad Mujeeb, for instance, came from a landlord (zamindar) family of Bara Banki (United Provinces). His father was a prosperous lawyer in Lucknow who paid great attention to the education of his children: Mujeeb himself went to the Loreto Convent, one of Lucknow's most prestigious schools, and later pursued further studies at the University of Oxford and in Germany.Footnote ³⁰ Likewise, Zakir Husain was born into a highly educated family, originally from the United Provinces. His father, like Mujeeb's, was a lawyer, who worked for the High Court at Hyderabad. Husain studied at the MAO College before he joined the Jamia movement. He then pursued doctoral studies in Germany, where he met Mujeeb and Abid Husain, another future key figure of Jamia.Footnote ³¹ By contrast, Jamia students sometimes came from less privileged backgrounds. According to Hasan and Jalil, many of them hailed ‘from semi-urban areas that had lost their Muslim gentry to the new trading and commercial classes’.Footnote ³²

Furthermore, even in Jamia's supposedly ‘classless society’, differences of status did exist, as reflected in income disparities. For instance, in the 1950s, the director of the Institute of Art Education was paid Rs 150 a month, and some teachers earned up to Rs 200 per month, while the gardener was paid Rs 50, and the cooks only Rs 20 to Rs 40. At the bottom of the heap, in Jamia as elsewhere, were the sweepers, who earned only Rs 10 each month, a tiny proportion of the director's salary.Footnote ³³

Still, these inequalities were far less pronounced than at AMU, where, in 1945, a professor could earn up to Rs 18,000 a year, while a part-time water-carrier only earned Rs 24.Footnote ³⁴ Even if social hierarchies remained visible, it seems that Jamia members made a conscious effort to minimize ‘feudal-type’ hierarchies, which some of them had experienced at Aligarh, replacing them with more subtle, family-type relationships.

One may see in these efforts to counter Aligarh's ‘feudal’ character the influence of socialist and Marxist ideas, widespread among North Indian Muslim intellectual elites, including, paradoxically, at Aligarh, especially in the 1920s and 1930s and then again after partition.Footnote ³⁵ At Jamia, these influences became more visible in the early years of independence. Indeed, some key faculty members, like Dr Salamatullah, the second principal of Jamia's Teaching College, and Ghulam Rabbani Taban, an Urdu writer who had joined Jamia's publishing house after partition, were known for their leftist inclinations.Footnote ³⁶ Both men played an active role in the development of Jamia's branch of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), closely associated with the Communist Party of India. The Association had a significant influence on the campus, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to its regular literary meetings. The members of the Association also invited famous left-wing authors, like Habib Tanvir, linked to the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), or even Pakistani authors like Faiz Ahmed Faiz,Footnote ³⁷ to share their ideas and writings with Jamia members. These leftist influences contributed to shaping Jamia's ‘egalitarian’ discourse, particularly in the early years of independence.

Jamia's attempts to promote a simpler, less ‘feudal’ lifestyle could also be seen, before independence, as yet another trace of Gandhi's prominent influence. Gandhi articulated his anti-colonial message through the image of a simple, austere lifestyle, best epitomized by his homespun attire. Unlike socialists and Marxists, Gandhi did not fundamentally challenge socio-economic inequalities and he certainly did not advocate class struggle. But he promoted an alternative social and moral model based on simplicity, self-sufficiency, and ‘harmonious’ relations of interdependence between rich ‘trustees’ and poor peasants, or between different caste-based groups.Footnote ³⁸

This message, it seems, inspired many of the early Jamia members, like well-born Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai. Young Shafiqur came from a rich landowning family of Barabanki in the United Provinces. His student days at Aligarh, Mujeeb tells us, were ‘distinguished by his love of comfort and fastidiousness in clothing and food’.Footnote ³⁹ However, the rise of the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements had a deep, transformative effect on him. Following Gandhi's call for non-cooperation, Kidwai started picketing in front of shops selling foreign goods. He burned his own foreign clothes, regarded as a symbol of collaboration with the British as well as a marker of status and wealth, and replaced them with ‘coarse khaddar’,Footnote ⁴⁰ thereby responding to Gandhi's anti-colonial rhetoric along with his call for self-transformation. Kidwai's rupture with his family further accentuated this transformation. Indeed, his anti-colonial activities provoked a clash with his father, who considered it his duty to support the government.Footnote ⁴¹ As a result, Shafiqur had to renounce his share of the family's land. He also had to leave the MAO College, joining instead the nascent Jamia Millia.Footnote ⁴² In so doing, Kidwai not only broke away from Aligarh's ‘loyalist’ attitude, he also distanced himself from his social milieu, the North Indian Muslim landowning elites, who had often chosen either to support British rule or to stay away from politics altogether.Footnote ⁴³ In that sense, the efforts of Jamia members to emulate a simple lifestyle advocated by Gandhi appeared, simultaneously, as yet another attempt to dissociate themselves from Aligarh's landowning elites, who had preferred to ally themselves with the British in order to preserve their social status.Footnote ⁴⁴

Jamia members thus distanced themselves from their ‘mother institution’ in a variety of ways, flagging up their independence from government. Yet, in practice, they remained very much part of the same world as Aligarh students and teachers. Jamia's faculty, who often came from the MAO College, retained strong personal connections with AMU, even after 1920. For instance, Zakir Husain remained a Court member at AMU until the 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁵ As for Mujeeb, he did not himself join Aligarh but his brother, the famous historian Mohammad Habib, held a prominent position there.

Jamia and Aligarh also shared some of their patrons. Here lay one of Jamia's most striking ambiguities. Despite their attempts to distance themselves from AMU's ‘loyalist’ attitude and ‘feudal’ character, Jamia members largely relied on the support of princely rulers, such as the nizam of Hyderabad, the nawab of Rampur, and the begum of Bhopal,Footnote ⁴⁶ who were all, of course, also generous donors to AMU's coffers. This awkward situation resulted, in part, from the fact that Jamia could not rely on the government's patronage. Moreover, Mujeeb argues that, unlike during the Non-Cooperation movement, the ‘rift’ between Hindus and Muslims had ‘widened’ so much by the mid-1920s that it had become ‘unrealistic’ to seek help from non-Muslim donors.Footnote ⁴⁷ It therefore appears that Jamia members had little choice but to turn towards Muslim princely rulers for financial support.

This financial dependence forced Jamia authorities to tone down their anti-colonial message. Indeed, Mujeeb himself confessed that princely patronage could come with strings attached. In 1930, for instance, the nizam's Council decided that the payment of Jamia's monthly grant would depend upon the prior approval of Delhi's chief commissioner, who, in the context of the Civil Disobedience movement, actually suspended the grant for four years after a few University members joined Gandhi's movement.Footnote ⁴⁸ Therefore, even if they proudly claimed their independence from colonial authorities, Jamia's faculty were also deeply aware of the potential downfalls of too loud and direct an attack against colonial rule. In this context, Jamia authorities preferred to stay away from political agitation. After the end of the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements, they focused their efforts on education and constructive work, another—quieter—way of preparing for the advent of national independence.

Making education accessible to the non-elites

Unlike many national educational institutions inspired by Gandhi's Non-Cooperation movement, which disappeared soon after it ended, in the 1920s Jamia reinvented itself as an experimental ground for a new ‘national’ education system. Jamia authorities shifted to the promotion of basic and adult education, using experimental methods inspired by Gandhi and progressive educationists abroad. Through their educational experiments, they aimed to develop a model of education that would be accessible to the largest number, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Zakir Husain played a key role in the emergence of Jamia as a pioneering institution for the provision of basic education in the late 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Mohammad Ali, Jamia's first vice-chancellor,Footnote ⁴⁹ Husain was more interested in pedagogical ideas and practices. Having completed his studies in Germany,Footnote ⁵⁰ he was, according to his friend K. G. Saiyidain, in ‘fairly intimate contact’ with the movement of ‘New Education’, in Europe and North America.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, Husain had attended classes on German educational philosophy during his studies in Berlin and met progressive educationists, notably thanks to Abid Husain, his friend and future colleague, who studied education with Eduard Spranger.Footnote ⁵² Back in India, Zakir Husain explicitly acknowledged the influence of German educationists, particularly Kerschensteiner, about whom he declared: ‘I owed to him almost the entire framework of my educational thinking.’Footnote ⁵³ While he recognized that he had ‘learnt a great deal from German thinkers and educators’, Husain asserted that he was ‘also indebted to others, including many Indian, Swiss, English and American educators’.Footnote ⁵⁴ One can think, for instance, of Pestalozzi, whom he quotes explicitly,Footnote ⁵⁵ and John Dewey, of the ‘Project Method’.

