topics: |  india | british-raj | indep | islam | |

While focusing on the historical aspects, what drew me to this book was the
pages of poetry - much of it written in jail - that it featured...

The end of the Caliphate

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire had sought alliances with the British
French and then the Russians.  Rejected by all three, they finally joined up
with Germany.  

In the ashes of defeat immediately after the war, the Empire was
split up among several colonial powers under the League of Nations. 
Thus Syria and Lebanon were mandated to France, while Palestine and what is
now Jordan became British protectorates.  Turkey, where Kemal Ataturk had
waged a revolutionary war since 1918 (killing thousands of Armenians, Kurds
and Greeks), eventually gained political control over Anatolia. Another chunk
became what is now Saudi Arabia.  

The Ottoman Sultan had been for some centuries, the Caliph of Islam, and the
dismemberment of the Caliphate was seen as a body-blow to Islam.  The effect
was most pronounced in British India, where Indian Muslims organied the
Khilafat movement agitation. 

Hindu-Muslim unity

The movement was spearheaded by the Oxford-educated maulana, Muhammad Ali,
his brother Shaukat Ali, and a number of muslim intellectuals from Deoband.
The Ali brothers had been active in Congress, and had been active in
Congress.  They had served jail terms together with Congress leaders, and
they had a personal friendship with Mahatma Gandhi.  

In the event, Mahatma declared his support for the movement without
consulting others in the Congress, but eventually it became the INC policy.  
Khilafat was combined with the swadeshi movement, which was then the
main civil disobedince movement in Congress.  The movement had a broad
response among Muslims, and Hindus and Muslims

	cooperated fully, with Gandhi's first non-violent non-cooperation
	movement against British rule. Muslim and Hindu were thus engaged in
	parallel political activity: the broadening of national political
	participation from the elite to the mass through new techniques of
	organization and communication.

At one point Muhammad Ali said that he would assist an Afghan army were
they to invade India.  The viceroy confronted Gandhi on these speeches and
eventually at Gandhi's urging, the brothers apologized for these
intemperate speeches.  

Ginault writes about the young Shankaracharya of Puri, an eminent scholar who
had worked with GK Gokhale, who joined the Ali brothers and other Muslims on
the stage at a large meeting in Karachi in September 1921.

These Karachi seven were immediately arrested, leading to a large public
sympathy for the movement.  

However, this strongly positive sentiment would wither later, when it was
found that the Khilafat committee may have misappropriated funds 
out of a total of 72 lakhs, not including gold ornaments etc., collected with
great fervour from the populace:   

	In July 1622, the Smyrna and Angora funds reportedly contained a
	balance of Rs. 16 lakhs.  The central committee, in order to meet
	current expenses, decided to transfer one lakh to the Khilafat fund,
	and requested Seth Chotani to send ten lakhs of the balance to
	Angora... At their October meeting however, they found that neigher
	Chotani nor his son, Ahmad Mian Chotani, had complied with their
	instructions to forward the money to Turkey.  Chotani had difficulty
	explaning himself, and rumours of financial scandal began to
	circulate.   The working committee appointed an inquiry cmmittee into
	the financial dealings. p.189
	
The committee found that many heads had gaps - e.g. "propaganda", on which
1.5 Lakhs were spent, of which only about a third was accountable.  Shaukat
Ali and others had travelled royally (never in third class), and hired 15 for
the work of four, etc., some ledgers were lost or with the jailed leaders.
In the end, however,

	thre were enormous discrepancies in the accounts, and the balance of
	sixteen lakhs supposedly in the keeping of Seth Chotani and his son
	had vanished.  p.190

[Mian Mahomed Haji Janmahomed Chotani, a Gujarati mill-owner from Bombay
(b.1873), had been associated with the Congress since 1915.  In 1919, at the
Lucknow conference where the Khilafat Committee was formed, he had been
appointed president.  In 1922, he was re-elected as president cum treasurer.

After the scandal, he handed over two saw mills, valued at 18 lakhs, to the
Central Khilafat Committee.   


  
  Muhammad Ali Jauhar	          Seth M. M. Cholani

Excerpts

The Karachi seven were rounded up in mid-September 1921 and charged with
conspiracy to tamper with the loyalty of the troops.  169

After the arrests of the brothers Shaukat and Muhammad Ali, their wives
showed a determination to perservere as touring attractions for the Smyrna
Fund and swadeshi.  Begam Muhammad Ali continued the tour of Madras that
her husband was prevented from finishing.  Bi Amman addressed mass meetings
in Lahore, saying that hundreds would spring up where one had been arrested. 170

Poetry of the Khilafat

Minault, who has previously written an artiicle on the Urdu poetry of the
Khilafat period, also quotes extensively from this corpus. 

A number of Muslim intellectuals were arrested during world war I and again
later during the Khilafat movement (1921-24). 

Zafar Ali Khan (ran the journal Zamindar from Lahore; every day it carried
a poem commenting on political events - "Martial Law", "Khilafat Committee",
"Swaraj" etc., but the imagery was traditional :

	The garden is restless to hear the song
		'God is one,'
	The time to set the nightingale free from
		his cage has come.  p.156

The poetry of Hasrat Mohani was more direct, and less ambiguously
couched in the traditional devices of Persian poetic themes.  Here is a
couplet written in jail:

	     	My opinions are free and so is my spirit
	     	It is useless to lock up the body of Hasrat. 

Muhammad Ali (Jauhar) was a maulana with a large following, and most of his
poetry was written when he was in jail, where he found leisure: 

		Grieve not over imprisonment in the cage, but
		    do not forget the actions of the plucker of the rose
		Oh foolish nightingale! When free in the garden,
	  	    when did you ever find repose?  p.160


Voices of silence
Ḵẖvājah Alt̤āf Ḥusain Ḥālī, Gail Minault