David Lelyveld is the author of Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim

Solidarity in British India (1978, reprinted 2003) and co-editor of A

Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational
Perspective (2005). His most recent publications deal with the social and
political history of Urdu and its differentiation from Hindi. His current
project is Sir Syed and Macaulay’s Curse, a study of Sir Sayyid Ahmad
Khan, Justice Sayyid Mahmud, and Sir Sayyid Ross Masood. He has
held faculty and administrative positions at the University of Minnesota,
Columbia and Cornell. He is now Professor of History at William Paterson
University in New Jersey.