Ashraf Ali Khan Chowdhury

The family now known as the Khan Chowdhurys of Natore, many of the present members of which are still resident in their ancestral homestead near Nicha Bazaar of that district town in northwest Bangladesh, was of Pathan stock. Legend has it that its ancestors were from the town of Qasur in the Punjab and were in the service of the Mogul Emperors. The earliest known ancestor was one Azam Khan, who migrated eastwards, possibly in the late eighteenth century and settled at Burdwan in the then Presidency of Bengal. According to some accounts he was in the service of the Maharaja of Burdwan. Other, and perhaps more reliable, traditions have it that he was in the employ of the East India Company and for loyal services rendered by him to the Company his son, Zaman (or Jumma) Khan was appointed a Nazir to the District Judge of Burdwan. A Nazir, in the District administration of the time, was Head of the Police and Superintendent of criminal investigation affairs and it was thus a position of much respect and honour and one of the highest that an Indian could then aspire to. When the judge under whom he served was transferred to Natore, which was at the time the headquarters of the district of Rajshahi, Zaman Khan accompanied him. He was, however, "recalled," presumably to Burdwan, to help in the capture of a notorious outlaw called Pandit Dacoit. His pursuit and capture of this outlaw gave him a reputation and he was subsequently stationed in Dhaka for six years to suppress dacoities in that district. (Family legend also ascribes to him the capture of two famous dacoits who had terrorised the Chalan Beel area, a large tract of marshy land that lies between Bogra and Natore.) At the end of this period he returned to Natore where he died leaving a twelve-year old son, Dost Mohammad Khan.

Some time after Zaman Khan’s death, the district headquarters were moved to Rampur Boalia, to the town now known as Rajshahi, and the judge’s house at Natore, no longer needed by the government, was given to Dost Mohammad Khan for the nominal sum of 100 rupees in recognition of the loyal service rendered to the government by his father and grandfather. Presumably, this was the compound at Nicha Bazar, within walking distance of the Natore law courts, that later became the ancestral homestead of the family. From a sale deed that was in existence up to the twentieth century, it appears that he bought property, a zamindari, in 1800. At an early age, according to family tradition, he married a daughter of the Rais of Bagha, a zamindar of the district of Rajshahi who had his seat some twenty miles distant from Natore. Dost Mohammad Khan built a mosque (possibly the mosque that is even now in existence near the main entrance of the homestead) and endowed many properties by several Wakf deeds, the first of which was in 1850. By this time he had become the largest Muslim landholder resident in the town of Natore, though of course his zamindari was dwarfed by those of the Raja of Dighapatia – whose seat was two or three miles distant from the town – and from the holdings of the Maharaja of Natore, whose descendants had their ancient palace within the town. However, his zamindari was large enough to deserve mention in two books, both of which are now rare. The first of these is Mouj-i-Sultani in Persian, and the second is Origin of the Mohammedan Families, a history of the district of Rajshahi, written in Bengali by Khan Bahadur K. Fazle Rabbi, sometime Dewan of the Nawab of Murshidabad.

Unverified picture of either Dost Mohammad Khan
or Rashid Ali Khan Chowdhury (See note)

The earliest records that exist of Dost Mohammad Khan’s zamindari, and of the affairs of the family, are the Waqf deeds that he executed, first in 1850 and then again a few years later, in Natore and the 30-mile distant district town of Rajshahi. He was then well past middle age and something of a patriarch. According to the terms of the Waqf, he was himself the first Mutwalli (or trustee) of the estate. After his death the Waqf stipulated that the eldest surviving son of the family would become Mutwalli. Thus he was succeeded in the position by his son Mohammad Ali Khan who built another mosque in the town and made Waqf of more properties. Mohammad Ali was followed as Mutwalli by his son Rashid Ali who is said to have established the first high school for English education in Natore. Rashid Ali was awarded the title of Khan Bahadur for the many charities he had established and supported. The estate in his time must have grown in extent and prosperity for he is famous in family history for his attempts to acquire the title of Nawab from the British government, a title that was given only to very large landholders. Reputed for his extravagant life style, he is said to have had a large mansion in Calcutta where he entertained civil and military officers in a lavish manner in the hope of buying their influence. His efforts towards a Nawabship proved fruitless in the end, but they did succeed in almost ruining his once-prosperous estate. Nevertheless, when he died in debt – being succeeded by his son Noor Khan Chowdhury – the estate had revenues enough to support a large household and to maintain the outward semblances of a zamindari. By this time, however, the grand mansion in Natore that Dost Mohammad Khan had built on the site of the judge’s house, which had become the residence of the Mutwallis of the estate and of their extended family, had been destroyed by the Great Bengal Earthquake of the 1880s. The mansion was never rebuilt, though its ruins and remains were left and some of them can still be seen. In its place a number of smaller houses, some brick-built and some of bamboo and clay with tin roofs, were constructed all over the seven acres of the homestead. In time, too, the homestead was divided into Boro Bari and Chhoto Bari, i.e., the "elder’s" house and the "younger’s" house, in which the descendants of Dost Mohammad Khan’s two wives, the elder and the younger, were settled.

