The Prime Minister and the Beedi Worker: Two Muslim Freedom Fighters India Forgot

Every August 15, the same handful of names surface: Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, Maulana Azad. Thousands of others fought for India's independence, some hanged, some imprisoned for years, some living out their lives abroad in the struggle against British rule — and most have simply dropped out of the books. Among them are two Muslim freedom fighters whose stories a Nous Explainer revisits: Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali, who led a government-in-exile most Indians have never heard existed, and Maulana Ali Hussain Asim Bihari, who built a newspaper for people who could neither afford one nor read.

The Prime Minister Before Nehru

Ask who India's first prime minister was, and most people will say Jawaharlal Nehru. Few know a provisional government existed even before independence — and that its prime minister was Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali. Born in Bhopal in 1854, Barkatullah eventually mastered seven languages and left India in the 1880s convinced the British Empire had to be encircled from without, not just resisted from within. In Liverpool in 1895 he joined revolutionary circles alongside figures like Lala Hardayal and Raja Mahendra Pratap; in Japan from 1899 he taught Oriental languages at the University of Tokyo while publishing anti-colonial magazines until British pressure got them banned. In 1913 he joined San Francisco's Ghadar Party, working to persuade Indian soldiers in the British army to lay down their arms — activism that cost him his Tokyo professorship the following year. His politics were explicitly pluralist: he argued Indian Muslims owed two duties, to country and to faith, fulfilled only through genuine Hindu-Muslim unity.

In December 1915, with the First World War underway, Barkatullah travelled to Kabul with Raja Mahendra Pratap and Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi and announced India's first provisional government, beyond British reach. Its president was Pratap, a Hindu king; its prime minister was Barkatullah, a maulana from Bhopal; its home minister was Sindhi, born Sikh before converting to Islam — a cabinet that was itself a picture of the pluralist India Barkatullah envisioned. The government wrote to the Tsar seeking support; when he refused, Barkatullah travelled to Moscow in 1919 and met Lenin directly. He never returned home, dying in San Francisco in 1927 at 73, a man who raised India's cause on the world stage without ever seeing it realised.

The Beedi Worker Who Built a Newspaper for the Illiterate

The other figure came up through a different kind of ruin. East India Company policy had flooded Indian markets with foreign cloth, devastating millions of weavers — a wound poet Josh Malihabadi later captured: "You used to chop off the thumbs of artisans." Ali Hussain was born into one such ruined weaving family in Bihar Sharif in 1889; his grandfather had led the region during the 1857 rebellion. At sixteen, work took him to Kolkata, where he joined the Khilafat Movement and, once the Ali brothers were arrested, organised gatherings for their mother, Bi Amma — losing his job as a result. To survive, he turned to rolling beedis, adopting the pen name Asim Bihari, and it was under that name his real work began.

While rolling beedis, he organised fellow workers into a debating group, drafted a five-year adult-education plan at just twenty-two, and after Jallianwala Bagh organised a nationwide protest campaign that drew nearly 150,000 letters and telegrams. In 1920 he founded what became the nationally known Momin Conference, giving weavers and working-class Muslims a political voice of their own. In April 1921 it launched Al Momin, a wall newspaper — articles pasted on neighbourhood walls and read aloud to those who couldn't read for themselves, later printed for wider reach, work that has led some to call him the father of the Pasmanda movement. When Gandhi offered the organisation one lakh rupees with conditions attached, Asim Bihari refused it, arguing an organisation speaking for workers could not operate on anyone else's terms. He resisted the presidency for years, accepting only general secretary, living on an allowance the organisation often couldn't fully pay; beedi workers called him Kamali Baba. In the 1940s he publicly opposed Partition, arguing Hindus and Muslims could not be separated by a drawn line after centuries of shared life. He died in Allahabad in 1953, leaving behind neither property nor position — only the movement he built.

Whose Names Survive

Barkatullah and Asim Bihari took different routes to the same destination: one carried India's case to the world, the other gave political voice to those inside India no one wanted to hear. Alongside them stands a long, likely incomplete list of others history has under-recorded — Ashfaqulla Khan, hanged at 27 after Kakori; Hasrat Mohani, who coined "Inquilab Zindabad"; Saifuddin Kitchlew, whose arrest triggered the firing at Jallianwala Bagh; Begum Hazrat Mahal, who led Awadh's 1857 resistance; and Sheikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmud Hasan, imprisoned for years in Malta.

The film closes on a contemporary note. For nearly four decades, a university in Bhopal has carried Barkatullah's name — until June 3, 2026, when its Executive Council voted unanimously to remove it, on the stated grounds that, compared to Raja Bhoj, Barkatullah made no significant contribution to the region beyond having lived there. The file now awaits the Governor's decision. Asim Bihari's case is quieter still: nothing was ever named after him at all. One man's grave lies in Sacramento, the other's in Allahabad; one never lived to see an independent India, the other saw an India that may not have matched what he had imagined. The proof of what Muslims contributed to India's freedom, the film argues, does not need to be produced on demand — it is already recorded on every page of a history that has gone largely untaught. The only real question left is why.