The assassination shook British India and overthrew a king

It looked like an ordinary murder.

One hundred years ago today – January 12, 1925 – a group of men attacked a couple driving in a posh suburb of Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial India, shooting the man dead and slashing the woman’s face.

But the story that unfolded brought the case into the world’s spotlight, while its complexities embarrassed the country’s then-British rulers, eventually forcing an Indian king to abdicate.

Newspapers and magazines called the murder “perhaps the most sensational crime in British India”, and it became “the talk of the town” during the investigation and subsequent trial.

The victim, Abdul Kadir Bawla, 25, was an influential textile businessman and the city’s youngest municipal official. His female friend, Mumtaz Begum, 22, was a courtesan who had run away from the harem of a princely state and had been with Bawla for the last few months.

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

Suddenly, another car overtook them. Before he could react, he collided with them, forcing them to stop, according to intelligence and newspapers.

The attackers hurled slogans against Bawla and shouted “out madam”, Mumtaz Begum later told the Bombay High Court.

Bawla was then shot and died a few hours later.

A group of British soldiers, who had accidentally taken a wrong turn on their way back from a game of golf, heard the shots and went there.

They managed to catch one of the culprits, but one officer suffered gunshot wounds when an assailant opened fire on them.

Before escaping, the rest of the attackers made two attempts on the injured British officer Mumtaz Begum, who was trying to take them to the hospital.

Newspapers suggested that the attackers’ aim was probably to kidnap Mumtaz Begum, as Bawla – whom he had met while performing in Mumbai a few months earlier and lived with her since – had received several threats for harboring her.

The Illustrated Weekly of India promised its readers exclusive pictures of Mumtaz Begum, while the police planned to issue a daily bulletin to the press, the Marathi newspaper Navakal reported.

Even Bollywood found the case compelling enough to adapt it into a silent murder thriller within a month.

“The case went beyond the usual murder mystery, involving a young, wealthy tycoon, an underdog king and a beautiful woman,” says Dhaval Kulkarni, author of The Bawla Murder Case: Love, Lust and Crime in Colonial India.

The remains of the attackers, as speculated in the media, led investigators to the influential princely state of Indore, a British ally. Mumtaz Begum, a Muslim, lived in the harem of her Hindu king, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar III.

Mumtaz Begum was known for her beauty. “In her class, it was said, Mumtaz was without peer,” wrote KL Gauba 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 her under constant surveillance – strained their relationship, says Kulkarni.

“I was kept under surveillance. I was allowed to see visitors and my relatives, but someone always accompanied me,” Mumtaz Begum testified before the court.

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

“After the birth of my child, I did not want to stay in Indore. I did not want to because the nurses killed the born child,” Mumtaz Begum told the court.

After a few months, he fled to the northern Indian city of Amritsar, his mother’s hometown, but trouble ensued.

They saw him there too. Mumtaz Begum’s stepfather told the court that the maharaja cried and begged her to come back. But he refused and moved to Bombay, where he continued to watch.

The trial confirmed what the media had speculated after the murder: the Maharaja’s representatives had indeed threatened Bawla if she continued to protect Mumtaz Begum, but she had ignored the warnings.

Following a lead from Shafi Ahmed, the only attacker caught at the scene, the Bombay police arrested seven men from Indore.

Research revealed links to the maharaja that were hard to dismiss. Most of the arrested men were working in the princely state of Indore, had applied for leave at the same time and were in Bombay at the time of the crime.

The assassination put the British government in a state of shock. Although it took place in Bombay, the investigation clearly showed that the plot was planned in Indore, which had strong links with the British.

Calling it “a most awkward affair” for the British government, The New Statesman wrote that if it were a small state, “there would be no particular cause for alarm”.

“But Indore has been a powerful feudatory of the Raj,” he said.

The British government initially tried to keep the Indore connection of the mother’s murder out of the public eye. But in private, he discussed the matter with great anxiety, it shows the communication between the governments of Bombay and British India.

Bombay police commissioner Patrick Kelly told the British government that all the evidence “points to a conspiracy to kidnap Mumtaj (sic) now in Indore or through desperadoes recruited from Indore”.

The government was under pressure from different sides. The wealthy Memons community of Bawla, a Muslim community with roots in present-day Gujarat, raised the issue with the government. Municipal officials mourned his death, “surely there must be something more behind it”.

Indian MPs demanded answers in the upper house of the British Indian parliament and the case was also debated in the British House of Commons.

Former police officer Rohidas Narayan Dusar writes in his book about the murder that investigators pressured him to go slow, but then Kelly threatened to resign.

The case brought together senior lawyers for both the defense and the prosecution when it reached the Bombay High Court.

One of them was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would later become the founding father of Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947. Jinnah defended Anandrao Gangaram Phanse, one of the accused and a major general in 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 holding the Maharaja to account.

Judge LC Crump, who presided over the trial, stated, however, that “there were people behind them (the attackers) that we cannot pinpoint.”

“But when an attempt is made to kidnap a woman who was the mistress of the Maharaja of Indore for 10 years, it is not at all unreasonable to see this attack on Indore as a possible quarter,” the judge said. he stated

The prominence of the case forced the British government to act quickly against the Maharaja. He was given a choice: face a commission of inquiry or abdicate, according to documents filed in India’s parliament.

The Maharaja chose to leave.

“I abdicate my throne in favor of my son, on the understanding that no further inquiry will be made into my alleged connection with the Malabar Hill tragedy,” he wrote to the British Government.

After his abdication, the Maharaja stirred up further controversy by insisting on marrying an American woman against the will of his family and community. Eventually, he converted to Hinduism and they married, according to the British home department report.

Meanwhile, Mumtaz Begum received offers from Hollywood and then moved to the US to try her luck there. It faded into darkness after that.