Inspired by Emily Spinach’s ‘personal curriculums when they work, when they don’t work, when they work better’.

Personal curriculums are all the rage right now. People are figuring out how to self-learn, manage time, and keep their passions alive. Reading Spinach’s post made me think about how this isn’t new; people have always designed their own learning journeys. In fact, looking back to early modern Mughal South Asia, the everyday education of ordinary people was shaped not only by employment needs but also, much like today, an innate passion for learning.

A striking example comes from the life of the protagonist of my book The Sky Poured Down Candy (read more about it here), Abdul Jalil Bilgrami, the “personal curriculum” he created for his son, Sayyid Muhammad, and what ensues thereafter.

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The French traveller Jean Baptiste Tavernier, who visited India frequently over two decades of the seventeenth century, observed how Mughal merchants educated their children:

They [merchants] accustom their children at an early age to shun slothfulness, and instead of letting them go into the streets to lose their time at play, as we generally allow ours, teach them arithmetic, which they learn perfectly, using for it neither pen nor counters, but the memory alone, so that in a moment they will do a sum, however difficult it may be. They are always with their fathers, who instruct them in trade, and do nothing without explaining it to them at the same time.

What stands out here is not just the focus on learning but how education was woven into everyday life, and in it the role played by fathers. Children learned by observing their fathers, solving problems by memory, and working alongside them. This approach wasn’t limited to merchants, it reflected how the broader middle classes of the Mughal society educated their children.

Take Abdul Jalil Bilgrami, a modest Mughal official. Even though he was far from his son, posted as a news-recorder at a frontier town, he remained deeply invested in the young man’s learning. In letters he sent, he urged his son to study hard and acquire knowledge across both religious and secular subjects. He recommended that his son gain expertise in Quranic commentaries (tafsīr), traditions (ḥadīs̤), jurisprudence (fiqh), and theology (uṣūl), alongside logic (mant̤iq), philosophy (ḥikmat), apart from the conventional job-based (rozgāri) skills.

This wasn’t unusual. From emperor Akbar’s time, Mughal rulers promoted education that combined religious learning with scientific, mathematical, and philosophical studies. As Abul Fazl, Akbar’s famous court chronicler, recorded under the regulations regarding education in the Akbari period:

Every boy ought to read books on morals, arithmetic, the notation peculiar to arithmetic, agriculture, mensuration, geometry, astronomy, physiognomy, household matters, the rules of government, medicine, logic, the ṭabī’ī [physical sciences], riyāzī [sciences of quantity comprising mathematics, astronomy, music, and mechanics], and ilāhī sciences [literally, divine comprising everything from theology and the means of acquiring a knowledge of God], and history; all of which may be gradually acquired.

Naturally, not everyone approved of this approach. Critics like Abdul Qadir Badauni argued that focusing on non-religious subjects like astronomy, philosophy, history, literature, mathematics, and medicine led to neglect of Arabic learning and traditional religious texts such as exegesis, traditions, and jurisprudence.

Nevertheless, the idea of learning by understanding, in place of rote learning—another of the Akbari educational measures—seems to have been embraced in everyday education. Abdul Jalil’s method of teaching through practice is a case in point. He asked his son to copy portions of scholarly texts and post them to him. While this directly helped him access the material from afar, it also sharpened his son’s language and interpretative skills in Arabic, Persian, and Hindi. Poetry wasn’t left out either. Abdul Jalil shared his own compositions, including verses (rubāʻīs) and chronograms (taʼrīkhs), with his son, making literature a significant part of everyday learning.

Being himself trained, it seems, in medicinal sciences, in imparting medical knowledge, a combination of reading and practical application was what Abdul Jalil took recourse to. Abdul Jalil advised his son to read medical works like the Ikhtiyārāt-i Badi‘, Alfāẓ al-Adwiye, and Qarābādīn-i Shifā’ī, all pharmacological texts detailing drugs in multiple languages including Hindi. He, at the same time, asked his son to prepare remedies (like medicinal powder, churan) for his ill mother, using recipes from a household book.

Interestingly, Abdul Jalil did not just tell his son what to study; he also warned him against wasting time on obscure texts. When his son started reading a treatise titled I’lāmu’l Ḥadīs̤ (literally, science of Quranic traditions), Abdul Jalil thought it would not add much value and instead advised him to begin with better-known works that would make such texts easier to understand. To be specific, he mentioned that if the son had first consulted the Sharḥu’l ‘aqā’id (literally, interpretations of the fundamental religious tenets), the I’lāmu’l Ḥadīs̤ would have been very easy for him to comprehend. Additionally, he instructed his son to follow a system when it came to his curriculum, which would help him acquire knowledge in a structured and timely manner.

Throughout his letters, Abdul Jalil emphasized one thing repeatedly, that time was precious. He encouraged his son to keep reading and writing every day, making the most of each moment. Giving his own example of having achieved scholarly proficiency under the guidance of his diseased father, he asked him to be uniformly industrious. Appreciating the son’s efforts, albeit sparingly, he acknowledged the improvement he had made in his reading.

Interestingly, the father even advised the son to protect his eyesight by avoiding late-night reading, showing how caring for one’s well-being has always been very much a part of the learning process.

Of course, Abdul Jalil’s guidance bore fruit. His son, Sayyid Muhammad, went on to write a biographical dictionary in 1852, a collection of historical and biographical notices on the most notable and venerable men from their hometown of Bilgram (in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India).

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What strikes me most is how grounded and practical Abdul Jalil’s “personal curriculum” for his son was. It wasn’t about following rigid rules; it was about equipping a young man with tools to live, think, and contribute meaningfully.

In today’s world of self-designed study plans and productivity hacks, it is humbling to see how similar concerns of time, attention, practice, persistence, curiosity, and well-being have always shaped education, even in early modern Mughal South Asia.