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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2022
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.
1 Masood, Syed Ross, Japan and Its Educational System: Being a Report Compiled for the Government of His Exalted Highness the Nizam (Hyderabad, India: Government Central Press, 1923), iiiGoogle Scholar.
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.
7 Alan Guenther, “Justice Mahmood and English Education in India,” South Asia Research 31, no. 1 (Feb. 2011), 45-67.
8 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
9 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6Google Scholar; see also 26.
10 Koizumi, Kenkichiro, “In Search of ‘Wakon’: The Cultural Dynamics of the Rise of Manufacturing Technology in Postwar Japan,” Technology and Culture 43, no. 1 (Jan. 2002), 29-49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Koizumi, “In Search of ‘Wakon.’”
12 Ravina, Mark, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar,
13 Aydin, Cemil, “Globalizing the Intellectual History of the Idea of the ‘Muslim World,’” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 159-86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Aydin, “Globalizing the Intellectual History of the Idea of the ‘Muslim World,’” 166.
15 John Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum: Indian Nationalism in a Muslim State, Hyderabad, 1850-1948 (PhD Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998), 241-42; see also 180-255.
16 Adal, Raja, Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 5Google Scholar.
17 Masood to E. M. Forster, from Bankipore, March 15, 1914, letter #11, in Forster, Kidwai, and Masood, Forster-Masood Letters, 192n36; also see 109-10; 210n34-36. Masood left his position in Hyderabad to serve as the vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University from February 1929 to October 1934. See https://amu.ac.in/offices/public-relations-office/vice-chancellors.
18 Eric Lewis Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 27.
19 Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World, 6.
20 Ikegame, Aya, Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Syed Mahmood, A History of English Education in India: Its Rise, Development, Progress, Present Condition and Prospects, Being a Narrative of the Various Phases of Educational Policy and Measures Adopted under the British Rule from Its Beginning to the Present Period (1781 to 1893) (Aligarh, India: M.A.O. College, 1895).
22 Seth, Sanjay, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 109-27Google Scholar.
23 Aydin, Cemil, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Howell, David L., “Civilization and Enlightenment: Markers of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” in The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State: Japan and China, ed. Fogel, Joshua (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 117-37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India.
26 Ikegame, Princely India Re-imagined, esp. chap. 4.
27 Rahman, Tariq, Language, Ideology and Power: Language-Learning among the Muslims of Pakistan and North India, rev. ed. (New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2008), 195Google Scholar.
28 Masood traveled in 1928 to England with his sons, Anwar (age thirteen) and Akbar (eleven), for them to commence their education in England. Masood then returned to India to begin his position as vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, leaving his sons in England under the guardianship of E. M. Forster. Forster, Kidwai, and Masood, Forster-Masood Letters, 123-24, 152.
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).
30 Mark Ravina, “State-Making in Global Context: Japan in a World of Nation-States,” in Fogel, The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State, 87-104.
31 Iwakura was Iwakura Tomomi's surname. Japanese names are written according to Japanese convention, with the surname first, followed by the given name. For Japanese authors of secondary sources published in English, names are written according to European convention, with given name first, followed by the surname.
32 The Iwakura Embassy, 1871-73: A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary's Journey of Observation through the United States and Europe, comp. Kume Kunitake, ed. Graham Healy and Chushichi Tsuzuki, 5 vols. (Chiba, Japan: Japan Documents, 2002).
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.
36 Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World, 3.
37 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 137.
38 See Ravina, “State-Making in Global Context,” 90-91.
39 Mark Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World, 7.
40 Hamashita, Takeshi, “Maritime Asia and Treaty Port Networks in the Era of Negotiation: Tribute and Treaties, 1800-1900,” in China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives; ed. Grove, Linda and Selden, Mark (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), 85-113Google Scholar.
41 Ravina, “State-Making in Global Context,” 91.
42 Ravina, “State-Making in Global Context,” 91.
43 Howell, “Civilization and Enlightenment.”
44 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 341.
45 Roosa, The Quandary of the Qaum, 148-79.
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.
59 Rahman, “The Teaching of Urdu in British India,” 47; Rahman, Language, Ideology and Power, 228.
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.
71 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 21-22.
72 Ravina, Mark, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
73 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 4-5.
74 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 6.
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.”
78 Thomas Eich, “Pan-Islamism and ‘Yellow Peril’: Geo-strategic Concepts in Salafī Writings before World War I,” in The Islamic Middle East and Japan, 121-35.
79 H. Irving Hancock (1868-1922), Japanese physical training: The system of exercise, diet and general mode of living that has made the Mikado's people the healthiest, strongest, and happiest men and women in the world (New York: Putnam, 1904), v.
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.
84 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 132.
85 Masood, Travels in Japan, 186.
86 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 84.
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.
88 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 346.
89 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 347.
90 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 348.
91 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 352, 349.
92 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 352.
93 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 352-53.
94 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 354.
95 Masood, Travels in Japan, 186.
96 Masood, Travels in Japan, 186.
97 India Education Commission, Report by the North-Western Provinces and Oudh Provincial Committee, with Evidence Taken before the Committee, and Memorials Addressed to the Education Commission (Calcutta, India: The Superintendent of Government Printing, 1884), 291.
98 David Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 206-7.
99 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 83
100 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 185.
101 Masood, Japan and Its Educational System, 178-79.
102 Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation, 97-98.
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.
105 Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002).
106 Nanette Twine, “The Genbunitchi Movement: Its Origin, Development, and Conclusion,” Monumenta Nipponica 33, no. 3 (Autumn 1978), 333-56.
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.