Remembering Asaf Ali: A Forgotten Hero of the Freedom Struggle

For several years I worked in a publishing company situated on the bustling Asaf Ali Road, a road that serves as a cordon sanitaire between the squalor of Old Delhi and the (relative) order of New Delhi. Once an important business hub, by the time I went to work there in the late 1980s, this long stretch of colonnaded corridors with a warren of densely-packed offices wore an unmistakably grubby, down-at-heel look. At the head of the road, stood the statue of Asaf Ali in a derelict enclosure near Delhi Gate (or Dilli Gate as the locals pronounced it). The dark statue, generously speckled with startlingly white droppings from the many pigeons that frequent this neighbourhood, looked forlorn, especially so with the shervani-clad, bespectacled figure standing with hands clasped in a peculiarly supplicatory posture.

I must confess that in the four years I worked at Asaf Ali Road and passed this statue twice a day, morning and evening, it evoked no curiosity in me and I knew virtually nothing about Asaf Ali. Perhaps, his wife Aruna Asaf Ali’s name seemed more familiar given that she was still alive and active. I suspect I was not alone in this. For most people in Delhi, Asaf Ali is a forgotten footnote from long-ago history lessons, one of the many ‘obscure’ people who were part of the national freedom struggle. If the situation is so dismal in Delhi, where he had lived and worked, a city that had been home to his ancestors, I suspect it can only be worse in the rest of the country.

In writing Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the National Freedom Struggle, TCA Raghavan corrects an old wrong. For far too long the tall poppies of the freedom movement have overshadowed the countless others who devoted their entire lives to the cause of independence and struggle against colonial rule. For too long, a handful of names have dominated the history of the years leading up to 1947 with Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel being the most-often cited.

Over the past decade, with history being rewritten by new, dominant players, new names are being invoked and icons fashioned from often slender resources. In this unseemly clamour for space and recognition, some names have almost slipped through the crevices of the popular imagination, neglected and overlooked by the professional historian or, at best, relegated to the lowest rungs in a carefully crafted hierarchy of heroes. A park or a road named after the lesser-known evokes neither curiosity nor interest in their lives and the place they occupied in the shaping of a young nation. Asaf Ali (1888-1953) is one such person.

Raghavan’s book, however, is not a straightforward biography for it is not about Asaf (as the author calls him) alone. Instead, he chooses to tell his story through five protagonists who were inextricably tied by the threads of friendship and solidarity: Asaf Ali, Sarojini Naidu, Syud Hossain, Syed Mahmud and Aruna Asaf Ali. While Aruna enters this narrative quite late when she marries the much older Asaf, the other four meet in England just before the Great War where the three men have gone to study and Naidu, recuperating from an illness, is the erudite diva, eloquent poet, ardent nationalist and a veritable magnet for impressionable young men dreaming impossible dreams.

Over the next four decades, they meet, write long letters to each other, take a lively interest in each others’ lives and careers but ‘what gave meaning to their lives,’ as Raghavan notes in his conclusion, ‘was the great enterprise they chose to become part of’. And so it was the freedom struggle that not just formed the core of their relationship but also, in effect, shaped their lives. Were it not for this one singular, overwhelming zeal to seek freedom for their country, they could very well have lived other lives: Naidu would have remained a dulcet-voiced poet, both Asaf and Mahmud successful and wealthy barristers, Hossain a journalist and Aruna a do-gooder with no special qualifications. But such were the exigencies of the times that all five were caught up in different ways and different degrees with the national freedom struggle and that singular ‘great fight’ defined their lives.

With three extremely well-received books behind him – Attendant Lords: Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim – Courtiers and Poets in Mughal India, The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan and History Men: Jadunath Sarkar, G. S. Sardesai, Raghivir Sinh and Their Quest For India’s Past – Raghavan, a former diplomat, can recreate history with the aplomb of a master story-teller and the meticulousness of a professional historian. Here, he weaves the events of the tumultuous years leading up to Independence with the lives of his five principal characters, keeping Asaf at the centre of his concern. Through Asaf, he teases out the nuances and dilemmas of the moderate Muslims in India who refused to be enamoured by the lures and promises of the Muslim League and remained steadfast in their devotion to the Congress and, by extension, Nehru. 

