ABSTRACT
When Sayyid Ahmad Khan was growing up in Delhi, he lived in the home of his maternal grandfather, Khwaja Fariduddin Ahmad. This was unusual in a society where wives customarily went to live with their husbands’ families, but Sayyid Ahmad’s father, a religious mystic, was apparently willing to have the main responsibility for his family rest with his wife’s father, a high official in the Mughal Court. Sayyid Ahmad Khan may have been an extraordinary individual, but he was also paradigmatic. He shared many characteristics with others of the late Mughal service gentry who had to come to terms with the changing political and economic realities of British-ruled India. Returning to Sir Sayyid’s views, one could argue that he was not opposed to women’s education in principle, only to their education in schools. This was a realistic assessment of opinion among his fellow ashraf in the 1880s.
