Syed Mohamed Husain Nainar: Scholar, polyglot, and my grandfather

A termite-infested trove of papers unveils the extraordinary life and scholarly legacy of a Tamil Muslim academic who bridged civilisations.

S.M. Husain Nainar in his later years | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

This would perhaps be a good time to thank the termites: for their help in reconstructing the jigsaw puzzle that is my paternal grandfather Syed Mohamed Husain Nainar’s legacy. If they had not been so keen on chewing through the wooden cabinets of our house in Salem, Tamil Nadu, we may have never found it necessary to finally dig into the mountain of paper that had built up from the 1800s till date, hoarded for the rainy day that never came. As Nainar’s 125th birth anniversary approaches (May 25, 2024), this account of a search for a patriarch’s profile(s) would resonate with those trying to figure out how their ancestors lived.

Contemporary fact-seekers may often come across the name of S.M. Husain (also sometimes spelt Husayn) Nainar, (1899-1963), when they study Tamil country’s history before the British Raj, or look into the influence of Islam and Arab travellers in this region from the 7th to 13th centuries. As a senior reader and later head, of the Department of Arabic, Persian and Urdu at Madras University, from 1927-1954, Nainar wrote, edited and translated over 20 works about South Indian antiquity that are considered an important repository of knowledge gleaned from rare, archival documents in multiple languages.

He wrote in English and Tamil; he was proficient in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and Malayalam; could read and understand Dutch and French, and also learned Malayan and Bahasa Indonesia in the later part of his career. Among Nainar’s publications are Arab Geographers’ Knowledge of South India, originally written as his PhD thesis for the School of Oriental Studies (now known as the School of Oriental and African Studies or SOAS), University of London, in the 1930s; the English translation of ‘Tuhfat-al-Mujahidin (A Gift to the Holy Fighters), a historical work in Arabic by Zainuddin Makhdoom II, about Portuguese colonialism in 16th century Kerala (1942), and five volumes of Sources of the History of the Nawabs of the Carnatic edited based on Persian manuscripts Tuzak-i-Walajahi by Burhan Ibn Hasan; Sawanihat-i-Mumtaz by Muhammad Karim Zamin; and Bahar-i-Azamjahi by Ghulam Abdul Qadir Nazir, about the princely state in the erstwhile Madras Presidency.

In 1948 he mobilised public support and published a daily newspaper in Tamil called Swatandira Nadu. It was printed and published by Nuri Press, established by my grandfather and his elder brother with funds raised by well-wishers in Malaysia, Singapore and Burma. However, the daily could not survive beyond two years.

Shortly before his retirement, he was deputed as a research scholar to Indonesia by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), Ministry of Education in 1952, to study relations between India and Indonesia. After the ICCR’s contract ended, he stayed on to complete the research at his own expense, and worked as a professor at the Government Institute of Islamic Studies in Yogyakarta from 1957 to 1960.

When he returned to India, after a short stint at the Indonesian section of All India Radio’s External Services Division, he joined the Department of Arabic, Persian and Urdu at Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati in 1961. Nainar passed away due to liver failure in 1963, while still in service.

This is my grandfather’s story in a very crowded nutshell, gleaned from the papers and documentation that survived the termite infestation. A more detailed version can be found at www.smhnainar.com, a website I compiled with the help of some patient family members and web developers in Salem and Tiruchi.

An educational pioneer

Arabic, Persian and Urdu were, at different times, widely used in India, in the courts of kingdoms and revenue offices before the British Raj brought English into vogue. Tamil was influenced by Arabic from the 7th century, even before the birth of Islam in Arabia, and as Nainar’s research indicates, contains a significant number of loan words which are still in use. How did a boy from the temple town of Palni, Tamil Nadu, born into a family of ‘olai’ (palm fronds processed into writing material) merchants, farmers and ‘munsiffs’ (local magistrates), choose to study Arabic, and its sister languages of the South and West Asia, and then use his learning to decipher the history of South India?

S.M. Husain Nainar and his brother S. Kadir Mohamed Nainar with their children, circa 1940s.  | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Nainar grew up at a time when Tamil Muslims were resistant to the idea of any kind of non-religious education. His father, N. Syed Bawa Rowther, was convinced that Western education would reduce his sons’ marriage ‘market value’. His three daughters possibly never attended school.

