Syed Ross Masood

Syed Ross Masood (15 February 1889 – 30 July 1937) was an Indian educationist who served as vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University from 1929 until his death. He was the son of Syed Mahmood and the grandson of Syed Ahmad Khan, the university's founder figure; predicates for grandparenthood do not exist in the museum's schema, so that kinship is stated here and in his record's provenance rather than drawn as a parent edge. The novelist E. M. Forster, his friend, dedicated A Passage to India (1924) to him. ^{1 2}

Educated at Aligarh and at the University of Oxford, he returned to India to practise law at Patna, then joined the Indian Education Service: headmaster of Patna High School, professor of history at Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, and one of the founders of Osmania University. From 1916 to 1928 he was Director of Public Instruction in Hyderabad Deccan. Sent to Japan in 1922 to study its schools, he published Japan and its Educational System (1923), recommending that Hyderabad modernise on a Japanese model of patriotic education free of foreign control. ^{1 3}

He became vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University in 1929, introduced new courses, revised the syllabi and built science laboratories, and was knighted in the 1933 Birthday Honours. He was also president of the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu, which published his biography in 2011. He died at Bhopal on 30 July 1937, still in office; a residential hall built at Aligarh in 1969 bears his name. ^{1 3}