Hakim Ajmal Khan

Ajmal Khan was born in Delhi on 11 February 1868 into the Sharif Khani family, a dynasty of physicians whose ancestors had served the Mughal court and whose reputation in Unani medicine, the Greco-Arabic healing tradition practiced across South Asia, stretched back generations ^[1]. His grandfather Hakim Sharif Khan had been physician to the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, and the family clinic in the old city drew patients from across northern India ^[2].

His education followed the classical pattern of a scholarly Muslim household of the period. He memorized the Quran as a boy, then studied Arabic and Persian with private tutors before turning to the medical texts of the Unani canon under his father Hakim Mahmud Khan and other senior physicians of the family ^[1]. By his early twenties he was practicing at the family's Sharif Manzil clinic in Delhi, where treatment was famously given without charge to the poor ^[2].

In 1892 he became chief physician to the Nawab of Rampur, a post that carried both prestige and a substantial income. The appointment confirmed his standing among the leading hakims of his generation and gave him the resources and connections he would later put to public use ^[3].

The turn of the century brought Ajmal Khan into public life through medicine rather than politics. Colonial legislation regulating medical practice threatened to marginalize indigenous systems, and he emerged as the most effective spokesman for Unani and Ayurvedic practitioners facing that pressure ^[4]. He organized hakims and vaids into professional associations, arguing that traditional medicine should reform itself, adopt scientific methods of teaching, and stand on its own institutional feet rather than depend on colonial goodwill ^[4].

He backed this argument with institutions. Building on the Madrasa Tibbia founded by his family, he worked to create a modern teaching hospital and college for indigenous medicine in Delhi. The Ayurvedic and Unani Tibbia College at Karol Bagh, whose foundation stone was laid in 1916 and which was formally opened by Mahatma Gandhi in 1921, became the centerpiece of that effort, combining traditional pharmacology with instruction in anatomy, surgery, and modern diagnostics ^[3]. Attached to it he established the Hindustani Dawakhana, a pharmaceutical venture that standardized and sold Unani and Ayurvedic preparations to fund the college ^[4].

His medical fame during these years was extraordinary. Contemporary accounts describe patients traveling long distances to Delhi for his diagnosis, and princely families across India paying handsomely for his visits, while his practice for ordinary Delhi residents remained free ^[2]. The nickname Masih ul Mulk, healer of the nation, conferred on him honorifically, reflected a reputation that no other hakim of the era matched ^[1].

Ajmal Khan's political career began within Muslim community organizations. He was among the delegates associated with the Simla deputation of 1906 that pressed Muslim claims before the Viceroy, and he took part in the early activities of the All India Muslim League ^[5]. Yet his outlook widened steadily toward composite Indian nationalism, and by the First World War he had become a bridge between Muslim political circles and the Indian National Congress ^[5].

The events of 1919 and 1920 completed that shift. The Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the treatment of the Ottoman Caliphate after the war pushed him into open opposition to British rule. He joined the Khilafat movement, presided over the All India Khilafat Committee, and became a close ally of Gandhi in the Non-Cooperation campaign ^[6]. In protest he returned the title of Haziq ul Mulk and other honors he had received from the colonial government ^[1].

One of the enduring Hakim Ajmal Khan facts is his unique record of leadership across organizations that later drifted apart: he presided over sessions of the Muslim League, the Khilafat Conference, and, in 1921 at Ahmedabad, the Indian National Congress itself ^[5]. At Ahmedabad he presided at a tense moment, with Gandhi facing arrest and the movement under strain, and he used the platform to urge Hindu Muslim unity as the precondition of freedom ^[6].

Any account of Hakim Ajmal Khan achievements must begin with Jamia Millia Islamia. When the Non-Cooperation movement called on students to leave government institutions in 1920, a group of teachers and students seceded from the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh and founded a new national Muslim university. Ajmal Khan became its first chancellor, or Amir e Jamia, and held the office until his death, steering the young institution through chronic financial crisis, supporting its move to Delhi in 1925, and repeatedly covering its deficits from his own pocket ^[7]. Jamia Millia Islamia, today a central university in New Delhi, honors him as a founder ^[7].

