Chaos at Mohd Ali Road, this time over its name

MUMBAI: Mohammed Ali Road,

South Mumbai

’s famous thoroughfare, chaotic especially during Ramzan when food-stalls clog lanes and bylanes off it, is currently battling a different kind of chaos and confusion. The BMC has been asked to clear the air about which Mohammed Ali out of two—Nakhuda Mohammed Ali Roghe or Maulana Mohammed Ali Jauhar--the road is named after.

Though the issue is not new, it surfaced recently when a group of Urdu writers met Congress MLA Amin Patel to get BMC to verify if Mohammed Ali Road is named after poet-journalist and Khilafat movement leader Maulana Mohammed Ali Jauhar (1873-1931) or the famous 19th-century philanthropist

Nakhuda

Mohammed Ali Rogay.

“I have asked BMC to check records and end the confusion. We want to develop the stretch as a cultural hub,” said Patel, who has beautified the Mohammed Ali Jauhar Chowk on the road with LED lights. “We are checking records and will soon find out which Mohammed Ali this road was named after,” said municipal secretary Prakash Jakate.

Urdu writer-journalist Saeed Hameed, part of the delegation that met Patel, said: “The confusion should be removed.”

Scholar Zaheer Ali objected to speculation that the road was named after Jauhar. In his recent book on Khilafat, Ali notes the road is “named after Nakhuda Mohammed Ali Rogay who immensely contributed to the city.” Ali said, “How could the British have allowed it to be named after Jauhar, who opposed imperialism?” But Urdu scholar Prof Abdus Sattar Dalvi, during research for his book on the socio-cultural history of Mumbai’s Muslims, concluded Jauhar it was. Jauhar attended the First Round Table Conference (1930) in London. In his last speech there an ailing Jauhar said: “I would even prefer to die in a foreign country, so long as it is a free country; and if you do not give us freedom in India you will have to give me a grave here.” After his death in 1931, his body was sent to Jerusalem and buried near the Masjid e Aqsa.

“Two corporators in the pre-Independence era, A R Dimtimker and A L Curtey, demanded that Sydneham Road be renamed after Jauhar as the Khilafat movement was headquartered in the city. Sydneham Road was thus divided into two parts,” Dalvi said. The stretch from Crawford Market to Minara Masjid near

Bhendi Bazaar

was renamed as Mohammed Ali Road, without the “Maulana” at the beginning and “Jauhar” at the end, and the stretch from Minara Masjid to JJ Circle was renamed as Ibrahim Rahmatullah Road.

The two groups are now awaiting the BMC’s reply.


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