This is the text of a lecture delivered by Prof. Mohammad Sajjad of CAS Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University as a part of 'Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav' celebrations. The lecture was delivered at the Faculty of Arts, AMU on August 11, 2022.
Respected Dean, Faculty of Arts, Prof. Imtiaz Hasnain, teachers, colleagues, and dear students!
A very good afternoon.
In this gathering of knowledgeable people, someone assigned to speak with lots of constraints, is bound to be nervous. For someone like me, who has his own handicaps in oratory, adds to his constraints, limitations as well as challenges while choosing to speak on such occasions.
We have gathered here to celebrate 75 years of our independence, which also coincides with 80 years of the Quit India Movement. Both, the state, as well as society, or societies, have their multi-layered stakes in preserving and circulating group-memories, and also in the acts of remembering and memorialising events, processes, history-makers, etc.
We, as a university community of knowledge-seekers and disseminators, have our own roles and responsibilities in these acts of remembering, memorialising.
Forgetfulness and remembrances have their own dynamics.
In a gathering like this, where students and teachers of various disciplines have gathered, one is confused as to how to go about the issue which is, arguably speaking, simultaneously superficial and a subject of common sense, as well as full of challenges in terms of contested interpretations.
qissa-e-sāzish-e-aġhyār kahūñ yā na kahūñ
shikva-e-yār-e-tarah-dār karūñ yā na karūñ
Just for the sake of convenience of sharing the observations and views, one of the ways is to look back upon some of the tallest dramatis personane of the struggle during its popular phase, or the retreating phase of colonialism. Such a route would invite us to look upon Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Azad, Bose, etc.
The story of the national movement is basically a story of social change through democratic means as a prolonged process. This combined extra-legal means of struggle with readiness to negotiate with the state. This is the world’s biggest mass struggle for their socio-economic emancipation, and an exercise in preventing the degeneration of politics into a counter-revolution and authoritarianism.
There is a third kind of challenge too before this inept speaker. India comprises of various kinds of primordial and class identities. All these identities engaged with the colonial state and with anti-colonial struggles, keeping their own sectional interests in mind, whereas, nationalism, in its essence, is about people in pursuit of forming solidarities above and beyond such divisive sectionalism. More importantly, nationalism in a colonial society is basically anti-colonialism.
Given these sets of dilemma, may I kindly be permitted to share some questions for a collective introspection? This is an urge to re-think some of the issues about which there are complacent assumptions at academic as well as popular level that the issues need not be re-thought.
By now, it is no longer debatable that India’s freedom movement was one of the greatest mass movements the humanity has thus far known. What kind of India was to be made, after gaining independence, had been visualised during this anti-colonial struggle, which had its own vicissitudes.
I hope, none of us would have disagreement on admitting a fact that at this point of time, all is not well with us, on economic front, on the indices of specifics such as: rich-poor gap in economy and education, inter-community relations, and in terms of socially realistic representations in the structures and processes of power. By saying so, we don’t deny the big accomplishments that we have thus far made as a nation in the last many decades since independence. We are also not oblivious of the fact that we have been able to accomplish all these precisely because of the experiences we gained during the protracted mass movements not only before independence but also after that.
It would therefore be in the fitness of the things that we must keep looking into our own histories, with a mix of legitimate pride as well as with a gaze of objective self-criticism and sincere stock-taking.
Before I jump over to the late 19th century and to the popular phase of our anti-colonial nationalism, let us recall and reclaim the legacy of our reformists. (Revivalists had their own implications, which I would like to avoid discussing here).
One of the greatest problems of the colonised society like us, as diagnosed by our reformists, was that there was something which had held us back and which led to our colonial subjugation. Culturally, we had worked towards subjugating and excluding our own people through the practices like untouchability, female infanticide and foeticide, Sati, child marriage, and many other discriminations against women, castes, tribes, communities, etc. All such practices had been legitimised through particular interpretations of religion and scriptures. These were sought to be challenged by the people like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Jyotiba Phule and scores of other such reformists. They undertook this task premised on values such as rationalism, humanism, universalism, etc. For this, they had to democratise the scriptural knowledge. This was the way the priestly or clergy’s monopoly of scriptural knowledge had to be challenged. One of such ways was to render such scriptural contents into vernaculars and in people’s languages. People had to reclaim their own rights to interpret their religion.
