Maulana Azad: The mind that shaped modern India

Every November 11, India observes National Education Day — not merely to mark a birth anniversary, but to honour a mind that helped define the moral and intellectual grammar of independent India. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad — scholar, reformer, patriot, and the nation’s first education minister — remains one of those luminous figures whose clarity of vision still cuts through our age of noise and division.

Born in 1888 in Mecca to an Indian father and Arab mother, Abul Kalam Ghulam Muhiyuddin — later known to history as Maulana Azad — was destined to belong to more than one world. His father, Maulana Khairuddin, a respected theologian from Calcutta (later Kolkata), ensured that his son was steeped in the classical disciplines of Islamic scholarship.

But Azad, curious and self-taught, reached beyond orthodoxy. He secretly learned English, read the works of modern philosophers and reformers, and discovered early that faith and reason could be allies rather than adversaries.

In that tension between tradition and modernity was born a thinker for whom religion was not a wall but a window — a moral compass guiding his politics and philosophy alike. By his twenties, Azad had already turned reflection into action, wielding the pen as an instrument of liberation.

When Azad launched Al-Hilal in 1912, it was more than a publication — it was a declaration. Written in sonorous, impassioned Urdu, its pages challenged British authority and the political inertia of India’s Muslim elite. It spoke with moral audacity, proclaiming that nationalism and Islam were not contradictory, and that Indian Muslims’ destiny was inseparable from that of the nation.

The journal’s influence was electric — and alarming to the colonial state. Within two years, Al-Hilal was banned; Azad’s next paper, Al-Balagh, met the same fate, and he was interned in Ranchi in 1916. Yet, in silencing him, the British only amplified his voice. Long before freedom of the press became a constitutional right, Azad had already practiced it — with conviction and courage.

After his release, Azad joined the Khilafat movement and soon gravitated towards Mahatma Gandhi’s Congress. The two men formed a deep intellectual bond, united by their belief that the freedom struggle was also a moral struggle — for India’s soul. In an era when politics was fragmenting along communal lines, Azad stood as a bridge: a Muslim leader who refused the logic of separation, and who saw synthesis as India’s truer destiny.

He became the youngest-ever president of the Indian National Congress in 1923, and again in 1940, when the world was at war and India’s unity under strain. Through the Quit India movement and long imprisonment, Azad remained the quiet conscience of the nationalist cause — the thinker complementing Gandhi’s saint and Nehru’s statesman.

Azad’s warnings against Partition remain among the most haunting in Indian political literature. He foresaw that the division of the subcontinent would not resolve conflict but institutionalise it; that political safeguards could not substitute for social harmony.

When Partition came, he chose to stay — not out of expedience but conviction. He believed India’s future demanded courage, not retreat. As the new republic’s first education minister, Azad turned that conviction into policy. He saw education as the bedrock of democracy — “the true measure of freedom”, as he called it.

His tenure from 1947 to 1958 built the scaffolding of modern India’s cultural and intellectual institutions: the University Grants Commission, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and the national academies of art, music, and literature all bore the stamp of his vision.

For Azad, education was not a mere state function but a moral duty — emancipation not just from illiteracy, but from prejudice and passivity. “A school,” he believed, “is not a place where the mind is filled, but where it is kindled.”

When Maulana Azad passed away on 22 February 1958, Jawaharlal Nehru captured the nation’s grief in a single, unforgettable line: “Our caravan leader has departed.” It was not a cliché but a truth — India had lost a guide who had shown it how to think freely, act morally, and live pluralistically.

His autobiography India Wins Freedom, published a year later, offered not merely history but introspection — the record of a nationalist who wrestled with disillusionment yet never surrendered his ideals. In 1992, the Bharat Ratna was conferred on him — a belated recognition of a man who never sought honours, only enlightenment.

National Education Day should not be a ceremonial observance but a moral reckoning. Azad’s idea of learning was expansive — blending science with spirituality, inquiry with empathy. At a time when identity politics and historical amnesia threaten to erode the republic’s plural spirit, revisiting Azad is not nostalgia; it is necessity.

He believed education to be the republic’s moral infrastructure — the foundation of both freedom and fraternity. To forget him would be to forget that liberty is not secured by law alone, but by thought; that a free nation must first be a thinking nation.

In remembering Maulana Azad, India remembers itself — the better, braver self that once believed knowledge could unite what politics divides.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. You will find more of his writing here