Through the red sandstone foliated arch, the world explodes with active energy. Hundreds of people selling and buying things: rubber slippers costing twenty rupees, caps, skullcaps, jeans for four-year-olds, pots of chicken biryani, stolen watches and phones, medicinal herbs and roots, steel pans, copper boxes and other collectables. Here at Meena Bazaar, every atom is a spectacle. Through the arch, a few metres still ahead there is what appears to be an ad hoc dump yard. Still farther away, once again in red-sandstone, the high front walls of the Lal Qila can be seen. If one seeks to locate it, the Lahori Gate too can be spotted, an image made iconic by the customary Prime Ministerial Speech of India’s Independence Day (the only Prime Minister to have not delivered the annual speech was Chandrasekhar who stepped down around two months before the completion of one year in the office). Every image from the arch is worth looking at and every image also distracts you from all the others. Behind us, there is Shah Jahan’s dream: the rising minarets, the humongous white domes fluted subtly, the spacious qibla. There are gangs of men indulging in their favourite hobby, one of the regular pastimes of this part of the nation: swindling.
We are at the Jama Masjid.
On the wide, dramatic staircase, much like the plinth of an equestrian sculpture, Maulana Azad spoke to a large audience two months after independence. He began, churning intimacy with his listeners:
“My brethren, you know what has brought me here today. This congregation at Shahjahan’s historic mosque is not an unfamiliar sight for me. Here, I have addressed you on several previous occasions. Since then we have seen many ups and downs. At that time, instead of weariness, your faces reflected serenity, and your hearts, instead of misgivings, exuded confidence. The uneasiness on your faces and the desolation in your hearts that I see today reminds me of the events of the past few years.”
While his words carried reassurance it was a moment when every idealist in the struggle for Swaraj was weighed down by despair. Just around the time of the address, in the hills of Kashmir, a professional war was being waged with Pakistan while all throughout the frontiers, the partition had ripped not only two nation-states apart but communities, families, and lives. Gandhi, who had vowed that the ‘vivisection’ of India would occur only over his corpse, was still alive albeit distressed and inspiring at the same time (he would be brutally murdered three months later by a Hindu fanatic). Azad spoke at a time when fourteen million people had been uprooted from their homes and in hundreds of thousands, displaced Sikhs and Hindus were arriving at this very city (the event would force Delhi to take in almost half a million people by the end).
To all the millions of Muslims who had been residing in Delhi for generations, he urged them not to leave. There was not a better place to deliver this message to the city, perhaps than this seventeenth-century mosque. Spoke Azad:
“Where are you going and why? Raise your eyes. The minarets of Jama Masjid want to ask you a question. Where have you lost the glorious pages from your chronicles? Was it only yesterday that on the banks of the Jamuna, your caravans performed wazu? Today, you are afraid of living here. Remember, Delhi has been nurtured with your blood. Brothers create a basic change in yourselves. Today, your fear is misplaced as your jubilation was yesterday.”
Finally, this newly independent nation belonged to the Muslims as much as it did to anybody else. In his most stirring paragraph of the speech, Azad would stunningly anticipate the crisis of our times and the vignettes that the staircase would become a dais to:
“I do not ask you to seek certificates from the new echelons of power. I do not want you to lead a life of sycophancy as you did during the foreign rule. I want to remind you that these bright etchings which you see all around you, are relics of processions of your forefathers. Do not forget them. Do not forsake them. Live like their worthy inheritors, and, rest assured, that if you do not wish to flee from this scene, nobody can make you flee. Come, today let us pledge that this country is ours, we belong to it and any fundamental decisions about its destiny will remain incomplete without our consent”
Azad was a breathing example of this principle. He was born Muizuddin Ahmed to a Bengali family in Mecca that had fled the North Indian landscape in the midst of the revolt of 1857. Having been homeschooled in Calcutta for years in the languages of Farsi and Arabic, the various maddhabs of Sharia, theology, philosophy, world literature, and science he emerged as an extremely sound scholar on religion, politics, social reform, and education. He steadfastly followed the path of the journalist, edited two highly acclaimed journals, the Al Hilal and Al Bhalag before diving into Congress politics with Gandhi’s brilliant political experiment of the Khilafat Movement. In protesting the ‘imperialist’ treatment of the Ottoman Sultan and more importantly the Khalifa, alongside the brothers Shaukat Ali and Muhammad Ali, Azad too was Gandhi’s lieutenant in the Movement between 1920 and 1922. Following the movement, Azad presided over the 1923 Congress session, held at Delhi, as its youngest-ever president. For decades to come, Azad would be one of the conscience-keepers of Gandhi. Today, however, he spoke as India’s first Education Minister.
Incidentally, the tomb of Abul Kalam Azad is also located near the Masjid. It is a white lone memorial – with its canopies like the base of a lotus and its feet slender but stiff. Designed by Habib Rahman, the structure of the memorial was supposed to remind one of the central arches of Jama Masjid where he delivered the historic speech on secularism and where he virtually lay today. It is placed in a garden but the placard suggesting the name of the tomb is indistinguishable in the rush of the market. The tomb is, for the most of its time, closed. At least it was the three times I visited it. To catch a glimpse of the tomb I walked the alley of the Chor Bazar and pounced onto the soil-embankment that the memorial had been built. Through the metal railing, I was able to capture a photograph of the silent tomb. Here lay the man who passed, still as India’s first education minister, in February 1958.
On February 24th, two days after Azad’s passing, in the parliament, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke these words:
“He was a peculiar and a very special representative in a high degree of that great composite nature which has gradually grown in India. I do not mean to say that everybody has to be like Maulana Azad to represent that composite culture. There are many representatives of it in various parts of India; but, he, in his own venue, here in Delhi or in Bengal or Calcutta, where he spent the greater part of his life, represented this synthesis of various cultures which have come one after another to India, rivers that had flowed in and lost themselves in the ocean of Indian life, India’s humanity, affecting them, changing them and being changed themselves by them. ”
References:
- Gandhi, Rajmohan. Understanding The Muslim Mind. Penguin, 2000.
- Kabir, Humayun, ed. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad: A Memorial Volume. New Delhi, Asia Publishing House, 1959.
- https://ummid.com/news/2019/december/21.12.2019/maulana-azad-jama-masjid-speech-full.html#:~:text=Today%2C%20mine%20is%20no%20more,for%20my%20ashiana%20(nest).
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Hiya, I’m Revanth Ukkalam…
Hiya, I’m Revanth Ukkalam…Revanth is a History Graduate at Ashoka University, enrolled for a Master’s in Sanskrit at Deccan College Pune. He sees himself as a Historian, writer, and knowledge communicator in the making. Above all else, he sees himself as an indulgent reader. He runs a Podcast titled Pravaha and released Indian Classical Art-templated memes on his Instagram handle @thesleepingbuddha. He enjoys traveling, music (he regards himself a talent whistler), and doodling.
