The Place of Political Membership

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that Abul Kalam Azad, one of India's most prominent anticolonial thinkers, was critical of nationalism because of its emphasis on circumscribing a political community with territorial borders. Instead, he conceived of India as a place, and he used this conception of place as the grounds for an alternative frame of the political. For Azad, place indicated a point of equilibrium between conceptions of nationalism, particularly as a form of anticolonialism, and universal ideas of humanity (insāniyyat), and the earth as its common inheritance (arẓiyyat). Connecting the idea of place to that of self-knowledge, this article examines how Azad laid the grounds for membership in a locality where particular identities gathered to form a general consciousness of common life. In doing so, it argues that he developed a potent normative idea that remains relevant to repetitive contentions of the political membership of Muslims in India and elsewhere.