Azad’s Letters from Ahmednagar Fort Prison: A Reading of Ghubar e Khatir as a Prison Narrative

Abstract

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a prominent freedom fighter and religious scholar from India, was imprisoned by the British colonial administration many times before India gained independence in 1947. Between 1942 and 1945, the British administration incarcerated him at the Ahmadnagar Fort Prison. It was in this prison that the Maulana wrote one of the masterpieces of Urdu literature in the form of a collection of letters which he addressed to one of his closest friends, Nawab Sadr Yar Jung, Maulana Habibur Rahman Shirwani. The letters are Maulana’s reflections on a host of issues: his love for tea, his love for solitude, philosophy, religion, aesthetics, ethics, sin, and the concept of God. As a piece of Prison Literature, Ghubar e Khatir could be studied as an extraordinary piece of communication that a confined writer makes with his friend by imagining him in a state of dialogue with him; and, these letters show the imprisoned writer and his resilience to continue to read and write despite his solitary confinement as a human will to survive through writing. In fact, these letters show the capacity of the human mind to create meanings, seek consolations, and heal physical wounds through such a profound engagement with reading and writing. In the present paper, an attempt shall be made to read Maulana’s Ghubar e Khatir as a prison narrative, and an attempt shall also be made to see how the world within the writer helps him overcome the pain of solitary confinement