In 1922, working from Calcutta, Sajjad Husain used his own money to launch a newspaper he called Inqilab — Revolution. It was, on its face, an odd word for a businessman with a growing family and a successful contracting operation to attach his name and his capital to. It was also exactly the right word, because what he intended was not the violent overturning the word can suggest in other contexts, but the slower, more durable revolution of a community learning to speak for itself in print.
Urdu journalism in this period was a precarious trade. A newspaper lived or died by subscriptions that arrived late or not at all, by advertisers who could be frightened away by a single controversial editorial, and by a colonial administration that watched the vernacular press with an attention bordering on paranoia. Sajjad Husain understood all of this before he began, and he began anyway, because he had concluded — correctly, as it turned out — that a community without a press of its own was a community that other people got to describe on its behalf.
When he relocated to Allahabad in 1926, following an expanding electrical and contracting enterprise, the newspaper work moved with him and grew. Over the following years his name would be attached, in one capacity or another, to a shifting roster of publications — Haftawar Toofan, Tarjuman, Khadim, and others whose names survive only in fragments in the family's records, the print runs and mastheads of small-town Urdu journalism having largely vanished along with the newspapers themselves. What did not vanish was the pattern: a paper would struggle financially, an editorial arrangement would change, sometimes an editor would die and the work would pass, by informal arrangement, to an associate — a man named Rais, in one instance, who went on to a respected career in Urdu newspaper editing in his own right — and Sajjad Husain would keep the enterprise alive rather than let a Muslim public voice go silent for want of a subscriber base.
He was, by every surviving account, a naturally gifted controversialist — not for his own sake, but because he had a talent for turning an argument into a sentence people remembered. Friends recalled that he could make a serious political point through a single sharp remark more effectively than through a column of careful prose, and his papers were not shy about criticizing powerful people, including Muslim figures whose conduct he believed harmed the community's interests. This was not universally popular. A religious scholar once asked him, with evident frustration, why he had not simply purchased or fully underwrote a particular struggling newspaper rather than continuing to prop up several at once with limited means. The exchange, family memory suggests, led to a reshuffling of editorial arrangements and the eventual continuation of the work under a different title — one more thread in the dense, often confusing tangle of newspaper names that appear and disappear through this period of his life.
What mattered, in the end, was not any single masthead but the underlying conviction that held all of them together. A school, he liked to say, educated children. A hospital treated bodies. A Masjid nourished faith. A newspaper — this was his own addition to that familiar list, and the one that reveals the most about how he understood his own vocation — a newspaper awakened minds. He did not have radio, television, or any of the tools a later generation of community leaders would take for granted. He had paper, ink, a printing press, and conviction, and for the better part of two decades he used them without pause.