Memorial for Zakaullah

Imagine the agony of a family closely connected with the Delhi court witnessing the eclipse of the Mughals and Bahadur Shah Zafar’s unceremonious removal. Imagine, too, how those brought up with notions of stability and political acquiescence would have reacted to Hindustan becoming ‘the arena of the mighty whirlwind and the blazing fire.’ Consider, moreover, what it meant for a family steeped in learning and scholarship to discover the loss of the city’s great libraries. One of them belonged to Nawab Ziauddin Ahmad Khan of Loharu. It had supplied the manuscripts from which Henry Elliot compiled his eight volumes of translated excerpts on the history of India.

The family I refer to is that of Munshi Muhammad Zakaullah. Though fascinated by the liberal west and virtually seduced by Western science and technology, ‘the shock of those last Mutiny days was beyond all bearing.’ He studied mathematics under ‘Master’ Ram Chandra’s tutelage, taught at Delhi College (founded in 1825), an early and significant enterprise in secular education, and at Agra and Allahabad. His circle of friends and colleagues in Delhi College included the great novelist Nazir Ahmad, Muhammad Husain ‘Azad’, Maulvi Karim Bakhsh, Rai Piyare Lal ‘Ashob’, Kanhya Lal, Mir Babar Ali, Master Nand Kishore, and the Arabic scholar Maulvi Ziauddin. They were the pioneers of Delhi’s renaissance.

It was characteristic of Zakaullah’s energy that he published 146 books. Besides, he contributed 10,000 pages to numerous newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. Several thousand pages of manuscript were found in boxes at the time of his death. His first work was on playing cards and chess, an entertaining guide to forms of leisure and recreation in early nineteenth-century Delhi. He wrote a 10-volume history of India, his magnum opus, and translated twenty-three volumes of mathematical works in Urdu. Some of his other works are solid enough to be useful for reference, and to deserve a long life. But Urdu’s virtual disappearance from India has made that impossible. Most of his books have either vanished from our libraries, or gather dust on bookshelves.

Besides his erudition, what is so special about Delhi’s grand old man? First, he did not cling to the past: it was the living present that engaged his attention. He did not bemoan the Mughal Empire’s collapse; instead, he argued that only by contact with a fresh and younger civilisation could life and vigour flow back into the community and the country. His liberal humanism was yet another feature of his multi-faceted personality. He therefore asserted that virtues such as honesty, truthfulness, loyalty to friends, and concern for the poor and the needy, had a place in any great civilisation. In other words, the Islamic ethical ideal was not very different from the ethical ideals of other religions.

A devout Muslim, Zakaullah was untainted by the spirit of religious bigotry. He did not draw religious boundaries in his personal and professional conduct. By word and example, he tried bridging the gulf between the two religious communities. C.F. Andrews, his biographer, described him as ‘one of God’s peace-makers who brought unity among the children of men by his goodness and love.’ The most eloquent tribute to his memory came from Pandit Tulsi Ram. Every evening when his family lighted the lamps to worship, they included Zakaullah’s name in the prayer repeated at that time, along with the names of other close family members.

The Coronation Durbar was held on December 12 1911. The state entry into the newly chosen imperial capital, led by George V riding a horse, went through the Red Fort and onto the big maidan between the Fort and the Jama Masjid. But there was no Zakaullah to witness the curtain being drawn on another phase in Delhi’s history. He had died on November 7, 1910, and buried in the Sufi shrine of Shah Abdul Salam Faridi.

‘‘Seldom’’, novelist Ahmed Ali wrote in Twilight of Delhi (1940), ‘‘is one allowed to see a pageant of history whirl past, and partake in it too. Ever since becoming the capital in the early nineteenth century, imbibing knowledge and ideas and imparting cultures, becoming homogeneous and cosmopolitan in spite of the origins and ethnicity of its rulers and inhabitants, Delhi had remained the embodiment of a whole country, free of the creedal ghosts and apparitions that haunt some of modern India’s critics and bibliographers chased by the dead souls of biased historians of yesterday.’’

Stimulating the local patriotism of Delhi’s citizens isn’t my intention, but I wish to invoke a fragment of their past that has vanished into the mists of history. Resurrecting even a fragment would have been a painstaking exercise; so I’ve focused on an individual who embodied the values of Delhi culture and society that are worth remembering even in these dark times.

If Sheila Dikshit and her colleagues in the Delhi government are convinced, they must build a memorial for Zakaullah. Otherwise, Indian society as a whole may no longer value, as before, and perhaps may not even know, the principles for which he and others like him stood.

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