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The Agha Khan

Sun, 26 Feb 2012, 09:53 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

In his fifth and sixth years at Aligarh, my father worked on his master’s degree. After that, you could do research, but it took years to get a doctorate. My dad wanted a doctorate.

Sometime near the end of his sixth year, he was offered a scholarship to study at Forman Christian College in Lahore. But he had a problem.

You see my father had applied to be a tutor to the Agha Khan’s grandchildren in Switzerland. Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah, Agha Khan III had been chancellor of the university, and evidently an Aligarh student was going to be chosen as teacher to his grandchildren.

My dad’s problem stemmed from the fact that the chairman of the Physics Department, a certain Dr. Gill, was also involved in choosing the tutor from the list of applicants. And Gill knew about the Forman scholarship offer. So not only were his prospects as a tutor bleak, but his future as a physics student was also evidently at risk.

Gill must have been upset, because he demanded that my father provide a guarantee that he could and that he would pay back two to three months of his Aligarh scholarship.

As we sat in his living room, my father explained his quandry.

“My father was dead,” he said, “and my mother didn’t have the money to pay.”

All he could do was give his word, but that wasn’t enough for Gill. My father’s friends didn’t think this was right. They told him to talk to his professors and to talk to the dean.

“The dean listened to my story,” my dad said.

Evidently the dean spoke with others at the university and concluded that the right thing to do was to release my father and let him go to Forman, because it was clear that Dr. Gill’s anger at my father was going to be a problem.

So in the end he left Aligarh Muslim University. He left India and went to Forman Christian College in Pakistan.

As for his application to teach the Agha Khan’s grandchildren, that was out of the question.

“If things had been different,” my father said, “the current Agha Khan would have been my student.”

Update: The opening sentence above suggests that my father didn’t finish his Master’s degree at Aligarh. That’s not the case. During his fifth and sixth year, he worked on and was awarded his Master’s.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License