The Khilafat Movement

When the First World War ended in an Allied victory, it left the Ottoman Empire defeated and its territories marked for division. For many Indian Muslims, this was not a distant diplomatic matter: the Ottoman Sultan held the title of Caliph, a symbolic head of the wider Muslim community, and the prospect of the Allies dismantling that office altogether felt like an assault on a shared religious institution. Out of that anxiety grew one of the most unusual alliances of India's freedom struggle (Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement^[4]). It briefly united Hindu and Muslim political energy behind a single campaign, and its unraveling still shapes how historians read the limits of that unity.

Why did the Khilafat Movement begin?

Indian Muslim anxiety over the Ottoman Empire's fate had been building since Britain declared war on the Ottomans in 1914, but it sharpened considerably after the war ended. The Armistice of Mudros in October 1918 left Ottoman territory occupied, and speculation mounted that the Allies intended to strip the Sultan-Caliph of real authority. In response, the All India Khilafat Committee was formed in Bombay in March 1919 (NCERT, India and the Contemporary World II, ch. 2, p. 32^[1]) to organize protest and press the British government to preserve the Caliphate's authority intact. Its fears were confirmed by the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920, which partitioned Ottoman lands and reduced the Sultan to a figurehead.

The Committee's most visible organizers were two brothers, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Maulana Shaukat Ali, working alongside figures including Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, Hasrat Mohani, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and Dr. Hakim Ajmal Khan.

What was Khilafat Day?

Khilafat Day, on 17 October 1919, was the movement's first nationwide protest. Across India, Muslims observed it with fasting, prayer and a hartal, the closing of shops and businesses for the day, and many Hindus joined the shutdown at Gandhi's urging (Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement^[4]). It showed that a religious grievance could bring crowds onto the streets in every province, and that Hindus would turn out for it too. A month later, in November 1919, the All India Khilafat Conference met in Delhi and issued a manifesto calling on the British to protect the Caliphate.

How did the Khilafat Movement merge with Non-Cooperation?

Mahatma Gandhi saw in this grievance an opportunity Indian nationalism had not yet found: a cause capable of drawing Muslims into the freedom struggle alongside Hindus in large numbers. He backed the Khilafat cause publicly, and when the Central Khilafat Committee met in Allahabad in June 1920, it adopted a program that dovetailed directly with what would become Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22: a boycott of British titles, courts, schools, and legislative councils. Earlier that year, in March 1920, a Khilafat delegation led by Mohammad Ali had traveled to England to press the case directly, without success, and once the Indian National Congress endorsed non-cooperation at a special session in Calcutta that September, the two campaigns were running as one (NCERT, India and the Contemporary World II, ch. 2, p. 32^[1]; Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Noncooperation Movement"^[2]), producing the broadest Hindu-Muslim political coalition the nationalist movement had yet achieved. Its absence a decade later is one of the clearest differences between Non-Cooperation and the Civil Disobedience campaign of 1930.

Malabar and the limits of unity

That unity had limits, and where it broke down is still contested among historians. In Malabar, on India's southwestern coast, Khilafat-Non-Cooperation agitation among Muslim peasant cultivators known as Moplahs fed into an uprising that broke out in August 1921, beginning as an extension of the political campaign but escalating into violence against local Hindu landlords and residents. Some historians treat the Moplah Rebellion primarily as a continuation of Khilafat mobilization overtaken by long-standing agrarian grievances specific to Malabar's land-tenure system; others emphasize the communal turn itself as evidence of how thin the Hindu-Muslim alliance's local footing could be once it left the control of its national leadership. Both readings appear in the mainstream historical literature, and the episode did lasting damage to the coalition Gandhi had built.

When did the Khilafat Movement end: 1922 or 1924?

Books give both dates, and both are defensible, because the movement ended in two stages. As a mass campaign it was effectively over in 1922. The Ali brothers had been arrested and jailed in September 1921, and when Gandhi called off the wider Non-Cooperation campaign in February 1922, Khilafat agitation lost its shared platform and its Hindu allies (NCERT, India and the Contemporary World II, ch. 2, p. 38^[1]). Then, in November 1922, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's nationalist government in Turkey abolished the Ottoman Sultanate, leaving the Caliph a purely religious figure.

The cause itself ended on 3 March 1924, when Turkey's Grand National Assembly abolished the Caliphate. Historians who date the movement 1919–1924, as this article does, take that as the end point, since there was nothing left to defend after it. The institution Indian Muslims had organized to defend was ended by Turkish secular reformers, not by the British.

Khilafat Movement timeline