Miryam Sikandar on Maulana Azad

Maulana Azad was born for great things. His father was a Sufi 'Pir' who could attract a crowd of 30,000 rapt devotees to the Calcutta Maidan. His mother was from a scholarly Arab lineage and so his mother tongue was Arabic. However, it was his own prolific pen and political courage which gave him a leading position within reformist Indian Islam while yet an adolescent.

As he grew older, which he did with grace and dignity, there were moments when his scholarship and international stature seemed to fit him for the title of 'Imam-ul-Hind'. At the very least, he seemed destined to end up as a Head of State- a powerless but dignified ceremonial presence.

Instead, Nationalistic Indians think of him as a windbag who, in his final days, descended into a rancorous and incoherent alcoholism. Islamists think he was seduced from the true path by a sort of taqlid of the charismatic swindler Gandhi. Instead of planning and building something Islamic, the fellow participated in some crazy, wholly delusive, majazi, Hindu 'leela'- i.e. unreal playacting which was an end in itself and served no useful function- except perhaps to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses.

Currently, because of the CAA agitation we remember the Maulana as the author of an utterly fatuous plan which sought to avoid Partition by grouping Assam with Bengal in defiance of the wishes of the Assamese people who are currently enraged at the outcome of the Supreme Court mandated Nationality Register initiative in their Province. This unwelcome development forced the BJP to bring in the Citizen Amendment Act which now is being protested by many Indian Muslims who, it appears, object to non Muslims being allowed to escape from forcible conversion.

One such, Miryam Sikandar, currently doing a Doctorate at SOAS, has written a bizarre article in Scroll.in.

She points to the above caricature of Azad- depicting him as a belligerent Quasimodo- or perhaps a Kabanda type demon- scowling upward at some enemy- drawn by a Pakistani cartoonist and published in a Pakistani journal one year after Azad's death.

Dr. Sikandar writes-

When I chanced upon this image of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wincing in despair, I wondered why the cartoonist chose to depict the leader in this unflattering hunchback posture.

Pakistanis would, quite naturally, depict Azad as a foolish creature who failed miserably. It was military men, like Nasser, who got things done.

Gandhi and Azad had said Independence was not worth having if it meant the dissolution of Hindu Muslim unity. This was like an Irish politician saying Ireland should not accept Independence till the Protestant North was reconciled to the domination of the Papist South. The thing was foolish. Independence is a good thing because you can do stuff that it is in your interest to do. Unity is a bad thing if it means you can't do anything that is in your own interest. You have to just talk meaningless tosh while some alien power rules over you. This was Azad's fate. His Islamic work was useless. It was predicated upon a wholly false belief- viz. that Religion matters only if all Religions teach that they don't matter at all because they are all the same. The Union is one of inutility and imbecility. As a matter of fact, sects which differentiate themselves maximally can serve a very good purpose by providing a mimetic target. But, for this to happen, they have to pursue excellence in education, commerce, culture etc. The same could be said of different Languages or Regions or, indeed, classes of people. Competition and emulation permit the whole of Society to rise up not because it is United but because it isn't. As Jefferson said long ago 'in matters of Religion, united we fall, divided we rise.'

The other point is the slogan 'Hindu-Muslim unity' was only as appealing as Hindus were appealing or Muslims were appealing. But both were revealed to be utter shite. No Muslim country could help any other. They were all equally useless. The Hindus may have been a little worse than the Muslims but they were terrible bores and doomed to poverty and impotence and an eternity of whining about British Rule which had impoverished them all the more effectively by ceasing to exist.

Azad, as a great figure in Urdu publishing, was a failure in another respect. His language was sinking without trace in India. Even as Education Minister, he had been powerless in this respect. Nor had Azad been able to convince his community that scientific education was the way forward. Why? He lacked it himself. The Muslim reaction was to retreat into Deobandi orthodoxy. India's big export to the Islamic world was the backward looking Maulana Nadwi and the notion that all modernity was 'jahilliya'.  Thus this minority was bound to fall behind while the Christians and Dalits and everybody else advanced.

At that time there was still a trickle of migrants from India whereas Pakistan had turned the corner and was growing twice as fast- at least in the West Wing. Thus, Azad was an exploded volcano whose molten lava had flown away uselessly. He had blown his top and was but an ugly crater on the face of Islamic Revival.

