INTRODUCTION

The gentry to which Sir Sayyid Ahmad (1817–1898) belonged considered education a vehicle for cultivating the mind, while service under the state mainly a duty for men born in the concerned families; in other words, they believed that military and executive service under the state was noblesse oblige. Initially, Sir Sayyid Ahmad's thoughts on education were, quite predictably (and naturally), lofty and idealistic. He feared that education was primarily treated as a mere tool of livelihood. Rather than continuing his familial tradition of serving in the Mughal court (for which his rather rambling education had prepared him), he chose to serve the East India Company: this arguably marked the beginning of the process through which the youth from old elite families came to terms with the increasingly disorienting new world. During their lifetime, humans go through distinct phases wherein their conceptions of higher and nobler ultimate purposes of education undergo modifications and adaptations. Originally, education is the process of cultivating thinking and intellect; there is a discernible trend of the process coming closer to the realities of Sir Sayyid's time when the reins of command and control ceased to be even nominally with the ancient regime of the Mughals – the baton passed indubitably to the East India Company. Thus, to test Western education's ability to cultivate minds and enhance the learners’ future material well-being, Sir Sayyid Ahmad started experiments of establishing Western educational institutions at Moradabad in 1859 and Ghazipur in 1862. However, the character-building ability of this type of education was affected by the mediocre curriculum of universities to which his labour of love, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, was affiliated.

Over the years, educational projects metamorphosed to involve various paradigms – from using Persian as a dominant medium for attaining knowledge to including useful sciences (kaar aamad or mufeed uloom), such as agriculture, soil sciences, and allied disciplines, suitable for upgrading the overwhelmingly agrarian economy, and establishing conventional universities with the elusive vernacular as the medium of instruction. Thus, Sir Sayyid Ahmad initiated the translation of Western knowledge from various disciplines, such as philosophy, political economy, logic, and history; however, after making some progress, the pragmatic entrepreneur realized that the time available for translation was very short, and hence he stopped the translation work.