Most of these educationists, including Kerschensteiner and Dewey, emphasized the importance of ‘learning by doing’. Kerschensteiner, for instance, had developed the concept of arbeitsschule (work school), which he saw as an ‘instrument of independent and self-motivated acquisition of knowledge’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The objective of these educationists was to stimulate students’ curiosity and imagination through manual work.Footnote ⁵⁷ Borrowing and building on these ideas, Husain encouraged the introduction of art and crafts at Jamia, such as carpentry, spinning, or clay modelling.Footnote ⁵⁸ Jamia teachers further started new kinds of projects, such as the Murgh khana (poultry farm), Sehat-o-safai (hygiene), Baghbani (gardening), Sabzi mandi (fruits and vegetables), and Dehat (a week-long stay in a village) projects,Footnote ⁵⁹ designed to train children to deal with ‘real-life’ situations.

These experiments also drew inspiration from Gandhi, who, like progressive educationists abroad, placed special emphasis on manual work.Footnote ⁶⁰ Krishna Kumar argues that Gandhi's conception of basic education involved ‘a radical restructuring of the sociology of school knowledge in India’. Indeed, while ‘elitist’ colonial education privileged intellectual work, Gandhi put handicrafts at the centre of his teaching programme, which, according to Kumar, were associated with ‘the lowest groups in the hierarchy of castes’.Footnote ⁶¹

One may, however, qualify the ‘radicalism’ of Gandhi's socio-educational agenda. As Parimala Rao points out, handicrafts were not always associated with the ‘lowest groups in the hierarchy of castes’. Moreover, Gandhi tended to privilege spinning, associated with Brahman castes (they had to spin the sacred thread for themselves), over other forms of handicrafts, such as pottery, which were more closely identified with lower castes.Footnote ⁶² Some caste biases thus continued to infuse Gandhi's reformist agenda.

In a similar way, at Jamia, it seems that the introduction of basic education methods did not have as ‘radical’ an edge as Kumar would suggest. Some teachers, like Dr Salamatullah, influenced by leftist ideas, may have criticized the ‘ruling classes’ for maintaining a strict hierarchy between intellectual and manual work,Footnote ⁶³ but this does not necessarily mean that Jamia aimed to completely undo this hierarchy of values, nor the social hierarchies that underlay them. After all, even at Jamia, manual workers continued to earn much less than teachers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet, even if they did not necessarily advocate radical social reforms, Jamia authorities did try to take into account the needs of non-elite students. Adopting a pragmatic attitude, Mujeeb argued, for instance, that craft education would help Jamia students get a job in a workshop or in industry.Footnote ⁶⁵ Through the introduction of manual work, Jamia teachers thus tried to develop a form of education that would be relevant not only to the ‘ruling classes’ but also to ordinary Indians.

Likewise, their adoption of Hindustani as the main medium of instruction appears to have been an effort to make basic education accessible to the largest number of people.Footnote ⁶⁶ The adoption of this medium had, of course, a powerful political significance. As mentioned above, it allowed Jamia members to display their independence from the colonial system of education.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, by using a composite language—Hindustani written in both Persian and Devnagari scripts —as the main medium of instruction, and by adopting both Urdu and Hindi as compulsory subjects, Jamia authorities sought to resist the increasing polarization between the two languages along communal lines.Footnote ⁶⁸ In a message published by Jamia's Hindi department, Mujeeb thus asserted that:

The mix of Urdu words (such as khwaish, meil mohabbat, qaumi yakzahati) and Devnagari script was in itself a reflection of Jamia's efforts to bring together the two languages and to oppose their politically motivated separation.

Like NehruFootnote ⁶⁹ and Azad,Footnote ⁷⁰ Jamia members saw in Hindustani a ‘language of the people’, which transcended religious barriers. A representative of Jamia thus argued that Hindi and Urdu received equal importance in its curriculum as the two languages represented the ‘two literary forms of the tongue spoken by the people in this region’.Footnote ⁷¹ Jamia teachers distanced themselves from a sophisticated and highly Persianized Urdu, associated with a ‘high culture’ that was becoming more and more exclusively Muslim. They privileged instead a simple and mixed language, which could be widely understood by the ‘people’, either in Delhi's bastis or in Jamia's rural neighbourhood, whether they were Muslim or not.

To use Hindustani, a ‘spoken language’, for educational purposes, Jamia members first had to develop the language in order to transform it into a medium of instruction. Around the same period, in Hyderabad, Osmania University established a Bureau of Translation intended to expand Urdu's terminology, including for scientific subjects, so that Urdu could become a ‘worldly vernacular’, adapted to the needs of modern education.Footnote ⁷² Jamia members drew inspiration from this work. According to Mujeeb, they too tried to develop a language adapted to their educational needs,Footnote ⁷³ even borrowing some of the terms created at Osmania.Footnote ⁷⁴

Yet, more so than at Osmania, sometimes criticized for its difficult brand of Urdu,Footnote ⁷⁵ Jamia teachers privileged the adoption of simple terms. Nehru, who often criticized Urdu and Hindi supporters for using too many Persian, Arabic, or Sanskrit words, himself pointed out that Jamia members were ‘very good at writing simple Urdu or Hindustani’.Footnote ⁷⁶ According to Sughra Mehdi, Jamia authorities sought to ‘liberate Urdu prose’ from ‘verse-worship’ and to purify it from its ‘verbose’ character in order to produce an ‘exact’ language.Footnote ⁷⁷ In that sense, Jamia members followed in the footsteps of Aligarh reformers who, in the late nineteenth century, made the development of modern Urdu prose a crucial part of their reformist agenda.Footnote ⁷⁸ Jamia's rejection of Urdu's ‘verse-worship’ further resonated with the call of progressive writers in the 1930s to break away from the ‘rigid formalism’ and ‘mystical devotional obsession’ of Urdu classical literature in order to ‘assist the spirit of progress in the country’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Be it at Jamia or at Aligarh, the reform of language therefore appeared as an essential element of socio-educational reforms.

To transform Hindustani into a language of ‘communication’ (iblagh)Footnote ⁸⁰ able to bring, in Sughra Mehdi's words, ‘the light of knowledge to the common people’,Footnote ⁸¹ Jamia teachers placed special emphasis on the development of children's literature. Some of them, notably Zakir Husain, Abid Husain, Mujeeb, and Abdul Ghaffar Madholi, wrote stories for children,Footnote ⁸² as did some of their partners: Saleha Abid HusainFootnote ⁸³ and Begum Mohammad MujeebFootnote ⁸⁴ made notable contributions to this genre of literature. Furthermore, in 1926, the Maktaba Jamia, Jamia's publishing house, brought out the children's magazine Payam-e-Taleem (The Message of Education), which soon became an exciting publication in this field.Footnote ⁸⁵

Jamia's faculty also paid special attention to drama, seen as a privileged medium to develop students’ creative skills and to reach out to a wide audience.Footnote ⁸⁶ Before independence, some teachers, including—once again—the gifted and enthusiastic trio Husain, Mujeeb, and Madholi, started writing plays for children. After independence, Mujeeb continued to promote theatre on the campus, despite the hostility of a few faculty members.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 1954, he invited Habib Tanvir, the famous playwright and theatre director, to write a play about the poet Nazir Akbaradi, later known as ‘Agra bazaar’. The choice of this poet was symbolic of the form of language and education that Jamia members sought to promote. Indeed, Tanvir argued that Nazir Akbaradi was closer to the ‘ordinary people’ than to the Urdu-speaking elites. According to him, he wrote in a ‘simple and spontaneous style’, with a ‘rich admixture’ of vocabulary, borrowing from both Urdu and Hindi, to evoke the ‘life and concerns of the common people’.Footnote ⁸⁸ For the performance, Tanvir and his Jamia colleagues invited students and teachers but also villagers who lived in the surroundings areas to come on stage.Footnote ⁸⁹ This experience reflected Tanvir's inclination towards an ‘inclusive’ and ‘progressive’ theatre.Footnote ⁹⁰ It also epitomized Jamia's efforts to develop, through experimental teaching methods and a simple, composite language, a form of education that would be accessible to the largest number of people, including to the non-elites, be they Muslim or not.