Look at the cartoon below by the same artist. It is of Syed Ahmed Khan brandishing a knife and fork- which, for Indians, were unnatural implements and signaled an excessive admiration of Europe. Like the Kabandha demon, perhaps Sir Syed would be restored to his celestial form if his arms were cut off. Azad's hands are empty in the cartoon. But what might they have held? From the Pakistani perspective, Azad's right hand was his own patented Hizbollah and a Deobandi type of anti-Westernism while the left hand was paralyzed because it was chained to 'nanga bhooka Hindustan'- naked, hungry, India.

Dr. Sikandar writes-

The cartoon, published in the Urdu magazine Nuqoosh in February 1959, had been drawn by the eminent journalist Irshad Haider Zaidi. It was most probably a reference toAzad’s anguished last speech at Delhi’s Jama Masjid in 1948,

He died 10 years later. How could it have been his last speech? All that windbag did was give speeches.

where bemoaning the Partition, he accused the Muslims of India of breaking his back:
“Do you remember? I hailed you, you cut off my tongue, I picked my pen, you severed my hands, I wanted to move forward, you broke off my legs, I tried to turn over, you broke my back…

It was true that Indian Muslims decisively rejected Congress and voted for Jinnah and Pakistan by an overwhelming majority in 1946.

'Today mine is no more than an inert existence or a forlorn cry. I am an orphan in my own motherland. This does not mean that I feel trapped in the original choice that I had made for myself, nor do I feel that there is no room left for my aashiana [nest]. What it means is that my cloak is weary of your impudent grabbing hands. My sensitivities are injured, my heart is heavy.”

So, once in power, the Minister Sahib says 'don't trouble me with your importuning. You have made your own beds and must lie in it.' But this is quite routine for politicians.

A week after the Delhi Police stormed the premises of Jamia Millia Islamia making a desolation in the interest of peace-keeping, students across the country continued to spill out on streets in grief and righteous anger.

Very self-righteous anger, no question, but a great boon to the ruling party precisely for that reason. It seems some Indians get very angry when they think of non-Muslims finding safety and citizenship in India.

Roused from the benign lethargy of writing up my PhD thesis in London, 7,500 km away from everything I called home, still struggling to shake off the image of the blood-stained corridor of the Zakir Husain Library where I spent six months during fieldwork two years ago and where I found this curious image of Azad in its Periodicals section.

This sentence is incomplete. You were roused from lethargy. But to what purpose? Was it to write illiterate shite? How would that help anybody? Or are you merely virtue-signalling? No. Sikandar is a Muslim name. You are saying you object to non-Muslims being able to flee from persecution and forcible conversion. You may have a sound theological reason for this scruple. But it is not one which non-Muslims are likely to share.

Azad was the First Minister of Education in the Indian Government. In 1920, he was elected as a member of the foundation committee to establish Jamia Millia Islamia. One of the main founders of the Dharasana Satyagraha in 1931, Azad vigorously led the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity and India’s secular ethos.

Sadly, to unite people you have to say sensible things and sponsor a mutually beneficial program of practical works. Neither Azad nor Gandhi did anything of the sort. They were associated with worthless, money-pit, institutions. Their agitations boomeranged leaving the Brits with more, not less, power.

What was the point of the Salt Satyagraha? It was a silly piece of political theater.  The salt tax remains to this day; it was only briefly abolished after Independence- but the price of salt rose, it did not fall. India still has a Salt bureau. The cost of collection of the tax is about 50 per cent. But the opportunity cost is over 100 per cent. Stupid people like giving endless lectures about the importance of unity and non-violence and not molesting everybody you meet. They may want to bring the masses out on to the streets to protest the rape of the Liberal Ethos of the Environment by increasingly Fascist Neo-Liberal anal banditry. However, the opportunity cost of this silly behavior is that people can't unite on a common program of doing sensible stuff.

