Saifuddin Kitchlew

He was born at Amritsar into a Kashmiri family of the Kitchlew clan; his father Azizuddin, a pashmina and saffron trader, belonged to a Baramulla Kashmiri Pandit family that had converted to Islam from Hinduism generations before ¹. He went to Islamia High School in Amritsar, took a BA at Cambridge and a doctorate at a German university, and returned to practise law in Amritsar ¹.

Drawn to nationalism by the outcry over the Rowlatt Acts, he was elected a municipal commissioner of Amritsar in 1919, gave up his practice for the independence movement, and joined the All India Khilafat Committee ¹. On 10 April 1919 he and Dr. Satyapal were secretly deported to Dharamsala; the protest meeting that gathered at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April against their arrest and Gandhi's was fired on by General Dyer's troops ¹².

He rose to head the Punjab Provincial Congress Committee and became general secretary of the All India Congress Committee in 1924, chaired the reception committee of the 1929–30 Lahore Congress session, founded the Urdu daily Tanzim and the Swaraj Ashram at Amritsar, and spent some fourteen years in British prisons across the struggles of 1930–34 ¹. He sat on the foundation committee of Jamia Millia Islamia in 1920 ¹. He championed a united Indian nationalism and opposed the Partition of India to the end, calling its acceptance a surrender of nationalism for communalism ¹. After his Amritsar house was burnt in the 1947 riots he moved to Delhi, left the Congress, drew closer to the Communist Party of India, and led the All-India Peace Council and the World Peace Council's Indian work ¹.

The English article records his family's conversion from Hinduism generations before his birth — family history — and files him among Kashmiri and Indian Muslims; the Urdu article calls him a leader of Muslim nationalism in South Asia ². No article names a school for the man himself, and Wikidata records his religion as Islam only ³. The museum's data record therefore leaves his school unknown and sets out the evidence exactly.

He died at Delhi on 9 October 1963, survived by his son Toufique and five daughters ¹. Kitchlu Nagar in Ludhiana and Kitchlu Chowk in Amritsar bear his name, and Jamia Millia Islamia created a Saifuddin Kitchlew Chair in 2009 ¹.

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