Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Edited Al-Hilal at 23, Presided Over the Congress in 1923 and Again from 1940 to 1946, and as Education Minister from 1947 to 1958 Launched the UGC, Three National Akademis and the ICCR

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was 23 when the first issue of the Urdu weekly Al-Hilal appeared in Calcutta in 1912, and by his own account it was selling 26,000 copies a week within two years. He went on to preside over the Indian National Congress twice, in 1923 and from 1940 to 1946. From 15 January 1947 until his death on 22 February 1958 he headed the education ministry, and the University Grants Commission, the Sangeet Natak, Sahitya and Lalit Kala Akademis and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations all took shape under him. The Government of India’s resolution of 11 September 2008 describes him as “the first union minister of education” and asks that his birthday, 11 November, be observed every year as National Education Day.

A weekly set in type, and a press the government took

Azad was born on 11 November 1888 in Mecca, according to the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, and his family returned to Calcutta in 1890, where he was taught at home, first by his father. In his memoir India Wins Freedom he writes that a journal was essential to build public opinion. Urdu papers in Punjab and the United Provinces were printed by lithography, which could not carry half-tone pictures, so he set up the Al Hilal Press and printed his weekly from type. Its first number, he says, came out in June 1912.

Within three months every new subscriber wanted the back issues, so he reprinted them all. Within two years the circulation reached 26,000 copies a week, a figure he calls “unheard of in Urdu journalism” until then. That is his own figure.

Officials noticed. Under the Press Act it demanded security deposits, Azad writes, and forfeited two of them, and he dates the confiscation of the Al Hilal Press to 1915. Five months later he started the Al Balagh Press and a journal of the same name. The Azad Institute’s biography has different years, with Al-Hilal banned in 1914 and Al-Balagh in 1916. In April 1916 he was ordered out of Calcutta under the Defence of India Regulations. Punjab, Delhi, the United Provinces and Bombay had already barred him, so he went to Ranchi in Bihar. Historian Sumit Sarkar lists Al-Hilal among the journals that drew police attention during the war for their anti-British tone.

Ranchi, then Gandhi’s programme

Azad was interned at Ranchi until 31 December 1919, by his account. Gandhi came to Ranchi during his work in Champaran and asked to meet him, but the Bihar government refused permission. They met first in Delhi in January 1920, when Indian Muslims were preparing a deputation on the Khilafat, the campaign over Turkey’s future after the First World War.

At a meeting with Mohammed Ali, Shaukat Ali, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Maulvi Abdul Bari, Gandhi set out a programme of non-co-operation: titles returned, law courts and schools boycotted, officials resigning, no part in the new legislatures. Each of the others asked for time. Azad writes that he “said without a moment’s hesitation” that he accepted it, and that he had urged something similar in Al-Hilal.

Through most of the months that followed he toured with Gandhi, and the Congress adopted the programme at a special session in Calcutta in September 1920. Arrested in Bengal among the first, with C. R. Das, he was not released from Alipore Central Jail until 1 January 1923. How the movement ended is told in Chauri Chaura and the end of non-cooperation.

Delhi, September 1923

Whether to enter the legislative councils the British had created split the Congress. Sumit Sarkar records that the Gaya session in December 1922 rejected council entry by 1,740 votes to 890, and that C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru founded the Swaraj Party in March 1923 to contest elections anyway. After leaving jail he tried to reconcile the two camps, he writes.

At a special session in Delhi in September 1923, Bipan Chandra and his co-authors write, the Congress suspended all propaganda against council entry and let Congressmen stand in the coming elections. Their reasons were the felt need for unity, the view of both groups that only a mass movement outside the legislatures could force the government’s hand, and a shared acceptance of Gandhi’s leadership. Sarkar calls the result a compromise.

Azad presided. His memoir says he was then 35 and that it was said he was “the youngest man to be elected President of the Congress”. Counting from the birth date the Azad Institute gives, he was a couple of months short of 35.

Ramgarh in 1940, Ahmednagar from 1942

He was elected president again at the 53rd session, held at Ramgarh near Ranchi from 18 to 20 March 1940, according to the National Herald. His address began by recalling that the delegates had elected him in 1923 and had now done so a second time “after seventeen years”. The memoir says M. N. Roy stood against him and lost by an overwhelming majority.

The address set out his position as a Muslim in the national movement. “I am proud of being an Indian,” he said, and he described himself as “a part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality”. The Azad Institute says he stayed in the post until 1946.

In July 1942 Azad and Gandhi disagreed over the movement Gandhi was planning. According to the memoir, Gandhi wrote on 7 July that Azad must resign the presidency if the Congress wanted him to lead, and withdrew the letter by midday. Quit India, 1942 covers the movement itself.

In the early hours of 9 August the leaders were arrested, Chandra and his co-authors record. He was taken to Ahmednagar Fort with nine other members of the Working Committee, among them Nehru, Patel and Asaf Ali. The prisoners were under military control, he writes, and his weight fell from 170 lb to 130 lb. He was later moved to Bankura in Bengal, and he and his colleagues were released on 15 June 1945.