Like Afghani, Azad's big shtick was 'Muslim Society is sick. Only cure is the Koran'. But, as Connor Cruise O'Brien pointed out long ago, this cure worsened the disease. The fact is no Scripture says 'do stupid shite.' Both Hindus and Muslims were educationally, commercially, and politically backward. They needed to imitate smarter more successful people. It is foolish to pretend that re-interpreting the Koran or the Gita or Das Kapital to suit the needs of the modern day is vital to reinvigorate the glorious tradition of Hindus and Muslims constantly cuddling and kissing in the streets with the result that India was a 'golden bird' which a handful of homophobic Brits were able to pluck of all its feathers because, despite constant cuddling, Hindus and Muslims were too cowardly or stupid to fight back.

What are the needs of the modern day? Secularism in the sense of telling Religious, or Ideological cults, to go fuck themselves. Just imitate the Japs or guys who imitated the Japs or whoever else pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. If you see a Maulana or a Mahatma, tell him to fuck off. No doubt, he may reply, 'if I fuck off, there will be Partition.' But Partition is a good thing. Ireland's Civil War ceased in the Twenties once Partition was accepted. Ataturk made peace with his neighbors after a big population exchange. If the Sikhs want a state where they will be the majority- just give it to them already. Don't get guys with long beards to talk shite about the unity of all Religion. Sooner or later, they will start killing each other as heretics.

Why be 'inclusive' to minorities? The only minority that matters is the small number of people who don't have shit for brains. Imitate them if they make money. Tell them to fuck off if they start asking for funds to help poor, disabled, homosexual goats who are struggling against the hegemony of late Capitalist goat-herders.

In India, when any group starts talking shite you must tell them in no uncertain terms that the first step that must be taken is the physical liquidation of the Iyengar population. Those bastids are saying Iyers put garlic in the sambar. This proves that 'Divide and Rule' policy is invention of Iyengars only. Queen Victoria was an Iyengar. Genghis Khan- typical Iyengar lady pretending to be a Mongol warlord. How long we are going to tolerate being trampled underfoot by the Iyengars?

Often dubbed as a “Congress Showboy” by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Azad continued to proclaim his faith in Hindu-Muslim entente.

However, he failed to denounce Iyengars. But the same can be said about Jinnah. Gandhi, that bastard, went and became the sambandhi of a vicious Iyengar named Rajaji. He and he alone was responsible for all bad things which have been happening. How could India prosper if its first Governor General was such a scoundrel as to deny the possibility of a jivanmukta? Would he eat sambar at the house of an Iyer? Maybe. But if so, why Iyengars are spreading rumors that I put garlic in sambar?

Consider my 2020 speech at the International anti-Iyengar Congress.
'I am proud of being a sambar eater. I am part of the indivisible unity that is constituted by the practice of slurping sambar even up to elbow- as is right and proper. I am indispensable to a particular orifice and without me gobshittery would be impoverished. Yet Iyengars are saying I am putting garlic in sambar! Why not just say beef-fat and be done with it?'

In a similar vein, Maulana Azad declared in 1940, 

“I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice and without me this splendid structure is incomplete. I am an essential element, which has gone to build India. I can never surrender this claim.”

So, he opposed the Pakistan Resolution. Yet, 7 years later, Pakistan became a reality. Muslims, as Muslims, were an essential element in Pakistan. Not so in India. Bare citizenship, no special status, was accorded them.

Azad and Jinnah had different worldviews and both went on to espouse an ideology different from the one they initially propagated.

In other words, they were politicians opposed to each other.

In light of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sly suggestion that the people protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act could be identified by their clothes, it is perhaps parenthetical but telling that despite changing their ideologies, Azad and Jinnah did not change their appearance.

Jinnah certainly did change his appearance. The protesters did not change their appearance. This was a Muslim protest against non-Muslims being permitted to escape forcible conversion.

The sherwani-donning Azad, who completed Dars e Nizami Islamic curriculum, undertook the study of Quran, hadith, tafsir, fiqh and who produced the unfinished four-volume Tarjuman-ul-Quran – a reinterpretation of Islamic theology reconcilable with the religiously composite ethos of India – sided with the secular Congress and supported Indian nationalism.

