Former diplomat T C A Raghavan’s Circles of Freedom studies the national movement from the perspective of Asaf Ali, a Muslim leader of some standing in the Congress. In doing so, Raghavan provides an insight into the society’s response to the inter-faith marriages of Asaf Ali and Aruna Ganguly and Syud Hossain and Sarup Kumari, later known as Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. The conflicting emotions these two pairs generated suggest a century of continuity in India’s conservative attitude towards Hindu-Muslim marriage, and which has now been weaponised as love jihad, a vicious term coined today to claim Muslims fake love to marry Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam.

Asaf was already a rising Congress leader when he met Aruna in January 1928, through a mutual friend in Allahabad. He was 40 years old, she just 18 and under considerable pressure from her family to agree to an arranged marriage. He proposed marriage to her; she agreed. They were married in September through an Islamic ceremony, for which purpose she opted for what sociologists today call ‘conversion of convenience’ and took the name Kulsum Zamani. They subsequently went through a registered or civil law marriage in Delhi, Raghavan writes.