Aijaz Ahmad.Pdf

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Political Essays ('S' A i j a zAhmad ■‘■S. % i( ((((((((( C (( ( Azad's Careers; Roads Taken and Not Taken Maulana Abul Kalam A/ad was undoubtedly one of the seminal figures in the Indian National Movement, and he came to ’ occupy, after Ansari’s death in 1936, an unassailable position among the nationalist Muslims as they were represented in the Indian National Congress.1 His Presidential Address at the Ramgarh Session of the Congress in March 1 940, merely a few days before Jinnah was to unveil the historic Pakistan Resolution at the Lahore Session of the t Muslim League, is one of the noblest statements of Indian secular nationalism and a definitive refutation of the so-called ‘two-nation theory’,2 Likewise, his attempt at reinterpreting Islamic theology itself in such a way as to make it compatible witli the religiously composite, politically secular trajectory of India, which found its 1 I use the awkward phrase ‘nationalist Muslims as they were represented in the Indian National Congress’ in more or less the same sense in which Mushirul Hasan uses the simple term ‘Congress M uslims’ in, for example, his recent Nationalism and Communal Politics in India 1885-1930 (Delhi: Manohar, 1991). The longer phrase is used here for a certain emphasis. There were also great many nationalist Muslims who did not join the Congress. Many more worked primarily m or around the Communist Party than is generally recognized; some others went into smaller parties of various types; an incalculable number did not join any party because of more or less equal discomfort with League policies and the presence of substantial Hindu communalist forces inside the Congress. It is also crucial to realize that the vast majority of Muslims— indeed, of all Indians— neither belonged to any political party nor had any opportunity, until after Independence, for electoral expression of their will, thanks to the extremely restricted nature of the franchise, even in 1946. 2 For the text of the Address, sec Malik Ram (ed.), Khutbaat-e-Azad, Delhi: Sahitya Akadcmi, 1 974. The significance of the Address shall be discussed below. 134 LINEAGES OF THE PRESENT most extended statement in the unfinished Tarjuman-al-Quran in the 1930s, represents a distinctive contribution to Indian Islamic thought. If we take as axiomatic the assertion of the late Fazlur Rahman, the eminent Pakistani scholar of Islam, that post-medieval Islam has had neither an Ilm-al-Kalam (‘Theology’ in the Christian sense) nor a Fiqh (Jurisprudence),3 we might say that Tarjuman is indeed one of the more notable efforts on the part of Indian theologians to fill that vacuum, at least on the level of general principles. And, surely, Ghubar-e-Khatir (1946) is one of the enduring books of Urdu literary prose. Azad himself seems to have become somewhat bitter in his later life for not being allowed to remain President of the Congress after 1946, hence missing the opportunity to play a pivotal role in the politics immediately preceding Partition, or to become the first Prime Minister of independent India. Whether or not that was a realistic possibility is questionable, but he had by then doubtless come to command within the Congress, and in the National Movement generally, that kind of stature. Azad’s achievements are myriad. I have highlighted the particular ones in the above paragraph for three reasons. First, it is with his w ritings that I am here-the most concerned. Second, I want to specify the three areas of his work which I shall like to discuss here, separately but also in tandem with each other, because it is in the overlap of these areas that the breadth of his engagements truly lies: his political trajectory as it is reflected in his writings, his ways of connec-ting Islam with politics, and his status as a writer of Urdu prose. Third, as even a glance at the above paragraph would indicate, I believe that'Azad’s essential achievements as writer and scholar came only in the latter part of his life and they came only after he had either abandoned or greatly modified the positions that had governed his thbught and actions up to and into the Khilafat Movement. In this last emphasis, my views seem to run counter to the main trends of the Azad scholarship as it has developed since his death in 1958, both in India and in Pakistan. Contrary to general impressions in India, where it is pre- 3 See, for a fuller discussion of this point, Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Mo dernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. p p\ p p p pi p P p P ( sumed that Azad would be neglected in Pakistan because of his commitment to secular Indian nationalism, he is in fact an extremely popular author there and collections of his writings are