His second lasting achievement was institutional medicine. The Tibbia College trained generations of practitioners in a curriculum that treated Unani and Ayurveda as living sciences open to laboratory methods, and its associated hospital served Delhi for decades ^[3]. Scholars of colonial medicine credit him with doing more than any other individual to give indigenous medical systems a modern professional infrastructure, a legacy visible in the continued state recognition of Unani medicine in India ^[4].

In politics his signal contribution was conciliation. When communal riots and the collapse of the Khilafat cause soured relations between Hindus and Muslims in the mid 1920s, he worked with Motilal Nehru and others in efforts at unity, and he was among the founders of the Swaraj Party wing that sought council entry after Non-Cooperation was suspended ^[5]. Colleagues across communities regarded him as one of the few leaders trusted on all sides ^[6].

Ajmal Khan lived his whole life rooted in Delhi, at the family mansion of Sharif Manzil in the old city near Ballimaran, a short walk from the haveli of the poet Ghalib, whom his family had once treated ^[2]. He married within the Delhi physician families and raised children who continued the household's medical and public traditions, though none matched his fame ^[1].

He was a man of settled habits and considerable personal charm. Urdu memoirists describe his courtly manners, his fondness for poetry (he wrote Persian and Urdu verse under the pen name Shaida), and a daily routine that balanced a punishing clinical schedule with political correspondence and institutional work ^[2]. Despite the wealth his princely practice brought, contemporaries noted that he gave much of it away to the Tibbia College, to Jamia, and to patients who could not pay ^[7].

His religious life was conventional and unostentatious. He belonged to the reformist yet traditional milieu of Delhi's Muslim gentry, comfortable with both the ulama and Western educated professionals, which helps explain his ability to hold together coalitions that others could not ^[5].

The mid 1920s tested him severely. Communal violence in northern India, the fragmentation of the Khilafat movement, and factional quarrels within the Congress dismayed him, and his health began to fail under the double burden of medical practice and public duty ^[6]. He nonetheless refused to abandon either Jamia Millia Islamia, which survived largely on his fundraising and personal guarantees, or the cause of Hindu Muslim cooperation, which he continued to advocate in speeches and unity conferences ^[7].

Heart trouble shadowed his final years. He died on 29 December 1927, aged 59, while returning from a visit to Rampur, and was buried in Delhi. The grief was remarkably broad: tributes came from Congress leaders, Muslim League figures, hakims and vaids, and former patients, and Gandhi mourned him publicly as an irreplaceable friend of Indian unity ^[1]. His grave lies at the Panchkuian cemetery area near the resting places of his family ^[2].

Nearly a century after his death, the institutions Ajmal Khan built still function. Jamia Millia Islamia grew into a major central university, and its history departments and official records preserve his role as founding chancellor ^[7]. The Ayurvedic and Unani Tibbia College continues to teach indigenous medicine in Karol Bagh, and the busy Ajmal Khan Road in that Delhi neighborhood carries his name, as does Ajmal Khan Park ^[3].

Historians of medicine treat his career as the clearest example of how a colonized profession reinvented itself. Studies of Unani medicine in British India place him at the center of the tradition's survival, showing how his colleges, pharmacies, and associations turned a court centered craft into a regulated modern profession ^[4]. In political history he figures as a leading representative of composite nationalism among Indian Muslims, a counterpoint to the separatist currents that gathered strength after his death ^[5].

For readers seeking a short Hakim Ajmal Khan biography, the essentials are simple: a hereditary Delhi physician who became the most famous hakim of his age, gave traditional medicine modern institutions, helped found a national university, and led India's largest political organizations while insisting that Hindus and Muslims shared one destiny. In 1987 India Post issued a commemorative stamp in his honor, one of many official acknowledgments of a life spent in public service ^[1].