Zakir Husain

Zakir Husain was born on February 8, 1897, in Hyderabad, then the capital of a large princely state in the Deccan, where his father Fida Husain Khan practised law ^[1]. The family traced its roots to Qaimganj in the Farrukhabad district of the United Provinces and belonged to an Afridi Pathan lineage that had settled in northern India generations earlier ^[2]. His father died when Zakir was about ten, and his mother Naznin Begum moved the children back to the family's ancestral region, only to die herself a few years later during an epidemic. Responsibility for the orphaned brothers fell largely on relatives and on the boys themselves.

He received his early schooling at the Islamia High School in Etawah, a town on the Yamuna in the United Provinces, where teachers remembered him as serious beyond his years ^[2]. From Etawah he went to the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, the institution founded by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan that later became Aligarh Muslim University. There he studied, debated, and absorbed the arguments then dividing educated Indian Muslims: loyalty to British rule, the pull of pan-Islamic sentiment, and the growing appeal of Indian nationalism ^[1]. The Aligarh years gave him both an intellectual grounding and a lifelong conviction that education, more than agitation, would decide India's future.

The turning point came in 1920, when Mahatma Gandhi and the Khilafat leadership called on students to leave institutions supported by the colonial government. Husain, then a young postgraduate at Aligarh, joined a group of teachers and students who walked out and helped establish a new national Muslim university, Jamia Millia Islamia, in October 1920 ^[3]. The founders wanted a university answerable to Indians rather than to the Raj, one that combined modern learning with Islamic studies and an openly nationalist outlook. The venture was born in tents and borrowed buildings, chronically short of money, and dismissed by many as a political gesture that could not last.

In 1923 Husain sailed for Germany and enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he earned a doctorate in economics in 1926 ^[1]. Berlin in the Weimar years exposed him to European debates on pedagogy and political economy, and he worked with fellow Indian students on scholarly projects, including an edition of the poetry of Ghalib. When word reached him that Jamia was near collapse and might be wound up, he and a small circle of colleagues resolved to return and keep it alive on subsistence salaries ^[3].

Back in India, Husain became Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia in 1926, at the age of twenty-nine, and held the post for twenty-two years ^[4]. Under his stewardship the university moved from Aligarh to Delhi and eventually to its permanent campus at Okhla. He recruited teachers willing to accept a fixed low wage, raised funds from sympathisers across the country, and built a reputation for Jamia as a laboratory of Indian education rather than a sectarian college. Any serious Zakir Husain biography treats these lean decades, not his later offices, as the core of his achievement.

Husain's standing as an educational thinker drew him into Gandhi's orbit in the late 1930s. After the Congress ministries took office in the provinces in 1937, Gandhi proposed a scheme of free, compulsory schooling taught through a productive craft, an idea that became known as basic education or the Wardha scheme. Husain chaired the committee that turned the proposal into a detailed syllabus and administrative plan, and its report, often called the Zakir Husain Committee report, became the foundation of the nai talim movement ^[5]. He then led the Hindustani Talimi Sangh, the body Gandhi created to promote the new pedagogy across India.

His ideas were practical rather than utopian. He argued that children learn character and competence together, that handwork disciplines the mind, and that a poor country could not copy the expensive schooling models of Europe ^[5]. These convictions ran through his speeches and his Urdu writings, which included essays on education and stories for children. Among Zakir Husain facts that surprise modern readers, his authorship of children's fiction in Urdu is one of the most human: the president who once wrote animal tales for young readers.

Independence and Partition in 1947 tested everything he had built. Jamia's campus sheltered refugees during the Delhi violence, and Husain himself, travelling by train that year, narrowly escaped harm in an encounter with a hostile crowd ^[2]. He rejected the demand for Pakistan and chose to remain in India, insisting that Indian Muslims could be full citizens of a secular state. In 1948 the government asked him to take over as Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, an institution demoralised by the departure of many staff and students to Pakistan and viewed with suspicion for its earlier association with the Muslim League. Over eight years he steadied its finances, rebuilt its academic standing, and reoriented it toward the new republic ^[4].