The extreme deference that the nationalist Muslim leaders displayed towards Nehru is noted; each time a Muslim leader attempted to bring the ‘communal problem’ to Nehru’s notice, the latter would brush aside these concerns by saying, ‘The real problem is a political problem – the conflict between an advanced organisation like the Congress and a politically reactionary organisation like the League.’ Concerns of leaders such as Asaf who believed ‘self determination was preferable to a union that was forced’ were disregarded. Mindful of the suspicion that Muslim leaders within the Congress evoked amongst their colleagues, Raghavan notes, ‘Because he was a Muslim, the impression among some was that he was a fifth columnist for the League’. The coming of independence didn’t make it any easier for those Muslims who chose to stay on in India. Nationalism increasingly began to mean thinking and living in the Congress way and none other. Those who lived or thought another way came to be regarded as anti-national, a phenomena we see repeated in the New India that is Bharat, except that it is the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party that has replaced the ideological hegemony of the Congress.

Different readers will possibly take different things from this book: the broad brush strokes that delineate milestone moments from modern Indian history, Gandhi’s irresistible call to Quit India, the unfurling of the national flag at Gowalia Tank by a young Aruna that catapults her to national fame, the detailed account of jail-life for a group of high-profile, political prisoners inside the Ahmadnagar fortress, a meticulous dove-tailing of accounts from different sources and disparate perspectives to create a bright, colourful and immensely readable patchwork quilt of modern Indian history, and much else in this engrossing book.

I, however, was left with an ineffable sadness and a sense that the more things change, they remain the same – at least for India’s Muslims. Despite his many sterling qualities of heart and mind, despite a fine legal education, Asaf neither made a mark as a lawyer or a politician. Though seemingly destined for greatness, having aided fate by preparing himself assiduously for a life devoted to the larger good, Asaf never quite scaled the heights he aspired to. The few successes that came his way, such as a seat in the Constituent Assembly (from Delhi) or fighting high-profile cases such as those of Bhagat Singh or Shaikh Abdullah, were marred by controversy or a smaller share in the limelight than he felt he deserved. The mantle of statesmanship that should have fallen on him with the passing of Dr Ansari and Hakim Ajmal Khan, both national leaders from Delhi like him, and a seat at the high table that should have been offered to him as a veteran Muslim leader, did not happen.

Given the price paid by far taller leaders in the Congress – such as C. Rajagopalachari and Bhulabhai Desai – for showing initiative and thus offending the party high command, shows the extent to which the Congress, not unlike the League, was becoming a personality-dominated organisation. Asaf’s case was compounded – to use a modern expression – by the optics; his timorousness, his ‘going to pieces’ fretting with worry over his wife during his long years of incarceration, his marital woes, the shadow of mistrust and suspicion that clung to him all his life combined to create a persona that failed to inspire confidence.

For all his loyalty to Nehru, Asaf was not chosen for any cabinet position or placed on any important committee. Instead, he was sent as Ambassador to Washington, brought back to serve as Governor of Orissa and then sent again as Ambassador to Sweden where he died barely a few months into his tenure.

Just as being a moderate Muslim defined Asaf’s public persona, so did his marriage to Aruna. From a political novice she rapidly transformed into a stormy petrel causing immense anxiety, consternation and eventually a sadness in her husband. Raghavan is to be credited for staying steadfastly away from prurient gossip and portraying the changing contours of the marriage objectively: ‘… in fact the relationship had started changing quite early in the marriage and here Aruna’s own political journey was the driving factor.’ Reading between the lines of Raghavan’s carefully crafted text, one picks up the whiff of misogyny in the higher echelons of our national leadership. While acknowledging Aruna’s bravery and patriotism, Gandhi saw her as a ‘perpetual rebel’ and Nehru went so far as to call her ‘hysterical’ on one occasion – something Aruna never forgot.

Incidentally, Gandhi, who was vehemently opposed to inter-religious marriages and had opposed his son Manilal’s relationship with Fatima (a Gujarati Muslim) and Hossain’s alliance with Nehru’s sister Sarup Rani (later known as Vijay Lakshmi Pandit), endorsed Asaf’s marriage to Aruna. Read Circles of Friendship to find out why.