Relentless Guardians

Qamar Azad Hashmi

Qamar Azad Hashmi is an 83-year-old educationist, activist, author, mother, and survivor. Today her apartment in Delhi is scattered with the writings and photographs of people she has outlived, including one of her two sons, the pioneering playwright Safdar Hashmi. Her life has mirrored the tragedies, fractures, and separations of the subcontinent. Yet in spite of all she has endured, Qamar Azad remains deeply driven by her vision of a creative, dynamic system of education for India’s children. No matter has stood in her way, she has always lived life on her own terms.

Within a few moments of my first meeting with her, Qamar Azad revealed the strength and determination that has sustained her delicate frame all these years. Despite a constant struggle with age-related health problems, she moves effortlessly around her apartment, talking with visitors and undertaking her daily chores. When she finally sat down at an elegant study table designed by her husband—“the table’s older than you”, she exclaimed—I began to appreciate what it is that drives and inspires her.

Surrounding her study table are black and white photographs of her father (who looks strikingly like Lokmanya Tilak), biological and ‘rakhi’ brothers, and extended members of the family. Among the images is a framed photograph of Pandit Nehru taken on the momentous occasion of India’s birth as a nation. Qamar Azad Hashmi is one of the few remaining from a generation that believed deeply in that ‘tryst with destiny’ Nehru professed. She read the last lines of his speech that night for me: “It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.” She paused and then added, “I do not understand you girls talking about liberation and modernity today. On 14th August 1947, I left my house with my brother’s friend to hear Panditji’s speech at midnight. There was a sea of humans who had flooded the roads of Delhi. I was one of them and even though I could not see the stage or get any where near it, I was proud to have heard Panditji. I was 19 then.”

Born in 1926 in Jhansi to mother’s name and Azhar Ali ‘Azad’, Qamar Azad was educated in Aligarh, Lucknow, Malihabad and Kasmandi. Her father was a tehsildar who had to move his family around constantly. Apart from his administrative position, Azhar Ali Azad was a poet who wrote in Persian and Urdu. He contributed verses to literary magazines. He also published a literary journal that was edited by Qamar’s mother. Qamar describes her family as ‘not wealthy’ but intellectual and creative. Learning in her family was based on recitations of verses and stories that she and her siblings mimed while resting under mango trees outside their home. Young Qamar rejected the family surname Abbasi and chose to call herself ‘Azad’ or ‘free’ (from her father’s pen name).

She had early brushes in her childhood with serving as a teacher. “I was not as bright as my elder sister or as beautiful as my younger sister,” she told me. “But I had a gift—I could monitor well.” Her teacher, who was also the head mistress and the administrator of the small school of 40 girls in Malihabad, asked her to teach the girls while she was busy finishing her other odd responsibilities.

Family fortunes kept changing over time and the family moved to Delhi to stay with Qamar’s elder brother, who was a lecturer in English at the Kashmiri Gate Polytechnic. Despite the communal tension rising before independence and partition, young Qamar simply dreamed of finishing her education. But tremendous upheavals stood in her way. Her brother surprised everyone at home by opting to migrate to Pakistan. Because her parents and younger siblings were dependent on him, they reluctantly agreed. The family faced numerous threats to their lives before reaching Pakistan. But to Qamar the biggest loss was leaving her books and notes behind.

Adapting to life in Pakistan was a challenge. Qamar and her parents could not find the space for a progressive, educated Muslim family in the bitter social and political environment after independence. Qamar took it upon herself to add to the family’s diminishing income and growing expenditures. She wrote for a newspaper called Imroze and made handkerchiefs for a shopkeeper in the Anarkali Bazaar of Lahore. The need to earn something extra inspired her to create a new line of handkerchiefs for the shopkeeper. He was so impressed by her creativity and conversational skills that he requested her to teach his daughter. Qamar took up the assignment and within a month her student’s grades improved, much to the shopkeeper’s delight. So he entrusted his son’s tuitions to Qamar as well.

Qamar’s life would take a new turn through the influence of the politically active Hashmi family, friends of her parents since their days in Delhi. The Hashmis encouraged Qamar to attend meetings of the Progressive Writers Association. She met young poets of the Indo-Pak literary movement, listened to their poetry, and studied trends. Her literary horizons expanded.

But the Hashmi family’s influence would extend beyond literature. The Hashmis proposed that Qamar marry their son Haneef, who had opted to remain back in Delhi. Haneef Hashmi was an avant-garde craftsman whose workshop made furniture for embassies in Delhi. Qamar and her family accepted, though it meant saying painful goodbyes. She would not see her family again for decades.