Public office followed academic life. Husain was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, in 1952, and in 1957 he became Governor of Bihar, a post he held for five years ^[1]. In 1962 the electoral college chose him as Vice President of India, succeeding Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and he presided over the Rajya Sabha through the difficult years that included the war with China in 1962 and the war with Pakistan in 1965 ^[6]. The state recognised his services early: he received the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 and the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, in 1963 ^[4].

The presidential election of May 1967 was the most contested India had yet seen. The Congress party's dominance had cracked in the general election months earlier, and the opposition united behind Koka Subba Rao, a former Chief Justice of India. Husain won with roughly 56 percent of the electoral college vote and was sworn in on May 13, 1967, as the third President of India ^[6]. His election carried weight beyond arithmetic: a Muslim educationist, chosen twenty years after Partition, occupied the highest office of a state that defined itself as secular.

Among Zakir Husain achievements, contemporaries ranked the symbolism of that moment alongside his institutional work. In his inaugural address he described the whole of India as his trust, a formulation widely quoted afterwards as a statement of the presidency's unifying purpose ^[7]. As head of state he travelled abroad, received foreign leaders, and kept the office scrupulously above the factional battles then consuming the ruling party.

Husain married Shah Jahan Begum, and the couple had two daughters, Saeeda Khan and Safia Rahman ^[2]. Family life was frugal by the standards of men of his eminence; the Jamia years had fixed habits of plain living that he never abandoned, even in the governor's house at Patna or at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Visitors noted his courtesy, his soft voice, and a certain reserve that colleagues read as shyness rather than aloofness.

His private enthusiasms were those of a scholar. He collected books, took a connoisseur's interest in Urdu poetry, especially Ghalib, and enjoyed gardening, with a particular fondness for roses ^[2]. He translated works on economics and Plato's Republic into Urdu, believing that a modern Indian language had to carry serious ideas if it was to live. Though a practising Muslim, he wore his faith without display and counted Hindus, Christians, and sceptics among his closest collaborators, a pattern set in the ecumenical common rooms of Jamia ^[3].

The presidency occupied the last two years of his life. Husain was seventy when he took office and his health was already uncertain, but he maintained a full schedule of ceremonial duties, state visits, and addresses to universities, the settings where he always seemed most at ease ^[6]. He used the office's limited powers with restraint, in keeping with his view that the president should be a guardian of constitutional propriety rather than a rival centre of power.

On the morning of May 3, 1969, Zakir Husain died of a heart attack at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, the first Indian president to die in office ^[7]. Vice President V. V. Giri took over as acting president, and the succession set off a political contest that split the Congress party later that year. Husain was buried, at his own wish, on the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, beside the graves of colleagues from the university's founding generation; his wife was later laid to rest next to him ^[3]. The mourning crossed communal and party lines, with tributes emphasising the schoolmaster in him more than the head of state.

Husain's most durable monument is institutional. Jamia Millia Islamia, the struggling national college he refused to let die in the 1920s, became a central university in 1988 and today teaches tens of thousands of students on the Okhla campus where he is buried ^[3]. Aligarh Muslim University's recovery after Partition owed much to his eight years at its head, and the basic education movement he helped design left a lasting mark on Indian debates about craft, work, and schooling ^[5].

His name is stitched into public life across India. Zakir Husain Delhi College, one of the capital's oldest institutions, was renamed for him, as were colleges, roads, and a rose garden in Chandigarh; commemorative stamps have carried his portrait ^[4]. Scholars return to his career when discussing secular citizenship, because his life offered a working answer to the question of whether a devout Muslim could stand at the centre of the Indian state. Nearly six decades after his death, the record of the educator-president remains a standard reference point in histories of the republic's early years ^[1].