About Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

The household Azad grew up in was a serious one. His father was a religious scholar with a substantial following; the family settled in Calcutta around 1890, and the boy was educated at home, in the classical curriculum, by his father and by tutors. Available accounts describe him as an exceptional student who had completed the traditional course of study while still very young.

What makes the story unusual is what he did next. Rather than settling into the role the training implied, he read his way out of it — into history, philosophy, mathematics, the natural sciences, and the political writing of his own century, much of it in languages he taught himself. Government and institutional sources describe him as a scholar educated largely outside any conventional school system, with a range across languages and disciplines that few of his contemporaries matched.

That combination — deep classical training plus wide self-directed modern reading — is the single most important fact about his intellectual life. It gave him standing inside a religious tradition and, at the same time, the vocabulary of modern politics. He spent the next fifty years speaking to both audiences at once, which is a large part of why he was so difficult for anyone to place.

Azad’s move from scholarship to politics was not a break; it was a continuation by other means. He was editing journals as a teenager — a poetical journal in 1899, a weekly in 1900, a monthly between 1903 and 1905 — and the habit of addressing a public in print never left him.

By his early twenties he had travelled outside India and had come into contact with political currents in West Asia and Egypt. Historians generally connect that exposure with the sharpening of his anti-colonial position on his return: the conviction that the condition of Indians under British rule was a political problem requiring political organisation, not simply a moral or religious one.

The result was Al-Hilal. It is worth being precise about what was new in it. Urdu journalism already existed. What Azad added was an argument aimed squarely at Muslim readers, telling them that the national movement was theirs, and doing so from within a religious idiom that his readers recognised and trusted.

Al-Hilal’s first issue appeared on 13 July 1912. It was produced to an unusually high standard and it found readers quickly. It was also, from the colonial administration’s point of view, a problem: an Urdu weekly with reach, arguing for Indian nationalism and for cooperation across communities, in the years when the First World War was making the government especially sensitive to what Indians were reading.

Government and institutional accounts record that Al-Hilal was suppressed under press legislation in 1914. Azad’s response was to start again: Al-Balagh appeared from 12 November 1915. It ran into 1916, when it too was stopped and Azad was removed from Calcutta under wartime regulations. He was held under restriction — latterly at Ranchi — until 1 January 1920.

Four years of enforced silence is a long time for a writer. It is also, in the logic of colonial rule, a compliment: the state does not detain a journalist it considers harmless.