Some cities are overshadowed by the institutions they contain. Aligarh is a striking example. To most people outside the region, the name immediately evokes Aligarh Muslim University, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the movement for Muslim educational regeneration that grew around the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. So powerful has this association become that the considerably older city within which the College arose has almost disappeared from popular historical memory. Atif Syed’s Aligarh: The City That Outlasted Empires seeks to recover that city and restore to it a history extending far beyond, and long before, the University.
It is an ambitious undertaking. Syed follows Aligarh, known for much of its earlier history as Kol or Koil, across a remarkably long chronological span. Archaeology and traditions concerning the earliest settlement lead into the medieval period, the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, followed by the political turbulence of the eighteenth century, when Jats, Marathas, Afghans, regional magnates and European military adventurers struggled over this part of the upper Gangetic plain. The narrative subsequently encounters British expansion, colonial Aligarh, Sir Syed and the MAO College, before moving towards the modern city. The publisher appropriately describes the result as a “panoramic biography” of Aligarh.
Syed himself has an interesting relationship with his subject. He grew up in Aligarh but is not a professional historian. Trained in computer engineering in Singapore, he eventually settled in Austin, Texas, and pursued a career in technology. His engagement with his native city, however, is clearly much more than an exercise in nostalgia. He has read widely, investigated monuments and archaeological remains, followed scattered references in textual sources, and paid attention to the histories concealed within neighbourhoods, buildings and place names. The result is a book written with affection, but also with the curiosity of someone who repeatedly asks what existed here before the familiar Aligarh took shape.
Irfan Habib and the Problem of Recovering Koil
The volume carries a brief but significant Foreword by Professor Irfan Habib. It deserves attention because Habib does more than provide the customary words of commendation. He identifies quite precisely what he considers Syed’s principal historical contribution. Habib begins by giving Syed credit for producing a comprehensive study of Aligarh, or Kol/Koil as it was known in medieval times. He then draws attention to the central difficulty confronting anyone attempting such a history. For long periods Koil remains practically unmentioned in written sources. Syed has therefore had to make archaeological evidence perform work that written documents cannot. Habib particularly commends his survey of this archaeological material. When the textual record becomes somewhat firmer from the thirteenth century onwards, Syed painstakingly assembles scattered references in medieval sources and combines them with the evidence of a remarkable surviving thirteenth-century inscription. Habib again singles out the archaeological material for the later period and draws attention to the notable examples of Anglo-Indian architecture that Aligarh acquired.
This endorsement is important because Irfan Habib himself represents an Aligarh historical tradition in which archaeology, historical geography, cartography and material remains have long been taken seriously. His observation that Syed’s use of archaeological evidence is “particularly noteworthy” should therefore not be regarded as casual praise. It identifies one of the genuine strengths of the book: its willingness to allow objects, buildings, inscriptions and landscapes to supplement the silences of chronicles. Yet Habib’s Foreword is also admirably restrained. He does not claim that Syed has discovered an entirely unknown history of Aligarh or overturned an existing historiography. His emphasis is upon comprehensiveness, careful reconstruction and the assembling of dispersed evidence. His concluding hope that Syed’s work receives a broader readership points towards another of the book’s achievements. Material scattered through archaeological studies, medieval chronicles, inscriptions, local histories and specialist scholarship has been brought together into a narrative accessible to readers outside the professional historical community.
Before Atif Syed: Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui
This qualification is important because the history of pre-modern Aligarh was certainly not an untouched field. Any assessment of Syed’s achievement must acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui’s Aligarh District: A Historical Survey, from Ancient Times to 1803 A.D., published by Munshiram Manoharlal for the Centre of Advanced Study, Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, in 1981. A limited reprint was made in 2018. The substantial volume ran to 346 pages, with plates, maps and an extensive bibliography. Siddiqui’s book belonged to a somewhat different genre. It emerged from an academic tradition of regional history and historical archaeology cultivated at Aligarh. Its range of sources was formidable, extending across historical works, mystical and administrative literature, travel accounts, memoirs, letters, archaeological reports, administrative records, biographies, regional and local histories, topographical works, gazetteers, settlement and census reports, and linguistic material. Its very organisation, with substantial sections devoted to the Sultanate, Mughal and eighteenth-century periods, reveals the seriousness with which the pre-British history of Aligarh had already been investigated.
