Bhagwat Mohan and Moulana azad

Bhagwat Mohan and Moulana azad 

4/8/2021

 

A lot has been written on RSS head Mohan Bhagwat’s recent speech where he spoke of common ancestry of Hindus and Muslims.

Commentators have hailed it as an attempt to bring the two communities closer. When I think of one speech in the annals of modern

Indian history which powerfully articulated our shared living, underlining cogently the commonalities between practitioners of two different faiths,

no speech surpasses the one Maulana Azad gave at the Ramgarh session of the Congress in 1940. Combining his erudition gained through

vast reading with mastery of Arabic, Persian and Urdu, Azad’s eloquent speech left the listeners spellbound. And if it doesn’t make

you stop for a moment and ponder over which direction we are taking our beautiful India, an ocean of streams, a mosaic of many cultures and religions.

to, nothing else will. Excerpts from that historic speech.

“It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable soil,

and many a caravan should rest here . . . …One of the last of these caravans, following the footsteps of its predecessors, was that of the followers of Islam.

This came here and settled here for good. This led to a meeting of culture-currents of two different races. Like the Ganga and Jamuna,

they flowed for a while through separate courses, but nature’s immutable law brought them together and joined them in a Sangam.

This fusion was a notable event in history . . . …Eleven hundred years of common history have enriched India with our common achievements.

Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, out dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life,

everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavor. His joint wealth is the heritage of our common nationality and we do not want to leave it and

go back to a time when this joint life had not begun . . . …The cast has now been molded and destiny has set its seal upon it.

Whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible. No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide

can break this unity. We must accept the logic of fact and history and engage ourselves in the fashioning of our future destiny. “