Sir Ross Masood

Anyone asking who was Sir Ross Masood begins with an extraordinary family. He was born on 15 February 1889 into one of the most influential Muslim households of nineteenth-century India. His grandfather was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the reformer who founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875, the institution that grew into Aligarh Muslim University ^[1]. His father, Syed Mahmood, had studied at Cambridge and became one of the first Indian judges to sit on the Allahabad High Court, a distinguished jurist whose later years were clouded by illness and an early death ^[2].

Masood spent part of his childhood in the Aligarh household of his grandfather, who doted on the boy and reportedly saw in him the continuation of his own educational mission. Sir Syed died in 1898, when Masood was nine, and his father died in 1903, leaving the teenager under the guardianship of family friends associated with the Aligarh movement, among them Theodore Morison, the college's English principal ^[1]. He was educated at the college school in Aligarh before being sent to England to prepare for university.

In 1906, while studying in England before going up to Oxford, Masood was tutored in Latin by a young Cambridge graduate named E. M. Forster. The lessons began a friendship that lasted three decades and shaped English literature: Forster later wrote that Masood opened his eyes to India and gave him a new horizon ^[3].

Masood entered Oxford in 1907, reading history, and cut a memorable figure there: tall, expansive, generous with money he did not always have, and given to grand gestures of affection and hospitality that his English friends found both exasperating and irresistible ^[3]. Forster's biographer P. N. Furbank records that the novelist's feelings for Masood ran deep, and that Masood, while returning warm friendship, gently declined anything more ^[3].

After Oxford, Masood read for the bar in London and was called at Lincoln's Inn, returning to India to practise law briefly at Patna ^[2]. The law did not hold him. Education was the family inheritance, and by the mid 1910s he had moved into the Indian Educational Service, beginning the administrative career that would define his public life ^[1].

Forster visited India in 1912 and 1913 largely at Masood's urging, staying with him and travelling through the country that would furnish the material for his most famous novel. When A Passage to India appeared in 1924, its dedication read, in part, to Syed Ross Masood and to the seventeen years of our friendship ^[4]. Forster later wrote a moving memorial essay about him, collected in Two Cheers for Democracy, in which he credited Masood with waking him out of his suburban and academic life ^[4].

Masood's administrative reputation was made in Hyderabad State, the largest of India's princely states, where he served as Director of Public Instruction during the 1920s ^[1]. Hyderabad was then engaged in an ambitious experiment: Osmania University, founded in 1918, taught modern subjects through the medium of Urdu rather than English, and the state's education department was expanding schooling across a vast and largely rural territory. Masood threw himself into this work, supervising curricula, teacher training, and the translation of technical vocabulary into Urdu ^[5].

In 1922 the Hyderabad government sent him to Japan to study how that country had built a modern education system on its own linguistic and cultural foundations. The result was his report, published as Japan and Its Educational System, which argued that India could modernise without abandoning its own languages, just as Japan had done ^[5]. The Japan journey became one of the defining episodes of the Sir Ross Masood biography, and he returned to the theme repeatedly in speeches: scientific and technical knowledge, he insisted, had to be made available in the languages ordinary Indians actually spoke.

His Hyderabad years established him as one of the leading Muslim educationists of his generation, a man equally comfortable negotiating with British officials, princely courts, and university senates ^[1].

In 1929 Masood accepted the post his ancestry had almost predestined: Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, the institution his grandfather had founded ^[1]. The university he inherited was struggling with debt, factional quarrels, and flagging academic standards. Among the principal Sir Ross Masood achievements of this period was a sustained effort at rebuilding: he raised funds from princes and philanthropists, recruited able teachers, pushed science education, and worked to restore the university's standing among Indian Muslims ^[1].

Contemporaries described his vice-chancellorship as energetic and personal. He knew students by name, entertained lavishly, and used his connections across British India and the princely states to the university's advantage. The historian David Lelyveld, in his study of the Aligarh movement, treats the Masood family as central to the college's story across two generations ^[1]. During these years Masood also deepened his friendship with the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal; the two travelled together to Afghanistan in 1933 at the invitation of King Nadir Shah to advise on the reorganisation of Kabul's educational institutions ^[6].

His services were recognised with a knighthood in the 1933 New Year honours, making him Sir Ross Masood ^[7]. He resigned the vice-chancellorship in 1934 after tensions with sections of the university's governing bodies, an ending that pained him, though his standing outside Aligarh remained high.

Masood married and had two sons, Anwar Masood and Akbar Masood, who carried the family line of Sir Syed into another generation ^[2]. Domestic life, by most accounts, mattered less to him than friendship, which he practised on an almost theatrical scale. He wrote letters constantly, in an emphatic style full of endearments and exclamation, and his correspondence with Forster, later collected and published in Karachi by the Ross Masood Education and Culture Society, remains a primary source for both lives ^[8].

Among the memorable Sir Ross Masood facts is the sheer range of his acquaintance. He was equally at ease with the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Bhopal, Oxford dons, Bloomsbury writers, and Aligarh undergraduates. Iqbal counted him among his closest friends and confidants during the last decade of the poet's life ^[6]. Friends also remembered his flaws honestly: extravagance with money, impatience with committee routine, and a temper that flared and passed quickly.

He was a lifelong advocate of Urdu as a language of modern knowledge, serving the cause through the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu and through his insistence, from Hyderabad onward, that translation and terminology work were as urgent as building schools ^[5].

After leaving Aligarh, Masood entered the service of Bhopal State, where the ruler, Nawab Hamidullah Khan, appointed him minister in charge of education. He spent his final years reorganising schooling in the central Indian state, applying lessons gathered over two decades in Hyderabad, Japan, and Aligarh ^[2]. He died in Bhopal on 30 July 1937, aged forty-eight, and his body was carried to Aligarh, where he was buried near his grandfather in the grounds of the university mosque ^[1].

The grief his death caused was wide. Iqbal, himself in failing health, mourned him in verse, and Forster's memorial essay preserved him for English readers as the friend who had made India real to him ^{[4] [6]}. Aligarh Muslim University commemorates him in the name of a residential hall, and his papers and letters continue to draw scholars of Indian education and of Forster alike ^[8].

His larger legacy is the argument he made throughout his working life: that Indian Muslims, and Indians generally, could take full possession of modern science and administration without surrendering their own languages. That conviction linked him backward to Sir Syed's reform movement and forward to the debates over language and education that followed Indian independence a decade after his death ^{[1] [5]}.