Thus the Dor traditions, Sultanate Koil, Mughal administration, Sabit Khan, Suraj Mal, Najaf Khan, the Jats and Marathas, local zamindars and the complicated political developments preceding British occupation were not chapters entirely forgotten until the appearance of Syed’s book. Siddiqui had already demonstrated more than four decades earlier how much could be recovered by combining the written record with historical geography, inscriptions and archaeology. This does not reduce Syed’s achievement. It enables us to define it more accurately. Siddiqui wrote primarily as an academic historian of a district. Syed writes something closer to the biography of a city. The relationship between the two works is consequently better understood as one of continuity and enlargement rather than discovery and repetition. Indeed, Habib’s Foreword makes it difficult to dismiss Syed as simply a populariser of material already available in Siddiqui. Syed has returned to archaeological evidence, gathered dispersed medieval references, used inscriptions and attempted to bridge periods in which written documentation becomes frustratingly thin. Moreover, his narrative continues far beyond 1803. He is interested not simply in who controlled Aligarh, but in what traces successive political and cultural worlds left upon the city.
From Kol or Koil to Aligarh
One of the most attractive features of the book is its recovery of Koil as a historical place. The modern name Aligarh has become so dominant that it can obscure the earlier identity of the settlement. Syed restores the continuity between the two. Here, however, lies one of the difficulties inherent in writing history across such an enormous chronological span. The earliest phases have to be reconstructed from evidence of very unequal value. Archaeology, local traditions, later gazetteers and textual references cannot automatically be placed upon the same evidential plane. Traditions concerning early rulers or communities may preserve important historical memories, but they require a different kind of handling from contemporary inscriptions or chronicles. At places, therefore, the reader must remain alert to the distinction between what can be demonstrated, what can reasonably be inferred and what belongs to remembered antiquity.
One object demonstrates particularly well both the possibilities of material history and the remarkable continuity connecting medieval Koil with modern Aligarh. This is the inscription from the minaret erected at Koil in the reign of Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud when Balban, the future Sultan Ghiyasuddin Balban, was an enormously powerful figure in the Sultanate. The inscription is dated 10 Rajab 652 AH, corresponding to 26 August 1254. The minaret itself was eventually demolished under the colonial administration in 1862, but its inscription survived. The story of its survival deserves to be told, but Syed misses out on it. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan recognised the historical importance of the inscription, acquired it after the demolition of the minaret and ensured its preservation within the institution he founded. It was eventually fixed into a wall of the building which had housed the Nizam Museum of the MAO College. Thus, even before the professional institutionalisation of archaeology at Aligarh, Sir Syed was acting as a custodian of the material remains of Koil’s past.
The history of the inscription did not end there. When I was in charge of the University Museum, I felt that an object of such significance should no longer remain embedded in a wall but should be displayed as part of the archaeological history of Aligarh and of Sir Syed’s own antiquarian interests. In 2019, with the necessary permission and the technical assistance of the Archaeological Survey of India, the slab was carefully removed and transferred to the Sir Syed Gallery within the University Museum. Its removal produced an unexpected discovery. The reverse of the slab carried earlier sculptural work in the Jain tradition, apparently datable to the tenth or eleventh century. The same piece of stone therefore preserves multiple layers of Aligarh’s past. An earlier Jain sculptural fragment was reused for an inscription associated with Balban’s thirteenth-century Koil; the inscription was rescued by Sir Syed in the nineteenth century; it became part of the MAO College’s museum heritage; and in the twenty-first century it was moved to the Sir Syed Gallery for proper display. Few objects could illustrate more vividly the idea of Aligarh as a historical palimpsest. Wish Syed had included some of this in his book.
The Mughal Landscape and an Unexpected Link with the Taj Mahal
From the medieval period onwards, Koil can be placed more securely within the political geography of northern India. Its importance was related to its position in the upper Gangetic doab and to its relationship with Delhi, Agra and the routes connecting the two. Political authority, agricultural resources, military movement and revenue administration tied the locality to much larger structures of power. Aligarh’s history was never simply that of an isolated town. A fascinating documentary survival provides an unexpected illustration of this relationship during Shah Jahan’s reign. Preserved in the Taj Museum within the Taj Mahal complex at Agra is a document recording that the revenues of the village of Dodhpur in Kol were reserved for the maintenance of the Maqbara-i Munawwara, the Taj Mahal. Dodhpur, now so completely absorbed into the urban geography of modern Aligarh, was thus once connected through the Mughal revenue system with Shah Jahan’s celebrated mausoleum at Agra.
The significance of this evidence extends beyond local curiosity. Great Mughal monuments did not exist as isolated architectural creations. Their continued maintenance required resources, personnel and revenue assignments extending across a much wider imperial landscape. The document concerning Dodhpur reveals one small part of that fiscal geography. An apparently ordinary locality in modern Aligarh was connected economically with one of the most celebrated monuments of the Mughal Empire. It is precisely evidence of this kind that makes local history important. A village name, an inscription displaced from its original monument or a document preserved in a museum a hundred kilometres away can suddenly connect the history of Koil with the larger structures of the Sultanate or Mughal Empire. The inclusion of this would have made the book richer.
