Nawab Salimullah

Khwaja Salimullah was born on 7 June 1871 in Ahsan Manzil, the pink riverside palace of the Dhaka Nawab family on the bank of the Buriganga. His father, Nawab Khwaja Ahsanullah, headed a household of Kashmiri merchant origin that had risen through trade in hides, salt, and gold before acquiring vast zamindari holdings across eastern Bengal ^[1]. The family was Urdu-speaking and Sunni, and by the time of Salimullah's birth it ranked among the wealthiest Muslim houses in the Bengal Presidency.

His education followed the pattern common to aristocratic Muslim families of the period: private tutors at the palace taught him Urdu, Persian, Arabic, and English rather than sending him through the government school system ^[1]. This upbringing gave him fluency in the languages of both the old Mughal elite and the new colonial administration, an asset he would later use in negotiations with British officials.

As a young man Salimullah sought experience outside the estate. In 1893 he entered British service as a Deputy Magistrate, an unusual step for the heir of a great zamindari house, and served in Mymensingh district ^[2]. He resigned in 1895, tried his hand at business in Calcutta for a period, and returned to Dhaka to assist with the management of the family properties. These years gave him firsthand knowledge of district administration and of the economic condition of the Muslim peasantry of eastern Bengal.

Salimullah succeeded to the title on the death of his father in December 1901, becoming the fourth Nawab of Dhaka ^[1]. The estate he inherited was enormous but encumbered, and the new Nawab quickly showed that he intended to be more than a landlord. He assumed leadership of the Muslim community of Dhaka at a moment when Bengal's Muslims, a majority of the province's population, held only a small share of its government posts, professional positions, and university degrees ^[3].

The defining event of his early public career was the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Viceroy Lord Curzon's government divided the sprawling presidency, creating a new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam with its capital at Dhaka. Hindu bhadralok opinion in Calcutta condemned the measure and launched the Swadeshi agitation against it, but Salimullah emerged as the partition's most prominent Muslim defender ^[3]. He argued that a separate eastern province would bring courts, colleges, and administrative investment to a neglected region and open careers to educated Muslims who had long been overshadowed by Calcutta.

His stance made Dhaka a rival political center to Calcutta and made Salimullah himself a figure of all-India significance. British officials cultivated him as a counterweight to the anti-partition movement, and Muslim leaders across northern India began to look to the Nawab as a spokesman for community interests ^[2]. He toured the new province, organized public meetings in support of the arrangement, and pressed the government to translate the partition into concrete gains in education and employment.

The achievement for which Salimullah is best remembered came in December 1906. Following the annual session of the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference, held that year in Dhaka at his invitation, delegates gathered at the Nawab's garden house at Shahbag on 30 December 1906 ^[4]. Salimullah had circulated a scheme for a central political association of Indian Muslims some weeks earlier, and the Dhaka meeting adopted a resolution, moved by him, establishing the All-India Muslim League ^[4].

The new organization committed itself to promoting loyalty to the British government, protecting the political rights of Indian Muslims, and preventing hostility between Muslims and other communities. Salimullah served as a vice-president of the League in its early years and hosted much of its formative activity, and the party he helped launch would, four decades later and under very different leadership, carry the demand for Pakistan ^[5]. Historians debate how far the League of 1906 anticipated later separatism, but there is no dispute that the Dhaka meeting under Salimullah's patronage created the institution itself ^[4].

He followed this with sustained lobbying for separate Muslim electorates, a demand that the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 conceded. The Indian Councils Act of that year gave Muslims reserved seats elected by Muslim voters, embedding communal representation in the constitutional structure of British India ^[5]. Salimullah regarded the measure as essential protection for a community that feared permanent minority status under majoritarian institutions.

Salimullah believed that the backwardness of Bengal's Muslims was above all an educational problem, and he spent accordingly. He founded and funded madrasas, scholarships, and hostels, the best known being the student residence in Dhaka later named Salimullah Muslim Hall when the University of Dacca opened in 1921 ^[6]. Although he did not live to see the university founded, his persistent demands for a seat of higher learning at Dhaka, pressed on the government after the partition was annulled, are widely credited as part of the campaign that produced it ^[6].

