Ramachandra Guha: Remembering Yusuf Meherally, the Muslim socialist mayor of Mumbai

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Back in 2006, I wrote a column in the now defunct Time Out Mumbai setting out the criteria for an urban agglomeration to be considered a ' world city'. To qualify for that appellation, I argued, a city had to be massive in size, have historical depth, a thriving cultural life, appreciable social (including linguistic and religious) diversity, and be an economic powerhouse. I concluded that there were only three world cities: London, New York, and Mumbai.
I remembered that piece when reading about Zohran Mamdani's campaign for the mayoralty of New York. Christian-dominated London, remarkably, already has a Muslim mayor; might New York, known so far for being Christian and Jewish (and atheist), also soon have one? In considering this question, it struck me that our third world city, Mumbai, comfortably beat them in this race, for it has had as many as six Muslim mayors, the first in 1934 and the last in 1963.
This column focuses on one of these Muslim mayors of Bombay, for whom his brief stint in that post was not his only or even his most important distinction. His name was Yusuf Meherally, and among the reasons for writing about him now is that he died 75 years ago this month.
An articulate leader
Born in Bombay in 1903, Meherally studied at the Bharda High School and at Elphinstone College, where he acquired a formidable reputation as a debater. He also took a law degree, but was denied a licence to practice on account of his political views. For he had thrown himself into the freedom struggle, playing an active part in the protests against the all-White Simon Commission in 1928, and being jailed in the Salt Satyagraha two years later.
In 1934, the Congress Socialist Party was formed, seeking to give an egalitarian direction to the parent party led by Gandhi. Meherally became one of the CSP's most articulate leaders, with a particular interest in workers' rights and in anti-colonial movements in other parts of Asia and Africa. Through the 1930s he travelled tirelessly across India promoting the credo of grassroots socialism, while also visiting Europe and America to build bridges with democratic socialists there.
In April 1942, Yusuf Meherally was elected mayor of Bombay. In August of the same year, Gandhi launched the Quit India movement. In his capacity as mayor, it fell to Meherally to formally welcome Gandhi when he arrived by train in Bombay for the All Indian Congress Committee session which passed that historic resolution.
Folklore has it that Yusuf Meherally came up with the slogan 'Quit India'; this may be a misattribution, though it was indeed Meherally who came up, in 1928, with that other resonant slogan, 'Simon Go Back!'
Notably, Madhu Dandavate's biography, published in 1986, does not make the claim, merely writing that 'with the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi, Meherally's Padma Publi­cations, brought out on the eve of the 1942 August Revolution a booklet with the caption, Quit India.'
The book Quit India by #MahatmaGandhi & edited by Yusuf Meherally, was published by Padma Prakashan. In Sept 1942, C.I.D raided the premises of Padma Prakashan at Pherozshah Mehta Rd Mumbai/Bombay for the copies of 'Quit India'. #QuitIndiaMovement pic.twitter.com/mqVWq5Hi1V
— Mani Bhavan Mumbai (@GandhiInMumbai) August 8, 2023
In one of his jail terms, Meherally was incarcerated in Lahore, far away from his native city. He noted in his prison diary that it moved him to be so close to the barracks in which Lala Lajpat Rai was imprisoned, so close to the yard where Bhagat Singh and his companions, Sukhdev and Rajguru, were executed, so close to 'the famous well whose water Maharaja Ranjit Singh loved so much and which today [1942] serves the entire jail population'.
I myself first heard of Yusuf Meherally in the early 1980s, when a friend worked at a centre for urban studies named for him. Some years later, I bought, in a New York bookshop, a collection of essays by the American journalist and historian, Bertram D Wolfe. The book was called Strange Communists I Have Known, and it had an essay on Meherally, intriguingly titled: 'Gandhi versus Lenin'.
