Almost 30 years ago, when heritage walks were still a novel idea in the capital, a walk focussed on the demarcating line between Old and New Delhi: Asaf Ali Road. The walk leader mentioned how Asaf Ali and his wife Aruna, both eminent freedom fighters, had met.
It was quite a tale: Aruna was wearing the INA’s uniform, her hair tucked under her cap, looking like a man—and when Asaf Ali congratulated her on her bravery, she whipped off that cap; her long hair tumbled down and Asaf Ali fell in love with her.
So very romantic, and so very inaccurate. Aruna was never in the INA, and they got married (to great controversy, because of their different religions and a 20-year gap in their ages) well before she became a revolutionary. But thus do legends arise, surrounding heroes, contorting the truth: unless unearthed by someone with a desire to discover what might actually have happened.
This is what TCA Raghavan sets out to do in Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle: to explain the dynamics—personal and political—between Asaf Ali and a small group of those closest to him, including, of course, his wife Aruna.
These people are Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), Syud Hossain (1888-1949), Syed Mahmud (1889-1971) and Aruna (1909-1996), four people whose interconnections Raghavan describes thus in the introduction to the book: “Living at a time when life was more than a search for personal happiness, fulfilment and stability, for them politics, ideology, dissent, great struggle and sacrifice contextualized the more human but equally important acts of friendship, love and loyalty.”
Raghavan hits the ground running, beginning in London in 1913, when Mohammad Asaf Ali, then 25 years old, first met the ‘Nightingale of India’, Sarojini Naidu.
From this point in time, Raghavan goes back to the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century, tracing Asaf Ali’s early years in Delhi (where he grew up in a haveli in Old Delhi’s Kucha Chelan) and how he ended up pursuing a career as a lawyer—a vocation which allowed him to go to London. Raghavan then circles back to 1913, and from then on in chronological order, narrating not just the story of Asaf Ali’s life, but of those around him.
This timeline stretches all the way from those early years right up to just after independence. The freedom movement, of course, takes centrestage, since pretty much every single one of the characters in this narrative played a part in it.
Raghavan structures his book skilfully, so that while the history of the freedom movement and its main milestones play out in the background, the reader can approach this larger story through the lens of this handful of central characters—and, among them, mainly Asaf Ali.
In 1928, with his marriage and the Westernized Bengali-resident-in-Nainital, Aruna Ganguli, that focus expands beyond Asaf Ali to this firebrand woman, initially seemingly content to stay in her famous husband’s shadow, but gradually coming into her own.
Through landmarks like Asaf Ali’s defence of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru; the imprisonment (along with several other national leaders, at Ahmednagar Fort after the Quit India resolution was passed; the INA trials; Asaf Ali’s work as independent India’s first ambassador to the USA—Raghavan presents a fascinating, well-researched insight into the life and times of Asaf Ali. Sarojini Naidu, Syud Hossain and Syed Mahmud, after those initial years in the 1920s, largely vanish from the narrative, and even Aruna Asaf Ali comes and goes.
Raghavan uses Asaf Ali’s autobiography, along with the memoirs and letters of various other people (including Nehru, Gandhi, and Wavell), to build up the character of a man trying to strike a balance in life: a Muslim in a Hindu-dominated Congress; a moderate, believing in a legislative path to freedom; but married to a woman who evolved into one of India’s most popular revolutionaries. A non-violent man who defended some of the most violent of the freedom fighters in our annals.
Who Asaf Ali was; how he was perceived by friends and foes; how he evolved—as a lawyer, a politician, a person; what were his triumphs and his failures. All of these come through vividly in Circles of Freedom.