Qamar set up a home with her husband in Delhi. Upon a family friend’s request there, she filled out the forms for International Montessori training at Delhi College and informed her husband only after getting admission to the school. The family was going through one financial misfortune after the other, but Qamar was still determined to let nothing come in the way of her learning. By that time she had three young children at home and another was born just four days after her final Montessori exam. But nothing could deter her.

Dr. Zakir Hussain, then the Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University and a family friend, encouraged Haneef Hashmi to move to Aligarh. During her years in Aligarh, Qamar was itching to be useful and do more than create fancy dress costumes for her children’s school functions. She enrolled in a graduate degree course at the Aligarh Muslim University. Her husband took over the household responsibilities for three months during her exams. The young Qamar’s dream of being a graduate, a dream disrupted by partition, marriage, and children, was finally fulfilled.

Qamar took a vacation with relatives in Delhi that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. She interviewed for the position of a nursery teacher advertised by the Delhi Municipal Corporation and was not only accepted, but swiftly upgraded to the position of head mistress. She was at the threshold of a new journey.

Qamar lived alone in Delhi for over three years, meeting her family in Aligarh only every ten days. Her “independent lifestyle” became a matter of debate within the family but Qamar remained determined. Her position’s administrative duties coupled with burgeoning family pressures only increased her determination to keep going.

When Qamar speaks of her career as a head mistress her voice fills with enthusiasm. She took me to her study where she has cartons full of material she has been busy creating for over 40 years. One almirah holds three decades of experiences in education. As I unraveled the contents—match-boxes, beads, seeds, elastics, corrugated sheets, cardboard shapes and jars of various shapes and sizes—I heard her say, “Sometimes people find it embarrassing that I scan the dust-bin before I send it out. I never let anything interesting, any shape, pass out of the house. They all enter this box to be a part of my nursery kit.”

The genesis of her collecting is Maria Montessori’s resource kit that she and her teachers struggled to implement at the NDMC Nursery School. In order to create new experiences for children, so they would have a better understanding of the world around them, she and her team of teachers stretched their imaginations to prepare more effective and economical means of preparing the Montessori kit. They adapted and expanded the kit and Qamar was proud of her teacher’s creativity. Three of them won prestigious awards from the NDMC.

Qamar’s reputation as a determined, no-nonsense, and dependable Head Mistress grew with each school she was transferred to. She fought with the authorities, teachers and parents to get new learning materials, improved resource kits, stronger roofs, and better teachers. She wanted her students to have membership to Bal Bhawan and pushed to take them on weekly trips to Lodi Gardens. She also advocated for teaching materials that incorporated visuals and the dynamic contents of her brimming cartons, perceived then as “unconventional.” Her attitude was always, “Of course we can do this!” She encouraged her teachers to “unlearn” the books and follow their instincts.

Three decades of distinguished service in education did not mean her life was without grief or tragedy. She witnessed her husband weaken with an illness and then pass away. Later, in 1989, her son Safdar was brutally murdered for his strident and creative opposition to government oppression. But tragedy has never derailed her life’s struggle to improve children’s education.

“Struggles keep going on and life without struggles is not a life enough. But I disagree with the idea of learning by heart. What total non-sense,” she told me. “Teachers find the learn-by-heart pattern easy as it is unchallenging. But observation and using sensory organs is the most effective way of learning. One of the mandatory subjects at my school was to sow seeds and see the various stages of growth. We would relate this to the child’s personal growth. I am amazed how students of the so- called good schools lack basic application. We had no resources… we were poor but we had a fire in us.”

Whether she was working with her daughter to run informal schools for Muslim girls in Nizamuddin basti or speaking at public functions, Qamar’s life during her school years was always 9-9. ‘I just cannot stop imagining,’ she exclaimed.

In 1988 Qamar was honoured with the State Award for Best Teacher. After her retirement in 1990, she completed her Masters in Urdu and published an anthology of her father’s poetry. She also wrote a book The Fifth Flame about her deceased son’s life. Now she is busy working on a book based on her thirty years of experience as a nursery school Head Mistress.

As she read out some passages from her manuscript to me, I remembered the “tryst with destiny.” Each carefully handwritten page recorded her own tryst with educating the children of a free India. Some lines go like: “It is wrong to correct a child. We need to be prepared for a child’s boundless imagination which is not caged like ours. Their strength of mind is different than ours and they can surprise us.” She stopped and reminisced: “Oh, how tough it is to have your teachers think out of the box! Just to use simple words, simple tools...” Another passage of the manuscript notes: “For thousands of years humans have been following their own intellectual and mental freedom to follow pursuits like painting, writing and even today the artist is master of his thoughts. A child can express through colours or clay with his limited verbal vocabulary. We need to observe closer. I always told my teachers to leave them alone while they are painting.”

As we spoke in her study, Qamar began re-arranging her cartons. “I love to keep myself busy. These boxes are a result of fifty years of ‘being busy.’”