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Syed Ross Masood and a Japanese Model for Education, Nationalism, and Modernity in Hyderabad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2022

Mimi Hanaoka*
Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies, University of Richmond, VA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan's educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had been key to Japan's rapid modernization and recommended that Hyderabad follow the country's model of modernization and educational reform: transmit Western knowledge through widespread vernacular education, and focus on the imperial tradition, freedom from foreign control, and patriotic nationalism. Masood sought to use mass vernacular education to create in Hyderabad a nationalist subject, loyal to the ruling Muslim dynasty, who absorbed modern scientific knowledge with its Western epistemic foundations but who remained untainted by Western norms. This study contextualizes and historicizes Masood's attempt to create in Hyderabad a new nationalist subject, focusing on his 1923 report about Japan.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the History of Education Society

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References

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2 Masood to E. M. Forster, letter 12, in E. M. Forster, Jalil Ahmed Kidwai, and Syed Ross Masood, Forster-Masood Letters, ed. Jalil Ahmad Kidwai (Karachi, Pakistan: Ross Masood Education and Culture Society of Pakistan, 1984), 113-14. The letter is incomplete and undated, but Masood closes with the remark, “Well, goodbye for the present, and expect my next letter from Hyderabad on the 21st Jan 1923.”

3 Renée Worringer, introduction to The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity, ed. Renée Worringer, Andras Hamori, and Bernard Lewis (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007), 3. Meiji (October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912) is the era name in Japan that corresponds to the reign of the Emperor Meiji.

4 Masood was born on February 15, 1889, and died on July 30, 1937. He accepted the job of Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad in 1916 and held the position from 1918 to 1928. See Forster, Kidwai, and Masood, Forster-Masood Letters, 173 (birth); 29-30 and 153 (death); 124; 192n36 (Director of Public Instruction). See also Syed Ross Masood, Travels in Japan: Diary of an Exploring Mission, ed. Jalil A. Kidwai (1922; repr., Karachi: Ross Masood Education and Culture Society of Pakistan, 1968), vii.

5 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, ii. The earliest Indian merchants in Japan based themselves in Yokohama and, beginning in the 1890s, also in Kobe. Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 235-79.

6 Methodologically, this study moves beyond the limitations of both the Western-centric diffusionist model of global educational history—wherein ideas and practices are diffused or transmitted from certain locations (often in the West) to other locations (often not located in the West)—as well as the aggregative approach that aims for a comparative framework by aggregating discrete histories. See Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “Towards a Global History of Education: Alternative Strategies,” in Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education, edited by Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 27-40.

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29 The Ansei Treaties were treaties of friendship and commerce (the individual names of each treaty differ) signed by the Tokugawa bakufu, or shogunate, in the final decade of Tokugawa rule before the Meiji period. These were, in chronological order, the treaty with the United States on July 29, 1858 (Ansei 5/6/19); Holland on August 18, 1858 (Ansei 5/7/10); Russia on August 19, 1858 (Ansei 5/7/11); Britain on August 26, 1858 (Ansei 5/7/18); and France on October 9, 1858 (Ansei 5/9/3). The Ansei (November 1854 through March 1860) was the era name during the period of the emperor Kōmei-tennō. The Japan-US Treaty of Amity and Commerce formed the template for the rest, which were all nearly identical trade treaties. Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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33 On the Iwakura Mission, see Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism, 156-200.

34 The quote is from an interview between Iwakura and Granville, November 22, 1872, in Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism, 193-94.

35 The quote is from an interview between Iwakura and Granville, November 27, 1872, in Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism, 193-94.

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37 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 137.

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43 Howell, “Civilization and Enlightenment.”

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46 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 148-79.

47 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 243; see also 180-255.

48 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 148-79.

49 While there was some overlap between technical and vocational schools, technical schools involved more theory than the primarily hands-on nature of vocational schools. For Japan and for Masood, advanced education, or post-secondary education, was distinct from the schooling in higher education institutions that granted university degrees.

50 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 340-69.

51 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 340-41.

52 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 342.

53 Seth, Subject Lessons, 27.

54 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 5

55 Tariq Rahman, From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2011), 226-47 on Hyderabad and 247-60 on Kashmir.

56 Salar Jung I, regent of Nizam VI from 1869 to 1883, instituted significant administrative reforms throughout his thirty-year tenure as minister and regent for the young Nizam. See Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 37-178.

57 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 133-47.

58 According to that year's census, the language distribution of the population of Hyderabad was 6,015,174 Telugu speakers, 3,394,858 Marathi speakers, 1,536,928 Kanarese speakers, and 1,290,866 Urdu speakers. Rahman, Tariq, “The Teaching of Urdu in British India,” Annual of Urdu Studies 15 (2000), 50Google Scholar.

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60 Aleem, Shamim, Personnel Management in a Princely State (New Delhi: Gitanjali Pub. House, c. 1985), 236-37Google Scholar, 37-38.

61 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 351-403.

62 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 317-18; see also more generally 317-50.

63 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 317-18; see also more generally 317-50. The Nizam, sensing that the Khilafat movement threatened his own authority, banned political meetings in September 1921.

64 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 317-18; see also more generally 317-50.

65 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 342-45.

66 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 344.

67 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 345.

68 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 345.

69 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 346.

70 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 4, 13.

