The Writer & Journalist

Azad did not write to report. He wrote to work something out in front of his readers, and to bring them with him.

This is the first thing to understand about him as a writer, and it explains a great deal about the shape of his prose. His sentences are long. His paragraphs develop rather than summarise. He quotes, digresses, returns. Read carelessly, it looks ornamental. Read properly, it is the structure of an argument being built in the open, with the joints left visible so that a reader can check the work.

The method came directly out of his training. Classical Islamic scholarship is an argumentative tradition: positions are stated, objections raised, authorities weighed. Azad took that apparatus out of the seminary and applied it to the political condition of India under British rule. The result was an Urdu prose that was simultaneously familiar to a religiously educated reader and completely new in what it was being used to say.

It was also, by common consent, beautiful. Ghubar-e-Khatir — the letters he wrote at Ahmednagar Fort between 1942 and 1946, on subjects ranging from music and memory to tea and the weather — is still read as literature rather than as history. A political prisoner writing about birdsong is not avoiding the subject. He is demonstrating what the subject is for.

By 1900 Urdu already had a substantial periodical press: literary magazines, reformist journals, newspapers of record. What it had less of was a publication that treated its readers as participants in national politics rather than as a community with grievances to be represented.

Azad’s early ventures — the poetical journal Nairang-e-Aalam in 1899, the weekly Al-Misbah in 1900, the monthly Lissan-us-Sidq from 1903 to 1905 — were the apprenticeship. They taught him the practical trade: commissioning, editing, printing, distribution, and the perpetual problem of money.

When he launched Al-Hilal in July 1912, he brought all of it to bear. Contemporary accounts describe a weekly produced to a standard of typography, illustration and paper unusual for Urdu publishing at the time. The physical quality was part of the argument: this was not a pamphlet to be read once, but a periodical to be kept.

Azad’s central communicative problem was this. He wanted Muslim readers to join a national movement many of them regarded as belonging to somebody else. Telling them so directly would have failed. Instead he argued from inside their own frame of reference: using the vocabulary, the textual authorities and the moral categories his readers already accepted, and showing that they led towards national politics rather than away from it.

That is a harder rhetorical task than it sounds, and it carried a permanent risk of being misunderstood in both directions — as too religious by secular nationalists, and as too nationalist by those who wanted a separate communal politics. He was attacked from both sides for most of his career.

“This thousand years of our joint life has moulded us into a common nationality … we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible.” Presidential address, Indian National Congress, Ramgarh session, 1940 — widely reproduced English translation

The argument in that sentence is the same argument he had been making in print since 1912. Twenty-eight years is a long time to hold a line.

Al-Hilal’s readership was young. That was deliberate. The weekly was aimed at students, teachers, junior professionals and the newly literate — readers whose political opinions were not yet fixed and who were, for the first time in Indian history, numerous enough to matter.

Historians of the period generally agree that this is where the paper’s real influence lies. It is not that Al-Hilal changed a policy or forced a decision; it did neither. It is that a cohort of young Urdu readers encountered, at a formative moment, a serious and confidently argued case for Indian nationalism made in their own language and idiom — and a good number of them acted on it for the next thirty years.

The colonial state did not need to ban ideas outright. It had a more efficient instrument: a body of press law that required publishers to deposit securities, and allowed the government to forfeit those securities and demand larger ones if a publication was judged objectionable. For a small periodical, one forfeiture was usually fatal.

The pressure intensified after 1914, when wartime regulations gave the administration additional powers over publication, movement and detention. Both of Azad’s major papers were stopped in this environment: Al-Hilal in 1914 and Al-Balagh in 1916. He himself was removed from Calcutta under wartime regulations and held under restriction until 1 January 1920.

It is worth being clear about what this means. The colonial press regime did not primarily punish what had been published. It made publishing itself financially and personally unsurvivable for anyone who would not moderate. That most Indian nationalist journalism of the period was produced anyway, repeatedly, by people who knew the cost, is the fact that ought to be remembered.

The Indian freedom movement was not only a sequence of campaigns. It was also a very long argument, conducted in print, about what India was and who belonged to it. Newspapers were where that argument happened — which is why so many Indian political leaders of the period were, first, editors.

Azad’s contribution to it was specific: he made the case that a religiously grounded reader had national obligations, and he made it in a register that could not be dismissed as borrowed. The papers were shut down. The argument was not, and he went on making it for another four decades — from Congress platforms, from prison, and finally from a minister’s desk.