Hemmed in by an apartment block and shiny new houses, Prof Irfan Habib’s home and sprawling garden in Badar Bagh in Aligarh is an oasis, a repository of history and memories, much like its owner. As the afternoon sun travels through the verandah, the garden comes to life. Three peacocks strut through the greens, the parakeets screech from a tree top and a crow pheasant lends its baritone to the chorus. “We get many migrant birds but I am afraid I can’t identify all. My uncle was a great bird scholar though,” says Habib, referring to India’s celebrated ornithologist Salim Ali. “One of his grand tours was to Tibet. I often asked him to write on his experiences in Tibet. but he wrote only on the birds,” he laughs. Inside, in his study, books fill up the entire room and in a corner, stands a motorcycle, an unlikely prop for a library. It’s from this corner of the nearly 100-year-old house that Habib, who turns 94 this August, has chronicled the history and journey of a nation. Author of The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707; An Atlas of the Mughal Empire; Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception; Medieval India: The Study of a Civilization; Economic History of Medieval India, 1200-1500; and An Atlas of Ancient Indian History, Habib’s writings have thrown a light on India’s past — from ancient to medieval and modern India. “Nowadays, I doze here more than I write,” he grins. Age may have forced him to take things a bit easy but Habib — among India’s foremost historians, an authority on medieval and Mughal India, and Professor Emeritus at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), where he spent his entire teaching career in its much-respected History Department — is showing no signs of slowing down. He still edits the biannual journal brought out by the Aligarh Historians Society, a group that meets regularly and which sponsored the People’s History of India, a book series project that Habib edited. At present, he is completing his book on Akbar — he had previously edited a book on the life and times of the Mughal Emperor called Akbar and His India (OUP, 1999). Habib still goes to the department two or three times a week. “I go there to meet my colleagues, catch up on the gossip and we run everyone down,” he jokes. For generations of students at AMU, Irfan sahab on his bicycle was a familiar sight. “I would always cycle to the university,” says Habib. A fall about 10 years ago put a stop to it. “I fell and it was not a nice sight. So, I stopped cycling. Now I go in a lordly way in a car,” says Habib. The cycle, an institution in its own right, now stands in one part of the bathroom, an unlikely bath accessory. At the university, teachers and students drop in to meet him regularly, seeking his guidance on a range of subjects. “Our classroom is next to Prof Habib’s chamber and I go and meet him often and ask him for suggestions. He is very friendly and is always ready to help us,” says Amna Asim, a postgraduate student at the department. “As a teacher, he always encouraged me to question,” says historian Shireen Moosvi, who taught at AMU and is the author of The Mughal Empire, c. 1595: A Statistical Study and Taxation, Trade and People in Mughal India. Habib, in fact, was responsible for making Moosvi take up history. “I was doing research in mathematics in Lucknow but we then moved to Aligarh. I met Habib sahab and he told me you have studied mathematics and you know Persian, so why don’t you pursue history now,” says Moosvi. The dwindling number of people who can read Persian worries Habib. “There are not many people who can read Persian. It’s not just Muslim history that will be lost, a lot of Hindu history will be lost,” he says. The role of historians In these polarised times, when language is politicised and much of history is contested, the historian’s isn’t an easy job. “I think Indian historians have done fairly well. They have been largely critical and their methodology most of the times has been, I think, unobjectionable. Of course, there would be tendencies towards both nationalism and regionalism, as is quite obvious on the question of the identity of the Indus Valley Civilisation. There is a whole group of historians who still insist that the Indus characters carry the Sanskrit language although to any objective student, this would be laughable because the symbols that we found from the Indus Civilisation and also the few sculptures do not suggest any relationship with Vedic rituals, beliefs or ideas. But still, you find this is a very strong, often officially supported, position,” he says. Recently, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin had offered a $1 million prize to anyone who would decipher the Indus Valley script following a study by the state’s archaeology department that showed similarities between the signs and graffiti found in Indus Valley and those discovered during digs in Tamil Nadu. “Clearly, there is a relationship with Tamil, though I must say a very partial relationship. But there is no such relationship at all with Sanskrit. In some writings I saw, the Rigveda is dated as far back as 8,000 BC. It’s not only impossible but ridiculous. The Rigveda is dated fairly well because of its relationship with Avesta (primary collection of religious literature of Zoroastrianism),” says Habib. On politics and political boundaries that often lead to contestations of history, Habib says, “I don’t know how a professional historian is bothered about political boundaries. How does it matter whether Harappa and Mohenjo Daro were in India or in Pakistan? India was one country before 1947. In the history of India, Peshawar is as much a part of our history as Calcutta. We must recognise that whatever the present boundaries, before 1947, there was a definite country recognised as India, a recognition that perhaps goes back to the Mauryan empire and that recognition is not shaken by Partition. We had a common civilisation before that time, therefore, pre-1947 history should be treated as the history of the whole of India,” he says. Critics of Habib and other Marxists historians often accuse them of having dominated Indian universities after Independence and of stifling all other voices. “Well, first of all, if