Abul Kalam Azad was a respected Islamic scholar and writer by his early twenties, having taught himself several languages and traditions of religious and philosophical scholarship without formal university training, and he used his growing reputation to argue publicly, and controversially within some circles, that India's Hindus and Muslims belonged in one shared, undivided nation rather than separate states.
He joined Gandhi's independence movement early and was jailed multiple times by British authorities, spending, by some estimates, roughly a decade of his life across various prison terms for his political activities, using much of that prison time to continue writing and studying rather than treating it as lost time.
As one of the most senior Muslim leaders within the Indian National Congress, he consistently opposed the movement toward the partition of India along religious lines in the 1940s, arguing that dividing the country by religion would create more communal violence and hardship than it would resolve, a position that put him at odds with the eventual course of events.
After independence and partition arrived regardless in 1947, Azad chose to remain in India rather than move to the newly formed Pakistan, going on to serve as India's first Minister of Education, where he pushed to establish some of the country's most significant technical and educational institutions, including the Indian Institutes of Technology.