promoted a great deal, mainly by the conservative, fundamentalist groupings who concentrate on what I would call the Al-Hilal decade of Azad’s life4 and many of whom take Azad to have been—before his ‘Gandhian error’—the precursor of the kind of Islamic politics which came to be represented in Pakistan by men like Abul A’ala Maudoodi and organizations like the Jam a’at-e-Islami.5 More enlightened Pakistani scholars, such as Qazi Javed,ft counter this predominant tendency, then, by essentially eliding the question of his later anti-Pakistan politics, and emphasizing his anticolonial activities during that same Al-Hilal decade; this alternative narrative basically ends with affir mative descriptions of the concept of Umtna-Wahida,7 which Azad resurrected in 1920. The uncanny convergence between these con trasting strands of Pakistani representations of Azad resides in the fact that both emphasize that same decade as the period of his true 4 in this 'period' I include all his writings between the founding of Al-llilul itsdf and the writing of Qatil-cbaisal, thus including Al-Ralflgb, Tazkira, the articles and addresses of the Khilafat Movement, and so on, 1 Publishing houses in Karachi and Lahore, like Macjbool Ai idemy and Daata Publishers, have brought out literally tens of collections of Azad’s essays, culled from Al-llilal, Al-Balagh, and sundry lesser known journals, as well as numerous editions of I'azktra and Masala-c-Kbilafal. It is also significant that the full file of Al-Hilal was reprinted in a modern, multi- volume, well-bound edition in Pakistan well before the Indian reprint. s See Qazi Javcd, Sir Sycd se Iqbal lak , Lahore: Book Traders, 1975. 7 No adequate translation of the term, timma-wahida, is really possible. Azad later took to translating it simply as mutlahida qaumiyal, with the emphasis falling both on nationalism and on ittcbad, meaning ‘unity’. But that is something of an interpolation. The translation of wtwni as ‘nation’ is of course in keeping with the exigencies of the modern nation-state, hut ‘people’—even in the generic sense o f‘human species’—would he closer to the etymological root; in the strictly religious discourse of Islam, mean while, the term connotes a sense of ‘community’, mainly of shared belief, as in Ummat-e-Rasid, i.e., Community of the Faithful held together by a shared belief in the Prophet hood of Mohammad. Wahida, meanwhile,carries the literal sense of ‘united’, hut Azad cites thecase of a treaty between Muslims and non-Muslims, concluded by the Prophet of Islam, as the basis of his conception. The ‘unity’ implied in the term, then, has the sense of an ‘alliance’. The conroxt, usage, and consequences of this conception shall he discussed presently, in the main hotly of this text. rcccccccccc 136 LINEAGES OF THE PRESENT achievement and both tend to ignore his later life, except for cursory reference to Tarjumart and his epistolary work.8 In the mainstream scholarship in India, there is of course no inhibition about recognizing the seminal importance of Azad’s later career, of the kind that exists in most Pakistani scholarship, and the precociousness of Azad’s early growth, bordering on genius, is also justifiably and readily recognized. But then what happens is that the insights gained in maturity are read back into the youth, so that one has the impression of a seamless growth, unproblematic and always fiilly enlightened and secular, from the start.9 The procedure, from which only a few depart,10 is to see Azad as a man not only of exceptional talent and intelligence but also always in full possession of himself: commanding great reservoirs of knowledge since child hood; a mature writer by the age of fifteen (when he establishes Lisan- al-Sidq, in 1903); already in possession of a religiously pluralistic anticolonial ideology by the age of twenty-four (when he starts publishing Al-Hilal, in 1912); launched already, as he came out of Ranchi prison in 1919, on the trajectory that would take him inevitably to the apex of the National Movement; always teaching 8 I.H. Qureshi, the late doyen of rightwing historiography in' Pakistan, is notable for having emphasized the break between Azad’s earlier period and the latter, locating the break, as I do, in 1922. But his reading is almost exactly the opposite of mine, for he eventfully sees the latter period of Azad’s life in terms of a betrayal of Indian Muslims. See I.H. Qureshi, T he Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent, 610-1947 , The Hague: Mouron, 1962. 9 See, for characteristic examples of this trend among very diverse writers, Abdur Razzaq Malihabadi, Zikr-e-Azad, Calcutta, 1959, reprint, Delhi: Maktab-e-Ishaat-c-Quran, 1965; Humayun Kabir, Muslim Politics, 1906- 47, Calcutta, 1969; M.

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