How Did Maulana Azad Shape India'S Secular Constitution?

I get a little thrill whenever I look up historical figures who shaped modern India, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is one of those names that always pulls me in. He was born on 11 November 1888 in Mecca — at the time that city was under Ottoman rule, though today it’s part of Saudi Arabia. His family moved to Calcutta when he was young, so even though his birthplace was abroad, his life and work became deeply rooted in the Indian subcontinent. He passed away on 22 February 1958 in New Delhi and was buried in the precincts of the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. I’ve seen photographs of the simple grave within the mosque complex; it’s striking in its humility compared to the enormous influence he had as India’s first Minister of Education. Visiting that part of Old Delhi — with its narrow lanes, tea stalls, and chanting — gives you a tangible sense of the era he lived through. If you’re ever poking around biographies or old editorials he wrote, you’ll notice how his literary side (he left behind essays and letters that people still quote) matches his political life. His birthday, 11 November, is observed as National Education Day in India, which feels apt since his policies and ideas helped shape the educational framework of independent India.

I get a little excited talking about this because Maulana Azad was one of those old-school visionaries who quietly built the scaffolding for modern Indian higher education. As India’s first Education Minister (1947–1958) he pushed for a national system that could support research, technical training and cultural growth. That meant he wasn’t just signing paperwork—he championed and helped set up several central institutions and bodies that shaped universities across the country. Concretely, he played a major role in the creation of the University Grants Commission (UGC) which came into statutory existence in 1956; that body has been crucial for funding, coordinating and maintaining standards in Indian universities. He also strongly backed the idea of national-level technical institutes, and his tenure saw the founding of the first Indian Institutes of Technology (with IIT Kharagpur opening in 1951). During the same era he supported the establishment of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi (1956) and helped found cultural and scholarly academies such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi (early 1950s), Sahitya Akademi (1954) and Lalit Kala Akademi (mid-1950s). These weren’t all ‘universities’ in the strict sense, but they formed the ecosystem that helped universities flourish. Beyond the headline names, Maulana Azad also worked to strengthen institutions like Jamia Millia Islamia and was instrumental in laying the groundwork for national educational planning bodies and curriculum efforts (precursors to things like NCERT). If you love reading old plaques or debating campus histories, his fingerprints are everywhere—he was that quiet force that pushed India from fragmented institutions toward a coordinated higher-education system, and that legacy still feeds students and scholars today.

If you’re planning a little pilgrimage to places connected with Maulana Azad, start with New Delhi — that’s where the most accessible collections and public displays tend to be. The National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library both hold letters, speeches, and photographs related to him, and they’re geared toward researchers and curious visitors alike. I dropped by the NMML years ago and loved paging through reproductions of his speeches; the staff there were really helpful about pointing me to other sources. Beyond the big archives, look for university libraries and institutes named after him. The Maulana Azad Library at Aligarh Muslim University is a living tribute — not a flashy museum, but a hub of manuscripts, books, and research material that reflects his emphasis on education. In Kolkata, the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIAS) runs seminars and exhibitions on his life and thought; I caught a talk there once and it added so much color to what I’d read. If you want to go further afield, Hyderabad’s Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) has archives and cultural events, and of course his birthplace (Mecca) and other historic sites linked to his early life are of interest if you travel internationally. Tip: call ahead for access, and check online catalogs — a surprising number of documents are now digitized, so you can peek before you go.

When I dig into the late-colonial debates, Maulana Azad always feels like the conscience of a crowded room — loud, stubborn, and impossibly patient. I’ve spent weekends leafing through his speeches and then curling up with his memoir 'India Wins Freedom', and what leaps out is how insistently he argued that India’s Muslims and Hindus formed one political nation. He didn’t just dislike the idea of partition as a headline; he dismantled the two-nation theory piece by piece, saying a shared history, interwoven economies, and everyday social ties made separation not only unjust but impractical. Azad used speeches, essays, and rounds of intense negotiation to fight partition. He argued for constitutional safeguards and opposed communal separatism on moral and legal grounds. He backed solutions like the Cabinet Mission’s federal proposals because they kept India united while recognizing provincial autonomy — a compromise he felt was far preferable to carving the subcontinent by religion. He also campaigned among Muslims to show that many could and did want to stay in a united secular India, even while the Muslim League pushed for Pakistan. Even after things went the other way, I’m struck by his pragmatism: he didn’t retreat into bitterness. Instead he became the first education minister of independent India and worked to protect minorities through institutions and policy. Reading him now, I’m left with a mix of admiration and melancholy — admiration for his clarity and melancholy for the paths history chose instead.

