Developing the Heart by Nigel Collett

Author:Nigel Collett [Collett, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789629375904
Publisher: CUHK UP
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Forster was aware neither of the situation in Dewas nor of much that was going on in India at the time, save for what he read in the newspapers. Masood was even more uncommunicative now that he was working hard in Aligarh. His sons, at school in England, did allow some tenuous link to be maintained, but there were few Indian friends in London now to keep Forster abreast of what was going on.

We have a picture of Masood at this time, drawn by André Weil, who had taken up Masood’s offer of a job and taught at Aligarh from 1930 to 1931. He was initially lodged in Masood’s house, so had many occasions to see him at close quarters. As Weil described him, Masood was much as he had seemed in Paris, ebullient, the centre of Aligarh life and in evident command of the university. Inside the campus, he was, according to Weil, like the raja of a small native state.

Seeing him preside over a group of distinguished dinner guests and regale them with an endless tide of anecdotes in English and Urdu was a spectacle of which one could never get enough. It was only much later, when returning to France, that I understood how much this brilliant façade served to cover up a gaping void.12

Masood was indeed no intellectual, but he had drive and administrative flair, qualities more likely to be approved of by prosaic Englishmen than by an intellectual Frenchman. He had been given absolute powers to hire and fire as part of his reforms, and this, Weil felt, led to despotism and “countless intrigues revolving round the person of Masood”.13

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.