Why? That is the crucial question. The answer is that Azad's mother was a pure Arab. He was interested in the Middle East and Turkey. He understood that the nationalists there wanted support from a united India which would be the successor state to the British Raj. Thus, Azad favored Hindu-Muslim unity so that India could play a part in the liberation of the Islamic heartland. This dream was still alive when I was a kid in Baghdad. I recall visiting dignitaries gassing on about Amba Prasad Sufi's Pan Islamic propaganda during the Mesopotamian Campaign and so forth. But that dream vanished long ago. India's Socialist Secularist friends in the region have either disappeared- e.g. Saddam- or are under siege, or are as corrupt and incompetent as the Nehru Dynasty.

The big problem with India's blathershites was that they refused to mimic successful nations like Japan. The mimetic model they represented was of a giant begging bowl being passed around by a set of arrant cowards.

Jinnah, who used to wear Savile Row suits and had little orientation about Islam, sponsored the idea of creating a state in the name of Islam.

Jinnah was born an Ismaili. He was converted to the Pakistan idea and took to wearing a karakul cap. He didn't want to meddle too much with Islam because of the potential for a Shia-Sunni split- not to mention Ahmadiyas and so forth.

Azad was born in Mecca in 1888 in a family known for piety and religious scholarship.

What is important to note is that his father had left Delhi after the Mutiny. He returned under British auspices. But his son was of the 'Ghaddar' breed and got worked up about Turkey and Khilafat and so forth- all of which turned out to be a mirage. Jinnah and the Aga Khan had been chased out of the Khilafat movement by greedy embezzlers but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Still, Indian Ismailis tended to fall behind Bohras because of the Aga Khan's politics.

His real name was Sayyid Ghulam Muhiyuddin. The first change in Azad’s thinking came when he read the works of scholars like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Shibli Nomani and Jamaluddin Afghani.

Azad was a favorite pupil of Nomani, along with Sulaiman Nadvi who, however, left India for Pakistan some two or three years after Partition. It is believed that Azad's hostility to Aligarh rubbed off on Nomani.

The concept that appealed to him initially was that of pan-Islamism.

This is the orthodox Indian position. It was challenged by sectarian hot-heads and extremists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. However, after 1857, that type of militancy disappeared. I suppose one could say that Zia revived it in Pakistan- but there was a tactical element to this.

Azad joined the Muslim League in 1913 and remained a member till 1920 while also being the driving force behind the creation of Jamiat-ul Ulama e Hind in 1919 along with Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani.

Azad, however, did not have the religious standing of Madani and thus his influence was bound to decline.

Well versed in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Turkish, Azad had exceptionally precocious journalistic capabilities. He started editing his first newspaper Al-Misbah at the age of 12. In 1903, Azad’s monthly magazine Lisan us Sidq(Voice of Truth) gained popularity, his prime concern being the revival of Muslims and their political challenges in the world at large.

I think Azad was more similar to Sir Syed as a teen, though he would naturally have resented the airs and graces the English medium scholars gave themselves. But there was already an anti-Aligarh reaction among the traditionally educated courtier class. Still, the fact is, by 1905, parents all over India were demanding some English language instruction in primary school. Previously, there had been a superstitious fear of the 'la-deen' alphabet. But the tide had turned in its favor. Azad's long life marked the final eclipse of Urdu in its birthplace. But, Sir Syed himself had said- a little before Azad was born- that writing in Urdu made people stupid. Scientific instruction could be give in it, but Law and Philosophy and so forth should be taught in English. Otherwise, the country would drown in hysterical verbosity. Experience has confirmed this view. Urdu is the language of the manic-depressive. By contrast, Bengali is the language of the blathershite while Tamil is so pure and beautiful that speaking it makes me want to kill Iyengars.

In 1914, the British government banned his Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh for his anti-British stance. Charged with sedition, he was asked to leave Bengal under the provisions of the Defence of India Act.

Al Balagh was started after Al-Hilal was shut down. It too ceased to operate when the Brits imprisoned Azad in 1916.

The turning point in Azad’s life came after his release from Ranchi Jail in 1920 when he met Gandhi who then joined hands with the Khilafat Movement leaders and launched the Non-Cooperation movement.

This was a bad mistake. Gandhi and Rajaji and so forth were saying Hindus had a religious duty which only Muslims might possibly have felt incumbent on them. If Hindus really had died fighting the Brits and the French etc. in Turkey or MENA then Gandhi would not have been shown to have been a lying cheating hypocrite. But Gandhi called off Non Cooperation a couple of weeks before Egypt got unilateral independence.

