Tag Archives: Hakim Sharif Khan

Hakim Ajmal Khans last resting place: in a forgotten corner of Delhi

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NEW DELHI :

Hakim Ajmal Khan a philanthropist, freedom fighter, famous hakeem and nationalist is a well known personality.

So I was very surprised when I was told that his grave was I one corner of The Hazrat Rasool numa compound in Panchkuian Road of Delhi

Now it’s a slum

In between a whole row of beds tucked away in one forgotten corner sleeps one of the greatest leaders of our Freedom movement. Revered by Muslims and Hindus alike.

Yes it was Hakim Mohammad Ajmal Khan. I checked up his dated on the net to find they were correct.

The lady who lives there then showed me many graves of Hakeems from his family scattered around the beds and chores of daily life.

Amita Paliwal a Delhi historian and keen heritage lover informs me this is probably the famous Doctor’s lane where Bernier apprenticed to learn Unani medicine.

It may have been famous then but it’s forgotten now and I don’t know why his very rich trust( he had gifted most of his income to charity) and rich family doesn’t do something about it.

You can read more about him below I have taken it from

He was the founder of the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. He is the only person to have been elected President of both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, as well as the All India Khilafat Committee.Hakim Ajmal Khan was born in 1863 to the illustrious Sharif Khani family of Delhi, family that traces its lineage to court physicians who served the Mughal emperor Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India.

Khan studied the Qur’an and traditional Islamic knowledge including Arabic and Persian in his childhood, before studying medicine at home, under the tutelage of his relatives. All of whom were well-known physicians.

His grandfather Hakim Sharif Khan sought to promote the practice of Tibb-i-unani or Unani medicine and for this purpose, had setup the Sharif Manzil hospital-cum-college that was known throughout the subcontinent as one of the finest philanthropic Unani hospitals that charged no fees from poor patients.

Once qualified, Hakim Ajmal Khan was appointed chief physician to the Nawab of Rampur in 1892. Soon he met Syed Ahmed Khan and was further appointed a trustee of the Aligarh College, now known as the Aligarh Muslim University.

Hakim Ajmal Khan took much interest in the expansion and development of the indigenous system of medicine, Tibb-i-Yunani, or Unani. Khan’s family established the Tibbiya school in Delhi, in order to expand the research and practice of Unani.

As his family of Hakims served as doctors to the British rulers of India, in his early days Hakim Khan supported the British. He was part of a deputation of Muslims that met the Viceroy of India in Shimla in 1906 and even supported the British during World War I. In fact, the British Government awarded him the titles Haziq-ul-Mulk and Qaiser-e-Hind for his contribution to the expansion of the Unani system of medicine.

But once the British government changed its stance and sought to derecognize the practice of Indian schools of medicine such as Ayurveda and Unani, this turn of events set Hakim Ajmal Khan gathering fellow physicians on one platform to protest against the Raj.

Actually, Hakim Ajmal Khan’s political career commenced with his writing for the Urdu weekly Akmal-ul-Akhbar, which was founded in 1865-70 and run by his family.

Subsequently, when the British clamped down on the freedom movement and arrested many Muslim leaders, Hakim Ajmal Khan solicited Mahatma Gandhi’s assistance and together they joined others to start the Khilafat movement. He was elected the President of the Congress in 1921, and joined other Congress leaders to condemn the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He was imprisoned for many months by police authorities. Hakim Khan’s pursued his political career side-by-side his medicinal and educational endeavours. Often, the interests overlapped.

Hakim Ajmal Khan resigned from his position at the AMU when he realized that its management would not endorse the Non-Cooperation Movement launched by the Indian National Congress. He envisaged a place of learning that would be free of government control. He worked towards this aim with the help of other Muslim luminaries. Together, they laid the foundations of the Jamia Millia Islamia (Islamic National University) in Aligarh in 1920, in response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call for Indians to boycott government institutions. The JMI subsequently moved to Delhi and slowly grew to be the prestigious university it is today.

Ajmal Khan served as its first Chancellor until his death. He was a key patron of the university, financially bailing it out of sticky situations throughout the rest of his life.