Designing a new model of education for the nation

Through these educational experiments, Jamia members aspired to play a larger role, beyond the premises of their school, in the development of a national alternative to colonial education. By the mid-1930s, it had built a solid reputation as an experimental school within progressive circles, both in India and abroad. Before coming back to India, Zakir Husain had already developed good connections with German educationists and intellectuals, in large part thanks to Gerda Philipsborn, a Jewish intellectual from Berlin, who later joined Jamia's staff. Philipsborn herself played an important role in the development of the school's nursery.Footnote ⁹¹ Husain's experiments at Jamia further attracted the attention of foreign organizations invested in the promotion of new pedagogical methods. In 1934, for instance, Dr Zillaeus, a Finnish scholar and the president of the New Education Fellowship, an international network of progressive educational institutions, paid a visit to Jamia. According to K. G. Saiyidain, who knew him personally, Zillaeus was ‘highly impressed’ by the school.Footnote ⁹²

An even more striking symbol of Jamia's recognition was the appointment, in 1937, of Zakir Husain at the head of the Wardha Committee. Set up by Gandhi to design a national system of education inspired by basic education principles, this Committee provided Husain with a wider platform from which to publicize his own ideas on education.Footnote ⁹³ According to his friends and colleagues, Husain was one of the main driving forces behind the Wardha scheme.

Husain did not passively embrace Gandhi's ideas on education. In fact, he was quite critical of some of the Mahatma's proposals. For instance, he expressed serious concern about the fact that, if schools were to rely on students’ labour for funding, as Gandhi had envisaged, ‘teachers may become slave-drivers and exploit the labour of poor boys’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Husain was not alone in questioning Gandhi's programme, with other Committee members, like K. T. Shah, raising similar concerns.Footnote ⁹⁵

K. G. Saiyidain and Mujeeb both argue that Husain played a pivotal role in achieving a consensus between Gandhi's supporters and his critics within the Committee. Saiyidain thus insists on Husain's role in ‘polishing’ Gandhi's ‘rough-hewn’ ideas, making them more acceptable to the rest of the Committee. Likewise, Mujeeb argues that ‘it was only in the form in which Zakir Husain presented it that the Wardha scheme … would have been acceptable to those who were not Gandhiji's followers but were seriously concerned with educational reform’.Footnote ⁹⁶

By presenting Husain as solely responsible for achieving this consensus, Mujeeb may have downplayed the role of other important educationists, like K. T. Shah and K. G. Saiyidain, who were also very active during the discussions.Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet, it is true that the consensus that emerged out of these discussions had much in common with Jamia's model of education. Committee members recommended the adoption of the mother tongue as the main medium of instruction and they recognized manual work as the main teaching method.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although Husain was not alone in defending these ideas, the adoption of the Wardha scheme gave new resonance to his work at Jamia. Indeed, by promoting basic education, Jamia members could now be part of a larger plan, supported by Gandhi, to establish a national education system.

Husain's appointment as the head of the Hindustani Talimi Sangh (HTS) a year later further reinforced his stature and gave him new means to promote basic education throughout the country. For instance, he was directly involved in the reform of the education system in Bihar and the Central Provinces.Footnote ⁹⁹ According to Mujeeb, Husain's position as head of HTS allowed him to ‘imprint the image of Jamia Millia on thousands of minds’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Of course, this was a gross exaggeration of Jamia's actual influence. It was not alone in promoting basic education: in other parts of the country, private institutions, such as Andhra Jatiya Kalashala in Masulipatam, and provincial governments, notably in Bihar, United Provinces, Bombay, Madras, Orissa, and in the Central Provinces, also took steps in this direction.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Yet, Husain's appointment as the head of HTS did allow Jamia members to develop a privileged relationship with the national organization. Mujeeb and Abid Husain, Husain's closest colleagues, and his friend K. G. Saiyidain took an active part in HTS.Footnote ¹⁰² Although the association's headquarters were in Sevagram, Gandhi's ashram, HTS's meetings sometimes took place at Jamia.Footnote ¹⁰³ Moreover, it was Jamia's responsibility to publish the Urdu version of Nai Talim, HTS's magazine.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Thus, there seemed to be a strong partnership between Jamia and HTS, at least in the association's early years.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In parallel, Jamia members established a teachers’ college, which aimed to spread basic education methods.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Through these different initiatives, Jamia reinforced its status as a pioneering institution in the promotion of basic education as per Gandhi's ideas. It came to be seen, in large part thanks to Zakir Husain's own prestige, as a key actor in the emergence of a ‘national’ alternative to the colonial system of education.

In addition, Jamia members participated in the expansion of adult education, encouraged in the 1920s by provincial councils and later by the Congress ministries.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As early as 1926, they opened an evening school in Karol Bagh to teach the residents of this lower middle-class basti to read.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1938, Gandhi's admirer Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai went one step further and founded the Idara-e Talim-o-Taraqqi (the Organisation for Education and Progress) to provide a more comprehensive form of education to illiterate and semi-literate adults.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Idara established several centres in lower middle-class neighbourhoods near Old DelhiFootnote ¹¹⁰ as well as in the rural belt around Jamia Nagar to teach local residents to read and write and to provide skills-training.Footnote ¹¹¹ Idara workers were also particularly active in the production of audio-visual material, pamphlets, and books for neo-literates, a distinct contribution which Nehru himself recognized.Footnote ¹¹²

The Idara's initiatives strongly resonated with Gandhi's emphasis on constructive work. Through their educational activities, its staff worked to encourage more ‘harmonious’ relations among villagers. In Khizrabad, for instance, they tried to convince different sections of the village to join their literacy classes in order to induce ‘a new conception of intercaste relation’.Footnote ¹¹³ In Okhla, Idara workers also helped ‘common villagers’ to revive the Fishermen's Cooperative Society so that they could better defend their interests vis-à-vis more powerful factions in the village.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In these various, and often imaginative, ways, Jamia members sought to promote reform from below, starting at the village level.

For Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai, Jamia's objective was to prepare ‘progressive citizens of a progressive state’:Footnote ¹¹⁵ the belief was that the training of progressive citizens would pave the way for the emergence of a progressive state, and not the other way round. In that sense, Jamia's initiatives in adult education appeared as yet another way to participate, at grassroots level, in the advent of a ‘meaningful independence’.

At a time when communal tensions were on the rise, Jamia leaders thus turned away from direct political action to focus on constructive work, as promoted by Gandhi. Not only did they spread ‘Gandhian’ ideas on education and social reform, they also took an active part in shaping them.

Through their educational experiments, Jamia members aimed to participate in the formation of a new national education system as well as in social reform. Their very insistence on, or even their exaggeration of, Jamia's capacity to influence educational policies seemed to reflect this urge to play a role at the national level. Although most Jamia members were Muslim, they aspired to contribute to the advent of an independence that would be meaningful not only to them as Muslims, but to the entire nation.

Jamia's experiments could thus be compared to that of other institutions, such as Osmania University, which sought to lay the foundations for an inclusive independent India. Datla argues that by promoting Urdu as a secular national language rather than as a Muslim language, Osmania members refused to be reduced to their status as ‘Muslims’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In similar ways, by projecting their institution as a laboratory for the nation, Jamia members implicitly claimed the right to participate in the construction of the nation as ‘unhyphenated Indians’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Serving the nation in the name of ‘Islamic values’

This does not mean, however, that Jamia members put aside the Muslim character of their institution. On the contrary, they laid great emphasis on religious instruction, which was seen as an essential part of Jamia's model of education. At a time when communal tensions were on the rise, Jamia teachers strove to prove that ‘true’ religion could act as a unifying force for the nation. In the process, they promoted their own definition of ‘true’ ‘Islamic values’ in order to challenge what they saw as the ‘false’ interpretation of religion, deemed responsible for the rise of communal tensions.

From the very beginning, religion occupied a central position in the discourse and education model of Jamia authorities. Jamia Millia Islamia was founded at a time when the Khilafat movement was at its peak. According to Mujeeb, the call for the protection of the Caliphate had resonated powerfully among Jamia's first students, ‘overwhelmed with religiosity and with Islamic … zeal’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ ‘Ulama, who had been at the forefront of the pan-Islamic movement, played a key role in the establishment of the new school. No fewer than five theologians were thus on the Foundation Committee, including Abdul Bari, the pir of Mohammad and Shaukat Ali, and Husain Ahmad Madani, Deoband's principal.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Jamia's founders further turned to ‘Shaikh-ul-Hind’ Maulana Mahmud al Hasan, one of the most revered leaders of the Khilafat movement, to inaugurate the new institution. On 29 October 1920, Hasan's disciple, Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, delivered the official inauguration speech at Aligarh's mosque.Footnote ¹²⁰ Through these symbolic choices, Jamia's faculty themselves stressed their affiliation with the Khilafat movement as well as the strong religious orientation of the newborn institution.

