Baragaon, a village in Barabanki district of what was then the United Provinces, produced in Akhlaqur Rahman Kidwai a figure who moved between two worlds that rarely overlap in Indian public life: the research laboratory and the constitutional office of Governor. Born on 1 July 1921, Kidwai trained as a chemist in the United States, taught and led one of India's major universities, chaired the body that recruits the country's senior civil servants, and served as Governor of four states across three decades. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2011 and died in 2016 at the age of ninety-five.

Barabanki, Jamia and America

The Kidwais of Barabanki were a well-established Awadh family with a strong record of participation in the national movement and in education, and A. R. Kidwai's early schooling reflected that milieu. He took his first degree from Jamia Millia Islamia in 1940 — the nationalist university founded in opposition to colonial education — and then went abroad for advanced study in chemistry.

He earned a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1948 and a doctorate from Cornell University in 1950. For an Indian student in that period, from a district town in the United Provinces, this was an exceptional trajectory, and he returned to India with a research training that few of his contemporaries possessed.

The academic career

Kidwai joined Aligarh Muslim University, where he became Professor and Head of the Department of Chemistry. He spent the core of his working life there, teaching and supervising research, and he was closely identified with the institution for the rest of his career. From 1983 to 1991 he served as its Chancellor, the ceremonial and constitutional head of the university, during a period when Aligarh's status and character were the subject of considerable political and legal contention.

His reputation as an administrator rested on a combination that is not common: technical credibility as a working scientist, an unflappable temperament, and a reputation for procedural correctness. It was that last quality that carried him into a very different kind of appointment.

Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission

From 1974 to 1977, Kidwai served as Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission, the constitutional body responsible for recruitment to the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Foreign Service, the Indian Police Service and the other central services. The chairmanship is one of the most sensitive offices in the Indian state precisely because the commission's value depends entirely on its perceived independence from political interference.

His tenure spanned the declaration of the Emergency in 1975, a period in which almost every Indian institution came under pressure. He completed his term and moved on with his reputation for integrity intact, which is a substantive fact about those years.

Four states, three decades

Kidwai's second career was as a state Governor, an office he held for longer, in total, than almost anyone else in Indian history:

Governor of Bihar, 1979 to 1985
Governor of Bihar again, 1993 to 1998
Governor of West Bengal, 1998 to 1999
Governor of Haryana, 2004 to 2009
Additional charge as Governor of Rajasthan, 2007

The Governor's role in India is largely ceremonial in normal times and acutely consequential in abnormal ones — in the appointment of a Chief Minister when no party has a clear majority, in decisions on dissolving an assembly, and in the reporting of a state's constitutional condition to the centre. Bihar in the 1980s and 1990s was among the most politically unstable states in the union, and Kidwai's long service there placed him repeatedly at the centre of such decisions. As Governor he was also, ex officio, Chancellor of the state universities, which returned him to the education administration he knew best.

Between his gubernatorial terms he served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, from 1999 to 2004.

The Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour, was announced for Kidwai in 2011 in the field of public affairs, recognising a career of some six decades in academic and constitutional office. He died in New Delhi on 24 August 2016.

Why the village matters

Kidwai's career is a particular kind of Indian story. He was not a mass politician and never sought elected office of the campaigning kind. His authority came from qualification, from institutional service and from a reputation that survived several of the most contested periods in the republic's history. That such a career began in Baragaon, a village in Barabanki, is a reminder that the Indian administrative and academic elite of the mid-twentieth century was drawn far more widely from small-town and rural India than is often assumed.

He is commemorated in Barabanki and at Aligarh Muslim University, where the association ran across more than half his life, and his name recurs in the institutional histories of the universities and commissions he headed.