An Indian revolutionary’s trip to the Soviet Union

Shaukat Usmani’s Historic Trips of a Revolutionary is an account of a world we have lost. As a young man, he heeded the calls of the Hijrat movement in the early 1920s to leave India, ruled by British infidels and therefore not a country for Muslims to live in. About 36,000 persons made the journey. The emigrés had in mind the destination of Turkey, the spiritual centre of the Islamic world, but had been invited by the Amir of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, to come to that country. He soon lost enthusiasm for the project, Turkey became an aggressively secular republic and therefore no destination for practising Muslims, and many of the muhajirs then travelled through Central Asia into Soviet territory. Usmani combines political details with a pastoral narrative of the beauties of Afghanistan and Central Asia, of historic sites connected with the historical memory of the Mughal empire, and of the sense of wonder at entering Soviet territory, where Usmani records, ‘(f)or the first time in our lives, we saw Europeans mixing freely with Asians’.

 

Benjamin Zachariah(pic) is a historian whose latest book is Playing the Nation Game.