Maulana Shaukat Ali and Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar

Shaukat Ali and Muhammad Ali Jauhar were brothers from Rampur who led the Khilafat Movement, the Indian Muslim agitation over the fate of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph after the First World War. For a few years it ran alongside Mahatma Gandhi's non-cooperation campaign. Those were also the years in which the Akali Movement and the Central Sikh League were drawing Sikhs into mass action in Punjab, which is why the brothers appear in this record. Muhammad Ali Jauhar also has a profile of his own.

Muhammad Ali Jauhar was born on 10 December 1878 at Rampur and studied at Aligarh and at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was a journalist who launched the English weekly The Comrade in Calcutta in 1911 and the Urdu daily Hamdard in Delhi in 1913. He was interned on 15 May 1915 after writing in support of the Turks, and on his release in 1919 went straight to Amritsar, where the Congress and the Muslim League were holding their annual meetings. He helped found Jamia Millia Islamia in 1920, was jailed at Karachi in 1921, broke with Gandhi after non-cooperation was called off in 1922, and was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1923, though his term lasted only months. He attended the Round Table Conference in London in 1930 and died there on 4 January 1931. He was buried at Jerusalem, at his own wish.

Shaukat Ali was born on 10 March 1873 and spent 17 years in the civil service of the United Provinces before entering politics. He helped his brother run Hamdard and Comrade, was elected president of the Khilafat conference in 1919 while in jail, and was imprisoned again from 1921 to 1923 for backing Gandhi's non-cooperation. After his brother's death he organised the World Muslim Conference at Jerusalem in 1931. He joined the All India Muslim League in 1936 as a close ally of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and died at Delhi on 26 November 1938.

Key moments

• 1919 to 1920: the brothers join other leaders in the All India Khilafat Committee, which issued the Khilafat Manifesto in 1920.
• 1920: the Khilafat leaders ally with the Congress under Gandhi for Khilafat and swaraj.
• October 1920: at its Lahore session the Central Sikh League backs non-cooperation and asks for 10,000 Sikh volunteers.
• 1921: both brothers are arrested.
• 1922: the movement fades after non-cooperation is suspended; Turkey abolishes the caliphate in 1924.

They are remembered as the voice of the Khilafat agitation and as the Muslim leaders who stood beside Gandhi in 1920 and 1921, and later joined the Muslim League.