By highlighting its religious orientation, Jamia's founders sought to promote a model of Muslim education different from that of Aligarh. Mohammad Ali, in particular, was very critical of Aligarh's model of education. Although religious instruction was compulsory there, it remained a separate subject, with limited influence on the overall grooming of students.Footnote ¹²¹ As a result, Ali regretted, students’ ‘communal consciousness was far more secular than religious’. Ali, who was himself deeply influenced by the ‘alim Abdul Bari, sought to overcome this distinction between the religious and secular orders. With the foundation of Jamia, he hoped to promote a conception of Muslim society in which Islam would be recognized as a ‘living guide to the total social order’.Footnote ¹²²

Although Ali left Jamia soon after the end of the Khilafat movement, religious ideas and practices remained central to Jamia's educational project. For Zakir Husain, Jamia's mission was to reconcile the ‘modern university with the theological seminary’.Footnote ¹²³ Jamia's faculty repeatedly insisted on the ‘essential’ character of religious instruction in their students’ training,Footnote ¹²⁴ and Islamic Studies was compulsory for all students.Footnote ¹²⁵ At primary level, students were expected to develop an ‘intimate knowledge’ of the Qur'an and Arabic through reading sessions of the holy book.Footnote ¹²⁶ At secondary level, Islamic Studies included the study of Arabic, theology, Islamic history as well as the teachings on the life of the Prophet.Footnote ¹²⁷ Besides these lectures, prayer occupied an important place in students’ routine: five times a day, they were expected to go to the Mohammad Ali Hall to perform namaz.Footnote ¹²⁸

In parallel, the Idara-e Talim-o-Taraqqi published a series of posters, charts, and booklets addressed to neo-literate adults on ‘the teachings of Islam’ and on religious practices, such as namaz or zakat. They also organized regular lectures on the Qur'an in the local mosques around Jamia Nagar.Footnote ¹²⁹ In that sense, Jamia teachers followed in the footsteps of nineteenth-century reformists, like Deoband scholars: they imparted a religious training based primarily on textual knowledge—with a strong focus on the Qur'an—and on the inculcation of a few normative religious practices.Footnote ¹³⁰

Like these reformists, through this training, Jamia teachers aimed at a moral transformation of their students. Maktaba Jamia, Jamia's publishing house, released a number of books on the lives of the Prophet and his Companions, presented as role models for children. These books emphasized their ‘pure’ or ‘flawless’ characters (pakeezah sairat).Footnote ¹³¹ They encouraged children to emulate their righteous behaviour. Payam-e-taleem thus ‘cited’ Prophet Luqman's words of advice to his son: ‘remain constant in your prayers, follow the rightful command, turn away from evil … be patient in the face of adversity’,Footnote ¹³² thereby using the figure of this prophet to define an ideal code of conduct that children ought to emulate.

By putting forward these role models, Jamia teachers sought, beyond a change of behaviour, a conversion of the ‘heart’. For instance, the authors of Payam-e-Taleem defined a ‘chaste’ (parhezgar) person as someone who believed ‘in her heart’ (apne dil se) in God, in the Day of Judgement, in angels, in the Book, and in the prophets.Footnote ¹³³ Similarly, the publishers of Hamare Rasool hoped that the depiction of the Prophet's life would make such an impression on its readers that ‘a desire to do the right thing and to follow God's command … [would] arise spontaneously in children's hearts’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Jamia teachers thus suggested that the reform of one's behaviour first required a transformation of the inner self.

While reformist schools like Deoband put great emphasis on the ‘correct’ implementation of religious law in daily life, some of Jamia's leading figures distanced themselves from a law-centric approach to religion. Mujeeb repeatedly made a distinction between ‘true faith’, based on spiritual and ethical principles, and ‘legalism’, dismissed as soulless practice.Footnote ¹³⁵ According to him, Jamia's faculty privileged a ‘mystical’ rather than a ‘theological’ conception of knowledge.Footnote ¹³⁶ Mujeeb proudly claimed that Jamia teachers ‘never fettered [themselves] with irrelevant principles’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Instead, he argued, Jamia had ‘evolved its own Muslim character more by deviation from accepted traditions and attitudes than by adherence’.Footnote ¹³⁸ As proof of this non-orthodox mindset, Mujeeb cited Zakir Husain's introduction of painting into the school syllabus and the performance of mixed plays on campus.Footnote ¹³⁹

In reality, not everyone approved of these ‘deviations’. Habib Tanvir thus recalls that when he came to perform Agra bazar on campus, some ‘mullahs and maulvis’ who ‘wielded considerable influence’ on campus expressed their opposition to theatre.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He was probably referring to some of Jamia's teachers who had been trained in madrasas that defended a more orthodox conception of ‘Islamic rules’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ According to him, ‘even Mujeeb sahib’, then the vice-chancellor, ‘had to often keep quiet in front of them so that the play could be staged’.Footnote ¹⁴² Mujeeb himself sometimes hinted at these tensions. In the 1960s, he recalled that ‘even forty years ago, the dogmatic among us and outside did not accept the Jamia as an Islamic institution’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Therefore, even among Jamia members, the definition of what comprised ‘Islamic values’ or what should constitute Jamia's ‘Islamic’ character remained a contentious issue.

Yet, beyond these internal divergences, Mujeeb's emphasis on ‘true faith’ reflected an effort of at least part of Jamia's faculty to move beyond a text-based approach to religion. Jamia's faculty repeatedly insisted on the need to ‘restore harmony and coordination’ between religious thought and daily activities.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ According to them, religious principles should not be confined to a separate sphere, instead they should ‘mould [students’] lives and inspire their actions’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Jamia's efforts to promote an ‘egalitarian’ ethos, mentioned earlier, could be read in this light as an attempt to put into practice Islam's principles. Indeed, for Abid Husain, ‘universal brotherhood’ and ‘social and economic justice’ constituted some of the core ‘Islamic values’. Abid Husain asserted that there was a strong convergence between Islamic and socialist ideals. According to him, the equitable distribution of wealth thus represented the ‘essence of the economic ideas of Islam’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In this context, Jamia's critique of Aligarh's ‘feudal’ character could also be read as an attack against Aligarh's insufficient adhesion to ‘true’ Islamic values. Within this framework, to distance themselves from Aligarh's ‘feudal’ character could correspond, for Jamia members, to an attempt to restore some coherence between their lifestyles and what they regarded as ‘true’ Islamic ideals.

Jamia's faculty, very critical of Aligarh's ‘feudal’ character and of its ‘servile’ attitude towards the British, celebrated instead the idea of service. More than the ‘correct’ implementation of religious law, serving others seemed to them to be the utmost manifestation of Islam's ‘true’ principles. This notion of service lay at the heart of Jamia's ethos and educational project. For instance, Jamia's life-members pledged to ‘serve’ the institution for at least 20 years on minimal pay.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ According to Mujeeb, they aimed to make their school a place of ‘devotion to a social end’ rather than a ‘place of individual self-seeking’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

To instil these principles, Jamia teachers relied, as always, not just on text-based knowledge but also on ‘learning by doing’. For instance, they pushed students to take an active part in education work in neighbouring villages.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Students were also in charge of the daily running of their hostels. Together, they had to clean the rooms, manage food, and organize prayers.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Through these activities, teachers aimed to develop a ‘social consciousness’ among their students, as well as a strong sense of ‘personal responsibility’.Footnote ¹⁵¹

This emphasis on service had, for many teachers, a deep religious underpinning. In a document on Jamia's Scout Association, the author argued that the Association's purpose was to ‘serve humanity according to the teaching of Islam’. The author defined service as a form of worship: by serving others, students would develop a ‘true love for their Creator and for His creatures’.Footnote ¹⁵² In a similar vein, Zakir Husain argued that Muslim schools based on ‘Islamic ideals’ were to:

In his eyes, the ‘removal of these ills’, both moral and social, constituted a religious duty for Muslims.

Husain's emphasis on service and self-sacrifice resonated, in many ways, with Gandhi's discourse.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ It also had, according to Husain's biographer, B. Sheikh Ali, deep roots in his religious training, marked by Sufi thought. Ali highlights the influence of Hasan Shah, a Sufi preacher, who became Husain's spiritual teacher during his school days. According to him, it was Shah's influence ‘that excited in Zakir Husain great simplicity, modesty, humility, tranquillity, patience, love and service’. Through him, Ali suggests, Husain learned to ‘appreciate the inner meaning and thought of Sufi trends in Islam, all based on ethical principles’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Within this framework, service appeared as a manifestation of ‘true faith’, a means to put into practice Islam's ‘inner’ principles.

Ali further argues that this conception of service and religion had a powerful resonance with German idealism, another major source of inspiration for Zakir Husain. He underlines the influence of German philosophers and educationists, like Edward Spranger, who considered that education should contribute to the ‘steady growth of personality through service and love towards humanity’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ For these authors, education had a strong transcendental dimension. It was a means to serve humanity, beyond one's individual benefit. The combination of these various influences reinforced in Husain the idea that ‘true faith’ lay in selfless service. In his eyes, it therefore appeared that the role of education was to instil in students a strong sense of devotion to the ‘common good’.