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75 Although Japan increasingly became militarized in the 1920s, rikkensei (constitutional system) was the term applied to the new Meiji political structures during the Meiji period itself, emphasizing the Meiji Constitution. Tennōsei, or an emperor system, was a term that would only be coined later, in the 1930s, and was later abolished by the US occupation and the post-WWII Japanese government because it had advanced Japanese militarism and imperial expansion. See Gluck, Carol, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 41, 281Google Scholar.

76 Major Osman Senai graduated from the War College in 1895, and Captain Ali Fuad (Erden) graduated in 1904; both were regular contributors to the military press in the years after the 1908 Young Turk/Constitutional Revolution. Handan Nezir Akmeşe, “The Japanese Nation in Arms: A Role Model for Militarist Nationalism in the Ottoman Army, 1905-1914,” in The Islamic Middle East and Japan, 63-89.

77 Akmeşe, “The Japanese Nation in Arms.”

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80 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 28-63.

81 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 9.

82 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 234, regarding “national morality and to the development of a sound national spirit” in middle schools for boys; 264 on fostering the “spirit of national morality” in high schools for boys; 267-68 on the nationalist mission to pay deep attention “to the formation of character, and the nurture of the national spirit” in universities.

83 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 9.

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87 Masood, Travels in Japan, 186. The commission to explore university reform in India was led by and named for Ethelbert Blatter, S.J. (1877-1934), the Swiss born Jesuit and botanist, who taught botany at St. Xavier's College in Bombay from 1903-1908, before returning to England and Europe and then ultimately back to Bombay in 1915. He remained in India until his death in 1934. “Obituary: Ethelbert Blatter, S.J. (1877-1934),” in Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Volume 147, Issue1 (October 1935): 159.

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103 Masood, Travels in Japan, 186; Masood, “National Education: Bold Experiment at Osmania University,” in Khayaban-e-Masood; A Collection of Writings, Speeches, etc., on and by Nawab Masood Jung Sir Syed Ross Masood, ed. Jalil Ahmad Kidwai (Karachi, Pakistan: Ross Masood Education and Cultural Society of Pakistan, 1970), 29. Both publications reprint the oral evidence given by Masood before the Father Blatter Commission, Bombay, India, October 4, 1924.

104 Kavita Saraswathi Datla, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013), 9.

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107 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 354.

108 Seth, Subject Lessons, 129-58. On Indian nationalism, modernity, and the “new woman” in late 19th century India, see Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 116-34 and 135-57.

109 Jason G. Karlin, Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014), 177-234.

110 Masood, Travels in Japan, 9; Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 14-15.

111 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 15.

112 David Lelyveld, “Sayyid Ahmad's Problems with Women,” in Hidden Histories: Religion and Reform in South Asia, ed. Syed Akbar Hyder and Manu Belur Bhagavan (Delhi: Primus Books, 2018), 98.

113 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 353.

114 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 353-54.

115 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 354.

116 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 180-255.

117 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 241; see also 180-255. In 1906, at the age of fifty-eight Muhib Husain abruptly ended his career, selling his library in 1909; completely stopped writing about politics; and became a follower of the Sufi Pir Shahn Muhammad Siddiqi.

118 Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750-1890 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 247-54.

119 White paper published by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology: https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/html/others/detail/1317627.htm.

120 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 285.

121 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 187.

122 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 188.

123 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 125-27.

124 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 314-39.

125 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 318.

126 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 319, 314-39.

127 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 362-63.

128 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 363.

129 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 366-67.

130 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 368.

131 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 363-66.

132 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 363-64.

133 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 368-69.

134 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 82.

135 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 368-69.

136 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 368-69.

137 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 364-65.

138 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 364-66.

139 Shamsul Alam, “Educational Administration,” in Developments in Administration under H.E.H. the Nizam VII, ed. Shamim Aleem and M. A. Aleem (Hyderabad, India: Osmania University Press, 1984), 108-29.

140 Vasant K. Bawa, The Last Nizam: The Life and Times of Mir Osman Ali Khan. 2nd ed. (Hyderabad, India: Centre for Deccan Studies, 2010), 101; Shamsul Alam, “Educational Administration.”

141 Datla, The Language of Secular Islam, 51-52. See also Osmania University's own narrative of its history at https://www.osmania.ac.in/aboutus-originandhistory.php; Mohd. Akbar Ali Khan, “Osmania as an Idea of the University,” in Developments in Administration under H.E.H. the Nizam VII, 130-48.

142 Masood, Travels in Japan, vii; Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 359-60, 363-66.

143 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 359-60.

144 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 360.

145 On E. E. Speight, see Masood, “National Education: Bold Experiment at Osmania University,” in Khayaban-e-Masood, 108; Forster, Kidwai, and Masood, Forster-Masood Letters, 185.

146 Datla, The Language of Secular Islam, 56-81.

147 Rahman, Language, Ideology and Power, 232.

148 Shamsul Alam, “Educational Administration,” 116.

149 Rahman, Language, Ideology and Power, 231-38.

150 Shamsul Alam, “Educational Administration,” 115.

151 Abdul Ali, Seventeen Years in Osmania University (Madras, India: Printed at the Diocesan Press, 1968), 45.

152 Khan, “Osmania as an Idea of the University.”

153 Nizam College remained an English medium institution that was affiliated with Madras University until 1946, when it changed its affiliation to Osmania University (but with the provision that it remain an English medium instruction). See Shamsul Alam, “Educational Administration.”

154 Shamsul Alam, “Educational Administration.”

155 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 340.

156 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6.

157 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 83.

158 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 365.

159 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6.