In my last column I traced the life and political career of Maulana Azad, India’s leading Muslim nationalist, during the struggle against the British. But it is above all as a visionary of the place of Muslims in India’s civilisational history — and therefore in its present and its future — that Azad must be remembered.

When he became President of the Indian National Congress at Ramgarh in 1940, Azad delivered perhaps the greatest testament of the faith of a religious Muslim in a united India. He declared that “every fibre of my being revolted” against the thought of dividing India on communal lines. “I could not conceive it possible for a Musulman to tolerate this,” he declared, “unless he has rooted out the spirit of Islam from every corner of his being.” It galled him that the secularised Jinnah claimed to speak for India’s Muslims and to assert their claims to being a separate nation, while the Maulana was both a deeply committed Muslim and a passionate Indian. “I am a Musulman and proud of the fact,” he said to his majority non-Muslim Congress audience. “Islam’s splendid traditions of thirteen hundred years are my inheritance. I am unwilling to lose even the smallest part of this inheritance. In addition, I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of that indivisible unity that is Indian nationality.”

Historic claim

Then he added — and this is the key part: “I am indispensable to this noble edifice. Without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete. I am an essential element which has gone to build India. I can never surrender this claim. It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, and that many a caravan should rest here.... One of the last of these caravans was that of the followers of Islam. They came here and settled for good. We brought our treasures with us, and India too was full of the riches of her own precious heritage. We gave her what she needed most, the most precious of gifts from Islam’s treasury, the message of human equality. Full eleven centuries have passed by since then. Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.”

It took courage to say this. The Maulana was not immersing his Islam in any soft and fuzzy notion of Indian secularism, still less was he uncritically swallowing Hindu professions of tolerance and inclusiveness. He was, instead, asserting his pride in his religious identity, in the majesty and richness of Islam, while laying claim to India for India’s Muslims. He dismissed talk of Partition by arguing that he was entitled — just as any Hindu was — to a stake in all of India, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from the Khyber Pass to Khulna; why should he accept the Pakistani idea of a narrower notion of Muslim nationhood that confined Indian Muslims to a truncated share of the heritage of their entire land? He was a far more authentic representative of Indian Islam than Jinnah, and it is part of the great tragedy of 1947 that it was Jinnah who triumphed and not Azad.

Bridging diverse opinions

Partition was, of course, less a triumph for Indian Muslims than an abdication. Azad realised this, and amongst those Muslims who opposed Partition, he represented a key bridge between secularists like Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Saifuddin Kichlew, on the one hand, and Deobandi Muslim fundamentalists like Maulana Maudoodi (who felt that Islam should prevail over the world at large and certainly over India as a whole, and believed it to be treasonous — both to India and to Islam itself — to advocate that the religion be territorially circumscribed as Jinnah and the Muslim Leaguers did). Critics like Keonraad Elst have associated Azad with the latter view, seeing him as a surrogate fifth columnist for an eventual Islamicisation of the whole of India. While there is no denying that in some of his appeals to Muslim supporters Azad may have given grounds for such beliefs, Elst and others overlook the profundity of Azad’s lifelong engagement with the multi-religious civilisational heritage of his homeland. “Islam,” Azad averred, “has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism. If Hinduism has been the religion of the people here for several thousands of years Islam also has been their religion for a thousand years. Just as a Hindu can say with pride that he is an Indian and follows Hinduism, so also we can say with equal pride that we are Indians and follow Islam. I shall enlarge this orbit still further. The Indian Christ

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