Choudhry Rahmat Ali
Choudhry Rahmat Ali was a Muslim nationalist activist who is credited with coining the name "Pakistan" for a separate Muslim homeland in British India and is sometimes regarded as the originator of the Pakistan Movement.
Born in Balachaur, Punjab, Rahmat Ali got his education in Lahore. His seminal contribution was when he was a law student at the University of Cambridge in 1933, in the form of a pamphlet "Now or Never; Are We to Live or Perish Forever?", also known as the "Pakistan Declaration". The pamphlet was addressed to the British and Indian delegates to the Third Round Table Conference in London. The ideas did not find favour with the delegates or any of the politicians for close to a decade. They were dismissed as students' ideas particularly by Muhammad Ali Jinnah but, by 1940, the Muslim politicians in the subcontinent came around to accept them, leading to the Lahore Resolution of the All-India Muslim League, which was immediately dubbed the "Pakistan Resolution" in the press.
After the creation of Pakistan, Ali returned from England in April 1948, planning to stay in the country, but his belongings were confiscated and he was expelled by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. In October 1948, Ali left empty-handed. He died on 3 February 1951 in Cambridge "destitute, forlorn and lonely". The funeral expenses of insolvent Ali were covered by Emmanuel College, Cambridge on the instructions of its Master - Edward Welbourne. Ali was buried on 20 February 1951 at Cambridge City Cemetery.
Early life
Rahmat Ali was born on 16 November 1897 in the village of Balachaur in the Garhshankar Tahsil of Hoshiarpur District in the Punjab Province of British India. He was born into a Punjabi Muslim family. His father, Haji Shah Muhammad, had two wives; Rahmat Ali was the son of the second. She passed away when he was too young to remember her, and he was raised by his stepmother. According to the historian K. K. Aziz, who knew Ali personally, he was from the Gorsi clan of Gujjar tribe.Education and career
As Balachaur was a small village, Ali had to continue his education in the town of Rahon where there was a middle school. After leaving middle school Ali travelled to Jalandhar in 1910 to enroll in the Saindas Anglo Sanskrit High School - then after matriculation in 1912, he then joined Islamia College Lahore later that year. He passed the intermediate examination in 1915 with English, history, maths and Persian as his subjects of study, he went on to earn a BA degree from Islamia college in 1918, reading English, economics and Persian. During his time at the college he had been secretary of the college debating union as well as being secretary and vice president of his tutorial group - additionally he was editor of the college magazine Crescent.Outside of college, Ali served as assistant editor of Kashmir, a well-known paper of that time founded and edited by Munshi Muhammad Dın Fauq Kashmiri. Ali had written several articles on Indian history and politics, arguing that northern or north western India was the homeland of the Muslims and that they had the right to rule over it. One of these articles cost him his job, entitled "مغرب کی کورانا تقلید" i.e. "Maghrıb ky Korana Taqlid". The article soon attracted the notice of the British authorities, prompting the Deputy Commissioner of Lahore, Henry Phillips Tollinton, to summon Fauq to his office. There, Tollinton issued a stern reprimand and cautioned him of potential punitive measures should such an incident recur. In the aftermath of this confrontation, Fauq dismissed Ali from his position.
After graduating from Islamia College Lahore in 1918, he taught at Aitchison College Lahore and after this, he served as the Chief Advisor to Sir Nawab Murad Buksh Khan Mazari for six years. During this period, he also took on the role of teacher to Mazari's children, including Mir Balakh Sher Mazari who would later become the Caretaker Prime Minister of Pakistan, and Sardar Sherbaz Khan Mazari, who was the Leader of the Opposition and the head of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, before joining Punjab University to study law. In 1930, he decided to move to England to study law at Emmanuel College, Cambridge which he joined in 1931. Subsequently, he obtained a BA degree in 1933 and MA in 1940 from the University of Cambridge. In 1933, he published a pamphlet, "Now or Never", coining the word Pakistan for the first time. In 1943, he was called to the Bar, from Middle Temple, London.
In 1946, he founded the Pakistan National Movement in England. Until 1947, he continued publishing various booklets about his vision for South Asia. The final Partition of India disillusioned him due to the mass killings and mass migrations it ended up producing. He was also dissatisfied with the distribution of areas between the two countries in The Greatest Betrayal he wrote of the six "deadly blows" that he believes Jinnah had dealt against the Muslims by accepting a smaller Pakistan than Ali had envisioned and considered it a major reason for the disturbances.