This emphasis on service as a manifestation of ‘true faith’ had a strong political resonance. In his address to the All India Muslim Educational Conference in March 1937, Husain contrasted the ‘new’ Muslim schools, like Jamia, based on ‘Islamic ideals’, with the ‘old system of Muslim education’, identified with ‘one class of Muslims, looking to preserve their self-interests’. By evoking this ‘old system’, it is, of course, Aligarh that he had foremost in his mind. Husain's main concern was no longer the University's loyalist attitude, but rather its increasing support for the Muslim League in a context where Congress and the Muslim League had become bitter rivals. As communal tensions were on the rise, Husain warned against a ‘narrow or false interpretation’ of ‘Islamic ideals’, which threatened to transform Muslim institutions into ‘breeding-grounds of communalism and communal selfishness’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In so doing, he clearly distanced himself from Muslim League and its allies, including Aligarh's authorities, whom he accused of defending ‘selfish interests’ in the name of Islam.

At the same time, Husain insisted that it was the ‘false’ interpretation of Islamic principles, not Islam itself, that led to the rise of communalism. While Congress authorities tended to contrast ‘secular nationalism’ with ‘religious communalism’,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Husain staunchly defended the idea that there was no inherent contradiction between the promotion of Islamic values and the defence of the nation's common good. In fact, he argued, the two went hand in hand. Husain asserted that the removal of slavery, ignorance, and poverty constituted a form of service performed ‘both for the sake of religion and country’. He added: ‘as Muslims, we are committed to the attainment and maintenance of freedom’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Therefore, while the ‘false’ interpretation of religion could lead to division, ‘true faith’, he argued, was a unifying force: it enjoined Muslims to mobilize for the common good of the nation.

In this context, Jamia's service ethos acquired a new layer of meaning. Its efforts to instil in students a strong sense of devotion to the common good appeared as an attempt to train ‘good Muslims’ who would also be, simultaneously, ‘good Indians’ who served the nation. The invocation of religious values in a national school was, on one level, nothing exceptional. In the 1910s, after all, the National Council of Education had already insisted on the importance of religious teachings.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ What was unusual about Jamia, though, was that, while most of these schools privileged Hindu philosophy, regarded as the ‘natural’ foundation of Indian culture, Jamia members claimed a strong simultaneous attachment to Islamic values and to the national cause. By defining service to the nation as a religious duty for Muslims, Jamia members not only opposed the ‘selfish’ defence of ‘class’ interests in the name of Islam, they also challenged Hindu majoritarian discourses, fast spreading at the time,Footnote ¹⁶¹ which projected Islam as an ‘alien’ religion and enemy of India's national interests and culture. Against the polarization of Hindu and Muslim interests, Jamia teachers articulated a sense of common belonging around the notion of service to nation and society, seen both as a religious and a patriotic duty. In so doing, they indirectly claimed the right to be recognized simultaneously as Muslims and as ‘unhyphenated Indians’.

Overcoming partition: promoting an inclusive conception of ‘composite India’

Despite the rapid communalization of political life, Husain, Mujeeb, and their colleagues thus continued to hold onto the idea that Muslims and non-Muslims should form part of the same nation. Even on the eve of partition, they remained deeply attached to the idea of a united and composite India. However, partition dealt a deep and unprecedented blow to this conception of the nation.

As communal riots engulfed Delhi, about 20,000 Muslims were killed and 330,000 Muslims fled the city in the months following partition.Footnote ¹⁶² Confronted in a very concrete way with the violence of partition, Jamia teachers and students increased initiatives to promote reconciliation, notably between Delhi's Muslim residents and non-Muslim refugees. They tried to create common platforms that cut across religious barriers in order to resume dialogue and to salvage, in their own ways, the idea of a composite India. In that sense, the traumatic experience of partition prompted Jamia members to engage in a more intensive and explicit manner with the question of Muslims’ position in the Indian nation.

Riots directly affected Jamia members. In Karol Bagh, one of Delhi's neighbourhoods most affected by murder and arson, mobs attacked Jamia's buildings and set them alight, killing an entire family.Footnote ¹⁶³ Around the same time, systematic looting and killing started in the villages around Jamia Nagar, prompting Nehru to intervene personally to ensure Jamia's security.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Yet, even in this context, only a handful of Jamia members left for Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ To encourage Delhi's other Muslim residents to stay on, a few students joined in the relief work in the evacuee camps around Humayun's Tomb and Purana Qila,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ where tens of thousands of Delhi's Muslims had sought shelterFootnote ¹⁶⁷ and sometimes waited for an opportunity to move to Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Jamia students brought them food, blankets, and tents.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In parallel, Zakir Husain coordinated different student groups, notably the left-wing Students’ Committee and Students’ Federation, to discuss ways of ‘fighting back communalism’ inside educational institutions.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ He used his connections with Congress leaders, particularly Nehru, to express concern about the ill-treatment of Muslim prisonersFootnote ¹⁷¹ and to raise complaints about the attitude of the police in Muslim localities.Footnote ¹⁷² In this way, he acted as an unofficial intermediary between state authorities and Muslim residents.

Amid exacerbated violence, in an atmosphere of deep distrust between Muslims and non-Muslims, Jamia members focused their attention on restoring dialogue. As the growing influx of Hindu and Sikh refugees from Punjab heightened the anxieties of Delhi's Muslim residents,Footnote ¹⁷³ a group of students turned their efforts towards the city to encourage these people to stay in their homes. Qaiser Naqvi and Shamsur Rahman, two ‘Jamia boys’,Footnote ¹⁷⁴ set up their base in the Bara Hindu Rao school, located between the Old City and Karol Bagh, an area earlier dominated by Muslims,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ where the arrival of refugees had led to pitched battles over the control of the land.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Originally a madrasa, in 1947, the Bara Hindu Rao school was opened to both Muslim and refugee children. This initiative raised resistance and suspicion among residents, who accused the ‘boys’ of being insensitive to their sufferings and refused to allow their children to play with the ‘enemy's’ children. Yet Naqvi and Rahman went ahead with their project and tried to convince some parents to send their children back to school.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ In parallel, Jamia teachers started providing shelter and education to refugee children from the camps. According to one of these refugees, Zakir Husain insisted on giving priority to them. For him, it was their ‘religious duty’ to show the ‘tolerant face of Islam’ to those who had endured the ‘un-Islamic attitude’ of Muslims on the other side of the border.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

As Husain's attitude suggests, these initiatives also constituted a means to ‘redeem’ Muslims for the persecutions that some of their co-religionists had committed. In a speech addressed to Jamia students, Zakir Husain declared that Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs all shared a responsibility for the riots. According to him, all had caused violence not because of their religion, but because they had ‘slaughtered their deen (religion) [and] their iman (faith)’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ As had been the case before independence, Husain continued to insist on the inherent connection between religious and patriotic duty. By showing ‘the tolerant face of Islam’, Husain wanted to demonstrate that ‘good Muslims’ would be ‘good Indians’ not in spite of their religious or communal identity, but because of their allegiance to the ‘true’ principles of Islam.

Jamia's faculty therefore firmly rejected the idea that Muslims’ religious identity hampered their ‘Indian-ness’, or vice versa. Beyond reconciliation, and deeply affected by partition, they sought, after independence, to restore Muslims’ sense of belonging to the nation. With memories of violence still very much alive in everyone's mind, they tried, within the school's premises, to create a strong sense of community among their students, including among non-Muslim refugee children who had joined Jamia during the riots. As these children stayed on campus, either with staff members or in hostels with Muslim students, they developed strong bonds of affection with Jamia members. Jitender Kumar, a former refugee student, thus recalls that for him ‘Jamia was not just a school or a college, it was a family’ where teachers looked after their students with ‘love and heartfelt feelings’ (‘mohabbat aur dili jazbe ke sath’).Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Kumar further remembers that students and teachers celebrated religious festivals together, including non-Muslim festivals such as Holi or Diwali.Footnote ¹⁸¹ This feature was not unique to Jamia, but in the aftermath of partition, these celebrations gained renewed significance. They appeared as a means to reinforce a sense of shared identity, transcending religious differences without denying them.

