The Prime Minister India Forgot It Ever Had

Ask most people who independent India's first prime minister was, and they will say Jawaharlal Nehru. Few know that a provisional Indian government existed before independence, formed outside British reach, with its own prime minister — and that he was a maulana from Bhopal. Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali was born on 7 July 1854 in Bhopal's Itwara neighbourhood, trained first in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and went on to master seven languages including English, German, Japanese and Turkish. Convinced the British Empire could not be broken from within India alone, he left the country in the 1880s to organise against it from abroad.

His route took him through England, where he worked at Liverpool's Muslim Institute from 1895 and fell in with revolutionary circles that included Lala Hardayal and Raja Mahendra Pratap; then to Japan in 1899, where he was appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Tokyo and published anti-colonial journals, first Islamic Fraternity and, after it was banned, El Islam — writing in Urdu and English with enough reach that the British government pressured Tokyo into moving against him. In 1913 he joined San Francisco's Ghadar Party, whose singular aim was to turn Indian soldiers in the British army against their officers; the following year, Tokyo stripped him of his professorship under British pressure, a measure of how seriously the empire took him.

In December 1915, during the First World War, Barkatullah travelled to Kabul with Raja Mahendra Pratap and Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi to proclaim India's first provisional government-in-exile. Its composition was itself a statement: Raja Mahendra Pratap, a Hindu, as president; Barkatullah, a maulana from Bhopal, as prime minister; and Ubaidullah Sindhi, born into a Sikh family who had converted to Islam, as home minister. The government appealed to the Russian Tsar, and to Germany and Turkey, for support against British rule; when the Tsar refused, Barkatullah travelled to Moscow in 1919 and met Lenin directly. He never returned home. He died in San Francisco in September 1927, aged 73, and is buried in Sacramento — having spent his life on four continents without ever seeing an independent India.

The Weaver's Son Who Built a Newspaper for the Illiterate

The second figure is Ali Husain, born on 15 April 1889 in Bihar Sharif's Khasganj neighbourhood into a family of weavers ruined by British trade policy — the same policy that inspired the poet Josh Malihabadi's line accusing the East India Company of severing weavers' thumbs. At sixteen he left for Calcutta and joined the Khilafat movement; when its leaders, the Ali brothers, were arrested, he organised public meetings for their mother, Bi Amma, and lost his job for it. Unable to find new work, he turned to beedi-rolling — the trade of the city's poorest — and adopted the pen name by which he became known: Asim Bihari.

Among fellow beedi workers he founded a discussion circle, Darul Mujakara, and by 22 had drawn up a five-year plan for adult education. After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, he organised a campaign that sent roughly 150,000 letters and telegrams demanding the release of arrested leaders. In 1920 he founded the Jamiat-ul-Momineen in Calcutta's Tantibagh, which grew into the nationwide Momin Conference — the first organised political voice for Muslim weavers and artisans, earning him the title “father of the Pasmanda movement.” In April 1921 he started al-Momin, a newspaper written on large sheets of paper and pasted on neighbourhood walls, read aloud to those who could not read — later printed conventionally, but built from the outset to reach literate and illiterate alike.

When Gandhi, Maulana Azad and Mohammad Ali Jauhar attended a Tantibagh gathering and Gandhi reportedly offered the organisation one lakh rupees with conditions attached, Asim Bihari refused it, saying an organisation speaking for workers could not accept anyone else's terms. He never accepted the presidency of his own organisation, serving only as general secretary on a stipend he often went without; beedi workers called him Kamali Baba, and the movement called him Kashti-e-Safir, the travelling ambassador. In the 1940s he opposed Partition, arguing Hindus and Muslims could not be separated by a line after centuries together, and that its heaviest cost would fall on the poor. He died on 6 December 1953 in Allahabad, leaving no property and no title — only the movement he built.

Two Idols of a Different India

Barkatullah carried India's demand for freedom onto the world stage; Asim Bihari gave voice, inside India, to people no one else wanted to hear. Neither man's fight was only against the British. Barkatullah's idea of a free India was one where a Hindu raja and a Muslim maulana could sit in the same cabinet; Asim Bihari's was one where a weaver's son could study, a labourer could be heard, and the poorest could live with dignity. For nearly four decades, a university in Bhopal carried Barkatullah's name. In June 2026, its executive council voted unanimously to remove it, arguing in its own proposal that he had contributed less to the region than the medieval king Raja Bhoj — beyond having been born there. The file now awaits the governor's decision. Asim Bihari fared worse still: nothing was ever named for him at all. One man is buried in Sacramento, the other in Allahabad; one never lived to see a free India, the other lived to see one that was not quite the India he had imagined. Remembering them, this account argues, is itself a political act — because history is not only written. It has to be kept.