Learn

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was an Indian scholar, writer and political leader who lived from 1888 to 1958. He is remembered for three things above all.

He was a journalist who was silenced twice. He started an Urdu newspaper called Al-Hilal in 1912. It argued that India should be free from British rule and that Hindus and Muslims belonged to one country together. The British government shut it down in 1914. He started another paper, Al-Balagh, in 1915; that was stopped too, and he was kept under restriction until 1920.

He was a leader of the freedom movement. He was president of the Indian National Congress twice: in 1923, when at thirty-five he was the youngest person ever elected to the post, and again from 1940 to 1946, through the Second World War and the Quit India movement. He was imprisoned several times, including for nearly three years at Ahmednagar Fort.

He was India’s first Education Minister. From 15 August 1947 until his death in 1958 he was in charge of education for the newly independent country. He pressed for free schooling for all children, for girls’ education, for science and technical education, and for national bodies to support universities and the arts. India observes his birthday, 11 November, as National Education Day.

Azad’s ideas hang together more tightly than a list of achievements suggests. Four of them are worth knowing.

Knowledge is not divided into permitted and forbidden kinds. He was trained in classical Islamic scholarship and then taught himself history, mathematics and the sciences. He never treated religious learning and modern inquiry as rivals, and this shaped everything he later said about what Indian schools should teach.

Argument belongs in public. He believed that political positions should be explained at length, in the language ordinary readers use, and defended against objections. That is why he was a journalist before he was a politician, and why he kept writing when in office.

A nation is made by shared history, not shared religion. This is his most contested idea, and the one on which he lost. See the section on composite nationalism below.

Education is how a democracy maintains itself. If citizens have to judge candidates, arguments and evidence, then the quality of their education determines the quality of their government. On this view education is not one service among many; it is the maintenance of the political system.

Newspapers mattered in colonial India in a way that is easy to underestimate today. There was no Indian parliament to debate in and no Indian government to petition. Print was where the argument about India’s future actually took place, which is why so many leaders of the freedom movement were editors first.

The colonial administration understood this too. Press law required publishers to deposit money as security; if a publication was judged objectionable the money could be seized and a larger deposit demanded. For a small paper, that was usually fatal. After 1914, wartime regulations added powers to detain editors and to remove them from a city.

Both of Azad’s papers were stopped this way. The important lesson is not about one journalist. It is that a government which needs to control what people read is telling you something about the strength of its own case.

Read the full story of Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh.

Composite nationalism is the idea that a nation can be formed by many communities living a shared history together, without those communities becoming identical, and without any one of them owning the nation more than the others.

Azad argued this position throughout his life. In his 1940 presidential address to the Congress at Ramgarh he described eleven centuries of shared life in India, and said that this joint history had “moulded us into a common nationality”. He also said, in the same address, that he was proud both of his Muslim inheritance and of being “a part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality”.

The opposing position, set out by the Muslim League in the Lahore Resolution of the same month, was that Indian Muslims constituted a separate nation and needed their own state.

For teaching purposes it is worth being clear about three things. First, these were serious arguments held by serious people, not simply good and bad positions. Second, they were made in a specific political situation, and the situation matters. Third, Azad’s position did not prevail in 1947, and understanding why is more useful than deciding who was right.

In August 1947 British India was divided into two independent states, India and Pakistan. The provinces of Bengal and Punjab were themselves partitioned. Very large numbers of people were killed and many millions were displaced.

Estimates of the death toll vary widely between historians and should be treated with caution; the underlying records are incomplete. Responsibility for Partition is also genuinely contested among historians, and any classroom treatment should present it as an open question rather than a settled one.

What can be said clearly about Azad: he opposed the division of India consistently from 1940 onwards; he supported the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946, which would have kept the country united under a federal arrangement; and available accounts record that he abstained when the All India Congress Committee accepted the partition plan in June 1947. On 23 October 1947 he addressed Muslims at the Jama Masjid in Delhi, urging those who had stayed in India not to leave and not to live as supplicants.

Read the fuller account, with its notes on disputed history.

Imagine being asked to build a school system for a country of hundreds of millions of people, most of whom cannot read, with almost no money, in the middle of a refugee crisis. That was the job in 1947.

Azad’s priorities, as recorded in government sources, were: free and compulsory education for children; education for girls and women; the teaching of modern science; the expansion of technical education; and the quality of university teaching. The Constitution adopted in 1949 directed the state to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to age fourteen within ten years.

That target was not met. India took much longer, and the right to education did not become legally enforceable until 2009. This gap between commitment and delivery is worth discussing in class: it shows that establishing a principle and achieving it are different problems, and that the first is not worthless just because the second takes decades.

Institutions are organisations designed to keep doing something after the people who started them have gone. Several that Indians still use every day took shape during Azad’s eleven years as Education Minister.

• Indian Council for Cultural Relations, founded April 1950 — Azad was its founding president.
• IIT Kharagpur, 1951 — the first IIT, established under his ministry.
• Sangeet Natak Akademi, established by government resolution 1952 — music, dance and drama.
• University Grants Commission, inaugurated by Azad on 28 December 1953; statutory from 1956.
• Sahitya Akademi, inaugurated 12 March 1954 — literature.
• Lalit Kala Akademi, inaugurated by Azad on 5 August 1954 — the visual arts.

Note the careful wording. Some of these Azad founded; some he inaugurated; some were created by committee recommendation during his tenure. Precision here is a good habit to teach: it is the difference between history and advertising.

Three exercises built on the timeline page, in increasing order of difficulty.

Widely repeated claims, checked against the record.