For a variety of reasons, certain groups or communities or components of the Indian populace, failed to undertake such reformist tasks, or, at least, delayed or deferred in undertaking such tasks. This delay, which also had to do with delay in formation of modern educated middle class, has had its own implications during the ongoing journey of Indian nationalism.
Notwithstanding these inadequacies and limitations, the reformist movements did help create certain proportion of middle class which harboured enough cultural self-confidence to challenge, confront and negotiate with the colonial state. Partha Chatterjee called this phase of nationalism as Moment of Departure. He found such articulations in literary outputs of Bankim Chandra Chatterji. One may attempt at finding such features in the writings of other Indian languages too. Hali, Shibli, and other associates of the Aligarh Movement also contributed to this, through their persuasive and unconventional writings. Hali’s long Urdu poem, ‘Qaum Ka Mutawassit Tabqa’ (1891), i.e., the middle class, would be of particular interest. Moin Ahsan Jazbi’s booklet (1956), ‘Hali Ka Siyasi Sha’oor’, is an important and interesting read, in this context.
The colonial state was forced to create institutions of governance, and with the growing strength of the freedom movement, Indianization (in terms of man power) of all such institutions, including the civil and police services, kept growing. By the 1940s, this process of Indianization, combined with the changed nature of imperial controls (as a consequence of the Second World War) the British had no way other than quitting India. They however did it by dividing it too, so that the imperial control of the Anglo-American power could continue to perpetuate without having formal political control on us. This continues to play out upon our collective lives ever since then. Most of our biggest problems are the legacies of the colonial subjugation and the manner in which the British had quit India with a blood wrenched partition.
Convenience and comfort of the colonial state was to encourage, exacerbate and accentuate the pre-existing social or primordial differences and contradictions through enumeration technologies such as census. Beginning from the municipal institutions, the identity-based differences were exacerbated more aggressively from the 1920s onwards, when legislative institutions expanded accommodating more and more Indians.
The Congress and other anti-colonial forces of India (there were pro-colonial forces as well: the collaborators and compradors) remained face to face with this difficult and challenging task of uniting the diverse people by pulling them above their primordial identities.
Before we put greater focus on the popular phase of nationalism and its tallest leaders, let us not forget the colonial roles in exacerbating and perpetuating divisiveness. Through, history textbooks the two biggest religious communities were pitted against each other. Before such a colonial power-play in the 19th century, India’s Hindus and Muslims didn’t look upon each other as their perennial adversaries.
B D Chattopadhyay’s book, ‘Representing the Other’, based on Sanskrit sources during 8th to 14th centuries, amply demonstrate that there did not exist political animosity against or ‘Otherization’ of Muslims. They were referred to with their ethnic/racial identities: Tajik, Turk, etc. traders belonging to the faiths such as Jains, Muslims, Brahmans, Vaishyas, all donated for each other’s prayer houses.
Neither Dahir was personifying all Hindus of India, nor was Muhammad Qasim personifying all Muslims of subsequent generations. Neither Prithviraj Chauhan was representing all Rajputs or all Hindus nor was Ghori representing the Muslims of the subcontinent (Cynthia Talbot’s book is an interesting read). The territorial and political defeats and victories were not attributed to the respective religious communities. Shivaji and Aurangzeb (James Laine’s two books) or Rana Pratap and Akbar, Tipu Sultan vs the restored Wodeyars, for that matter, were not looked upon as representatives of the two religious communities. These kinds of fissiparous history-writing and massive popularization of such divisive notions are phenomena of 19th century colonial state. State power and state-backed power in popularising such notions among the societies of illiterates is a subject of enquiry for specialised academic disciplines. Social and political anthropologies of manufacturing and spreading rumours and falsehood are becoming popular as well as challenging branch of academic discipline. One may recall contemporary experience of what is now popularly referred as WhatsApp “Universities”.
One of the biggest impediments before the Indian nationalism was communalism, i.e., Hindu-Muslim strife. There continues to be academic-intellectual confusion pertaining to this issue. Its best definition however was given by our very own K M Ashraf (1903-1962). He defined it as ‘Mazhab ki siyasi dukaandaari’; political trade in the name of religion.