The Cabinet Mission year

Azad first met the members of the Cabinet Mission on 6 April 1946. On 15 April he issued a statement against the Muslim League’s scheme of Pakistan, saying it would be harmful to India as a whole and to Muslims in particular and that “it creates more problems than it solves”.

On 16 May the Mission published its plan. In Azad’s account it matched his own in spirit, with three central subjects (defence, foreign affairs and communications) plus three Sections grouping the provinces. On 26 April he had proposed Jawaharlal Nehru as his successor in the presidency, and Nehru was accepted unanimously. Sarkar gives 6 June as the date the League accepted the long-term plan and 24 June for the Congress, and reads the agreement as short-lived because the two sides interpreted it in opposite ways.

Azad’s own judgement on stepping down is in the memoir: events since had made him think “I may have been wrong”. For the dispute over the Sections and Nehru’s press conference of 10 July, see the Cripps and Cabinet missions compared.

Education from 15 January 1947

Azad writes that Gandhi suggested education as his portfolio, and on 15 January 1947 he took it over from C. Rajagopalachari. Historian Aparna Basu, in the 2016 Maulana Azad Memorial Lecture, notes that not every scheme of the period began with him, and cites K. G. Saiyidain, who worked closely with him, as saying that on policy the leadership came from Azad.

A University Education Commission under S. Radhakrishnan was set up in 1948 and, the UGC’s own history says, recommended reconstituting the grants body on the model of the British University Grants Commission with a full-time chairman. In 1952 the Union Government decided that grant cases for central universities would go to the UGC. On 28 December 1953 the UGC was formally inaugurated by Azad, then Minister of Education, Natural Resources and Scientific Research, with Prime Minister Nehru addressing the meeting. Parliament made it a statutory body in November 1956.

At a meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education in 1952 he said that planning education on a national scale was “perhaps even more important than national planning in economic and industrial development”, as Basu quotes from the Publications Division’s collection of his speeches. IIT Kharagpur’s history page says the institute was formally inaugurated by Azad on 18 August 1951. In his opening address, quoted by Basu, he said he looked forward to a day when “people from abroad will come to India for higher scientific and technical training”. For the Kharagpur campus’s own history, see the IITs from the Hijli camp to the present network.

Three akademis and a council for culture

According to its own history, the Sahitya Akademi grew out of a debate in government on whether to wait for individuals with the authority to found national academies or to start them itself. Azad held that “if we had waited for the Academy to grow up from below, we might have had to wait till the Greek Kalends”. Government would start the academies and then leave them to run as autonomous bodies.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi was created by a Ministry of Education resolution of 31 May 1952 and inaugurated by President Rajendra Prasad at Parliament House on 28 January 1953, with Azad giving the opening address. The Akademi’s annual report quotes him: “Traditions cannot be preserved but can only be created afresh.” The report calls it the first national academy of the arts set up by the Republic of India. The classical dances of India lists the dance forms it later recognised.

The Sahitya Akademi was set up under a government resolution of December 1952, inaugurated on 12 March 1954 and registered as a society on 7 January 1956. Its site says it works in 24 languages, English included. Azad inaugurated the Lalit Kala Akademi on 5 August 1954, telling it to preserve the traditions of the past and add to them through modern artists’ work, according to the Akademi’s page. It was registered as a society on 11 March 1957.

The Indian Council for Cultural Relations was established and formally inaugurated in April 1950, its history page says, and Azad was its president from 1950 until 1958. Its history page traces the idea to the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1946.

The memoir, the Bharat Ratna and 11 November

Humayun Kabir, who wrote the English text from Azad’s talks, says in his preface that Azad approved the manuscript on Republic Day 1958 and wanted it published in November 1958 for his seventieth birthday. Azad died on 22 February 1958, of a stroke according to the Azad Institute. His last prepared and printed speech, Kabir notes, was his presidential address to the ICCR, which appealed for closer understanding between India and Pakistan. The royalties go to the ICCR for two annual essay prizes, one on Islam by a non-Muslim and one on Hinduism by a Muslim.

Azad had held back about thirty pages of a personal character, and sealed copies of the full text went to the National Library in Calcutta and the National Archives in New Delhi. The 1988 edition’s publishers write that the Delhi High Court directed on 29 September 1988 that copies be handed over, that the extra material proved to be scattered through the text, and that Kabir’s editing had altered the original in places. Kabir says in the preface that the book holds opinions he does not share, since his task was to record Azad’s.

The President’s Secretariat notification of 23 January 1992, printed in the Gazette of India of 28 March 1992, conferred the Bharat Ratna posthumously on Azad. A Government of India resolution of 11 September 2008, issued by the Department of Higher Education, decided that 11 November would be observed every year as National Education Day without being a holiday. A circular of 31 October 2008 asked CBSE-affiliated schools to mark the first one with seminars, essay competitions, quizzes and rallies.