A murder that shook British India and toppled a king

It looked like an ordinary murder.

One hundred years ago on this day – 12 January 1925 – a group of men attacked a couple on a car ride in a upmarket suburb in Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial India, shooting the man dead and slashing the woman’s face.

But the story that unfolded brought global spotlight on the case, while its complexity put the country’s then British rulers in a spot of bother, and eventually forced an Indian king to abdicate.

Newspapers and magazines described the murder as “perhaps the most sensational crime committed in British India”, and it became “the talk of the city” 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 companion, Mumtaz Begum, 22, was a courtesan on the run from the harem of a princely state and had been staying with Bawla for the last few months.

On the evening of the murder, Bawla and Mumtaz Begum were in the car with three others, driving in Malabar Hill, an affluent area along the shore of the Arabian Sea. Cars were a rarity in India at the time, and only the rich owned them.

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

The attackers showered expletives on Bawla and shouted “get the lady out”, Mumtaz Begum later told the Bombay High Court.

They then shot Bawla, who died a few hours later.

A group of British soldiers, who had inadvertently taken a wrong turn on their way back from a golf game, heard the gunshots and rushed to the scene.

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

Before fleeing, the remaining attackers made two attempts to snatch the injured Mumtaz Begum from the British officers, who were trying to rush her to the hospital.

The newspapers suggested that attackers’ aim was likely abducting Mumtaz Begum, as Bawla – whom she had met while performing in Mumbai a few months earlier and had been living with since – had earlier received several threats for sheltering her.

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

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

“The case went beyond the usual murder mystery as it involved a rich and young tycoon, a slighted king, and a beautiful woman,” says Dhaval Kulkarni, author of The Bawla Murder Case: Love, Lust and Crime in Colonial India.

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

Mumtaz Begum was famed for her beauty. “In her own class, it was said, Mumtaz was without a peer,” KL Gauba wrote in his 1945 book, Famous Trials for Love and Murder.

But the Maharaja’s (king’s) attempts to control her – preventing her from seeing her family alone and keeping her under constant surveillance – soured their relationship, says Kulkarni.

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

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

“After my child was born, I was unwilling to stay at Indore. I was unwilling because the nurses killed the female child that was born,” Mumtaz Begum told the court.

Within months, she escaped to the northern Indian city of Amritsar, her mother’s place of birth, but troubles followed.

She was watched there too. Mumtaz Begum’s stepfather told the court that the Maharaja wept and begged her to return. But she refused and moved to Bombay, where the surveillance continued.

The trial confirmed what media had speculated following the murder: representatives of the Maharaja had indeed threatened Bawla with dire consequences if he continued to shelter Mumtaz Begum, but he had ignored the warnings.

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

The investigation revealed links to the Maharaja that were hard to ignore. Most of the arrested men were employed by the Indore princely state, had applied for leave around the same time and were in Bombay at the time of the crime.

The murder put the British government in a tough spot. Though it happened in Bombay, the investigation clearly showed the plot was planned in Indore, which had strong ties to the British.

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

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

The British government initially tried to keep mum about the murder’s Indore connection in public. But in private, it discussed the issue with much alarm, communication between the governments of Bombay and British India shows.

Bombay police commissioner Patrick Kelly told the British government that all evidence “points at present to a conspiracy hatched in Indore or by instigation from Indore to abduct Mumtaj [sic] through hired desperadoes”.

The government faced pressure from different sides. Bawla’s community of wealthy Memons, a Muslim community with roots in modern-day Gujarat, raised the issue with the government. His fellow municipal officials mourned his death, saying, “there surely must be something more behind the scene”.

Indian lawmakers demanded answers in the upper house of British India’s legislature and the case was even discussed in the British House of Commons.

Rohidas Narayan Dusar, a former police officer, writes in his book on the murder that the investigators were under pressure to go slow, but that then police commissioner Kelly threatened to resign.

The case drew top lawyers for both the defence 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 India’s partition in 1947. Jinnah defended Anandrao Gangaram Phanse, one of the accused and a top general with the Indore army. Jinnah managed to save his client from the death penalty.

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

Justice LC Crump, who led the trial, noted, however, that “there were persons behind them [assailants] whom we cannot precisely indicate”.

“But where an attempt is made to kidnap a woman, who was for 10 years the mistress of the Maharaja of Indore, it is not in the least unreasonable to look to Indore as the quarter from which this attack may have emanated,” the judge remarked.

The case’s prominence meant the British government had to act quickly against the Maharaja. They gave him a choice: face a commission of inquiry or abdicate, according to documents presented to parliament in India.

The Maharaja chose to quit.

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

After abdicating, the Maharaja stirred more controversy by insisting on marrying an American woman against the will of his family and community. Eventually, she converted to Hinduism and they wed, according to a British home department report.

Meanwhile, Mumtaz Begum received offers from Hollywood and later moved to the US to try her luck there. She faded into obscurity after that.