Similarly, Jamia teachers introduced, in parallel to Islamic studies, a course in Hindu Ethics to accommodate their non-Muslim students.Footnote ¹⁸² Instead of excluding religious instruction from school, as the government did in state-funded institutions,Footnote ¹⁸³ Jamia teachers tried to develop a pluralist system of education that would at once accommodate difference and allow students—Muslims and non-Muslims—to share the same space, both real and symbolic.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

At a time when communal tensions seriously endangered Muslims’ sense of belonging to the nation, Jamia teachers further insisted on their central contribution to India's national culture. In late 1946, they set up a ‘Delhi Museum’ where they gathered books and portraits of Delhi's writers and poets.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ On the walls, photographs of the Qutub Minar, the Jama Masjid, and the Red Fort surrounded a frame with a question ‘Dilli kya hai?’ (‘What is Delhi?’),Footnote ¹⁸⁶ no doubt as a reminder of the importance of the Muslim cultural and architectural contribution to Delhi's identity. In another room, large posters of India's ruling dynasties and famous monuments, such as, again, the Qutub Minar, but also the Meenakshi Temple and the Golden Temple were aligned on a time chart entitled ‘Hindustan ka project’ (India's project), proudly celebrating India's shared legacy, integrated within a single, coherent line.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Put on display around the time of partition, these visual representations appeared as an attempt to project an alternative picture of India's history and identity. They appeared as a means of reclaiming a position—which was never peripheral and always integrated—for Muslims in the Indian nation at a time when Delhi's population and atmosphere were fast changing and pushing Muslims to the margins.

These efforts to represent Indian culture as firmly inclusive of Muslim elements resonated with Nehru and Azad's policy of promoting a composite national culture after independence. For Nehru, the recognition of Muslims’ belonging to the Indian nation was essential to preserving the unity and secular character of the state.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ He shared this conception of Indian secularism with a few other Congress leaders, notably his education minister, Maulana Azad. Together, Nehru and Azad strove to promote an inclusive idea of India's national culture through cultural and educational institutions. With this in mind, in the early years of independence, Maulana Azad established the Sahitya Akademi (1952), the Sangeet Natak Akademi (1952), and the Lalit Kala Akademi (1953):Footnote ¹⁸⁹ India's ‘composite culture’ was not simply a given, it had to be nurtured, particularly at a time when Nehru's political rivals sported majoritarian ideas about Indian culture, based primarily on Hinduism and Hindi.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Azad also believed that educational institutions would play a key role in the development of this ‘common outlook’, able to transcend and harmonize linguistic, cultural, and religious differences. The education reports commissioned after independence all underlined the role of schools and universities in reinforcing India's ‘spiritual’ and ‘cultural’ unity. The Radhakrishnan Commission (1948), of which Zakir Husain was a member, argued, for instance, that universities’ mission was to consolidate the ‘deep’ and ‘spiritual’ foundations of India's ‘common civilisation’.Footnote ¹⁹¹

While central authorities, particularly Nehru and Azad, certainly strove to promote an inclusive idea of Indian culture, they were not alone in taking such initiatives. Muslim institutions, notably Jamia but also Aligarh, took an active part in developing the concept of a ‘composite India’. As suggested above, Jamia's leading figures, who retained some autonomy from the state administration, enthusiastically endorsed education as a tool for emotional integration, even before it became the official objective of the government.Footnote ¹⁹²

Jamia teachers promoted an inclusive, composite Indian culture not only in the classrooms, but also outside the school's premises through adult education. In the 1950s, the Idara-e Talim-o-Taraqqi produced a wide range of publications for neo-literate adults, which included, among others, booklets on Islam as well as on the Vedas, the Guru Granth Sahab, the Bible, and the Upanishads. Their publications further included introductions to ‘famous books’ such as the Mahabharata, the ‘marriage of Ram and Sita’, as well as the Persian story of Shirin and Farhad, and the Shahnama.Footnote ¹⁹³ Just as with Azad's cultural institutions, the list of these publications reflected a very deliberate attempt to build up a common national canon, inclusive of different religious and cultural traditions.

Nehru, who himself supported the Idara's work,Footnote ¹⁹⁴ highlighted on several occasions the value of their publications.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Similarly, Azad's ministry took notice of these pamphlets, which they praised as ‘very popular and useful for the village-folk’.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ They chose to distribute several of them, including a series of booklets dedicated to religious figures such as Krishna, Ram, Buddha, Guru Nanak, the martyrs of Karbala, and Nizamuddin Auliya.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ In so doing, the Ministry used material produced by Jamia, at its initiative, to spread the government's message on ‘composite India’ among sections of the Indian population who otherwise had limited access to formal education.

In parallel, Jamia scholars aimed, along with AMU historians, to deconstruct the colonial and communal narratives of Indian history in order to highlight what Nehru named ‘the continuing synthesis in India's real history’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ As is well known, Aligarh historians played a leading role in the revision of India's history, particularly of its medieval period. Already by the 1920s and 1930s, Mohammad Habib was challenging the idea that Hindus and Muslims formed separate cultural and political blocks. In his work on Sufi saints, Habib showed that Islam had spread on the subcontinent through predication rather than force and conquest, thus stressing the fact that a majority of Indian Muslims were the descendants of local converts rather than of foreign invaders.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Habib, who knew Nehru personally, had great admiration for him.Footnote ²⁰⁰ As president of the Indian History Congress in the direct aftermath of partition, he openly supported Nehru's policy of national integration, arguing that ‘the unity of India [was] one of the fundamental postulates of Indian moral consciousness’.Footnote ²⁰¹ Nehru understood the value of historians’ work in promoting the idea of a composite India. Soon after independence, his government granted one lakh rupees to AMU to fund research in history, with a special focus on the medieval period.Footnote ²⁰² This was a way for the government to encourage historians like Mohammad Habib to pursue their revision of Indian history so as to strengthen an inclusive conception of the Indian nation.

Meanwhile, at Jamia, Habib's brother, Mohammad Mujeeb, offered a similar view of India's shared inheritance. First, he insisted on the fact that the ‘vast majority’ of Indian Muslims were local converts, not outsiders. Second, he emphasized the great social, political, and cultural diversity that existed among Indian Muslims, thereby rejecting the idea that Muslims formed a monolithic community, eager to assert its political independence.Footnote ²⁰³ Like Azad, he insisted on the fact that a large number of Indian Muslims had opposed the Muslim League and their demand for partition. Aligarh and Jamia scholars thus used the medium of writing history to support the idea—also vigorously defended by Nehru—that India formed a ‘composite’ nation, of which Muslims were fully part.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Through their historical studies, they provided Nehru and his allies with a narrative and a scientific legitimacy to defend their vision of ‘unity in diversity’.

After independence, therefore, Jamia members initiated multiple projects to promote an inclusive understanding of the Indian nation. These scholars and teachers, often close to Nehru, did not merely replicate the official discourse on ‘national integration’; their efforts to promote the idea of a ‘composite India’ also stemmed from their own experiences and attempts, as Muslims and educationists, to overcome the trauma of partition and resist marginalization. In that sense, one can argue that the discourse on ‘national integration’, usually associated with Nehru, did not emerge from a single source but from an ongoing dialogue between state and non-state actors, all confronted with the immense challenge of ensuring peace and unity in a partitioned country. For Muslims, more particularly, it also appears to have been an attempt to overcome the experience of violence and exclusion, and to assert their right to belong, as ‘unhyphenated Indians’, to the nation.

A pilot institution for Nehru's government?

Through this discourse on ‘composite India’, Jamia members firmly opposed the downgrading of Indian Muslims to minority status. As before partition, they aimed to play a ‘meaningful’ role in the construction of the nation as a whole. With this objective in mind, they resumed, soon after the end of partition riots, their educational experiments and social work activities. Having worked in close collaboration with Gandhi to develop a national scheme of education, Jamia authorities sought, with the advent of independent India, to retain a similar role, or even to expand it, thanks to government support. However, despite their strong personal and political ties with Nehru and some of his government allies, Jamia members received limited support from the government. This paradoxical situation reflected, beyond Jamia's single case, the many ambiguities of Nehru's policy, particularly on the question of Muslims’ representation in secular India.

At first, Nehru's accession to power seemed to provide favourable conditions for Jamia to play a bigger role in the development of national educational policies. Although Nehru considered that the state constituted the central agent in the modernization of Indian society,Footnote ²⁰⁵ his government also drew inspiration from ‘Gandhian’ ideas of development, based primarily on grassroots initiatives. It supported, for instance, sarvodaya schemes, such as Vinoba Bhave's bhoodan (land gift) and gramdan (village-in-gift) movements, meant to promote a strong sense of collective responsibility among villagers, and encouraged the establishment of village assemblies (gram panchayat), thereby endorsing Gandhi's vision of village ‘self-rule’.Footnote ²⁰⁶

In a similar spirit, Nehru's government endorsed ‘Gandhian’ ideas on education in order to establish a national system of education which would address the needs of the entire population. Just like Gandhi and his Jamia allies, Maulana Azad, India's first education minister, insisted on the need to transform the education system, inherited from colonial rulers, into one adapted to the needs of the nation. At a time when 85 per cent of the population was illiterate, he identified the universalization of education as the top priority in order to democratize education and to train Indians as citizens.Footnote ²⁰⁷ To fulfil this objective, Azad emphasized the importance of basic and adult education.Footnote ²⁰⁸ He surrounded himself with prominent educationists who were themselves in favour of progressive educational methods, notably K. G. Saiyidain, who had worked with Zakir Husain on the Wardha scheme. Under Azad's guidance, the Education Ministry thus embraced ideas and methods developed long before independence by Gandhi and progressive educationists, including at Jamia. Like Gandhi and Jamia teachers, they saw in basic and adult education important instruments with which to build an inclusive society and a democratic order in independent India.

