A murder that shook British India and toppled a king

It looked like a simple murder.

100 years ago on this day – 12 January 1925 – a group of men attacked a family riding in a car in Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial India, shot the man and cut his face.

But the story that happened brought international attention to the case, while its complications put the British rulers at a critical juncture, and eventually forced the Indian king to abdicate.

Newspapers and magazines described the murder as “perhaps the most gruesome crime ever committed in British India”, and it became “the talk of the town” during the subsequent investigation and trial.

The victim, 25-year-old Abdul Kadir Bawla, was a well-known and underrated businessman in the city. His girlfriend, Mumtaz Begum, 22, was a royal on the run from the royal palace and had been with Bawla for the past few months.

On the evening of the murder, Bawla and Mumtaz Begum were in a car with three others, driving to Malabar Hill, an affluent area on the shores of the Arabian Sea. Cars were rare in India at that time, and only the rich.

Suddenly, another car caught up with them. Before they could react, it collided with theirs, forcing them to stop, according to technical and newspaper reports.

The assailants insulted Bawla and shouted “get rid of this woman”, Mumtaz Begum told the Bombay High Court later.

They then shot Bawla who died a few hours later.

A group of British soldiers, who unknowingly took a wrong turn on their way back from golf, heard the gunfire and rushed to the scene.

They managed to catch one of the criminals, but another police officer was injured by a gunshot when a terrorist opened fire on them.

Before escaping, the survivors tried twice to take the injured Mumtaz Begum away from the British authorities, who were trying to rush her to the hospital.

The newspapers said that the terrorists’ motive was to kidnap Mumtaz Begum, because Bawla – whom he met playing in Mumbai a few months ago and is living with her – had threatened her several times for hiding her.

The Illustrated Weekly of India promised readers exclusive photos of Mumtaz Begum, while the police prepared a daily press release for the media, the Marathi newspaper Navakal reported.

Even Bollywood found the case so important that it turned into a silent killer within a few months.

“The case continued as a murder mystery involving a rich and young man, a diminutive king and a beautiful woman,” says Dhaval Kulkarni, author of The Bawla Murder Case: Love, Lust and Crime in Colonial India.

The footprints of the terrorists, as they say in the newspapers, led the searchers to the British colony of Indore. Mumtaz Begum, who was a Muslim, lived in the house of a Hindu concubine, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar III.

Mumtaz Begum was famous for her beauty. “In his class, it is said, Mumtaz had no peer,” KL Gauba wrote in his 1945 book, Famous Trials for Love and Murder.

But the Maharaja’s (king) attempts to control her – preventing her from seeing her family alone and keeping a constant watch on her – strained their relationship, says Kulkarni.

“I was under surveillance. I was allowed to see visitors and my relatives but someone always accompanied me,” Mumtaz Begum said in court.

In Indore, she gave birth to a daughter, who died soon after.

“After my baby was born, I didn’t want to stay in Indore. I didn’t want to because the nurses killed the baby girl that was born,” Mumtaz Begum told the court.

Within a few months, he fled to the northern Indian city of Amritsar, where his mother was born, but trouble followed.

He was being watched again. Mumtaz Begum’s stepfather told the court that the Maharaja cried and begged him to come back. But he refused and moved to Bombay, where he continued to supervise.

The case confirmed what the media reported after her assassination: the Maharaja’s representatives threatened Bawla with dire consequences if he continued to protect Mumtaz Begum, but he ignored the warnings.

Acting on the lead of Shafi Ahmed, the lone attacker caught at the scene, the Bombay police arrested seven men from Indore.

The research revealed links to the Maharaja that were hard to ignore. Many of the arrested men were employed by the princes of Indore, applied for leave immediately and were in Bombay at the time of the attack.

The assassination put the British government in a quandary. Although it took place in Bombay, the investigation clearly showed that the attack was planned in Indore, which had strong ties with the British.

Calling it “a very difficult issue” for the British government, The New Statesman wrote that if it were a small country, “there would be no real cause for concern”.

“But Indore has been a strong argument for the Raj,” it said.

The British government initially tried to hide the Indore massacre from the public. But in private, it discussed the matter in a very dangerous way, the connection between the Bombay authorities and the protests in British India.

Bombay police chief Patrick Kelly told the British government that all the evidence “so far points to a conspiracy being made in Indore or forcing Indore to capture Mumtaj. [sic] through the unemployment system”.

The government faced pressures from various sides. The Bawla group of wealthy Memons, a Muslim group from present-day Gujarat, raised the issue with the government. His fellow town officials lamented, saying, “there must be something behind the incident”.

Indian lawmakers sought answers in the upper house of parliament in British India and the case was also discussed in the British Parliament.

Rohidas Narayan Dusar, a former police officer, writes in his book about the murders that the investigators were forced to go slow, but then the chief of police Kelly threatened to resign.

The case attracted senior defense lawyers and the prosecution when it reached the Bombay High Court.

One of them was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who later became the founding father of Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947. Jinnah defended Anandrao Gangaram Phanse, one of the accused and the commander-in-chief of the Indore army. Jinnah succeeded in saving his client from the death penalty.

The court sentenced three men to death and three to life imprisonment, but stopped short of indicting the Maharaja.

Justice LC Crump, who presided over the trial, said, “there are people behind them [assailants] which we cannot show”.

“But when the attempt was made to kidnap a woman, who was the mistress of the Maharaja of Indore for 10 years, it is not reasonable to look at Indore as the quarter from which this attack originated,” the judge said. he said.

The publicity of the case meant that the British government had to take immediate action against the Maharaja. They gave him a choice: face a commission of inquiry or resign, according to documents released to India’s parliament.

The Maharaja decided to quit.

“I abdicate my throne in behalf of my son on the understanding that there will be no further investigation into my alleged involvement in the Malabar Hill tragedy,” he wrote to the British government.

After escaping, the Maharaja caused a lot of controversy by insisting on marrying an American woman against the will of his family and community. Later, they converted to Hinduism and got married, according to a British home department report.

Meanwhile, Mumtaz Begum received requests from Hollywood and later moved to the US to try her luck there. He disappeared into the darkness after that.