The right thing to do was to emphasize the anti-imperialist aspect of the agitation. But Azad and Gandhi and the Ali brothers went in the opposite direction. Thus the thing was bound to end in tears. Indian independence was indefinitely delayed.

Azad became an integral part of this movement and parted ways with the Muslim League. Adopting new ideas of cultural harmony, national unity and freedom, Azad wholeheartedly threw his lot with the Congress. He presided over its special session in 1923 in Delhi. Galvanised by the Kemalist abolition of the Osmanli Caliphate in March 1924, the pan-Islamic oppositional unity of an ummah wahida against the British that Azad’s Al Hilaal and Al Balagh stirringly invoked were now replaced by new idioms of secular nationhood and religious ecumenism. In fact, in his Ramgarh Address (1940), he described the history of India as a symbiosis where Hindus and Muslims resembled each other closely.

In other words, Azad saw he had been barking up the wrong tree. The Turks had liberated themselves. Egypt had got independence. The Saudis conquered the Hejaz and united much of the peninsula. Iran was taking a similar path to that of Ataturk. The age of the theologians was over. That of egalitarian secularism was dawning. India, because of the backwardness and stupidity of its Mullahs and Mahatmas, would have to learn patience by queuing up, in an orderly fashion, to be beaten on the head by policemen. Only prolonged satyagraha of this type would fit them for yet more such beating.

Indian students, of course, amply demonstrate the Indian need for regular beating. Indian Muslims are being encouraged to run amok. The BJP ought to be praying for another Godhra. We can easily imagine how Scroll.In will cover an atrocity committed against a train compartment filled with non-Muslim refugees. It will be said that the refugees infuriated the Muslims by saying 'Ha, ha! We are going to escape forcible conversion and get to live safely! You can't do anything about it!'

While Gandhi’s entry into active politics occasioned a sea-change in Azad’s politics, the same conjuncture spurred Jinnah’s transformation into a Muslim Nationalist from being a territorial nationalist (once known as the “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”).

Jinnah resigned from Congress in 1920. But he remained an important go-between. However, his deputy, Chaghla let him down when he was called away from negotiations with Motilal Nehru in 1928. This lawyer's trick proved Congress perfidy to Jinnah who retaliated, on behalf of the League, with his 14 points.

In 1929 he announced his famous Fourteen Points to safeguard Muslim interests in self-governing India. Which of the two leaders was successful in ensuring the full realisation of their vision is a question with no easy answers. 

Nehru was successful which is why his dynasty is still important in India.

The Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens has provoked a widespread backlash in the country, especially from students. While the full implications of the law are yet to be realised, many Indian citizens worry, with good reason, that it might mutate into something more nefarious.

In other words, some opposition politicians are trying to throw a scare into the Muslims in the belief that they will secure their votes. Students, being as stupid as shit, can always be relied on to jump into the fray.

On December 20, after the Friday prayers at Jama Masjid, another Azad dramatically surfaced amidst the sloganeering thousands: the Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad who read out a few passages from the Indian Constitution that he was holding in his hands. It is the same masjid from where Maulana Azad made his clarion call to Muslims migrating to Pakistan:

“Where are you going and why? Raise your eyes. The minarets of Jama Masjid want to ask you a question. Where have you lost the glorious pages from your chronicles? Wasn’t it only yesterday that on the banks of the Jamuna, your caravans performed wazu?”

So there you have it. Maulana Azad is now the equal of Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan who believes that Dalits were once the rulers of India, just as the Muslims were once the rulers of India. Muslims must die in jihad so that this Ravan can reclaim his throne and destroy any Ram Masjid which may be built in Ayodhya.

Maulana Azad lies buried in the vicinity of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. Somewhere close by, just across Jama Masjid also lies buried Sarmad Kashani, the sixteenth century Armenian mystic poet who traveled to India and was executed by Aurangzeb for his unorthodox religious views, freedom of speech and whose life Azad eloquently recounted in his Hayat e Sarmad Shaheed and with whom Azad, true to his sobriquets Abul Kalam (father of speech) and Azad (free) identified with.