you go into quantitative data, how many Marxists were there in Indian historiography? And a Marxist who writes only on the basis of Marxist writings would be an absurdity. If you are studying Mughal India, you are going to go to documents, you are going to study chronicles, you are going to study what historians wrote at that time, what foreigners wrote at that time. Whether you are a Marxist or a non-Marxist, the data is the same. Only the difference begins when it comes to allowing weights to particular facts. And that is, of course, true of not only Marxists and non-Marxists, but all historians,” says Habib, who joined AMU as a lecturer in 1953. Some have also pointed to what they see as a shortcoming in Indian historians — an inability to engage with the larger audience. “You can’t manufacture facts to make history interesting. Historians only write what they know to have happened. They can’t write stories. But research and making things popular go together and I tried my hand at People’s History of India,” says Habib. The early years Habib had just completed his high school when India became independent, and Partition took place. His father, Prof Mohammad Habib, taught history at AMU and the family lived in the city. “There were no riots in Aligarh. (Sardar) Patel had sent the Kumaon Regiment, one of the ace regiments in India, to protect AMU. There was total peace here, but I would still say that the Kumaon Regiment was very important for us,” says Habib. In the months following Partition, the university saw several teachers and students leaving Aligarh for Pakistan. “There was a large amount of migration from the university, reducing student numbers from 3,000 to 800. But the classes never stopped, not even for a day,” says Habib, comparing those days with the more than occasional shutdowns that colleges see today. The university pulled through those tumultuous years and Habib, whose interest and training in history had begun early, continued to study in Aligarh. It was his father who got him interested in Ashokan inscriptions and the Brahmi script. “I learnt the Brahmi script from inscriptions. I was in Class 8,” he says. Ashoka, he says, was his favourite from the entire cast of historical characters. His father, whose subject was medieval India, was a Congressman and knew Nehru well. “One day in 1942, my elder brother and I were playing here,” he says, pointing to the garden, “when suddenly, a tonga came in and out jumped Nehru. He took no notice of us —that disheartened me. He just came to this door, knocked on it, opened it and called out, ‘Habib, get me a sandwich’,” he remembers. By the time he met Nehru next, Habib, a college topper, was already teaching at the university. “He scolded me at a tea party here where he was invited. I was having my tea, and my fellow colleagues had dropped all kinds of things on the grass. Unfortunately, Nehru caught me and said, ‘You call yourself an educated person, a teacher and you throw all sorts of things on the grass? What will the gardener do tomorrow?’ Before I could answer, he had turned and left,” laughs Habib. His paths crossed with Nehru again when Habib won a Government of India scholarship to study at Oxford, but was denied a passport. “The Home Ministry refused to give me a passport although Pandit G B Pant was a friend of my father’s. But then Nehru overruled him. He called me to Delhi and then decided in my favour,” he says. “I wasn’t issued a passport because of my membership of the CPM,” adds Habib, who joined the Communist Party in 1950. “Now I am a retired kind of a member. I used to be the president of the employees’ union of the university and used to go into negotiations but I am too old now.” he says. Habib’s hopes for the future Never much of a traveller, Habib now keeps abreast of the developments in the country from his home which he shares with his wife, a retired economics professor at AMU, and his son Faiz who recently retired as a cartographer from the university’s history department. The couple have three more children — a son who is an academic, another a scientist in the US and a daughter who is a scientist. “None of them are historians,” he smiles. From his homestead, he has seen events unfold — the recent furore over the mosque in Sambhal and now, closer home, a new claim on the 18th-century Jama Masjid in Aligarh. “The Supreme Court has told the local courts not to take up such cases but despite its orders, no local court is obeying them,” he says. On December 12, the Supreme Court barred civil courts across the country from registering fresh suits challenging the ownership and title of any place of worship, and from ordering surveys of disputed religious places. “The Places of Worship Act was a necessity, it froze religious places as they were in 1947,” he says. Habib is concerned about what he sees around him — the “rewriting of history in textbooks”, the forefronting and sharpening of ideologies and identities. “You have taken Akbar out and put Maharana Pratap in. But how can there be Maharana Pratap without Akbar. But if you go on like this, the country does change,” he says, thoughtfully. “I meet people today, they are very different from how they were in 1947 or ‘50s. They have succeeded in changing the psyche of the Indian people to an extent, at least the middle classes.” Does he find this change in his circle too? “That circle is getting shorter and shorter,” he laughs. “Because it’s the question of critical perception of history and that kind of investigation starts with certain assumptions, one of which is the absence of false nationalism. Clearly, a critical spirit is necessary for history,” says Habib, who has travelled with the country’s past and chronicled it for the future. He has seen the country change in myriad ways but, he says, what will sustain India as a nation is the Constitution. “As a very old man, I would go back to what one hoped for in 1947 and to the discussions on the Constitution. Many reforms took place after Independence. For instance, landlordism of the old kind was abolished and industrial growth of India was also established. Some dreams have been fulfilled but there was an expectation of equity at the time of freedom that I think has not been fulfilled,” he says.
