By the standards of the district, Shahpur had schools, but they were not truly accessible to a boy in Sajjad Husain’s position. For a family without means in the late nineteenth century, formal education was a door that opened only briefly before closing again. He studied where he could, for as long as circumstances allowed, and then did what boys in his situation were expected to do: he went to work.
Yet he refused to accept that a closed classroom door meant the end of learning. What he could not receive from teachers, he pursued on his own. With little money and no formal guide, he taught himself one book at a time — borrowing what he could, saving for what he could not, and reading by whatever light was available until language itself became not a barrier, but a tool.
He first taught himself to read Urdu with real fluency, then turned to Persian, the language of poetry and of an older, more ornate world of Muslim learning. English came later and more gradually. He acquired it as a man might acquire a second trade: useful, necessary, and never quite as intimate as the first, but practical enough that in later years he could read a government notice, a court document, or an English newspaper without relying on another person’s translation.
There is a particular satisfaction in mastering, by one’s own effort, what formal systems have withheld. Sajjad Husain seems to have felt that satisfaction and carried it with him throughout his life. The private library he later assembled — numbering, according to family memory, in the thousands of volumes and covering history, politics, religion, and the general knowledge of his age — was not merely the collection of a prosperous man with space on his shelves. It was the slow completion of an education denied to the child, built book by book by the man that child became.
“Books,” he is remembered telling a nephew many years later, turning a worn volume in his hands as if it were a freshly sharpened tool, “cost less than pride, and they last longer than both pride and money.” Whether these were his exact words, or the shape family memory gave to a sentiment he expressed often, hardly matters. The thought fits him completely.
His life proved the lesson true. A mind formed outside formal institutions could still hold its own — in a courtroom, in a newspaper office, in a political meeting, or in conversation with a scholar trained in the seminary tradition. After hearing him speak, few would have guessed how much of his learning had been won through private effort rather than formally given.
That distinction mattered deeply to him and explains what might otherwise seem a contradiction in his later life: a self-taught man who could quote Persian poetry from memory and correspond in three languages still insisted that his grandchildren attend the best schools he could afford. He did not champion formal education because it had been easy for him to obtain. He championed it because he understood, not only in thought but through experience, the cost of being denied it.