My own understanding on the issue, by now, is something Bipan Chandra has developed via Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946) and W C Smith’s Modern Islam Islam in India: A Social Analysis (the revised edition of 1946). Briefly put, communalism is a product of colonial modernity. This view disagrees with CA Bayly’s thesis that there is a pre-history of communalism in India before its colonization by the British.
This view also asserts that, with the support of the colonial state, the Muslim communal separatist force was stronger during late-colonial era than the other divisive forces. While saying so, this view does not disregard the fact that certain majoritarian forces were made to grow leaps and bounds after 1938. Further, this view is absolutely unambiguous on this: nationalism has to be inclusive; any exclusionary idea or conception of nationhood cannot and must not be regarded as nationalism. This view therefore does not prefix nationalism with ascriptive-identitarian markers.
Coming back to the biggest challenge of communalism!
There were caste associations, for recognition by the state and for entitlement to state resources and institutions. So were the Muslims. Though, a part of the articulate segment of Muslim elites preferred to be recognised as, and staked their claims of entitlements, referring themselves as ex-ruling class, for preferential treatment, rather than a numerical minority. This will have serious implications not only in colonial period but also subsequent to independence. While saying so, my reference is not confined only to what was exchanged between our founder Sir Syed and the Congress leader Badruddin Tyabji. I will come back again to this issue, in a moment.
The dominant anti-colonial forces believed that economic nationalism was the antidote for any identitarian thing which was to be paraded as ‘nationalism’. In the 19th century therefore Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade and Romesh Chandra Dutt put forward the Drain theory. Critique of railway economy, agrarian and irrigation issues, particularly a huge neglect of agricultural and industrial development by the colonial regime, remained a central question of our nationalism. They articulated a scientific economic critique of colonialism: plunder, taxation, employment to Englishmen, free and uneqal trade, investment of British capital, etc.
This became clearer after 1918; cadres of the national movement at the lowest level were educated about this and were trained to resist it through political action and mobilization.
By the turn of the 20th century, peasant movements, working class movements, women, linguistic groups and the oppressed castes came forward to widen the social and regional base of the movement. This ever-increasing amplification of the national movement went on to decide the shares of those classes and groups in the evolving structures and processes of power.
The nationalist leaders destroyed the myth that the British ruled India for the benefit of Indians: mai baap
No mass movement can sustain without ideology. Nationalist leaders provided this movement with ideology—Ideology of anti-colonial nationalism, with core components of Civil libertarian, secular, republican, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and press.
The partition of Bengal in 1905, not for the sake of administrative convenience but for perpetuating religious divide was the turning point. Resistance to this anticipated Gandhian ways of mobilizing masses, while shaking the financial and ideological foundations of the Raj. It became popularly known as the Swadeshi Movement. This also manifested India’s intellectual capacities of anti-colonial mobilizations. From education to economy, culture to politics, workable as well as non-workable blue-prints of nationalist alternatives began to emerge among the contesting constituents of evolving Indian nation.
The 1920s was unprecedented in many ways. Asians were overcoming their race-based inferiority complex vis a vis the European West, the working class was gaining greater confidence after the Soviet Revolution, progressing from the Moderates to the Extremists, the violent revolutionaries, through their individual heroic action, within and beyond the Congress, were contributing towards reducing the fear of the Raj among the Indian masses. They too provided socialist orientation to the evolving Indian nation.
Through the Separate Electorates of 1909, nationalism was facing a great impediment, this was sought to be dealt with through the Lucknow Pact of 1916. But that turned out to be a very short-lived unity that too only from above.
Meanwhile, the peasant and working class movements were building up in certain parts, while integrating themselves with the ongoing national movement. Gandhi’s intervention in Bihar’s Champaran and Gujarat’s Kheda and Ahmedabad Mills, brought in a new radicalism in and massification of, the national movement. Now the subject people were rapidly moving towards becoming citizens. Nehru was already roaming among the stirred peasantry particularly of Awadh, eastern UP and Bihar. Emergence of the saint-politician Gandhi had become a sort of historical necessity, argues Sumit Sarkar’s textbook (1983). Gandhiji was preceded by certain peasant leaders cum saints such as Baba Ramchandra and Swami Vidyanand.
Meanwhile, something happened which still waits to be properly evaluated by many of us, not only at the academic level but also at the popular level.
