ABSTRACT
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was one of several major leaders of the Indian independence movement who were confined to Ahmednagar Fort for over three years, from 1942 to 1945. The prisoners of Ahmednagar Fort experienced confinement and a sudden disjuncture in their experience of time that is broadly similar to the collective global experience of living with lockdowns and drastically altered life experiences during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. What might we learn from their experiences and their responses? In this chapter, the author turns to the prison writings of Maulana Azad, written in Ahmednagar Fort and first published in 1946 as Ghubar-e Khatir (The Dust of Memories). Maulana Azad was not only a major Indian-Muslim political figure, the President of the Indian National Congress 1940–1946, and the first Education Minister of independent India, but also an influential and authoritative religious thinker, with an extensive oeuvre of work on theology, ethics, and an influential translation and exegesis of the Quran. Three sequential letters in this collection are of particular interest because they emerge from and engage with a long and underexplored tradition of Muslim ecological thought, the ethics of the garden. In these letters, Azad movingly depicts how an altered experience of time can lead to a transformative intimacy with other beings – in his case, the sparrows he shares a room with – and a truly democratic encounter across species, in a cosmo-theological ecology of practice.