His charity extended well beyond classrooms. He established an engineering survey school in Dhaka in 1902 that grew into a major technical institution, supported hospitals and famine relief, and maintained an orphanage that still operates in the city as the Sir Salimullah Muslim Orphanage ^[2]. During floods and epidemics he opened his granaries and funded relief kitchens for victims regardless of religion.

The scale of this spending, combined with the costs of political activity and the upkeep of a princely household, drove the Dhaka Nawab estate deep into debt. In 1907 the estate was placed under the management of the Court of Wards, an arrangement that gave the government control of his finances while paying the Nawab an allowance ^[1]. Contemporaries noted the irony that the most generous Muslim benefactor in Bengal ended his life without free command of his own fortune.

Salimullah's private world centered on Ahsan Manzil and the sprawling extended family of the Khwaja dynasty, which numbered hundreds of relatives and dependents housed and pensioned by the estate ^[1]. He married within the aristocratic Muslim circles of the time and had several children; his son Khwaja Habibullah succeeded him as Nawab, and a grandnephew of the family line, Khwaja Nazimuddin, later became Governor-General and Prime Minister of Pakistan ^[2].

Those who met him described a courteous, devout, and somewhat reserved man who took his religious obligations seriously and kept the Ramadan fast and daily prayers throughout his public career ^[2]. He was a practical rather than a theoretical politician: his speeches dwelt on schools, jobs, and famine relief rather than ideology.

The British honored him repeatedly, appointing him a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India and, in 1911, a Grand Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (GCIE) ^[3]. The honors sat uneasily beside his disappointment with government policy in his final years, and the combination of official decoration and political frustration marked the last chapter of his life.

The annulment of the Partition of Bengal, announced by King George V at the Delhi Durbar of December 1911, was a heavy blow. The eastern province for which Salimullah had staked his prestige was dissolved, Bengal was reunited, and the imperial capital moved from Calcutta to Delhi ^[3]. Muslim opinion across India read the reversal as proof that loyalty earned no lasting reward, and Salimullah shared the disillusion, though he continued to press the government for compensating concessions, chief among them a university at Dhaka ^[6].

His health declined in the following years, and he spent increasing periods in Calcutta for treatment. Nawab Sir Khwaja Salimullah died in Calcutta on 16 January 1915 at the age of forty-three ^[1]. His body was brought back to Dhaka and buried in the family graveyard at Begumbazar, and the city observed large public mourning for the man most residents knew simply as the Nawab Bahadur.

His death removed the leading Muslim political figure of Bengal at a moment of transition. Leadership of the community's politics passed gradually to a newer generation, including A. K. Fazlul Huq, who had worked with Salimullah in the early Muslim League, and the League itself moved toward cooperation with the Indian National Congress in the Lucknow Pact of 1916, a direction the founder did not live to see ^[5].

Any list of Nawab Salimullah achievements begins with the founding of the All-India Muslim League, the organization that eventually led the movement for Pakistan, and with the campaign that helped produce the University of Dhaka ^[4][6]. In Bangladesh he is remembered principally as an educator and philanthropist: Salimullah Muslim Hall at the University of Dhaka, Sir Salimullah Medical College, and the Sir Salimullah Muslim Orphanage all carry his name, and Ahsan Manzil, restored as a national museum, preserves the setting of his public life ^[6].

Historical judgment on his politics varies with vantage point. Historians sympathetic to the nationalist movement have criticized his support for the 1905 partition and his cooperation with the colonial government, while historians of Muslim South Asia present him as a realist who used the tools available to secure education, employment, and political safeguards for a disadvantaged majority in eastern Bengal ^[5]. Both readings agree on his sincerity and on the personal cost of his generosity.

For readers seeking Nawab Salimullah facts a century after his death, the essentials are these: he led the Muslims of Bengal through the decade in which their modern politics took organized form, he gave away much of one of the great fortunes of the province, and the institutions he founded or inspired still educate and heal in Dhaka today ^[2][6]. Few figures in any Nawab Salimullah biography emerge with the paradox intact: a knight of the empire whose deepest legacy belongs to the people of Bangladesh.