Person · nationalist pamphleteer · India
Choudhry Rahmat Ali
Also known as Choudhry Rahmat Ali, Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, Chaudhry Rehmat Ali
Cambridge law student (1897–1951) from Punjab who in his 1933 pamphlet Now or Never — issued at Cambridge and distributed at the Round Table Conferences — coined the name Pakistan as an acronym for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan, and argued for a separate Muslim state in northwest India two years after Iqbal's Allahabad address had proposed the territory without naming it. He went on in Pakistan: The Fatherland of the Pak Nation (1947) to argue for a larger Pakistan including Bangistan (East Bengal) and Osmanistan (Hyderabad), but the state that was created in August 1947 was not his project and the Muslim League leadership kept him at arm's length. He died at Cambridge in 1951 and was buried in Milton Road cemetery.
- Date
- 1897–1951
- Function
- Social reform & movement
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The acronym P-A-K-I-S-T-A-N with no E for Punjab was partly a Persian-language pun on pak meaning pure, and the letter order was deliberate — a word meaning Land of the Pure that also encoded the five provinces. Rahmat Ali spent his last years in Lahore unwelcome, forced out in 1948, and returned to Cambridge; his grave is tended by Cambridge Muslim students who make an annual visit.
About the place
Placed between Cambridge and Lahore. Died at Cambridge, buried there.
Connections (1)
- Influenced byAllama Muhammad Iqbal (poet-philosopher)
Choudhry Rahmat Ali's 1933 Now or Never pamphlet proposing the name Pakistan built explicitly on Allama Iqbal's 1930 Allahabad address that had argued for a separate Muslim state in northwest India. Where Iqbal had named the territory (Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, the Frontier), Rahmat Ali gave it a name — the P-A-K-I-S-T-A-N acronym that encoded the five provinces including Kashmir, which Iqbal had not. The Muslim League leadership adopted the territorial claim without acknowledging either source until the state was fait accompli.