In fact, Hakim Ajmal Khan also established the Tibbia College for higher studies in medicine. Realizing the need for private funding, he simultaneously established a commercial venture the Hindustani Dawakhana to manufacture Unani and Ayurvedic medicines and issued a diktat that doctors practicing in the Sharif Manzil could only recommend medicines from the Dawakhana. The Dawakhana is known to have patented 84 magical herbal formulas.

Tibbia College is presently located Delhi’s Karol Bagh area. As a mark of respect to this man, Karol Bagh’s most popular part is still called Ajmal Khan Road.

Hakim Ajmal Khan died in 1927. In the ensuing years, both the Sharif Manzil and the Dawakhana have languished for want of upkeep and restoration.

Although Hakim Khan renounced his government awards during the freedom movement, Indians who appreciated his work and held him in high esteem conferred upon him the title Masih-ul-Mulk (Healer of the Nation).

Freedom fighter, educationalist and beyond doubt, the greatest contributor to Unani medicine in India in the 20th century: Hakim Ajmal Khan.

Dr. Khan died of heart problems on December 29, 1927. He was succeeded in the position of JMI Chancellor by Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari.

Rana Safvi is the author of the book “Where Stones Speak”.

source: http://www.twocircles.net / TwoCircles.net / Home> Articles / by Rana Safvi / May 08th, 2016

Sharif Manzil’s Hakims

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NEW DELHI :

Hakim02MPOs30dec2017

Not far from Gali Mir Qasim Jan, where Ghalib’s haveli is situated, is Sharif Manzil. Here the descendants of the famous hakim Sharif Khan live in comfort. Among the hakims of Sharif Manzil were such physicians as Mahmud Khan and his sons, of whom Hakim Ajmal Khan (in sketch) became almost a legend in his lifetime. It was he who established the Hindustani Dawakhana nearby and also the Tibbia College in Karol Bagh.

At Sharif Manzil, which had dropped the suffix haveli, came rajas and maharajas and even government officials, besides ordinary people to seek medical advice from Ajmal Khan and his two elder brothers. During the “Mutiny” of 1857, the Manzil was guarded by the troops of the Maharaja of Patiala, who patronised the hakims. Ghalib too escaped arrest and destruction of his haveli because the hakims sent some of the Patiala soldiers to guard it. When Ghalib’s younger brother died and a sort of curfew order was in force in the troubled city it was under the protection of these troopers that the dead body was taken for burial.

Lala Chunna Mal’s haveli in Chandni Chowk is a 120-room building with shops below it. The haveli is partly occupied by his descendants, while the others have locked their rooms and gone to stay in modern bungalows in the posh areas of New Delhi. Chunna Mal, who belonged to the Khatri community, was an influential banker of the Mughals and a friend of the Sharif Manzil hakims, but after the “Mutiny” he came into the good books of the British, who allowed him (on payment) to take control of some Mehrauli palaces and Fatehpuri Masjid, which was given back to the Muslims only in 1877, otherwise it was closed to the namazis.

Skinner’s haveli in Kashmere Gate area is now a ruin of its former self and occupied by transporters. It was at this haveli that Col Skinner used to hold his lavish parties in which the main attraction was his friend and British Resident at the Mughal court, William Frazer. The Christmas, New Year and Easter get-togethers here have passed into legend.

The havelis of Mirza Jahangir and fellow-royal Mirza Babar in Nizamuddin were magnificent buildings during the last days of the Mughals and still retain some of their old grandeur.

source: http://www.thestatesman.com / The Statesman / Home> Features / Statesman News Service  / December 17th, 2017

The amazing Hakim Sahib

Community Involvement / Social Issues, Freedom Fighters (under research project), Leaders, Science & Technology, World Opinion, , , , , , ,

NEW DELHI :

Illustration by Vinay Kumar | Photo Credit: 01dmc rvsmith
Illustration by Vinay Kumar | Photo Credit: 01dmc rvsmith

Providing a healing touch to the sick and the destitute, there are several stories associated with Hakim Ajmal Khan

An Oriental wearing a Western suit and carrying a small box walked down a street in Paris when he saw a man rolling on the ground. Quickly he took out something from the box and, after a few minutes, the man got up, clutched his stomach for a while and then, with a nod of thanks, walked away. The Oriental was Hakim Ajmal Khan who had put away his sherwani and pyjamas to don a suit during his visit to France in 1925. It was widely believed by generations of Delhiites that Ajmal Khan had a magic chest from which he took out medicines to effect near-miraculous cures, like that of a woman in England with an abnormal issue of monthly blood and an epileptic at an Iraqi shrine. He spent nine years as the guest of the Nawab of Rampur, where he revived a dying begum.

