When the anti-colonial struggle was on the Congress leadership nurtured all through a conviction of the organic unity between Hindu and Muslim communities. And what happened is that this conviction steeled Muslim league’s resolve to turn its face away from India. Ironically enough, the more the Congress flaunted its resolve the fiercer turned the desperation on the part of Muslim league to go along the line of self-determination and, by its logical extension, for partition. This connotes a queer insecurity seemingly deeply set in the Muslim psyche vis-à-vis the typical Indian/Hindu tendency to take up, absorb and turn into its likeness almost eerily all that is dissimilar to it. True, the Muslims in the sub-continent like their confreres elsewhere often feel themselves as part of an international fraternity. But viewed strictly in the Indian context, this fear of being absorbed without knowing that they are being absorbed is deep.
However, there were some Muslim individuals who were not afraid to be part of what Swami Vivekananda described oceanic humanity that India is. For, India, in their view, when true to herself, has never asked anyone professing religious persuasions other than Hinduism to leave his identity to be true Indians. Islam would remain Islam despite its Indianisation, but the fact is that things do not remain the same, as India tends to add to them something peculiar and original by way of its infinite plasticity that transforms them in their deeps.
What Maulana Abul Kalam Azad said on this matter has not yet become a cliché despite being used for years. “I am a Musalman and proud of the fact. Islam’s splendid traditions of thirteen hundred years are my inheritance. I am unwilling to lose even the smallest part of this inheritance. In addition, I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of that indivisible unity which is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice. Without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete... I can never surrender this claim. It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and religions should flow to her and many a caravan should rest here...One of the last of these caravans was that of the followers of Islam...Full eleven centuries have passed since then. Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.”
Again, what he said when he was thirty—five is significant — “If an angel descends from the heavens today and proclaims from the Qutb Minar that India can attain Swaraj within 24 hours provided I relinquish my demand for Hindu-Muslim unity I should retort to it: “No, my friend, I shall give up Swaraj but not Hindu-Muslim unity, for if Swaraj is delayed it will be loss for India, but if Hindu-Muslim unity is lost, it will be loss for the whole of mankind.”
In his address as the Congress president in 1940, Azad said, interestingly: “Eleven hundred years of common history have enriched India with our common achievements. Our language, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, our dress, manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour. There is indeed no aspect of our life which has escaped this stamp…this joint wealth is the heritage of our common nationality and we do not want to leave it and go back to the time when this joint life had not begun. If there are any Hindus amongst us who desire to bring back the Hindu life of a thousand years or more, they dream and such dreams are vain fantasies. So also if there are any Muslims who wish to revive their past civilisation and culture which they brought a thousand years ago from Iran and Central Asia they dream also and the sooner they wake up the better.”
Here we may recall that in his early life, Azad was a pan-Islamist “whose speeches and writings, studded with quotations from Islamic scriptures, gave little inkling of his rationality or modernity”. Transformation went on, churning him into what he finally became. However, there is little doubt that he evolved under the benign, imperceptible, yet profound influence of the timeless Indian culture the quintessence of which is inclusiveness- absorbing without flaunting that it is absorbing.