An unconvincing new biography by S Irfan Habib glosses over Maulana Azad’s contradictions

The historian S Irfan Habib’s conviction is that Maulana Azad was a great man whose ideas can serve as an ideological blueprint for us today. Habib, a brilliant historian who has held the Maulana Azad Chair at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, clearly intended his slim volume to be a paean to his hero.

But powerful tributes make for poor biographies. Take, for instance, Habib’s foreshortening of Azad’s early career as a pan-Islamist. It must be remembered that the secular icon was once upon a time not very secular. During and after World War I, Azad was above all concerned with imposing sharia on Indian Muslims, and crowning himself amir-i-hind, the juridical emperor of Muslim India. To this end, he preached jihad, ran secret societies, and liaised with revolutionaries in Afghanistan and the Ottoman Empire. Habib glosses over all of this, telling us instead that there was little more to Azad’s pan-Islamism than “unflinching anti-colonialism”.

Habib is on much firmer ground, however, describing Azad’s youth. He writes thoughtfully about the Maulana’s intellectual formation, his birth in Mecca in 1888 to an Arab mother and Indian father he rebelled against. The young Azad was drawn to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s rationalism as well as to music, both of which his feverishly devout father found heretical.

Conjugal life came early to him, as was the convention at the time. Azad was 13, and Zulaikha seven, when they married. But the joys of marital companionship were non-existent. Azad was a lonely child. Habib pins down his solitude to precocity, and indeed, we find an 11-year-old Azad penning ghazals and publishing in leading Urdu dailies aged 14. A trip to France in 1908 opened sexual horizons, Azad partaking in what Habib coyly calls “his indulgences, some of which were not really Islamic.” Azad himself was less circumspect: “I did every kind of hateful deed.”

If Habib leaves out unsavoury details from Azad’s life, it is because he is absorbed by the more pressing task of recovering Azad’s contribution to the nationalist movement. But his hyperbole surely does the Maulana a disservice. It was because of Azad and Congressmen like him, he writes, that “such large number of Muslims decided to choose India” over Pakistan. They were won over by “composite nationalism”. Few working-class Muslims in forties Madras, I imagine, would have cared for Azad’s Quranic justifications of tolerance, let alone felt they were making a conscious decision in “choosing” India. As it is, Azad’s and Habib’s views on toleration (much the same) take up the bulk of the volume, which contains such anachronistic gems as “the notion of composite nationalism, which Azad espoused, can be traced back to the early history of Islam.”

Habib, likewise, overstates Azad’s significance in the Congress. As a sign of his importance, we are told the Maulana was the party’s president when it resolved in favour of Quit India. But what Habib doesn’t tell us is that Azad was personally opposed to it. Indeed, he wanted the Congress to close ranks with the British in order to prevent a full-scale Japanese invasion. Mass movements, he felt, could wait. Azad, then, had a rather more nuanced view of the British than Habib gives him credit for.

In Habib’s hands, Azad becomes the apostle of a nationalist jihad against the Brits, who “were waging a war to exterminate Muslims.” Compare this with Azad’s own effusive portrait of Lord Wavell, the penultimate viceroy: “I found him a rugged, straightforward soldier void of verbiage and direct both in approach and statement. He created in the mind an impression of great sincerity which touched my heart.” Nehru was not alone in thinking that Azad fawned over Brits a little too much.

True, Azad was the second longest-serving party president (after Sonia Gandhi). But he was also among the least consequential. His correspondence was vetted, often ghost-written, by Nehru. He was ignored by all parties that mattered at the Simla Conference, in part because he hardly spoke any English (though Habib has it that he was fluent in both English and French) and, in part, because the British and Muslim Leaguers alike considered him irrelevant. Similarly, his federalist plan to forestall Partition was disregarded by all sides. His refusal to come to terms with the Pakistan demand infuriated Gandhi: ‘Make way for a younger man’ was the message the Mahatma sent the Maulana. Pace Habib, Jinnah was on the money when he called Azad a ‘Muslim showboy Congress president’. Indeed, that precisely was his appeal. Very simply, the Congress needed a respectable Muslim figure, and Azad fit the bill.

After Partition, Azad was handed the education ministry, then as now a low priority. Habib bafflingly blames the British for education policy shortcomings. As it happens, education had been in Indian hands since 1919. At any rate, Azad was unable to do very much. His advocacy for peacetime conscription, dragooning young men and women into two years of teaching, thankfully fell on deaf ears.

Habib skilfully reconstructs Azad’s thought-world, the daily rhythm of his life in prison, his speeches and writings. But his hagiographic effort to confer sainthood on his subject prevents him from seeing the bigger political picture. Ultimately Azad’s greatest contribution was not the ‘composite’ utopia he envisioned in his books but rather his role in the Constituent Assembly, which Habib doesn’t mention. It is, in part, thanks to him that madrassas received state aid, Urdu found a constitutional footing, and Muslim personal law was recognised. But, on the other hand, were it not for Azad’s efforts, it is quite likely that Muslims would have reservations today.

Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at the University of Oxford