Abul Kalam Azam was a fascinating figure. Although, perhaps best remembered as the key Muslim supporter of the Congress and fierce proponent of Indian nationalism, he was also an influential journalist; a leading voice in the Khilafat movement; an autodidact and idiosyncratic religious thinker; a man of deep poetic and aesthetic sensibilities.
Although a scholar, in many ways he possessed a temperament of a poet and had a keen aesthetic sense. His poetic sensibility was at full display in the splendid following passage that he wrote:
“Of whatever kind it may be, love (ishq) is always the first step towards the station of truth and reality (haqiqat).... Or, better, love is the door to be passed through before man can become man. Whoever’s heart is not wounded, and whoever's eyes are not wet with tears - how can he fathom the meaning of humanity?”
As the theologian, Christian Troll noted, “he combined aesthetic experience and religious consciousness." For historian, Francis Robinson, the aesthetic sense shone through “his love of music, his art with words, but most of all his belief that religion should not be against life, should not fashion dour and unsmiling people, but should be a celebration of life - of nature, of beauty, of laughter.”
A second notable facet of his writing was religion as a form humanistic universalism. This is exemplified in the following quotation from him:
“Let us, for a moment, look at the Surat al-Fatiha as a whole and see what type of mind it reflects or tries to build.
Here is a person singing the praise of his Lord. But the Lord he praises is not the Lord of any particular race or community or religious group but Lord of all the worlds, Rabbul-'alamin, the source of sustenance and mercy uniformly for all mankind.... The path that he wishes to walk on is not the path devised by any particular race or by any particular community or by any particular religious group. The path that he has in view is that royal road, the Straight Path which the founders of all religions and all truthful people have walked on, whatever the age or country they belonged to ...
. . . What type of mind does all this argue or aim to build? Whatever view one may take, this is clear that the mind which the Surat al- Fatiha depicts is the type of mind which reflects the beauty and mercy of God or universal humanity, the mind which the Qur'an aims to build.”
A third point relates to his originality and individuality as a thinker. He was largely a self-taught person with an idiosyncratic vision. Much flowed from this. One, was an inflated sense of self-importance. In one passage he commented, egotistically,
“In religion, in literature, in politics, in everyday thought, wherever I have to go, I have to go alone. On no path can I go with the caravans of the day.... Whichever way I walk, I get so far ahead of the [caravan] that when I turn to look back, I see nothing but the dust of the way."
It also shaped his aloofness and loneliness. He never had a common touch and was never ever able to move the masses.
As Ian Henderson Douglas put it, “in spite of his pride in being 'Azad' (free), his greatest bondage was to himself. The sad loneliness of his last years was the fruit of a life lived so totally individualistically.”
Fourthly and finally, what of his political vision? Although he became a poster child for a secular Indian nationalism, there are some perceptive critical commentaries. Patrick French, in his book Liberty or Death wrote of Azad in the last decade of colonial rule:
"The problem for Azad by the mid-1940s was that the Muslim League jibes of his being a compliant Muslim 'show-boy' inside Congress gave every impression being true: it is apparent that he would not have occupied such an important position within the party if he had not been a Muslim...
...The irony is that without him, the last ten years of British rule in India lack a single Congress Muslim of national stature. This fact has persuaded many people to take him more seriously than he deserves...
...As the most prominent Congress Muslim following the death of Dr Ansari, Azad was crucial to the image of the movement, and he allowed himself to be used as a puppet of the Old Guard, acquiescing to decisions that he personally opposed.”
More recently, Pratinav Anil (Another India) has argued that “No single life encapsulates the depoliticisation of the nationalist Muslim that followed independence better than Azad’s.” Maulana Azad comes out badly in this account, indeed a rather spineless figure, who allowed himself to be reduced to a mere figurehead as President of the Congress. For Anil, Azad represented an elite Muslim class that “betrayed” the Muslim community with its focus on depoliticisation and juridification rather than on the political and material uplift of the community as a whole.
Despite such critical assessments of his political impact, he remains an inspiration for many and is perhaps more importantly an interesting figure because he was such an unusual thinker. Azad was a maverick.