An Eighteenth-Century Crossroads
The eighteenth century is among the most fascinating parts of Syed’s story. Here Aligarh becomes entangled in the redistribution of political authority that followed the weakening of central Mughal power. Jats, Marathas, Afghan interests, Mughal grandees and European military officers enter the narrative, while the fort assumes increasing strategic importance. The story also warns us against treating the eighteenth century merely as an age of “decline”. What we encounter at Aligarh is not the simple disappearance of authority but its reorganisation. New military establishments emerged, revenue resources were contested, alliances changed rapidly and European military knowledge became incorporated into Indian political formations.
The French connection is particularly revealing. European officers serving Indian powers belonged to a world very different from that produced by mature British colonialism. Some became deeply immersed in Indo-Persian and north Indian cultural environments. Syed’s references to Europeans participating in Urdu literary culture are therefore more than amusing anecdotes. They reveal the fluidity of an age in which political allegiance, military employment, language and cultural affiliation had not yet hardened into the colonial binaries of European ruler and Indian subject. Aligarh Fort stands at the centre of much of this history. Its importance eventually brought the locality directly into the military expansion of the East India Company. The events of 1803 thus represent not simply another change of rulers but a decisive alteration in the political order within which Aligarh operated.
The Physical City as Historical Evidence
Syed is particularly effective when he turns our attention from dynasties and battles to the physical landscape. The Jāmiʿ Masjid, the fort, the memory of Koil Minar, shrines, temples and neighbourhoods cease to be merely familiar landmarks and names. They acquire histories. For anyone who has lived in Aligarh, this is perhaps the book’s most appealing quality. We frequently pass through places without asking why they bear particular names or what older settlement lies beneath a modern colony. Urban expansion is especially ruthless towards such memory. Tanks disappear, old houses are demolished, gateways vanish, roads are widened and archaeological remains become absorbed into densely populated neighbourhoods. Once the physical evidence disappears, even the questions that might have been asked about it are easily forgotten.
The Balban inscription and the Dodhpur document demonstrate the two different ways in which these histories can survive. The first is an archaeological object whose successive uses extend from the pre-Sultanate period to the present. The second is a written record preserved outside Aligarh which suddenly illuminates the history of a familiar Aligarh locality. Together they remind us that the archive of a city is never confined to one repository. Syed’s book therefore has an important heritage dimension. By attaching histories to apparently ordinary locations, it reminds us that preservation begins with recognition. A monument cannot be valued if nobody remembers what it represents.
Sir Syed, Beck and the Making of Modern Aligarh
Eventually any history of modern Aligarh must encounter the personality who transformed its identity. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan did not create Aligarh, but the institution he founded fundamentally altered what the city would subsequently mean in India and beyond. Syed is right to make the establishment of the MAO College a later chapter in Aligarh’s history rather than its point of origin. The College entered an existing city with its own social geography and accumulated historical landscape. Yet within a few decades the new institution began transforming that landscape itself. The episode of Balban’s inscription also reminds us of an aspect of Sir Syed that can easily be overshadowed by the educational reformer and political thinker. He possessed a serious antiquarian interest and an acute awareness of the importance of monuments and inscriptions as historical evidence. The author of Āsār-us-Sanādīd understood that stones could preserve histories which texts had forgotten. His decision to save the Koil inscription was therefore entirely consistent with his larger intellectual personality.
Syed’s discussion of Theodore Beck and his influence upon Sir Syed is interesting, though this is one area where greater qualification is necessary. There can be little doubt about Beck’s imperial loyalism or his hostility towards the developing Congress movement. Nor should his political activities around the MAO College be minimised. But it would be too simple to explain Sir Syed’s changing political position primarily through the influence of an English Principal. Sir Syed was far too formidable and independent an intellectual personality to be understood in those terms. His political evolution needs to be located within the experience of 1857, the Hindi-Urdu controversy, debates over representative institutions, Muslim educational backwardness, emerging majoritarian anxieties and the changing politics of the North-Western Provinces. His opposition to the Congress and his apprehensions regarding representative government had roots extending beyond Beck. Beck mattered, but he operated within an intellectual and political transformation already under way. To acknowledge his influence is not the same as making him the architect of Sir Syed’s politics.
The MAO College itself should similarly resist retrospective simplification. It was neither merely an instrument of colonial loyalism nor simply the prehistory of later Muslim separatism. It was simultaneously an educational experiment, an arena of religious and social reform, a site of intellectual debate and an institution through which a new Muslim middle class attempted to negotiate the realities of colonial India. The contradictions within it were partly the contradictions of the age itself.