Within this new framework, Jamia appeared as something of a pilot institution, whose experiments could help shape the state's new educational policies. Azad himself considered basic education as a ‘great experiment’ which had to be tested on a wider scale before adopting it at the national level. To encourage these experiments, the Ministry of Education established the Central Institute of Education as a ‘laboratory’ for educational methods.Footnote ²⁰⁹ The Ministry also relied on existing institutions which had carried out educational experiments before independence, most notably Jamia and Tagore's Visva Bharati. Immediately after independence, Azad proposed a special grant to these two institutions to promote educational research and teacher education.Footnote ²¹⁰ Other key political leaders, including Nehru, Azad, and Rajagopalachari, the governor-general of India, also lent financial support to the Idara-e Talim-o-Taraqqi to help the organization resume its activities after partition.Footnote ²¹¹ The new government authorities therefore seemed determined to support Jamia so that it could participate, through its experiments, in the larger reform of India's education system.

Meanwhile, Jamia authorities paid attention to the government's main preoccupations and adjusted their educational project accordingly. They took special note of the government's attempts to promote rural education. Indeed, in 1948, the University Education Commission recommended that the government should establish rural universities to provide general education and occupational training to India's rural population, who represented about 85 per cent of the country.Footnote ²¹² The Commission further suggested that, given its location and its ‘outstanding work’ in the development of basic education, Jamia could become one of the first rural universities in the country.Footnote ²¹³ Greatly encouraged by this, Jamia authorities made special efforts to expand their social and educational activities in rural areas. In 1952, they established the Institute of Rural Economics and Sociology to conduct research in the villages around Jamia.Footnote ²¹⁴ The Idara-e Talim-o-Taraqqi also opened a new section specially dedicated to ‘social education’ and craft-teaching in rural areas.Footnote ²¹⁵ The government's promise to support rural education therefore encouraged Jamia authorities to reinforce their rural orientation.

In addition to this, Jamia authorities started collaborating with the new state institutions involved in development initiatives. In 1952, the central government introduced community development programmes inspired by Gandhi to encourage villagers to participate in self-help activities.Footnote ²¹⁶ In this context, Mujeeb proposed to K. G. Saiyidain, then educational adviser, that Jamia be transformed into a training centre for adult education organizers and village-level workers.Footnote ²¹⁷ After independence, Jamia thus became part of a larger movement, led by state institutions, to promote education and ‘constructive work’ à la Gandhi in rural areas. Its collaboration with Nehru's government seemed to symbolize the (partial) integration of ‘Gandhian’ ideas into the ‘Nehruvian’ project of state-led development.

Jamia's efforts to coordinate its activities with the state's development schemes reflected an important shift in its attitude towards the state. In a letter to Maulana Azad, Shafiqur Rahman Kidwai argued that Jamia was in a ‘unique position’ to support the government's policy of national integration and social reform.Footnote ²¹⁸ With the support of the government it could become, Kidwai argued, a ‘laboratory’ for the new nation, the ‘foundation for a great constructive enterprise’.Footnote ²¹⁹ Unlike in the colonial period, collaborating with state authorities no longer seemed illegitimate. For Jamia members, the government now represented the Indian people. It shared with Jamia similar objectives, such as the promotion of adult education, rural education, and the ‘emotional integration’ of the Indian people.

However, Kidwai's letter also reflected the widening gap between Jamia's ambitions and its capacity to play the role of a pilot institution. Jamia and state reports repeatedly emphasized the discrepancy between the ‘zeal and enthusiasm’ of Jamia workers and their lack of resources.Footnote ²²⁰ Indeed, after partition, Jamia quickly lost the financial support of its main patrons, the Muslim princely rulers. In 1951, Jamia informed the government that the state of Bhopal had stopped its monthly grant and that Hyderabad's monthly grant had also been suspended.Footnote ²²¹ As a result, Jamia became increasingly dependent on the state.

Despite Jamia's political affinities with Congress leaders, the state granted the institution little support. This was due, in part, to divisions among Jamia members, many of whom were reluctant to ask the administration for financial support, for fear that they could lose their autonomy.Footnote ²²² But this was not the only reason: Nehru himself hesitated to extend governmental support to Jamia. Although he recognized the value of Jamia's experiments, he feared that transforming Jamia into a government-sponsored institution could put it in a ‘straightjacket’.Footnote ²²³ As a result, funding remained limited. In 1951, the government increased Jamia's annual grant from Rs 36 000 to 1,8 lakh rupees, a sum meant to cover Jamia's deficit but which did not allow it to recruit new teachers and to expand its infrastructure.Footnote ²²⁴ In these circumstances, Jamia continued to face great difficulties. In 1956, for instance, Mujeeb wrote to K. G. Saiyidain to expose the hardships faced by the new Institute of Art Education. Due to lack of infrastructure, most teaching activities had been conducted in tents for the previous two years. Meanwhile, the committee sent by the government to inspect Jamia considered that, even if the Institute represented ‘a new and useful experiment and the staff [was] earnestly trying to make it a success’, it was ‘not yet sufficiently developed to justify the granting of permanent recognition’.Footnote ²²⁵ This attitude was symptomatic of the government's attitude towards Jamia: although it praised Jamia's experiments, in practice, its concrete financial support remained too limited to allow for a smooth expansion of the institution.

Beyond these financial difficulties, Jamia's situation reflected the broader ambiguities of the government's educational and social policies. While the government had made the universalization of education their top priority, the Ministry of Education suffered from a lack of resources, which jeopardized the implementation of these plans.Footnote ²²⁶ As late as 1990, the Ramamurti Committee, appointed to review the National Policy on Education, noted with regret that ‘despite efforts at social and economic development … a majority of our people continue to remain deprived of education’.Footnote ²²⁷

In parallel, state-sponsored constructive work programmes soon lost their momentum. Bhave's bhoodan and gramdan movements failed to make a lasting impact on the land structure and to replace rajniti (state power) with lokniti (people's power).Footnote ²²⁸ At Jamia, the government withdrew its support from the rural institute even after it had encouraged the development of rural education. Despite the state's Gandhian rhetoric,Footnote ²²⁹ Nehru's government thus continued to privilege a model of development based on industrialization and on technical and scientific education rather than on constructive work and basic education.Footnote ²³⁰ The limited support they offered to Jamia reflected, more largely, the difficult integration of ‘Gandhian’ ideas into the ‘Nehruvian’ project.Footnote ²³¹

The ambiguities of Nehru's ‘Muslim policy’

Moreover, as a ‘nationalist Muslim’ institution, Jamia did not attract much attention from the government. Despite its time-tested efforts to promote reconciliation among Indians of different religious backgrounds, Nehru made little use of Jamia as a symbol of composite India. In his correspondence, he frequently highlighted the value of Jamia's experiments in basic and adult education,Footnote ²³² its privileged connection with Gandhi,Footnote ²³³ or even its work with refugee children,Footnote ²³⁴ but he seldom evoked Jamia's contributions as a Muslim institution.

Instead, Nehru turned his attention towards another Muslim institution, Aligarh Muslim University, to try to promote national integration. In 1951, AMU became one of the first central universities to be directly funded by the central government. As mentioned above, this may appear as a paradoxical choice, given that AMU was widely perceived at the time as the cradle of ‘Muslim separatism’. Yet, this choice appears less surprising when put in the larger perspective of Nehru's—sometimes ambiguous—Muslim policy.