Philosophy
Ali's writings, in addition to those of Muhammad Iqbal and others, were major catalysts for the formation of Pakistan. He offered the name "Bangistan" for a Muslim homeland in the Bengal region, and "Osmanistan" for a Muslim homeland in the Deccan. He also suggested Dinia as a name for a South Asia of various religions.Conception of 'Pakistan'
Historian Aqeel Abbas Jafari has noted that that the name "Pakistan" was first used by a Kashmir Journalist, Ghulam Hassan Shah Kazmi on 1 July 1928, when he moved an application before the government in Abbottabad seeking a sanction for publishing a weekly newspaper named "Pakistan". This is the first documented occasion that the word Pakistan had been used. Choudhry Rahmat Ali is said to have suggested the name of the independent Muslim state Pakistan in 1933, 5 years after the name was adopted by Ghulam Hasan Shah Kazmi for his newspaper.In 1930, Ali moved to a house in Cambridge, on 3 Humberstone Road, it was in one of the rooms of this house that he is said to have written the word 'Pakistan' for the first time. According to Ali's secretary Miss Frost, he came up with the idea while riding on the top of a London bus. Apparently this suburban semi‑detached property has become something of a tourist attraction for Pakistani visitors, the current owner of the house - Juliet Mills - said in an interview with the University of Cambridge's Varsity newspaper that they "do get people coming to the door asking to look around".
After the creation of the name there are a couple of accounts of him first discussing it, according to a friend, Abdul Kareem Jabbar, the name came up when Ali was walking along the banks of the Thames in 1932 with his friends Pir Ahsan-ud-Din and Khwaja Abdul Rahim. In the 1930s, the London General Omnibus Company operated numerous bus routes that served the banks of the River Thames, especially around central London. Key services included Routes 11, 24, 59, and 76, which ran along or crossed near the Thames, linking north–south London and providing access to the Embankment and bridges.
Sir Mohammad Iqbal said that Rahmat Ali visited him in London when he was there for the First Round Table Conference in 1930 and asked him what he would call the government of the Muslim state he had proposed in Allahabad. Iqbal told him that he would call it "Pakistan" as an acronym based on the provinces' names. In 1930, St. James’s Palace was served by several London General Omnibus Company routes running along Pall Mall, Piccadilly, and St. James’s Street, placing the palace within easy reach of central bus services. The most notable were Route 3, Route 12, and Route 38, which connected the West End to areas like Brixton, Dulwich, and Clapton.
According to Ali's biographer Khursheed Kamal Aziz, the idea came to Ali in December 1932 "or a little earlier" while he was travelling on the top deck of a route 11 bus, Aziz states that Ali had "told this to his secretary, Miss Frost, on returning to Cambridge" and that she in turn had told Aziz when he interviewed her. On the bus journey Ali had a eureka moment and the "word flashed on the screen of his mind."
On 28 January 1933, Ali voiced the idea in a pamphlet titled "Now or Never; Are We to Live or Perish Forever?". The word 'Pakstan' referred to "the five Northern units of India, viz., Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan". By the end of 1933, 'Pakistan' had become common vocabulary, and an i was added to ease pronunciation. Ali also wrote that this would be followed by "reintegration of the three Muslim 'Asian' homelands of Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan" into Pakistan, a reference to Northwest India's political, historical and cultural affiliations with West Asia.
In a subsequent book, Ali discussed the etymology in further detail: 'Pakistan' is both a Persian and an Urdu word. It is composed of letters taken from the names of all our South Asia homelands; that is, Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and Balochistan. It means the land of the Paks – the spiritually pure and clean.
Ali's pamphlet described the Muslims of his proposed 'Pakistan' as a 'nation', which later formed the foundation for the two-nation theory of the All-India Muslim League:
Ali believed that the delegates of the first and second Round Table Conferences committed 'an inexcusable blunder and an incredible betrayal' by accepting the principle of an All-India Federation. He demanded that the national status of the 30 million Muslims of the northwestern units be recognized, and a separate Federal Constitution be granted to them.
Ali's biographer, K. K. Aziz writes, "Rahmat Ali alone drafted this declaration", but to make it "representative" he began to look around for people who would sign it along with him. This search did not prove easy, "for so firm was the grip of 'Muslim Indian Nationalism' on our young intellectuals at English universities that it took me more than a month to find three young men in London who offered to support and sign it." Later on, his political opponents used the name of these signatories and other friends of Ali, as creators of the word 'Pakistan'.
Choudhary Rehmat Ali was the personality who started independence movement in the name of Pakistan. He gave idea of two nations in 1915. He formed Pakistan National Movement in 1934 and also released fortnightly Pakistan newspaper in 1935.