The Freedom Fighters India Forgot: Barkatullah Bhopali and Asim Bihari

Two Lives, One Struggle

Every August 15, the same names surface: Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, Maulana Azad. But thousands fought for India's independence who rarely make that annual recitation. Two were Muslim freedom fighters who worked continents apart, in very different registers: one led a government that wrote to a tsar; the other pasted his newspaper on the walls of a Kolkata lane, because the people he wrote for could not afford to buy it, and mostly could not read it either.

This is the story of Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali, prime minister of a provisional Indian government formed in exile, and of Maulana Ali Hussain, who wrote as Asim Bihari and built one of India's earliest political movements of weavers, artisans and the labouring poor.

The Scholar Who Became a Prime Minister in Exile

Ask most people who served as independent India's first prime minister and they will say Jawaharlal Nehru. Few know that a provisional government of India existed even before 1947 — and that its prime minister was a maulana from Bhopal.

Barkatullah was born on 7 July 1854 in Bhopal's Itwara neighbourhood, and began his education in Arabic, Persian and Urdu before eventually gaining command of seven languages, including English, German, Japanese and Turkish. He left India in the 1880s, convinced the British Empire could not be broken from within the country alone; it would have to be encircled from every side. His first stop was England, where he was invited to work at Liverpool's Muslim Institute in 1895 and fell in with revolutionary circles around figures such as Lala Hardayal and Raja Mahendra Pratap. When former British prime minister William Gladstone made disparaging remarks about Indians, Barkatullah answered in essays and speeches, drawing the close attention of British intelligence.

He moved on to Japan, appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Tokyo, and launched a journal, Islamic Fraternity; when that was banned, he started another, El Islam, in Urdu and English. His writing reached India and worried London enough that it pressured Tokyo to silence him too, costing him his professorship in 1914. By then he had joined San Francisco's Ghadar Party, whose aim was blunt: Indian soldiers in the British army should turn their weapons on their employers. The movement spread to more than a dozen countries, drawing thousands of overseas Indians home to join the cause.

A Government Without a Country

On 1 December 1915, mid-way through the First World War, Barkatullah travelled to Kabul with Raja Mahendra Pratap and Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi and declared India's first provisional government from the Bagh-e-Babur gardens, beyond the reach of British law. Its president was Raja Mahendra Pratap, a Hindu king; its prime minister was Barkatullah, a maulana from Bhopal; its home minister was Ubaidullah Sindhi, born into a Sikh family before he converted to Islam. The cabinet itself was the argument: an India belonging to no single faith.

The government wrote to the Russian tsar and opened talks with Germany and Turkey seeking support for Indian independence; the tsar refused. In 1919 Barkatullah travelled to Moscow himself and met Lenin, pressing the same single cause. He never set foot in India again, dying in San Francisco in September 1927, aged 73, and is buried in Sacramento, having spent his life across four continents without ever seeing an independent India.

From a Ruined Weaving Family to a Movement of the Poor

Before East India Company policy flooded Indian markets with foreign cloth, the subcontinent's handloom and handicraft industries were famous worldwide; that policy ruined millions of weavers, a wound the poet Josh Malihabadi later captured in verse addressed to the Company's heirs. Into one such ruined weaving family, Ali Hussain was born on 15 April 1889 in Bihar Sharif's Khasganj neighbourhood; his grandfather, Maulana Abdul Rahman, had helped lead the 1857 revolt in the area.

His formal schooling ended early. At 16 he took work at Usha Company, where he was drawn into the Khilafat movement, organising gatherings for Bi Amma, mother of the imprisoned Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Shaukat Ali. The cost was immediate: he lost the job, and no employer would touch anyone tied to the movement, so he earned his living the way the city's poorest did, rolling bidis, and adopted the pen name by which he became known: Asim Bihari.

Giving the Voiceless a Newspaper They Could Read Without Reading

Among his fellow bidi workers, Asim Bihari formed a discussion circle, Darul Mujakara, "the house of debate," where essays on society and nation were written, read aloud and argued over. At 22 he drew up a five-year plan for adult literacy; two years later he founded Bazm-e-Adab in his hometown, Nalanda. After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, when Lala Lajpat Rai, Maulana Azad and others were arrested, he ran a campaign that reportedly generated some 150,000 letters and telegrams demanding their release, from towns and villages across the country.

In 1921 he founded what became known nationally as the Momin Conference, one of India's first political organisations of weavers, artisans and labourers, and launched a wall newspaper, Al Momin: essays on large sheets, pasted in narrow lanes, read aloud to anyone who could not read them himself. He did not wait for literacy to spread before publishing; he built a paper that worked around it. When Gandhi reportedly offered the young, impoverished organisation one lakh rupees with conditions attached, Asim Bihari refused, arguing that a body speaking for labourers could not run on anyone else's terms. He himself never accepted the Conference presidency, serving instead as general secretary while pushing others forward; bidi workers called him Kamal Baba, and in the movement he was known as Kashti Safir, the travelling ambassador.

In the 1940s, as politics moved toward Partition, he opposed it publicly, arguing that Hindus and Muslims had lived together for centuries and that the poor would bear the heaviest cost of any line drawn between them. He died on 6 December 1953 in Allahabad, leaving no property and no title, only the organisation he had built.

The Names Still Missing From the Books

Barkatullah and Asim Bihari are two entries in a much longer, largely unwritten list: Ashfaqulla Khan, hanged at 27 after the Kakori conspiracy; Hasrat Mohani, credited with coining "Inquilab Zindabad" and demanding complete independence first; Saifuddin Kitchlew, whose arrest drew the crowd fired on at Jallianwala Bagh; Begum Hazrat Mahal, who led Awadh's 1857 resistance; Peer Ali Khan, hanged in Patna that same year; Sheikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmud Hasan, imprisoned for years on Malta; and Bi Amma, whose organising powered the Khilafat movement nationwide.

An Erasure That Is Still Happening

For roughly four decades, a university in Bhopal carried Barkatullah's name. On 3 June 2026, its executive council voted to remove it; the proposal, now before the state governor, argues his contribution to the region does not compare to that of the medieval king Raja Bhoj, beyond his having been born there. Nothing was ever named after Asim Bihari at all. His grave is in Allahabad, Barkatullah's in Sacramento; neither man lived to see the India he had risked everything for, and the one who did may not have recognised it. Remembering them is not simply an act of history. It is, as both men's lives argued, a political one.