Wolfe and Meherally became friends in the mid 1930s, on the latter's first visit to the United States of America. Before he met Meherally, the species of Leftists Wolfe was most familiar with were American communists, who swore a blind fealty to the Soviet dictators, Lenin and Stalin, and fanatically believed that allegedly worthy ends justified using the most immoral means. Speaking to Meherally, Wolfe was struck by the compassionate humanism of his socialism and came to understand how 'it was the influence of Gandhi within the Congress Socialist Party which had immunized it against the moral corruption of the communists'.
Wolfe tells a lovely story of taking Yusuf Meherally to the tip of Cape Cod, where the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Massachusetts Bay meet. Meherally got out of the car, leaving his sandals behind, and waded into the waters. When Meherally walked back to the road, recalled Wolfe, 'his face was lit up with an expression of happiness that I had not seen before. 'We Indians believe that every confluence of waters is a sacred place', he explained to me.'
Indian Socialist heads: Jayaprakash Narayan and Yusuf Meherally pic.twitter.com/wp0NpzTu8O
— Socialist Swaraj (@SocialistSwj) February 27, 2023
On Meherally's first visit to the US, Wolfe found him full of righteous indignation against the horrors of British colonial rule. However, on his second trip, made in 1946 when it was clear that India would soon be independent, Meherally was heard speaking in fonder terms of the oppressor, telling his American friend 'of the good things the British had contributed to Indian civilisation and culture, above all the safeguarding of individual and civil rights that are inherent in the British tradition'.
Wolfe was taken aback by this change of heart. He asked Meherally how he could now praise 'the British sense of justice' when it had kept him in jail for so long. Meherally answered: 'Even while they oppressed us, they were uncomfortable about it. A hunger strike in a British jail could get me… your book or other books to read. In Hitler's jails or in Stalin's it would only have gotten me before a firing squad…If Gandhi had been in the Soviet Union, he would have disappeared forever from view after his first word of protest. The English at least at least felt that they had to report his defiance, even while they ridiculed it and imprisoned him. That is why he taught us to hate the evil things the English did but not to hate the English or ever despair of their regeneration or our own.'
In his introduction to Madhu Dan­da­vate's biography, Meherally's former colleague in the Congress Socialist Party, Achyut Patwardhan, described him as 'a great Humanist. Not for him any narrow religious affiliation. He was nurtured on a deep love of India's past culture.' Meherally's lifelong quest for mitigating human suffering went alongside a keen interest in art and literature, as well as a precocious environmentalism. His friend, recalled Patwardhan, 'had stood entranced before the Himalayan range, and he had caught the secrets whispered by the vast skies to the ageless snow ranges where man had never set foot'.
Elsewhere in the book, Dandavate quotes another old associate, the great socialist-feminist, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, as writing after Yusuf Meherally's death in July 1950: 'Fearless yet tender, daring yet considerate; ready for any sacrifice, yet full of love and affection, Meherally was unique among men. He claimed devoted friends and loyal comrades, cutting across politics and religion.'
A third comrade, the trade union leader and Goan freedom-fighter, Peter Alvarez, said in his tribute in the Bombay assembly that Meherally 'was a mingled fire and honey whose only concern was every human interest except his own'.
It was this selflessness, this absolute commitment to the welfare and happiness of others, that led Meherally to neglect his own health, hastening his early death. During his last illness, he was shifted to a well-known Bombay clinic, but when the treatment provided no relief, Meherally told Jayaprakash Narayan to take him back home so that he could die there since 'he did not want to spoil the good name of the doctors who attended on him.' In this manner, writes Dandavate, 'even at the last moment of his life, Yusuf's concern was for others'. His death brought together people from across the political spectrum, with conservative Congressmen walking side by side with radical socialists in the funeral procession.
For Mumbai to have had a mayor who was born Muslim was once both commonplace and characteristic. Tragically, while London and New York have become more open-minded in recent decades, more welcoming of religious and linguistic diversity, Mumbai has turned more chauvinistic. It is hard to see how, or when, it will ever again elect a mayor like Yusuf Meherally, that socialist, scholar, patriot and internationalist, truly a man who ennobled his city, his country, and the world.