ALTHOUGH THEY disagreed strongly with Hunter’s analysis of the mood of Indian Muslims, both William and Saiyid Ahmad, like Hunter, recognized higher education as the means to redress a widespread sense of ‘backwardness’ relative to other communities and regions. William’s own emphasis, frequently repeated, was on the people of the North-Western Provinces in general, the ‘Hindustanis’, whom he represented as losing out in a ‘race’ being run against Indians of other provinces, particularly Bengal. This image he conjured in almost every darbar speech from the late 1860s onwards. A typical speech warned that despite leading Bengal in elementary education, the north-west lagged ‘very far behind’ in higher education and was therefore losing posts to Bengali babus whom he represented as ‘invading the land and taking possession of that which is your birthright’. Hindustanis must rouse themselves from their ‘slumber of indifference’, or their children would ‘remain behind on all the paths of learning and knowledge’. He frequently set one district against another to try to generate a spirit of emulation even within the province.

Saiyid Ahmad, too, had frequently evoked ‘backwardness’ as a rallying call long before the Hunter furore, notably in speeches in Calcutta in 1863, and the next year at the opening of a school he established at Ghazipur. In Muslim gatherings, such as one held at the Muhammadan Literary Society in Calcutta, he deplored their ‘lagging behind’ the ‘social and cultural progress’ made by ‘our other countrymen’, implying non-Muslims. Muslims, unlike their ‘other countrymen’, he warned, have not yet recognized their predicament. They need to ‘wake up’, learn English and modern sciences in order to resume the lead now lost. When his target audience was undifferentiated ‘Hindustanis’ or ‘Indians’, the comparison turned to cultured and entrepreneurial Europeans with whom ‘fellow Indians’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ should now ‘catch up’. As we have seen, his London experiences caused him to turn the idea of ‘backwardness’ even more explicitly into a signifier of a gap in civilization between Hindustan’s ‘brutish’ state and Europe’s recent advances.

Literary and scientific societies

Some initiatives for the ‘self-help’ educational improvement schemes that both advocated were first raised in the cluster of learned societies that sprang up in the mofussil towns of this province from the early 1860s, several decades later than Calcutta and the other presidency capitals.