Death of a seminary

The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb granted the property of a European merchant to a learned family in Lucknow. This was named Farangi Mahall, and this was the name by which the family is known. Any student of modern Indian history would know how some learned men made Lucknow the centre for the study of medicine, religious jurisprudence, Islamic philosophy, logic, social and physical sciences and theology. Students will be equally familiar with its role during the Khilafat protest and the Non-Cooperation movements in the early 1920s. That was when Gandhi visited this institution to conduct his parleys with its spiritual head, Maulana Abdul Bari. At no time, wrote the essayist-novelist, Abdul Halim Sharar in Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, can one find a centre of learning in Delhi like the Farangi Mahall.

Longing to see the place and talk to its inmates, I reached Lucknow’s historic locality, Nakhas, in the very heart of the city’s wild disorder. ‘‘Where is Farangi Mahall?’’ I asked a gentleman dressed in a red beard that fanned out to his shoulders. ‘‘What? How am I supposed to know?’’ he answered curtly. Pacing up and down the crowded street, I stopped at the Shia College gate, where the chowkidar, with enormous black moustaches, mumbled for a while before directing me to a poorly lit lane. ‘‘It is somewhere there,’’ he said hurriedly. What surprised me was their disquieting, impenetrable naivete, their ignorance, and their total lack of awareness of their immediate surroundings.

Making my way through the alleys with considerable difficulty, I reached my destination. Just then, I saw the urine of the sacred cows spread slowly in great puddles. A man stood not far away praying, moving his lips. Gripped, as soon as I entered, by the shadows and the silence, I tried to fix in my memory as many as possible of the things I saw around me in the brief instant I stayed there. What I saw and experienced repulsed me. Believe me, there was nothing much to write home about. Today, the Nadwat al-ulama, also in Lucknow, flourishes. Farangi Mahall, on the other hand, languishes in the chowk mohalla. To cut a long story short, this institution is a living testimony to the decline of traditional centres of learning. The Farangi Mahall family itself disintegrated after Partition, some opting to go to Pakistan while others stayed put in India. Muslim politicians in Uttar Prad-esh talk big, but they pay little attention to the revival of those institutions that can still play a role in the community’s intellectual and cultural life.

The moral of the story is that Farangi Mahall, despite its glorious past, is not a site that inspired me to a second visit. If I do wish to know its history, my best bet, I discovered after returning to Delhi, was to read a book published last month by a British scholar, who has written perceptively on Islam in South Asia. Anyone who has, like myself, benefited by Dr. Francis Robinson’s earlier work on Muslim separatism in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) is bound to treat anything he writes with special attention. In this work, he uncovers the world of the pious and learned men of Farangi Mahall, plots their trajectory through two centuries, and explains their complex relationships with the society outside the boundaries of the seminary. ‘‘The learned and holy men of the Farangi Mahall family,’’ writes Francis Robinson in his lively style, ‘‘are a remarkable body of people in the history of South Asia; indeed they would be remarkable in that of any society.’’

Why? Many of them were scholars and teachers for nearly three centuries, drawing students and disciples not only from all parts of India but also from places as far away as Arabia and China. Second, many of them were perceived as men of piety by their followers, who followed their advice on religious/theological matters. Third, at a time when Western ideas and institutions were beginning to threaten inherited traditional values, the role of the ulama of Farangi Mahall was to defend Islam and the Muslim communities. In so doing, they acted as guardians, interpreters and transmitters of Islamic knowledge. They made available and interpreted to each generation the central messages of Islam, that is, knowledge of God’s word and how to know it in one’s heart. Several members of the family turned to other callings, joining government service, journalism, or the medical profession (unani). But many more survived as teachers transmitting the word of god and the skills required to understand it. Indeed, they were quite often the ones who exemplified the family code of right conduct.

‘Watch me’’, stated Maulana Abd al-Razaq, ‘‘so long as I follow our pious predecessors, follow me; and if I do not follow our pious predecessors, do not follow me. Our predecessors were better than we are, because they lived closer to the time of the Holy Prophet’’.

Besides these fascinating details, Dr. Robinson provides a useful supplement to the conventional outlines of the historians of South Asian Islam. The chapter on scholarship and mysticism in Awadh is sound and instructive. What it does is to place the ulama of Farangi Mahall in the context of an Islamic world system based on shared systems of formal and spiritual knowledge. There is a lot more for the specialist to read, especially the last two chapters of the book. The value of this lies in Dr. Robinson’s own contribution and in the synthesis, which it offers, of the work of a generation and more on the impact of colonialism on traditional societies. This is a central theme — if not the central theme — of 19th century Islam in South Asia, and in dealing with some of its critical aspects, the author provides, and deserves our thanks for providing, a useful starting point for further advance.

This is a stimulating book, informative, clearly arranged, and well provided with footnotes that direct the reader to the relevant authorities. But like most writers with a thesis, Dr. Robinson tends at times to exaggeration. He sees Farangi Mahall influence everywhere. He writes with feeling, if sometimes repetitively, on how good and great was the ulama of Farangi Mahall. All said and done, however, The Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia is certainly a readable and authoritative account. It is a record of a bold and heroic attempt to repair the ruins of a crumbling edifice. I hope it will make its appeal to an even wider public.

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