A student and his teachers

Nahla Nainar

Had someone told the teenaged Syed Muhammad Munawwar Nainar that hed be an expert in
Arabic by the age of 23, he would have probably laughed unsurely and gone back to his books.

For the lanky young Munawwar was dogged not just by fragile health, but dismal marks in school.

It didnt help that his father, Dr. Husain Nainar was fluent in six languages, and as professor of Oriental

Studies at the Madras University, had written a seminal doctoral thesis on Arab geographers knowledge of
southern India that rectified some of the earlier information recorded by Western scholars on the subject,

besides editing a 13-volume history of the Nawabs of the Carnatic. He was also a robust, if strict, patriarch,
taking charge of his own five children and six of his elder brother, Syed Muhammad Kadir Nainar, who
was a distinguished judge, the first gold medallist in law in the Madras Presidency.
***

Dr. Husain seemed to enjoy getting caught up in the confluence of languages; he was a prolific writer of

academic texts in English and Tamil, and he loved to teach Arabic, which he had first studied in southern

Indian Madrassas before graduating in the subject from Aligargh Muslim University, besides reading and
collecting books in Dutch, Sanskrit and French.

Husain wanted his elder son Anwar to learn Arabic, a process he started by taking verb conjugation lessons
at the dinner table.

Munawwar, who had been slotted to study Tamil after graduating from school, used to watch as his brother
and father sparred over the grammar, and started picking up the basics of Arabic. Dr. Husain noticed that
his younger son, who so far had been known only for his skill in re-enacting Tamil film scenes at home,
seemed to understand, or at least memorise, Arabic grammar rules more easily than his elder brother.

Anwar went on to graduate in economics, while Munawwar started studying Arabic from his Intermediate
(after Class X) at the Government Arts College, Mount Road, Madras.

Kokan Sahib and Muhaiyedeen Koya, colleagues of Dr. Husain, were engaged to give extra tuitions.

Munawwar spent his day negotiating classes and tutors. Kokan Sahib taught him in a mixture of Urdu and
English; Muhaiyedeen Koya, in the store room of the tiny grocery that he ran near the Thousand Lights
Mosque, in Arabic and Malayalam.

But Munawwars exam results remained disappointing. Dr. Husain had by this time, left for Indonesia on a
deputation from the Madras University. A chance discussion on the discovery of oil in Iraq and

employment potential of Arabic speakers at an embassy party in Jakarta sparked a new thought why not
make Munawwar study Arabic in Egypt?

***

And so it happened, that barely three months into his B.A. Arabic course in Madras, Munawwar found
himself preparing to leave for Egypt in 1955. He was 19.

Everything in the run-up to the departure was cloaked in fear and excitement the arrival of Munawwars
passport, the new wardrobe of formal suits from Syed Bawkher tailors, the two suitcases from the Evening

Bazaar on which his name was painted, followed by the emotional family farewell on a hot May day at the
Meenambakkam airport on the Air India Constellation aircraft.

After a brief stopover at Bahrain, the flight landed in Cairo at 2.30 a.m. Dr. Husain had arranged for Khalid
Ghazi, an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official, to receive Munawwar at the airport.
It was to be the start of an unforgettable odyssey.

***
At 10 a.m., Mr. Ghazi took Munawwar to the Cairo University, for completing the admission formalities.
Dr. Husain had made a conscious decision to select the secular Cairo University, rather than the more

conservative Al-Azhar University for his son. Established in 1908, the institution has three Nobel laureates
among its graduates (including the writer Naguib Mahfouz).

But Munawwar wasnt aiming for any prizes when he joined the university. Thrilled by his luxurious hostel
room, he nevertheless broke down when Mr. Ghazi bid him farewell. How would he survive in this vast
ocean of new faces and more terrifyingly a new language?
***
Mr. Ghazi helped him settle down, by taking him home to meet his family and showing him around the

city. As the lone Indian in a class of 40 Arabic speaking men and women, Munawwar felt overwhelmed
and quite ready to return home.

He wrote to his father, confessing the Arabic he had learned in India was rudimentary. Dr. Husains

solution: to engage two tutors, both from the Al-Azhar University, for his son with the help of Mr. Ghazi.

While Munawwar was an observer student at college (not required to write exams), he was immersed in
learning Arabic from scratch all over again through his new teachers, only one of who spoke English.

English, Munawwar was to realise pretty early on, was to be his ticket to survival. With the language being
compulsory in the Bachelors course at Cairo University, Munawwar used to help his Arab classmates with
English in return for some help with his Arabic.

After around six months, the University allowed Munawwar to become a regular student, provided he

brushed up on his academics. The universitys French-style classes included lectures by noted professors in
the language such as literary critic and historian Shawki Dayf and Suheir al-Qalamawi, the first Egyptian
woman to earn her Master of Arts Degree and PhD for her work in Arabic literature. The lectures would
have to be backed up by students library research.