What the Book Does Not Attempt
Apart from some exclusions pointed above, a balanced assessment requires acknowledging the some other limitations of the book alongside its considerable achievements. The most significant of these is the absence of sustained social and economic analysis. A comprehensive urban history of Aligarh would require systematic treatment of its markets and artisans, caste and community structures, mohallas, landholding patterns, demography, water systems, municipal administration, migration, occupational groups and economic relationships with the surrounding countryside. It would demand detailed examination of the transformation produced by colonial urbanism, particularly the relationship between the old city, Civil Lines and the new institutional settlement developing around the MAO College. Syed touches upon many of these worlds, but he does not attempt the kind of systematic social and economic anatomy that would justify describing the work as urban history in the strict sense. The book’s organisation around successive political formations and prominent architectural landmarks, while effective as narrative, tends to privilege the exceptional over the ordinary. We learn a great deal about rulers, monummonuments and significant events, but comparatively little about how the majority of Aligarh’s inhabitants lived, worked or organised their social worlds across the centuries.
A related limitation concerns the treatment of the pre-Sultanate and Sultanate periods. The evidential base for these centuries is extraordinarily thin, as Habib acknowledges. Syed’s willingness to work with archaeological fragments and scattered textual references is commendable. Yet the narrative occasionally smooths over the gaps in a manner that a more sceptical historian might resist. The distinction between what the material can support and what belongs to the realm of informed speculation is not always clearly maintained. A reader unfamiliar with the historiographical debates might come away with greater confidence in the reconstruction of early Koil than the evidence strictly warrants. The book would have benefited from more explicit discussion of its methodological choices and their limitations.
The treatment of Sir Syed’s political evolution similarly requires qualification. While Syed the author is right to resist reducing Sir Syed to a mere instrument of Beck’s influence, the countervailing danger is to underplay the significance of the colonial institutional context altogether. The MAO College was not established in a political vacuum. Its relationship with the British administration, the expectations placed upon it by its donors and well-wishers, and the broader dynamics of colonial educational policy all shaped the intellectual environment within which Sir Syed operated. A fuller account would need to situate the College within the wider landscape of nineteenth-century Indian educational experimentation, including comparison with institutions such as the Banaras Hindu University, whose founding followed a comparable though distinct trajectory. The book gestures towards these contexts but does not explore them in depth.
There is also the question of the book’s temporal imbalance. The pre-modern sections, while valuable, are comparatively brief. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the documentary record is richer, receive more extended treatment. The modern city – post-independence Aligarh – is treated somewhat cursorily, almost as an epilogue. Yet the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed transformations at least as consequential as anything that preceded them: the growth of AMU into a major national institution, the changing demographic and political composition of the city, the decline of traditional industries such as lock-making, the pressures of urban expansion and communal politics. A fuller biography of the city would need to engage more substantially with these contemporary dynamics.
Conclusion
Aligarh: The City That Outlasted Empires is an important and welcome book. It should be read not because it provides the final history of Aligarh, but because it opens so many doors through which future histories may enter. It also needs to be situated within the scholarship that preceded it. Jamal Muhammad Siddiqui’s Aligarh District: A Historical Survey remains fundamental. To describe Aligarh’s pre-modern past as previously “unexamined” would erase an important scholarly tradition associated with the Department of History at AMU. Siddiqui had already shown how textual evidence, inscriptions, archaeology and historical geography could be brought together to reconstruct the district’s history down to 1803. Atif Syed, however, does something sufficiently different to deserve recognition in his own right. As Irfan Habib perceptively observes, his particular strength lies in the use of archaeological material for those long stretches when Kol virtually disappears from written records and in his careful reconstruction of medieval history from scattered textual and inscriptional evidence. He then carries the story far beyond the chronological limits of Siddiqui’s study. If Siddiqui established an important scholarly foundation for the historical archaeology and political geography of Aligarh district, Syed has returned to the same landscape with additional material, different questions and a different audience. He has attempted to transform the accumulated fragments of Aligarh’s past into the biography of a city.
Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to Atif Syed’s book is that it encourages precisely the kind of historical curiosity that a city like Aligarh deserves. After reading it, one begins to look differently at familiar surroundings. The modern city begins to appear as a palimpsest in which successive histories survive, sometimes openly and sometimes in places where we least expect to find them.
Empires came to Koil, contested it, occupied it and renamed it. Sultans, Mughals, Jats, Marathas, Europeans and the British left their marks. Sir Syed then gave the place an entirely new intellectual significance, and the institution he founded eventually made the name Aligarh known throughout South Asia and far beyond it. Yet beneath all these transformations the city endured. In that sense, Atif Syed’s subtitle is more than a literary flourish. Aligarh really is a city that outlasted empires.
