Q: Going back to the Khilafat Movement, I am finding that however strange and absurd it may have seemed in its goals, it was still a very popular movement.

Yes, certainly. I remember as a boy, I was twelve years old, and there were songs in Punjabi that I even remember sung in the streets of Lahore. I remember a delegation of Turks passing through Lahore on their way to Afghanistan. In those days there were no aeroplanes, so they landed in Bombay and came by train. Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, who was then the editor of the Zamindar and a great political figure, also a very learned man and very fine person, he wrote article after article that the Turks were coming. I remember posters put on by the Zamindar quoting [the Urdu poet] Ghalib. I was then in college and we as students went to the railway station to receive these Turks. Being young we were strong and we managed to be right in front. When the train steamed in, the people in the back started pushing and we were yelling at the top of our voice for we would have been thrown in front of the engine. We just stopped. I remember some of the leaders going to meet these Turks, [Sir Mohammed] Iqbal was there I think. But I was rather disappointed you see, for I thought, being Turks that they would be wearing headcaps and all that, but they looked just like ordinary Europeans. I was not very much impressed.

But this was a genuine feeling [and was reflected in the local press]. Lahore was a center of Urdu publication. You will be surprised to hear that there were three Urdu newspapers of Lahore, which were owned by Hindus: Partab, Mehrab, and Vi Bharat. All three were Hindu newspapers. They probably still come out in Amballa. Many famous magazines came out from Lahore. This was the cultural center for the whole of India.

Q: I have seen a piece of film of [Khilafat leader] Mohammed Ali film footage visiting Lahore in the early twenties -

I was there. It was about 1920. I will tell you a story. I think it was 1920 or 1921, somewhere about there. In those days there were very few cars in Lahore. I think no more than about ten. We had one. My cousin and I were getting some harmonium lessons, and when we went to get a harmonium, somebody told us that the Ali brothers were coming. So we decided that we should go to the railway station and see the Ali brothers. As it happened when we reached the railway station and stopped the car, the Ali brothers came out and there were people following them. The only car there was ours. So they brought them towards this car and we couldn't say no. So they sat down. With them was Maulana Abdul Bari, also a leader. They had been jailed together, the three of them and come out together. So I sat on the harmonium and these three gentlemen sat in the back. I remember when we went through the bazaar, people asked them to stand up, so they stood up. We used to live near Branner Hall, near the central railway college where they spoke that night.

Q: What did you think of Mohammed Ali? What kind of a man was he?

I'm afraid I didn't know Mohammed Ali. I was told he was a great scholar, having started this newspaper [The Comrade] and he wrote English very well. Shaukat Ali was just a kind of reflection of him, he did not have much in him except that he was really just a fine figure of a man. It was the reflected glory of Mohammed Ali which came to Shaukat Ali.

They played an important role in the Congress, there is no doubt about that. I remember clearly, I was in the first year or second year [of college] when they were imprisoned in Chinwara jail in the Central provinces and Mohammed Ali was elected as President of the Indian National Congress in Kokannada in the south of India. I liked Urdu poetry very much. He started his address - they were in prison for about four years, and he went straight from prison to Kokannada to make his Presidential address to the Congress. He started with a famous Urdu verse which was absolutely apt and that meant that the turn of the goblet was as long as a century and the moment that I came out of the tavern, I saw that the world had changed. This is what he said. His English was very fluent, but I missed him because unfortunately I didn't attend the first Round Table Conference in 1930. I didn't go to Europe till 1931. He was a member of the Round Table in 1930, Shaukat Ali was there in 1931 when I was there. But he [Mohammed Ali] was a personality. But unfortunately all these people were lost in the Khilafat Movement, completely, because they supported a cause which Gandhi saw [as limited] but which they did not. It was more emotional than hard thinking. Quaid, for instance, never paid any attention to the Khilafat Movement because he had a much clearer sense that it was futile.