***
Two Palestinian classmates, Abdul Rahman Baroud (who later distinguished himself as a poet) and

Mohamed Siyam, started to coach Munawwar for the exams. After a lifetime of failing tests, suddenly,

Munawwar started enjoying his lessons, and the land that had welcomed him to study its language. In

todays parlance, he began to get Arabic. Besides relishing his hostel meals of foul medames (fava beans)

and boiled eggs, he started venturing out with friends for sight-seeing. Dr. Husains letters from Indonesia
urged him to enjoy responsibly, keep away from crowded places, and to avoid cigarettes.

He was one of around 50 students who went on a long cycling tour 25 kilometres from Cairo to see Egypts
many recreation centres, the Suez Canal, the Ismailiya Barrage and the backwaters of the sea and the
Pyramids of Giza. Munawwar wrote detailed letters back home describing their wonders.

In 1957, he returned to India for his first vacation in two years, by cargo ship. His co-passenger on this

journey that took him to Aden, Karachi and Bombay, was a Canadian missionary. After a month spent on

Indian shores, he went back, this time on a P&O cruise liner, via, Colombo, Aden and Suez. He took a train
back to Cairo.

***

In 1958, Dr. Husain urged his son to perform the Haj pilgrimage, because nobody had done it in the family
so far. Tales about the perilous nature of the journey to Makkah (due to highway robbery and inclement

desert weather) abounded in the pre-oil boom days of the Arabian Peninsula. Even today, pilgrims pack a
shroud to be used in case they dont survive Haj.

Munawwar set off on his Haj trip by ship on a four-day voyage from Suez Harbour to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
It was midnight when the group reached Makkah by bus from Jeddah, and Munawwar was mistaken for
an Egyptian by the Immigration officer until his passport gave away his nationality.

Abdul Rahman Shilli, a Saudi national whose mother was Indian, was the official guide and caretaker

(known as muallim) for pilgrims from southern India. Munawwar was put up with the other bachelor
Hajis (pilgrims) at Shillis residence.

The Haj too was to be an eye-opener for Munawwar. Quite early on in the 25-day sojourn, he had his first
introduction to death he saw the body of a Keralite scholar laid out at Shillis house to be sent back to

India for burial. The scholar had stepped out into the desert heat after an oil bath, which was thought to
have caused his premature death.

Munawwar himself suffered sunstroke after evening prayers at the Madrasa Saulatiya in Misfalah, the
oldest school set up by Indian Ulema in Saudi Arabia, situated very close to the Kaaba.

The journey to Madinah (on a single lane rough road) was no less eventful, especially when the Yemeni

driver of their bus stopped the vehicle after four hours and demanded money from each of the 80 pilgrims
to proceed to the destination!

Staying at the Rubat Bhopal, a pilgrim guest house maintained by the royal family of Bhopal in Madinah for
a week, Munawwar then returned to Jeddah, and from there, boarded the ship back to Egypt.
***
In 1959, Syed Muhammad Munawwar Nainar graduated from Cairo University with a Jayyid (Above

Average) grade. There was no farewell party, but there was the customary class photo. He travelled back to
India, to be received by his father in Bombay. Arabic was to make a man of Munawwar. It would take him
to radio broadcasting, teaching, translation and the Indian Foreign Service, besides a long stint as in the
Education Ministry of Qatar. But these are stories we must keep for another day.
***
The Egypt that Munawwar visited had yet to witness the sweeping changes brought about by the Arab
Spring in the new millennium, but it proved to be the place where a student found his teachers.

***

Dr. Syed Muhammad Husain Nainar

Dr. Syed Muhammad Husain Nainar (1898-1963), born into a family of two
sons and eight daughters, was eager to break out of his father Syed Bawa

Rawthers mirasdar (land-owing) background in Palani, south India, and see the
world. He was devoted to his elder brother Kadir (much less is known about the
eight sisters), and as letters (in elegant copperplate writing) between the two
siblings show, the love and respect was mutual.

The two Nainar brothers were very keen on educating their children, especially
the girls, which was considered a bit radical in the Tamil Muslim community
those days.

Dr. Husain ran the Tamil newspaper Suthanthira Naadu for a brief while, but closed it down when he

realised that hed have to accept advertisements from tobacco and liquor companies to make a profit. He

retained the press for commercial printing. And as lecturer, he wrote many monographs and edited a 13-

volume encyclopaedia on the history of the Nawabs of the Carnatic for the Madras University. History buffs
may have spotted the fact that he had named his sons after the descendants of the Arcot Nawabs. His home
in Eldams Road was called The Carnatic!

The Arab link to southern India was of particular interest to Dr. Husain as a scholar and as a Muslim. He

was also perhaps that rare young man who ran away from home not for love, but for education his own

formative years in higher studies were spent in Aligargh, northern India, where he had escaped to after he
learned that his father wanted him to take up farming because nobody would want to marry an educated
boy. He contacted his family after several years, once he had simultaneously graduated with Masters

degrees in Arabic and Law. He passed away in 1963, while serving as the Arabic Head of Department at the
Tirupati University.

VIGNETTES FROM EGYPT

Munawwar Nainar (second from left), with relatives ahead of his journey to Egypt from Madras,
May 1955.

Weekend outing with friends, Ismailiya Barrage.

At the Pyramids, Giza

Class photo, 1959