Bi Amma

Anyone asking who was Bi Amma must begin in Amroha, a qasbah town in the Rohilkhand region of the United Provinces, where Abadi Bano Begum was born in 1853 into a respectable Muslim family of modest means ^[1]. The India of her childhood was still absorbing the shock of the 1857 uprising and its brutal suppression, events that left many north Indian Muslim families impoverished, suspicious of colonial power, and anxious about their future under the British Raj ^[2].

Like most girls of her class and generation, Abadi Bano received no formal schooling. Her education was religious and domestic: recitation of the Quran, household management, and the codes of conduct expected of a sharif, or gently born, woman. She observed strict purdah throughout her life, a practice she never abandoned even at the height of her political fame ^[1].

She was married to Abdul Ali Khan, an official in the princely state of Rampur. The marriage produced six children, among them the two sons who would carry the family name into history, Shaukat Ali, born in 1873, and Mohammad Ali, born in 1878 ^[3]. Studying Bi Amma facts from this period, historians have noted how unremarkable her circumstances then appeared. Nothing in the routines of a Rampur household suggested that this woman would one day address tens of thousands of people at nationalist rallies.

Abdul Ali Khan died around 1880, leaving Abadi Bano a widow before the age of thirty with young children and little money ^[1]. Relatives advised her to keep the boys at home and put them to work. She refused. In a decision that shaped the rest of her life and, arguably, a portion of India's political history, she resolved that her sons would receive a modern English education, then the surest route to advancement under colonial rule ^[3].

The cost was punishing. Family accounts record that she sold her jewellery, pawned household goods, and lived with severe frugality to pay school fees ^[3]. Shaukat Ali and Mohammad Ali were sent to Bareilly and then to the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, the institution founded by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan to reconcile Muslim learning with Western science ^[2]. Mohammad Ali excelled there and went on to Lincoln College, Oxford, an extraordinary trajectory for the son of a widow from Amroha ^[4].

Mohammad Ali later wrote of his mother with open reverence, crediting her sacrifices and her uncompromising moral instruction for whatever he achieved ^[4]. It was the sons and their circle who began calling her Bi Amma, an affectionate Urdu term meaning respected mother, and the name spread until few people remembered she had ever been called anything else ^[1].

Bi Amma entered public life through a crisis in her own family. In 1915 the colonial government interned Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali for their pan-Islamic journalism and their opposition to Britain's war against the Ottoman Empire ^[2]. With the brothers confined at Chhindwara and later Betul, their mother, by then past sixty, stepped forward to keep their cause alive. She toured, met political workers, and became a visible symbol of the family's defiance ^[5].

Her emergence coincided with a broader shift in Indian politics. The Home Rule agitation, the Lucknow Pact of 1916 between the Congress and the Muslim League, and rising anger over wartime repression created audiences ready to hear an old woman demand her sons' release as a matter of national honour ^[2]. In 1917 she attended the Calcutta session of the All India Muslim League, and she is widely recorded as having addressed the gathering from behind her burqa, an almost unheard of act for a purdah-observing woman of her generation ^[5].

Any serious Bi Amma biography must stress how unusual this was. Indian public life in the 1910s was overwhelmingly male, and respectable Muslim women simply did not appear before mixed crowds. Bi Amma solved the dilemma in her own fashion: she came veiled, spoke plainly in Urdu, and framed her politics in the idiom of motherhood and faith, telling audiences that all the young men of India were her sons ^[1].

The peak of Bi Amma's public career came with the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements of 1919 to 1922, the first genuinely mass agitations of Indian nationalism. Her sons, released in 1919, stood at the centre of the Khilafat campaign to defend the Ottoman Caliphate, and Mahatma Gandhi allied the Congress with it ^[2]. Bi Amma threw herself into the work. She travelled across northern India, appeared at Khilafat and Congress meetings, and appealed directly to women, a constituency the movement had barely touched ^[5].

Among the most cited Bi Amma achievements was her fundraising. She collected money and ornaments for the Khilafat fund and for the national cause, and her presence on a platform reportedly loosened purses that speeches by male leaders could not ^[5]. She campaigned for swadeshi, urging women to spin, to wear hand-woven khadi, and to boycott foreign cloth, and she promoted the picketing of liquor shops in line with Gandhian discipline ^[6].

When the government again arrested Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali in 1921 for urging Muslim soldiers to leave the British Indian Army, Bi Amma issued the defiant message that made her a legend: her sons should not falter, and if they did, she would disown them. A rallying cry from this period, the Urdu refrain remembered as "Boli Amma Muhammad Ali ki, jaan beta Khilafat pe de do," meaning Mohammad Ali's mother says give your life for the Khilafat, was sung at meetings across the country ^[2]. In 1921 she also joined Gandhi's call by touring on behalf of the Tilak Swaraj Fund, sharing platforms, in spirit if not always in person, with figures such as Sarojini Naidu and inspiring the political activism of her daughters-in-law, Amjadi Begum among them ^[6].

Age and exhaustion caught up with Bi Amma soon after the great agitations subsided. The suspension of Non-Cooperation in February 1922, after the violence at Chauri Chaura, dismayed many Khilafat workers, and the movement's slow unravelling, completed when the Turkish republic itself abolished the Caliphate in March 1924, removed the cause to which her family had given years of liberty ^[2].

She nonetheless lived to see a moment of vindication. Mohammad Ali was elected president of the Indian National Congress for its 1923 Kakinada session, one of the highest honours the nationalist movement could bestow, and the widow from Amroha watched a son she had educated on pawned jewellery lead the country's largest political organisation ^[4].

Bi Amma died in Delhi on 12 November 1924, aged about seventy one ^[1]. Tributes came from across the political spectrum. Gandhi, who had worked closely with the family and addressed her with filial respect, mourned her publicly, and nationalist newspapers marked the passing of a woman they had come to treat as the mother of the movement itself ^[6].

Bi Amma's importance rests less on offices held, for she held none, than on the door she pushed open. Historians of Indian women's activism identify her as among the first Muslim women in India to speak at political meetings, proof that purdah and public engagement could coexist and that nationalism had room for grandmothers as well as graduates ^[5]. Geraldine Forbes and Gail Minault, in their studies of women and of the Khilafat movement respectively, both single out her platform appearances as a turning point in the mobilisation of Muslim women ^[5].

Her example worked through families as much as crowds. Her daughter-in-law Amjadi Begum became a significant Khilafat and Congress worker in her own right, and later generations of women activists in both India and Pakistan invoked Bi Amma when defending their presence in public life ^[6]. In Pakistan, where the Ali brothers are honoured as forerunners of Muslim political assertion, her memory is preserved in street names and commemorative writing, while Indian accounts of the freedom struggle place her among the movement's founding women ^[3].

The basic Bi Amma facts survive in the biographies of her sons, in histories of the Khilafat years, and in the recollections of contemporaries, yet she left no memoir and could not write one, having never learned to read English or keep the archives that historians favour. That silence makes her recorded moments, a veiled figure on a Calcutta platform in 1917, an old voice telling India's youth to stay firm in 1921, all the more striking. She turned maternal authority into political force, and the movement she served never forgot it ^[1].