Gandhiji and Muslim leaders used the symbol of Khilafat. Why a foreign issue and that too a religious one, came to be employed to mobilize people? Was it a worthy institution even in Turkey? What kind of degenerations had already set in this institution? Even the Turkinsh youth were disillusioned with the institution of Khilafat? Why did the Muslim leaders remain or keep Muslims ignorant about many such issues pertaining to the Khilafat? There are many such questions. It also created apprehensions among a considerable section of Hindus that the Pan-Islamic tendency of India’s Muslims would practically make Hindus into a politically subjugated minority. Lala Lajpat Rai had already been grappling with such issues. He had earlier written some open letters to Sir Syed raising certain concerns about Hindu-Muslim relations.
Now, Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) raised this issue with Malaviya (1861-1946) and CR Das (1870-1925). Intizar Husain’s Urdu biography, ‘Ajmal-e-Azam’ (1999), of Hakim Ajmal Khan (1868-1927), has hinted at such apprehensions of Hindus. Such dimensions of the issue need to be re-explored by scholars, rather than being dismissive about it.
Thus, on one hand the remarkable display of Hindu-Muslim unity alarmed the colonial masters, on the other, the use of the Khilafat symbol, alarmed a section of Hindus. This, needless to repeat, had massive implications for the entire subcontinent, in next few decades.
The Non Cooperation Movement, as it turned violent at Chauri Chaura, was suddenly put under suspension in February 1922. Subsequently, massive communal violence ensued across north India; Swami Shradhanand was killed (December 1926) by a fanatic Muslim, Abdul Rashid, though this conflict began from the Malabar coast in deep south. Left-leaning historians (particularly K N Panikkar) have traced agrarian discontent of the Moplah peasants against selected oppressive landlords happening to be Brahmins. That however continues to be referred to as Muslim communal aggression against Hindus. Ambedkar’s book (1946), ‘Pakistan or Partition of India’, and scores of other leaders never got themselves convinced of this agrarian factor behind the Malabar issue.
The 1930s is of particular significance in terms of the enduring legacy that the national movement bequeaths us. I am referring to the Karachi Resolution of the Congress, 1931. Crucial issues such as Fundamental rights, economic programmes, socialist economy, etc., state owned public sector industries, were assertively envisaged in the Karachi Resolution.
Subsequently, the Congress acquired more radical and emancipatory character through its Faizpur Agrarian Programme of 1936. Socialist and Leftist progressive contents started becoming stronger in the ideas of the national movement for the blue-print of future independent India. During this decade, Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose emerged as most popular leader among the youth. By now, the national movement gained tremendous confidence to articulate economic policies, education policies, foreign policies, and the roles India would play worldwide against colonialism and racism.
The Wardha Scheme of Education (1938), conceived and worked out by Gandhiji and Zakir Husain continues to be inalienable part of our subsequent nationalist education policies. I would urge the enlightened audience here to revisit the 200 odd pages draft of Zakir Husain. One would find out many things of the document retained even by the latest draft of the official educational policy. This could be an important reference point for both the admirers and critics of the latest education policy of the government.
So far as the radicalization of peasantry is concerned, the life-story of Navrang Rai alias Swami Sahajanand Saraswati is an interesting read, particularly because he began as a narrow, caste-based reformist and ended up as a tallest radical peasant leader.
At this point, once again, we need to remind ourselves that with this manner of radicalization of the national movement through organised and assertive peasants, working classes, youth, women, tribes, etc., the colonial power-play was towards creating identity-based communal polarization. This became an immediate necessity of the colonial regime once the Congress formed ministries in various provinces in 1937.
From 1938 onwards the majoritarian and minority communal-separatist forces started growing leaps and bounds. Their militias started mushrooming across the nooks and crannies of the subcontinent.
This is how we entered into the decisive 1940s. The two communal forces got open and secret support from the colonial state; the two competing communal forces collaborated with each other by forming coalition ministries in at least two provinces, not to say of such alliances of crassest opportunism in certain municipal bodies, even in the 1930s.
Subhash Bose was quite clear about the communal threat even though the means he chose to employ in order to fight the colonial forces remains a question of concern. In a desperate bid to get rid of British subjugation, Bose had no reservations about aligning with the totalitarian regimes of Europe. Nonetheless, his INA did insist on Ittefaq, Ittehad and Itimaad. Genuinely inclusive nationalism was non-negotiable in his conception of nationhood, sincerely employed within his INA, which also had a women regiment.
