Nations & States
The Khilafat Movement
Indian Muslims rally to save the caliphate, c. 1920
c. 1338 AH / 1920 CE
Educational historical reconstructionWhere
A maidan in northern India
28.6500, 77.2300 · View on OpenStreetMap
Background
As the First World War ended in the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims of India launched one of the largest mass movements in their history, the Khilafat Movement, to defend the institution of the caliphate, which the Ottoman sultan held and which Indian Muslims revered as the symbol of the unity and leadership of the worldwide Muslim community. From 1919 leaders such as the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, Abul Kalam Azad and others organised vast meetings, petitions, fund drives and a press campaign demanding that Britain, which ruled India and now dominated the Ottoman lands, preserve the caliph's position and the integrity of the Muslim holy places. The movement allied with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress in the non-cooperation campaign against British rule, making it for a few years a powerful engine of joint Hindu-Muslim anti-colonial politics. Its hopes were dashed from an unexpected quarter: it was not the British but the Turks themselves who, in building their secular republic, abolished the sultanate in 1922 and the caliphate in 1924, leaving the movement without an object. The Khilafat Movement faded soon after, but it had been a landmark, the moment Indian Muslims became a mobilised modern political community, and its energies fed into the politics that would later lead toward Pakistan. This scene depicts a great Khilafat rally around 1920, an enormous peaceful crowd before a speakers' platform on a north Indian maidan.
What you see
A huge open maidan in a flat north Indian city, ringed by colonial-era buildings, is packed with an enormous crowd under a hazy subcontinental sky.
The gathering is a vast public meeting, orderly and peaceful, with people massed before a raised speakers' platform; this is a political rally, not a riot or a festival.
Banners and placards in Urdu and English are held up across the crowd, and a draped platform carries the speakers; the cause is being argued in the language of modern mass politics.
Bicycles, period motorcars and tram lines at the edges, and the dress of the crowd, sherwanis, caps, fezzes and Gandhi caps together, mark an early-twentieth-century colonial Indian city and a movement that crossed communities.
Hundreds of thousands of Indian Muslims massing to defend a distant caliphate, in alliance with a wider anti-colonial campaign, marks a religious community mobilised as a modern mass movement on behalf of the unity of the ummah.
Further reading & cross-references
Khilafat Movement records, speeches and the Urdu press (1919-1924): The movement's own meetings, resolutions and press; used for the rallies, the leaders and the demands. Confidence high.
Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (1982): The standard modern academic study. Used for the mass mobilisation, the alliance with non-cooperation, and the movement's decline after 1924. Confidence high.
Histories of the Indian national movement and Hindu-Muslim politics (1920s): Used for the alliance with Gandhi and Congress and the place of Khilafat in colonial Indian politics. Confidence high.
Contemporary photographs of Khilafat rallies (cross-reference): Period photographs of the mass meetings constrain the depiction of the crowds, platforms and banners.
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