A different kind of secularist
Mujeeb Rizvi was a scholar-teacher who fought the pundits and the bigots
Written by Mahmood Farooqui
Written by Mahmood Farooqui
The passing away of Professor Mujeeb Rizvi brings alive an
old cliché that it is the passing of an era. His personal and intellectual
biography represents the journey of a nation from its inception to its somewhat
fraught maturity. Born and educated at Allahabad, the crucible of nationalist
politics in the pre-independence era, he went on to study at the Aligarh Muslim
University (AMU) before founding the Hindi department at Jamia Millia Islamia,
where he remained the presiding head for nearly 30 years. His subject of study
was medieval ‘Hindi’ poetry, a field dominated by pundits, literally and
metaphorically. His disputations with punditry of all sorts, Hindu-Muslim,
Urdu-Hindi, reflect an ethos and an era that seems quite incredible from the
vantage point of our more bigoted times.
Born in the Chail region of Allahabad, which was famous for
Syeds as well as police officers, he came to study at Allahabad in the 1940s,
when independence and partition were around the corner. After finishing high
school and intermediate there, he joined the famous university of the town a
few years after independence. He was lucky enough to witness a university at
the peak of its glory where the modern discipline of Indian history was being
formed by pioneers such as Tarachand, Noorul Hasan and Satish Chandra.
It was while at university that he came under the influence
and mentorship of the famous Gandhian, Pandit Sunderlal. He spent many years as
his political and spiritual disciple. Rizvi joined Sunderlal’s peace mission to
Telangana soon after the communist uprising of 1948, and a mission to China.
Besides being a politician, Sunderlal was also a scholar. His two-volume tome,
Bharat Mein Angrezi Raj, a blistering attack on British rule in India, had been
banned by colonial authorities. He also wrote a succint polemic called How
India Lost Her Freedom. The scholarship of these books is second to no
historian of the period, but in addition they are informed by a moral
indignation which parallels other anti-colonial polemicists like Frantz Fanon
and C.L.R. James. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Sunderlal, all his life Rizvi
struggled against the burden of ‘angreziyat without the angrez’ , which was to
become the fate of independent India.
Sunderlal was against both Persianised Urdu and Sanskritised
Hindi and argued in favor of a simpler Hindustani, a la Gandhi, but sadly
Hindustani lost out to Hindi by one vote in the Constituent Assembly. Soon
after, Rizvi had an encounter with Purshottam Das Tandon, the right-wing Congress leader of UP
who taunted him as to why Muslims do not study Hindi. Smarting at the taunt and
desirous of bringing his political and personal life closer, Rizvi then went on
to study Hindi at the AMU.
At that time the university was reeling under the impact of
Partition. Widely seen as the crucible for Pakistan, the stigma against the
university was strong. It had lost most of its teaching staff as well as a
majority of its students after 1947. The Muslim students who remained were
strongly pro Muslim League. In tow with the student wing of the Communist
party, of which he was never a formal member, Rizvi and his friends fought
bitter ideological wars, academically and politically, with right-wing elements
of both communities.
Afterwards, he joined Jamia in Delhi. Jamia Millia Islamia
was a highly important experiment in nationalist education. Founded in 1920 at
the peak of the Khilafat-Non Cooperation Movement, Jamia set itself up against
the crony and separatist politics of Aligarh. Inspired by Gandhi and following
his ideas on Basic Education, Jamia already had a sterling record as a secular
and nationalist education centre by the time Rizvi joined. It demanded of its
teachers more than educational instruction. It asked them to be role models of
service, for the students as well as the community around. Jamia’s famous adult
education program, with outreach extending to several villages in that corner of
South Delhi, remains distinguished in the country. Teachers and students ate
from the same mess, lived simply and practised ideas of education that extended
beyond class room teaching. Its famous vice chancellors, Zakir Husain and
Sheikh Mujeeb to name a few, and teachers, articulated an academic, emotional
and theological space for the Nationalist Muslims, across the country, who
badly needed this succor after the dark days of Partition.
For his PhD, Rizvi chose the apt theme of Jayasi’s Padmavat,
a 16th century poetic epic, in a genre called sufi premakhyans. For nearly five
centuries, sufis of North India had created epic poetic works which, while
ostensibly replete with Hindu religious terminology and deeply influenced by
Sanskrit erotic conventions, depicted the internal spiritual journey of a sufi.
These poets extensively translated passages from the Quran and from Persian
masters to create a language and a discourse without which the great Bhakti
poets such as Tulsi or Kabir may not have existed. Some of these works were
even recited from mosques in medieval India. Rizvi’s distinctive contributions
to this field, including the wider world of Bhakti poetry, was to show their
great debt to Persian, in vocabulary and in choice of themes.
This is something that famous Indologists such as George
Grierson as well as Hindi scholars, mostly Brahmins, who dominated this field
of study had completely missed out leading to erroneous conclusions. Rizvi was
a dedicated teacher who preferred to spend time with his students rather than
to produce research papers to advance his academic career. The list of people
who benefited from his discourses cuts through many fields. Historians such as
Shahid Amin, Muzaffar Alam and Aditya Behl, Hindi writers such as Asghar Wajahat
and Abdul Bismillah are only a few names of the thousands who benefitted from
his learning and affection.
Through the nearly 50 years he spent in and around Jamia, he
spent the longest fighting ‘the Mullahs’. One of his favorite statements was to wonder why “God only spoke
in Arabic to the Mullahs”. And he did this from within the largely Muslim
dominated landscape of Jamia, the university as well as the locality. Yet,
Rizvi’s secularism was not hollow of religion. He found his secularism from
deep within the practice of religion in this country, from figures such as the
Gujarati saint Mahamati Prannath, who wanted to teach Aurangzeb the Quran!
Since the time off Gandhi, intellectuals in India have come
in broadly two forms, desi and vilayati, English educated though they may all
be. The desi ones know that all wisdom does not come from the West. Rizvi was a
desi intellectual par excellence. Of all scholars and activists I have seen,
perhaps thanks to his early training, I found Rizvi occuping the most unique
position. He was a Gandhian as well as a leftist, a secularist as well as
profoundly versed in religion, an agnostic who was truly spiritual and a sufi
who put humour before seriousness.
A scholar who put praxis before pedantry, a devotee without
any sectarianism, he embodied a true sense of karuna. Not for him the humbug of
seminars, publications, conferences and self promotion. He sat in his place,
engaged with the world, in it yet not of it. He imparted affective, not bookish
knowledge. He represented a generation of intellectuals, secular Muslim
nationalists, who occupied the most precarious position in this nation, then
and now, and, perhaps, because of it came to stand for the best and the most
exemplary that modern India has to offer. We have lost an irreplaceable scholar
of medieval India. But more than that we have lost a life and a man, of modern
India, that we may soon not know how to mourn.
Baatein Hamari Yaad Rahein Ab Baatein Na Aisi Suniyega/
Parhte Kisi ko Suniyega to Der Talak Sar Dhuniyega
(Remember our talk, for you will not hear it again/
You will hit your
head for long when you hear it recited)