At this point, a reference to Jinnah’s politics becomes inevitable. We all know that Jinnah had left politics and settled in UK. All of a sudden, in 1934, he came back to India. We are yet to know as to who prevailed upon Jinnah to rejoin politics. Arguably, we don’t have much even to conjecture and surmise sufficiently in this regard, though, an intelligent guess can possibly be made, based upon how things unfolded subsequently.
I would submit before this enlightened audience to recall what David Gilmartin says in this regard. He says that what Jinnah wanted at this stage was to make the Muslim League an equal partner- a third party- in any negotiation for the future constitution of India. Recall the Muslims, for preferential treatment, being referred more as ex-ruling class, and hardly as numerical minority. Protective discrimination is provided to the historically oppressed. Such Muslim leaders chose to ignore that articulating their demand in this language of ex-ruling class would forfeit the claim of protective discrimination.
How did Jinnah do and achieve the status of “sole spokesman” of Muslims?
Here I would like the audience to pay a cool and careful attention. Jinnah did this through the passage of the Shariat Application Act in 1937, with spirited advocacy by Jinnah in the Central Legislative Assembly. This provided him with a symbolic ideological basis for Muslim solidarity on a national scale, transcending all debates pertaining to the stratifications existing within the Muslims. Politics of Separate homeland and intransigence on gender and caste equity should be noted here.
Not for the last time, this play of the Muslim Personal Law would vitiate the Indian politics. Please do recall the Shah Bano episode 1986. Its heartrending fallout, not only for the hapless individual citizen called Shah Bano, but also for the Muslims as a group, and for the Indian nation, its secularism and its goals of social and gender justice, etc., is something which hardly requires any elaboration in this gathering of wise men and women. Caste and gender justice is yet to be taken up with any degree of sincerity by the votaries of Personal Law.
Let me also put it unambiguously, that we as a university community of AMU have either failed to make an adequate intervention into, or, have maintained a criminal silence on, or, sadly enough, have aligned with those reactionary forces.
Anyway, at this critical juncture of history, we need to look back upon the Pakistan Project of Jinnah, with two kinds of questions:
1. Was it a project of minority rights? Did this project of Jinnah remain a minority rights issue after 1941, or, he turned it into a question of ex-ruling class to be treated as a nation? If yes, then, what did it give to its own minorities after becoming a sovereign or republic, even at theoretical/constitutional level? Why did it become an Islamic republic, rather than a republic for equality of citizenship?
Or,
2. Was it a project for a separate homeland for Muslims? If it was so, then, the question arises as to what did Muslim leadership do towards securing robust Minority Rights discourses for the India of post 1947?
I am reminded of Gyan Prakash’s recent book, ‘Emergency Chronicles’. He says that India’s Muslims and other minorities suffer from a substantive problem that there haven’t ever been mass struggles for the minority rights in India. In other words, in the name of minority rights only regressive and patriarchal values have been safeguarded.
This is not to say that Jinnah was the only articulate voice among Muslim leadership. Maulana Sajjad (1880-1940) was someone who advocated the idea of confining religious rituals and processions within private space. Tufail Ahmad Manglori (1868-1946; book, ‘Musalmanon Ka Raushan Mustaqbil’), the ace wicket-keeper of the Aligarh College cricket team; Maulana Hifzur Rahman Seohharvi (1901-1962; ‘Tehreek-e-Pakistan Par Ek Nazar’), etc., were some of the significant leaders who chastised Jinnah and his idea of separate homeland. Madani’s ‘Muttahidah Qaumiyat’ (1938) is quite well known conception, hence, hardly much necessary to point it out, here among this enlightened audience. [My book, ‘Muslim Politics in Bihar’ devotes a chapter on Muslim Resistance to the Two Nation Theory].
A comparative study of Iqbal’s presidential address to the Muslim League in Allahabad in 1930 and Maulana Azad’s presidential address of the Congress at Ramgarh (Jharkhand) in 1940 would be a helpful exercise for those who remain confused between the politics of separatism and politics of minority rights.
