It is difficult to reckon the breadth of scholarship once commonplace in the knowledge centres of pre-colonial India. Masters of multiple arts and sciences, these scholars were both teachers and practitioners of their disciplines.

The rigorous education that prepared them for a life of scholarship and service was a very different experience from the curtailed, shallow education carefully measured out in the academia in our time. It was also a different view of learning, in which the knowledge acquired by scholars connected them to a continuum of literary, philosophical, political and religious traditions, allowing for the continuation of an individual’s links to his cultural and intellectual heritage.

This system of knowledge, which focused on the student achieving a very high level of proficiency in languages at an early age, was both indigenous and universal, in the sense that a similar system was being followed across Indo-Islamic Asia and Central Asia, linking and enlarging the community of scholarship.

The world of this knowledge system makes for a fascinating study, as does the systematic manner in which it was destroyed, first by the colonists, then by the progressive and modernist education and literary movements, and in the end by the post-Independence societies that emerged in Pakistan and India.

This column commemorates one representative scholar of that now disintegrated world, Fazl-i-Haq Khairabadi (1797-1861), and one of his shorter but highly important works, Al Sauratul Hindia (The Indian Rebellion), which he wrote in Arabic living in imprisonment and exile in Kalapani in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

According to one version, the text, inscribed on fragments of paper with coal, was smuggled out of the Kalapani jail by another prisoner. Khairabadi died in prison, plagued by multiple diseases aggravated by the inhuman conditions of his imprisonment.

A man of many accomplishments, Fazl-i-Haq Khairabadi was a philosopher, poet and jurist. He was deeply learned in the poetic tradition and was instrumental in convincing Ghalib, who requested him to edit his divan, to adopt a simpler idiom. He wrote both prose and verse with equal facility in Arabic, and his command over the language is on display in Al Sauratul Hindia and in the two qasidas titled Qasaid-i-Fitnat-ul-Hind (Qasidas on the Turmoil in India) that he wrote while imprisoned, along with several other works he authored before his imprisonment.

Khairabadi was a counsellor to the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, whom he castigates as a weak, impressionable and incapable ruler, who allowed his queen Zeenat Mahal and prime minister Hakim Ahsanullah Khan to overrule his writ.

He criticises Bahadur Shah Zafar’s decision of leaving the city and taking refuge in Humayun’s tomb, and suggests that, at that time, the King had already betrayed those fighting at his behest, because Hakim Ahsanullah Khan had convinced the king that if he removed himself to Humayun’s tomb, the British would reward him upon their victory by leaving him on the throne.

Along with the king, all his nobles and their families also vacated Delhi, which greatly alarmed the ordinary citizens, and they too started emptying their homes. After the British had captured Delhi and started the massacre, Khairabadi remained in hiding with his family for five days, and then escaped to Khairabad.

Well before that, in May 1857, while the rebellion was brewing, Khairabadi was in Alwar when he was summoned to the court, to request his counsel. According to his own words, his counsel was not heeded. He writes in Al Sauratul Hindia:

“I informed people of my counsel and advice to the best of my intellectual ability and understanding, but they neither heeded my advice nor listened to my counsel.”

What his counsel was is not known, but it can be ascertained from the words he wrote later:

“I kept encouraging those not active and when the battle began I sat it out myself… I did not take part in it because of my laziness, which was my great sin. When those of auspicious fortune called upon me to join them in martyrdom, I did not present myself; I was deprived of the honour while those fortunate drank from martyrdom’s cup.”

Despite his passive role, Khairabadi was falsely accused of participating in the events of 1857 by men who bore him grudges. His prominence in society also went against him. The judge wrote in his verdict:

“He is a most dangerous man, able to inflict the greatest injury. The dictates of justice and public order demand that he is sent into exile.”

All his friends’ efforts and appeals to powerful quarters were in vain, and on October 8, 1859, Fazl-i-Haq Khairabadi arrived in Port Blair from Calcutta, aboard the ship Fire Queen. He would die one year, nine months and 19 days later, on August 20, 1861.

Abdul Shahid Khan Shervani’s Urdu translation of Al Sauratul Hindia, titled Baghi Hindustan (Rebel India), was published in 1946. In his preface to the Urdu translation, Abul Kalam Azad wrote:

“Men of learning were knowledgeable about this pamphlet by Maulana Fazl-i-Haq but, to this day, arrangements could not be made for its publication. After the devastation that followed the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, people lost the vestiges of will and ambition to the degree that they could not even think of the publication of such works. Maulana’s family itself considered its publication inadvisable, and those who possessed its manuscript copies thought it best not to advertise the fact. Today, when we study it, we do not find anything politically dangerous in it, but it was a different time then: nothing could have been more dangerous than the narration of the events of the ‘Mutiny’, and that too by someone who was sent into exile under the sentence of life imprisonment.”

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He can be reached on X: @microMAF

or via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 21st, 2024