Teaching history and policy feels like holding a map of decisions that still shape classrooms today, and Maulana Azad left a lot of those roads on the map. As someone who grew up flipping through old speeches and constitution debates on lazy Sunday afternoons, what stands out is how determined he was to make education democratic and secular. Right after independence he pushed hard for free and compulsory primary education to be written into the country's goals—those Directive Principles in the Constitution reflect his insistence that basic schooling be a public responsibility, not a privilege. He also championed scientific education and a modern curriculum, wanting to move beyond rote learning and communal divisions into an idea of education that fostered critical thought and national unity. Azad was heavily involved in institution-building: he helped create a national framework for higher education, was instrumental in setting up the University Grants Commission in the 1950s to coordinate university standards, and supported the birth of premier technical institutes (the early IITs grew under policies he promoted). He also expanded access—more colleges and universities, scholarships for underprivileged students, teacher training programs, and adult literacy initiatives. He worried about women's education and the lag in rural areas, and pushed for teacher training and research infrastructure so that schools wouldn’t be islands of outdated practice. Reading his letters, you can feel his frustration and hope: he wanted a single, inclusive system that could both modernize India and respect its pluralism, and that pragmatic mix still influences policy debates today.

I get a little excited whenever someone asks about Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s writings — he was one of those people whose pen followed his politics and scholarship in equal measure. If you want the headline items, start with his English memoir 'India Wins Freedom' — it’s his personal account of the independence movement and politics around partition, written in a clear, reflective style. In Urdu his most celebrated piece is the prison-era collection 'Ghubar-e-Khatir' (literally ‘‘Sawdust of Thoughts’’ or ‘‘Sparks from the Dust’’ in some translations), which feels like intimate letters and essays that wander across philosophy, literature and daily life. Reading those two side-by-side gives such a different sense of the man: one public and political, the other quietly contemplative. Beyond those, he produced a big Urdu translation-commentary of the Qur’an called 'Tarjuman al-Quran' — it’s a serious scholarly work that reflects his lifelong engagement with Islamic learning. He also edited and wrote for influential Urdu journals like 'Al-Hilal' and 'Al-Balagh' in his earlier years, and many of his speeches, articles and letters have been collected into various volumes (often titled as collected works or selected writings). So if you’re trying to collect his writing, aim for 'India Wins Freedom', 'Ghubar-e-Khatir', and 'Tarjuman al-Quran' first, and then look for editions that compile his speeches and journal pieces — they reveal a lot about his ideas on education, unity and communal harmony.

When I dug into Maulana Azad's life for a college paper, what stuck with me was how principled and stubborn he could be — in the very best way. He refused to join the Muslim League because he rejected the whole notion that religion should be the primary marker of a nation. Azad believed in a composite Indian nationalism where faith and citizenship were not identical; he saw Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others sharing a common destiny. That put him at direct odds with Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the League once they started pushing for a separate Muslim state. Beyond the principle, there were practical and personal strands. Azad trusted mass-based, secular politics and education as the route to safeguard minority rights, rather than top-down separatism. He feared the communal violence and social fragmentation that partition would bring. In his memoir 'India Wins Freedom' he mapped out these convictions, showing how his loyalty to inclusive politics and to leaders who sought unity outweighed any narrow communal loyalty. So it wasn't just a political choice — it was a deep moral stance about what India should be.

I get a little thrill every time I think about how Maulana Azad braided religious sentiment into a broader freedom struggle. Back when the Khilafat movement was at its height, he wasn’t just a pulpit orator — he was a bridge-builder. He used his reputation as a Muslim scholar and his powerful pen in publications like 'Al-Hilal' to explain why defending the Ottoman caliphate mattered to ordinary Indian Muslims, while simultaneously arguing that the cause could be joined to the fight against British colonial rule. He worked closely with other Congress leaders to bring large numbers of Muslims into the non-cooperation protests, urging that the Khilafat issue be treated in the context of Indian unity rather than narrow sectarian politics. At the same time he resisted turning the movement into purely pan-Islamic agitation that ignored India’s diverse fabric. That balancing act meant he sometimes clashed with more hardline Khilafat leaders, but it also made the movement more inclusive and impactful in its collaboration with Gandhi’s mass campaigns. The whole thing was messy and emotional — Azad faced censorship, his papers and speeches were targeted, and when the caliphate was ultimately abolished in 1924 the movement collapsed. What I really admire is how he pivoted: instead of retreating into communal cornerstones, he doubled down on the idea of composite nationalism, trying to translate the momentum of Khilafat into a longer-term commitment to Hindu–Muslim unity. It wasn’t a flawless record, but as someone who loves messy history, I find his role deeply compelling and instructive for how political leaders try to navigate religion and national politics.