The colonial regime however threw its weight behind Jinnah. Thus the voices of the nationalist Muslims, of their writings, their call for mobilizations, all fell on deaf ears. Jinnah outsmarted all these persuasive and enlightened Muslim luminaries. After all Jinnah had strong backing of state power. Jinnah cunningly and mischievously converted the minority rights discourse into separatism. Having converted a minority into a nation, Jinnah and his colonial benefactors inflicted most fatal injuries to the noble cause of minority rights, in our subcontinent. The sub-continental majoritarianism (to use Papiya Ghosh’s expression) of today has much to do with the nexus of the colonial masters with communal forces.
Those of us who have too many grievances against the Congress-led national movement and its tall leaders, by now, with the advantage of contemporary experiences, we need to introspect that identity-politics of various hues and shades had collaborated with the colonial regimes. Even the CPI had fallen prey to this extremely misleading discourse, in the name of right to ‘self-determination’. Unfortunately, except, K M Ashraf, to the best of my limited knowledge, none of the CPI people have subsequently confessed this fault as candidly as they should.
As against it, the inclusive and pluralist nationalism confronted the colonial regime.
The Constituent Assembly Debates and its final outcome in the form of our Constitution, is basically an outcome of the anti-colonial mass-based freedom struggle.
Here, Ambedkar becomes a necessary reference, more particularly, his three books: Annihilation of Caste (1936), States and Minorities (1947), and Pakistan or Partition of India (1946), among others. These works provide window to look into what democracy, social justice, minorty rights, liberalism and constitutionalism meant to Ambedkar.
In Ambedkar's reading of democracy is not just about form but about value, approach and attitude which should be guided by the trinity of fraternity, dignity, and equality. “One man, one vote, one value” is how Ambedkar conceptualised Democracy. Tryrany of majority is not democracy, and Ambedkar was always against this contrived and perverted reading of democracy. Ambedkar alarmed that if social and economic democracy is not realised, it will be at the peril of political democracy. For Ambedkar, citizen was the focal point of the Constitution. Contemporary politics, in the name of Ambedkar, needs to be reminded of this crucial aspect.
The Justice Party (with its rise and fall in the 1920s), Periyar and then Ambedkar are three important milestones in the evolution of Dalit politics during the national movement. Just before the Quit India Movement, the Dalits too had announced to stay away from the QIM. But the Dalit “separatism” couldn’t have sustained. Unlike the Muslim elites, Dalits didn’t have landlords and businessmen to fund their pursuit. The pro-Congress Dalit leaders could keep majority of Dalits with the Congress in the 1946 elections.
While acknowledging Ambedkar’s contribution, we should not forget the fact that it was only because of Gandhiji and Nehru that Ambedkar was entrusted with important responsibility of not only drafting the Constitution but also to let his ideas and vision acquire space within the Constitution.
In short, class-based approach of the national movement, and its emphasis on individual citizenship, failed to satisfy the identitarian and separatist forces.
There were some limitations of the National Movement:
1. The INM failed to undertake “cultural revolution” with regard to social position of women, and lower castes. Strong anti-caste ideology was not formed and propagated;
2. There was a strategic and tactical failure in defeating communalism with nationalism. Possibly because of that, even after independence, from late 1950s onwards, Nehru led India became sort of complacent about the communal problem and Nehru failed to devise institutions or organizational and administrative means to deal with it.
The question of landholding pattern and tribal empowerment remained grossly unaccomplished not only during the colonial era but also after independence, in greater parts of India. Such legacies of colonialism were foreseen even by the Internationalist and Universalist Rabindrnath Tagore, in his last public speech which was delivered in Shantiniketan in April 1941.
For these to accomplish, armed and unarmed struggles of the landless Dalit peasants and tribes emerged after independence. Their dispossession and displacement in the name of Development/ Vikas continues to happen. Many would say: Vikas is new Communalism.
Engaging with such debates, we as an academic community have to keep thinking how to realise the unfulfilled socio-economic goals of the freedom movement. Does it need repetition that we can achieve it not through identity-politics but by weaving a people’s solidarity through economic nationalism?
Sumit Sarkar concludes his textbook (1983) with a quotation from William Morris’ novel (1888), A Dream of John Ball. This is on the great Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England:
‘…pondered how men fight and lose battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’.
Faiz versified this very feeling:
Chaley chalo ki woh manzil abhi nahin aayee
Thank You,
Mohammad Sajjad
AMU, Aligarh
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