Indeed, an ongoing tension can be detected in Nehru’ approach to India's Muslim population. While, on the one hand, he aspired to contain or transcend religious differences, to the point of making them irrelevant, on the other hand, he also tried to reassure Muslims, thereby acknowledging their difference.Footnote ²³⁵ For instance, Nehru opposed the idea of separate electorates or reserved seats for religious minorities, which he saw as a threat to national unity. At the same time, he urged Congress leaders to secure an adequate number of seats for Muslim candidates so as to dispel Congress's image as a Hindu party and to encourage Muslim citizens to support Congress.Footnote ²³⁶

Nehru's government further turned towards religious organizations, particularly Jamiat Ulema, to reach out to the ‘Muslim masses’. In the early years of independence, the government followed, with great attention, Jamiat's efforts to build an all-India Muslim platform. Azad, who was not a member of Jamiat, himself participated in the meetings of the Jamiat's Working Committee, Central Committee, and Consultative Committee. According to Friedmann, this systematic participation in Jamiat's central organs lent greater credence to the organization's claims to represent Indian Muslims. Paradoxically, Nehru's professedly ‘secular’ government thus contributed to ‘building up the image of the [Jamiat Ulema] as the representative organization of the Indian Muslims’.Footnote ²³⁷

In so doing, the government reinforced, consciously or not, the idea that Indian Muslims formed a separate community. Their allies from Jamiat Ulema themselves saw ‘composite India’ as a loose federation of distinct religious communities. At the time of the Khilafat movement, they justified the political alliance between Muslims and non-Muslims as a ‘covenant’ in which each group, defined along religious lines, would retain a high degree of autonomy.Footnote ²³⁸ After partition, these scholars continued to embrace the same policy: while they supported Nehru's Congress, they insisted on Muslims’ autonomy in matters of religion and culture.

In contrast, at Jamia, Mujeeb and Abid Husain sought to promote a conception of ‘composite nationalism’ that did not confine India's Muslims to a separate community. Unlike Deobandi ‘ulama, Mujeeb and Husain sought to uncover, beneath religions’ ‘outer’ differences, their common principles. Inspired by Gandhi, whom he saw as a ‘seeker of Truth’,Footnote ²³⁹ Abid Husain thus spoke of a ‘universal religion of man’, transcending religious boundaries.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Similarly, Mujeeb declared that Jamia's mission was to make students ‘aware of the underlying principles of [their] faith[s] and [of] the traditions in which they are embodied’. By focusing on these ‘underlying principles’, he argued, Jamia teachers would be taking ‘the further step of demonstrating the fundamental unity of all religions’.Footnote ²⁴¹

Mujeeb and Abid Husain considered that this ‘fundamental unity of all religions’ could help reinforce the nation's unity. In his Destiny of Indian Muslims, Abid Husain envisioned ‘the diversity of religions merging into one true religion’. He warned Indian Muslims against the risk of ‘drifting away from the mainstream of national life’Footnote ²⁴² by locking themselves into the position of a minority. Instead of focusing on Muslims’ religious autonomy, he advocated the teaching of a ‘universal moral religion of humanity’ as a remedy to Hindu and Muslim communalism.Footnote ²⁴³

This ‘universalist’ conception of religion was very close to that of Gandhi or Radhakrishnan, the famous philosopher and educationist, who saw the ‘spiritual’ development of the nation as essential to its integration.Footnote ²⁴⁴ Like them, Husain asserted that ‘spiritual unity’ could serve as the ‘foundation of national unity’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ In his eyes, India's secular character need not lead to the exclusion of religions from the public sphere. Against the idea that secularism was anti-religious, he argued that a secular state could be ‘based on some of the highest moral values which all religions have emphasised’.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Similarly, Mujeeb underlined the merits of religious instruction in a plural secular state. He argued that by ‘demonstrating’ the ‘fundamental unity’ of all religions, religious education could ‘foster an attitude that is not just courtesy or toleration based on ignorance, but an expression of true humanity’.Footnote ²⁴⁷ Unlike Nehru, who sought to contain the influence of religions in the public sphere, lest it exacerbate communal tensions,Footnote ²⁴⁸ Mujeeb and Abid Husain thus defended the idea that religious education could contribute to the spiritual unity of the nation, provided it emphasized the ‘underlying’ principles shared by all religions. This spiritual foundation, they argued, would give the nation a much stronger unity than the mere toleration of each other's differences. In this way, Mujeeb and Husain tried to propose an alternative to both ‘pure secularism’ and a form of ‘composite nationalism’ that reinforced separate religious identities.

Yet, despite their efforts to secure a central position for Muslims in the nation-building process, an objective shared by Nehru, Jamia's heads met with little support from state authorities. In practice, Nehru's government turned primarily towards institutions identified as ‘Muslim representatives’ either because of their religious nature, as in Jamiat Ulema's case, or because of their former association with ‘Muslim politics’, as in the case of Aligarh.

Thus, when Nehru turned towards AMU after partition, he clearly identified the University as a Muslim institution. Interestingly for a man who sought to contain religious differences, during his visit to the University in 1948 he addressed students as a Muslim group while defining himself as a Hindu: ‘You are Muslims,’ he said, ‘and I am a Hindu.’ Nehru went on: ‘[India's] cultural inheritance is yours as well as mine.’Footnote ²⁴⁹ In other words, India's shared legacy belonged to Muslims as much as to Hindus. This discourse, meant to enhance Muslim students’ sense of belonging to the Indian nation, foreshadowed the government's decision to transform both AMU and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) into central universities.Footnote ²⁵⁰ To promote an inclusive conception of the nation, state authorities put these two institution on an equal level, thereby highlighting their denominational character: in their eyes, AMU was to be the Muslim counterpart to the Hindu BHU.

For Nehru, AMU was not simply a Muslim institution but also a former stronghold of Muslim League politics. In his 1948 address, he recalled the estrangement between Congress and AMU in the years preceding partition, when large numbers of students and teachers had supported the Muslim League's campaign for Pakistan: ‘We have been separated … by a distance of spirit and outlook,’ he said, rather euphemistically. Nehru explicitly engaged with the question of Pakistan, assuming that ‘this subject must be present in [students’] minds’. He promised that the Indian government had no desire ‘to strangle and crush Pakistan and to force it into a reunion with India’,Footnote ²⁵¹ a way, he thought, of assuaging the concerns of AMU students.

By evoking Pakistan in this way his objective was not, of course, to encourage pro-Pakistan tendencies among AMU students but to reassure them about the state's intentions. For Nehru, his main purpose was to win over AMU students, convince them that secular India—‘which includes people of all religions and shades of opinion’—was a better home for them than ‘religious, theocratic’ Pakistan. By highlighting India's shared legacy, he aimed to show that they too could, and should, be part of the nation's future: if ‘the past holds us together’, he asked, ‘why should the present or the future divide us in spirit’.

Similarly, by granting AMU central university status, Nehru's objective was not to encourage ‘separatist’ tendencies but to rally AMU to his nation-building project. Soon after independence, he and Azad supported the appointment of Zakir Husain at the head of the institution. By choosing a man whose commitment to India's unity was beyond doubt, the two Congress leaders aimed to ‘reorient’ the institution, move it away from its Muslim League legacy so that it could become a symbol of composite India. Husain himself embraced this agenda. In a letter to India's president Rajendra Prasad, he insisted on the need to dissociate AMU's promotion of modern education from its ‘separatist’ legacy. He argued: ‘the essence of the work at Aligarh at this stage in our national history is to see that the first aspect is revived and strengthened and the second liquidated and forgotten’. Husain saw in AMU's reform a ‘work of national importance’:

Like Nehru, Husain therefore regarded AMU as a Muslim symbol, able to crystallize the efforts to ‘revive hope and faith’ among Muslims. By reforming AMU, he intended, along with Nehru, to rally the ‘despondent Muslim masses’ to the idea of a secular democratic India. For both men, the erstwhile ‘arsenal of Muslim India’ was to become a symbol and an instrument of national integration.Footnote ²⁵³

Thus, even if Nehru's objective—the achievement of national unity—was radically different from that of the former colonial rulers, by focusing on the institution's reform, Nehru reproduced certain aspects of British Muslim policy. Like them, Nehru's government regarded India's Muslim citizens as a distinct group of people, led by their own elites, be they religious, as in Jamiat Ulema's case, or secular, as in the case of Aligarh. Government authorities privileged a top-down approach: instead of building direct contacts with Muslim citizens, they relied on so-called ‘Muslim representatives’ to mediate between state authorities and the Muslim ‘masses’.

Within this framework, there was little scope for a small institution like Jamia. Unlike Jamiat Ulema and AMU, Jamia Millia was not a religious body per se, nor had it played a prominent role in ‘Muslim politics’. Its proximity to Congress and its tensions with the Muslim League before partition had probably blurred, for many, its ‘Muslim’ image. Finally, Mujeeb and Abid Husain's efforts to transcend religious barriers did not sit well with the idea, widespread among government circles, that Indian Muslims formed a separate community.

This probably explains why Nehru put forward AMU, rather than Jamia, as a symbol of national integration. Despite AMU's past association with the Muslim League, Nehru considered that the University could act as a more efficient, more powerful mediator between the government and the Muslim population. He thus implicitly subscribed to the idea that Muslims formed a separate community, a community to be rallied to the national project. In so doing, he neglected the fact that Muslims did not to be rallied: as Jamia members strove to demonstrate, Indian Muslims could in fact be co-producers of this national project.