Sarmad fell in love with a Hindu boy, took of all his clothes and ran around naked. Sadly Maulana Azad did not do the same though, no doubt, Mountbatten would have been delighted by the spectacle. It was inconsiderate actions of that type which caused the Brits to get in a huff and depart India.

Before he was beheaded, Sarmad composed the following Farsi couplet:
“Shor e shud wa az khwab e adam chashm kishudemDidem ki baqi ast shab e fitna, ghunudem There was a clamour and we opened our eyes from an eternal sleep. Saw that the night of wickedness endures, so we slept again.”
The sword of course fell on Sarmad.

 Poor fellow! Next time he gets up the night of naughtiness will have ended so he can romp around naked to his heart's delight.

Who knows when this shab-e-fitna will end or if it ever will without decapitating us

because night has a sword with which it can cut off our head because...urm... arre bhai, ye husn-e-talil tere samajh ke bahar hai.  Just take my word for it already. Such things are happening all the time at SOAS. You fall asleep during lecture and when you wake up you find somebody chopped off your head and ran away with it! Probably it was some nasty boys from LSE. Kindly bring me back my head, I say, or I will beat you with my hockey stick!

but the clamour is stirring people in statutory caution from an eternal slumber and the minarets of Jama Masjid recall Azad’s impassioned call for action:
“Brothers, keep up with the changes. Don’t say, ‘We are not ready for the change.’ Get ready. Stars may have plummeted down but the sun is still shining. Borrow a few of its rays and sprinkle them in the dark caverns of your lives.”

Also borrow some of its sugar and atta and a little ghee so Mummy can make nice pancakes.

Incidentally the reason given for the 2010 Jama Masjid terror attack in which two Taiwanese nationals were injured was that the Imam was letting semi-naked foreigners into the mosque. Clearly only naked Armenians are tolerated at such places- provided they are in love with some Hindu boy.

When the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act was passed, exultant Pakistani Twitter uses got #ThankYouJinnah to trend on Twitter. Hundreds of social media accounts recounted their hard-won victories in Jinnah’s quotable adage rehashed over and over: “Muslims who are opposing Pakistan will spend rest of their lives proving loyalty to India”.

Or they could just get a job. Stupid people should not prove their loyalty to anything. Their way of doing so creates a public nuisance.

Our hearts are heavy. The hunchbacked ghost of Azad

who is now the equal of a guy named Ravan

and India’s secularism stare us back in our faces and the bitter fight for India’s secular backbone continues.

Who is fighting for anybody's or anything's backbone? Sarmad was taking of all his clothes so as to display his backside to some Hindu boy. Azad was served mutton curry by Kasturba Gandhi after her husband forced her to cook meat for the guest. Maybe Kasturba had to fight for the backbone of a goat so as to make nice broth. But other than her, I can think of nobody who gets into a fight over backbones. Still, perhaps Dr. Sikandar knows what she is talking about. In the SOAS canteen scholars and savants beat each other so as to secure backbones to gnaw upon. However, shab-e-fitna beheaded them when they fell asleep during lecture. So they are unable to gnaw upon any backbone. This makes them write articles which Scroll publishes.

As Maulana Azad said 'You Urdu speaking people are all completely bakvas. Raise up your eyes and look at the minarets of Jama Masjid. What do they remind you of? Chee, chee, how can you have such dirty thoughts! What you should piously think of is Sarmad's backside. O ye of little faith! Have you forgotten so soon that your Caravan was guided across the desert of verbal diarrhea by nothing but the radiant full moon of his hindquarters? You people have broken my back and are fighting with each other to snatch away my spinal cord for some revolting culinary purpose. Can you blame me if I shut myself in my room with a bottle of something medicinal?'

Azad was a good man. But he was incorruptible. Thus he is the patron of no dynasty. Still, at least he didn't get naked and run up and down Chandni Chowk babbling mystic verse. What he got up to in his own room behind drawn curtains is nobody's business but his own. At least he didn't get gay with Jawaharlal when they were in jail together. It is for small mercies such as this that we should venerate great heroes of the independence struggle like Atul Gopichand, Vivek Iyer and Patti Obaweyo Golem. I mean, of course, the British Independence struggle in which I played a leading part by getting naked and running around my little flat with the curtains drawn.