But the winds of change had begun to blow in Nainar’s part of the world. Like his elder brother Syed Kadir Mohamed Nainar, former district judge and public prosecutor, Nainar excelled in his studies. He studied Arabic at the madrasa (Islamic school) in Podakkudi, Thiruvarur district, and later at the Madrasa Jamaliya in Perambur, Madras, according to family sources.

A detailed eight-page résumé prepared by him, possibly while he was in between jobs in the 1960s, traces his progress from senior school in Victoria Memorial High School, Bodinayakanur (1918-1921), and Intermediate at American Mission College, Madurai (1921-1923), to BA in Arabic at Government Mohammedan College, Madras (1923-1925) that would eventually lead him to Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).

Here too, he was a bit of an over-achiever, as he simultaneously pursued Bachelor of Laws (LLB) and a Masters in arts in Arabic, from 1925 to 1927. Our discovery of his exam hall tickets confirms that.

At AMU, Nainar was a student of renowned scholar Abdul Aziz Maimani, who was known for his mastery over Arabic. Nainar also studied Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic under the tutelage of British Arabist A.S. Tritton, who served at the AMU from 1921 to 1931.

Linguistic bridges

In 1927, Nainar was appointed as senior lecturer of the Islamic section of the Institute of Oriental Studies and Research at the University of Madras, which was later re-constituted as the Department of Arabic, Persian and Urdu in 1930. Much of his work began with authorising ‘true copies’ to be made by professional scribes that did not deviate in any way from the original, down to the number of lines on a page. Among such true copies that have survived in his collection, is a version of Kerala Pazhama, in Malayalam, meant to be a companion volume to Tuhfat-ul-Mujahidin, for which Nainar collaborated with his colleague C. Achutha Menon.

Despite studying Arabic under notable tutors in India, and his fluency in it, Nainar still felt that his expertise was limited, and his sons could perhaps fill this lacuna by studying the language in an Arab country. When his elder son Anwar chose to study Economics, he sent my father, Munawwar, to pursue his BA in Arabic at Cairo University in Egypt. Rescued from a loft full of paper bundles, we found all the correspondence from this period.

A flyer issued in 1938 by N. Ghulam Hussain Munshi, secretary, Anjuman-e-Islamiya in Madurai, asking Muslims in the city to gather at the railway station to welcome Nainar after he completed his doctoral studies at SOAS, London. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

My father’s time in Cairo University was completely overseen through letters from 1955-1960, because Nainar was on deputation in Indonesia when he was sent off to Egypt at the age of 19. One personal favourite is a trilingual true copy made by Nainar, of three letters written by my father in Arabic, Tamil and English, informing him that he had passed his first year BA exams.

A man of letters

Family history can be a touchy subject, with each person having their own spin on events. In my case, having a stockpile of at least 10,000 documents from the 1800s kept me going, and helped to dispel the myths that had built up around my grandfather. There are flashes of humanity amid the academic studies: letters from his children (he had three daughters and two sons) written from India, when he was in the UK, reporting faithfully, the antics of my father, then just a three-month-old infant, and the periodic health checks by the doctor, besides requests for books, umbrellas and toys.

The letters grow more serious as the children walk into adulthood, and the subject of marriage proposals gets a few wires crossed between the senior Nainar brothers. One wonders how he navigated life as a student, scholar and family man across two World Wars and later, a complete change of government. At work, he seemed to be always in demand, seguing from professor to orator and in Indonesia, a representative of the Indian government, with ease.

In 1952, Dr. Nainar was chosen to head the Indian History Association’s 15th session in Gwalior, a rare honour for a language professor. In his presidential address, he spoke on early medieval Indian history, suggesting that the study of the Muslim period in India needed to be re-assessed, and indexed especially in the Deccan and the south with the help of inscriptions and letters in local languages.

It is sobering to know that my grandfather has no claim on public memory today; of the institutions he studied in only the SOAS archivist was able to provide a copy of his admission form and course details, within a day. Like many scholars, his work is valuable, but not, apparently, glamorous enough in a country where history is easily rewritten. Had he stayed with us longer, he may perhaps have written his autobiography, and guided his family through yet another idea of India.