Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar

Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar (1878 to 1931) was a journalist, poet and politician, and with his brother Shaukat Ali the best-known face of the Khilafat movement. He belongs in this record because, for a few years after 1919, Khilafat, Congress and Sikh politics in Punjab moved together, and because the unity he stood for had come apart by the time he died.

He was born at Rampur on 10 December 1878 and studied at Aligarh and then at Lincoln College, Oxford. He made his name with the English weekly The Comrade, launched at Calcutta in 1911, and the Urdu daily Hamdard, launched in 1913. According to Wikipedia he took part in the founding meeting of the All India Muslim League in 1906. His granddaughter, writing in Dawn, remembers him as a man who chose the pen over the sword.

Key moments

• 1915 to 1919: interned under the Defence of India Act for articles supporting the Ottoman Empire, and released in December 1919.
• 30 December 1917 to 1 January 1918: president of the All India Muslim League, for only a few days.
• 1919 to 1922: a leader of the Khilafat movement, which allied itself with Gandhi's non-cooperation campaign.
• October 1920: the Central Sikh League, under Baba Kharak Singh, voted at Lahore to support non-cooperation and began enrolling volunteers, as the Congress and the Central Khilafat Committee were also doing.
• 3 March 1921: after the Nankana Sahib massacre, Gandhi visited the shrine with Shaukat Ali, Jauhar's brother.
• Autumn 1921: tried at Karachi with Shaukat Ali and others and convicted. Gandhi spoke at Lahore on 10 November 1921 about the conviction of the Ali Brothers.
• 1923: president of the Indian National Congress at its Cocanada (Kakinada) session, for only a few months. Wikipedia says he had opposed Gandhi's suspension of non-cooperation in 1922 and later drifted from the Congress.
• 1928: opposed the Nehru Report, in particular its end to separate electorates for Muslims.
• 1930 to 1931: attended the first Round Table Conference in London, where he told the British that if India was not freed they would have to give him a grave there. He died in London of a stroke on 4 January 1931 and was buried in Jerusalem, near the Dome of the Rock.

Remembered for: his two papers, his leadership of the Khilafat movement beside Gandhi, and his burial far from home. For Sikhs the Khilafat years are remembered as a short season in which Akali reformers, the Congress and Khilafat leaders shared platforms, a season that ended with the movement itself in 1922.