Over the years, since his death in 1927, people seem to have forgotten the great hakim whose lasting legacy is the Unani Tibbia College in Karol Bagh. But last week Jamia Millia Islamia held a symposium on the works of Hakim Sahib, who was one of its founders and also the first Chancellor in 1920. It was decided to set up a Hakim Ajmal Khan Institute for Literary and Historical Research in Unani Medicine at Jamia Millia. The proposed institute would translate the classical works on Unani medicine which are hitherto available only in Urdu and Arabic.

Hakim Ajmal Khan was descended from Hakim Sharif Khan. His father Hakim Mahmud Khan was one of the three sons of Sharif Khan and, interestingly enough, also had three sons of whom Ajmal Khan was the youngest. His elder brother, Hakim Abdul Majid died in 1901 and the second brother three years later. Ajmal Khan founded the Tibbia Conference in 1906 to bring hakims together for joint initiatives. His popularity increased with each passing year and he began to be regarded as a man whose views on medicine, politics and religion were widely respected, not only by Hindus and Muslims but also by Europeans like C. F. Andrews and Sir Malcolm Hailey, Chief Commissioner of Delhi. Mahatma Gandhi, six years younger than Ajmal Khan, was the one who opened Tibbia College in 1920 though he regarded Unani and other medicines as “black magic” and believed in natural cures.

It is interesting to note that Ajmal Khan started off by wearing the Mughal angarkhas, then switched over to the Aligarh sherwani and pyjamas and then suits for foreign visits he made in 1911 and 1925, besides the one in between to Shia religious places in the Middle East. When Ahmed Ali wrote his “Twilight in Delhi”, he couldn’t help mentioning the great hakim in it as the one who had attended to the novel’s hero, Mir Nihal after a paralytic attack. The hakim gave him rare medicines and also prescribed the soup of wild pigeons, caught by the Mir’s Man Friday, Ghafoor, whose own wife had died of abdominal ulcers since she was wedded at a young age to a much older. Even the hakim could not cure her as Ghafoor did not exercise restraint. But Mir Nihal surely benefited from his medication, as also the goat being masqueraded as a sick purdah woman and prescribed green grass.

Barbara D. Metcalf, who wrote a learned paper on Ajmal Khan and his family, recalled the words of the poet Hali on the death in 1900 of Hakim Mahmud Khan: “…Mahmud Khan’s strength was an honour to our race/ But he too, left the World. Alas, the fortune of our race/Ajmal Khan filled up the gap with élan. Not only that, he was also a born poet with the pseudonym of Shahid Dihlawi (possessed lover from Delhi) and left behind a dewan of his poetry, which he sometimes recited at mushairas and during debates on who was greater: Daagh or Zauq. Surprisingly enough Ghalib was left hanging in between.”

Being a man of common sense, despite dabbling in romanticism, he refused to entertain fakirs who claimed to have secrets of alchemy. Ahmed Ali writes about Mir Sangi who had wasted his wealth in trying to make gold and of Molvi Dulhan, dressed as “the bride of God in red sari and with bangles and long hair like a woman”.

According to the Moulvi, there is a prescription written on the Southern Gate of the Jama Masjid which no one has been able to unravel. It says (for alchemy is needed) “half a piece of That”! However the vital word describing ‘That’ is missing though a fakir once claimed that it was ‘actually a small, golden flower with red circles and dots on the petals”. When the problem was referred to Ajmal Khan he wrinkled his forehead and remarked “There are other things worth seeking instead of the art of making gold which remains a fantasy”. The writing on the masjid gate is just a brain teaser.”

The hakim sahib is then said to have walked away with a shrug of his shoulders, still what followed him was the belief that the Sharifi family had a special verbal formula (amal-i-taskhir) which never failed to effect a cure. It is not known whether Ajmal Khan divulged it to his successors but those who came for treatment to the Hindustani Dawakhana in Ballimaran probably thought he had, for after all wasn’t he the “Masiha-e-Hind!”.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society / by R.V. Smith / May 31st, 2015