Maulana Shaukat Ali Road: Famous for eateries and hardware stores, it was once epicentre of Khilafat Movement

Maulana Shaukat Ali — one half of the famous ‘Ali Brothers’ — was an Indian Muslim leader of the Khilafat Movement

JUST like the popular Mohammed Ali Road winding along under the JJ flyover in south Mumbai, the M S Ali Road or Maulana Shaukat Ali Road is also home to row after row of eateries, offering everything from seekh kababs to delectable mawa jalebis. But as one moves westward, the road, named after the Muslim leader of the Khilafat movement, is also populated with hardware and electronics stores. The road stretches right up to Grant Road railway station, after it crosses the ‘Do Tanki Junction’, named after two tanks that many decades ago provided water near a former tram station.

Maulana Shaukat Ali, one half of the famous ‘Ali Brothers’, was an Indian Muslim leader of the Khilafat Movement that erupted in response to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. His elder brother Mohammad Ali Jouhar was also a renowned political leader. The movement brought together Hindus and Muslims

Fountain at the ‘Do Tanki’ Junction.

against the British for threatening to oust the Ottoman Caliphate in Istanbul from the guardianship of the holy Mecca and Madina, and for carrying out the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. Professor Abdus Sattar Dalvi, director of the Anjuman-I-Islam Urdu Research Institute, says: “They operated out of the Khilafat house in Byculla and published a newspaper from there. It was the main centre from where the movement was run.”

 

During the Khilafat movement, Ali was said to be close to Mahatma Gandhi. In his book Gandhi and the Ali Brothers: Biography of a Friendship, Rakhahari Chatterji, a former dean of the Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University, writes: “…he (Gandhi) considered his personal relations with the Ali brothers no less valuable than his political alliance with them.” The book says the friendship withered over a period of time. Ali passed away in 1938. According to the The Indian Express edition of November 28, 1938, “the Central Assembly, the Bombay Corporation and the UP Assembly were adjourned for the day, and hartals and condolence meetings were organised across the country.”

Today, as one passes the road, not many people have much information on who Ali was. Many, including Tanveer Shaikh, who owns a cloth store, know he was “someone linked to the freedom struggle”.

The road is as popular for sweetshops such as Hadiya and Cafe Paradise as for electronics and hardware stores.

The busiest stretch of the road, however, is the ‘Do Tanki’ (two tanks) Junction, where two tanks had been dug for water supply. Today, the original tanks have been covered and a defunct fountain that had once come up in their place stands forlornly. The fountain has been walled in on three sides with a VP Road police chowky on the other side, making it a spot for policemen to get some rest. The engraving about the two tanks is still maintained to this day. It reads: “This fountain was erected by The Municipal Corporation of Bombay in the year 1901 to mark the site of an old tank built partly from money bequeathed by a person named Huslaji and partly at the expense of government. Water was supplied to this tank from certain well of the Mugbhat Estate of the late Mr Framji Cawasji Banaji.”

Historian Rafique Baghdadi says: “Earlier, tanks were used to identify tram stations. So you had the Do Tanki or Char Tanki as tram stations.” According to local residents, while there was a tank, several horses would come to the spot to drink water and after the fountain was erected people would drink water there. Baghdadi says: “People would carry these leather bags in which they would fill water from there and go.”