Ershad Ali Khan Chowdhury, the younger son of Mohammad Ali and descendant of Dost Mohammad’s elder wife, was born in Natore, probably in 1859. He and his wife Masirunnessa Khanam with their only son Ashraf Ali were resident in the Natore house and were part of the extended family during the Mutwalliship of Noor Khan. In later years, Ashraf Ali would relate to his son and daughters how it came about that his father established a separate residence within the compound of the house. It happened in this manner: according to the terms of the Waqfnama of Dost Mohammad anyone who was the Mutwalli of the estate would provide for all the members of the family and the entire extended family would "eat out of the same kitchen" as long as they lived in the Natore homestead. Noor Khan, who was Ershad Ali’s nephew, was something of a wastrel and addicted to strong drink (it was said, however, that Pathan blood was strong in his veins; he was an excellent marksman and even when stone drunk he would send chandeliers crashing to the floor by shooting at the chains from which they hung). Each afternoon, when Ashraf Ali would return from his school, Noor Khan, in his cups, would call the young boy and ask him: "Do you know whose house you live in?" And he would answer the question himself: "You live in my house." One day, Ashraf Ali, unable to bear this question any longer, ran straight to his father, clasped him and asked in tears: "If this is Noor Bhai’s house then where is mine?" Much affected by his son’s appeal, Ershad Ali sued the estate for a separate income for himself and eventually was awarded some lands, the income from which was his own. He promptly made himself independent and began to build a small atchalla (house with an eight-sided corrugated iron roof) for himself, his wife and son within the environs of the homestead. Oral family history has recorded that the very day the atchalla was completed the great earthquake took place in which the Mutwalli’s mansion along with other brick buildings were destroyed. There was, however, minimal loss of life and Ershad Ali’s atchalla became the temporary shelter for most of the ladies of the homestead. On that day Masirunnessa Khanam made it a rule that, when in Natore, no member of her family would ever spend the night in a brick-and-mortar house. Thus it was that Ershad Ali acquired a house for himself and his family a tradition.

Ershad Ali Khan Chowdhury (date unknown)

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Noor Khan had, apparently through his profligate habits, brought himself to the verge of bankruptcy. In a bid to save the estate, Ershad Ali forced Noor Khan, his nephew, to surrender the Mutwalliship. Ershad Ali then, by challenging the terms of the Waqfnama of Dost Mohammad, declared himself Mutwalli and assumed ownership of most of the original lands of the Chowdhury estate. These actions of his were opposed by Noor Khan in court and the cases thus begun did not end until 1914-16. At the conclusion of this court action, Ershad Ali was confirmed in possession of the lands he had acquired. In addition to these lands which he held as Mutwalli, Ershad Ali had himself acquired a certain amount of land through lease, purchase and at auction. In a few years, therefore, and certainly by 1918, he held title not only to a substantial portion of ancestral lands but was in possession of about half of the total area of the homestead. Subsequently, [date unknown] Ershad Ali Khan Chowdhury was awarded the title of Khan Bahadur by the British government and became the most prosperous and the largest landholder among his cousins and relations who lived on the Natore homestead.

Ershad Ali, as those who knew him personally were wont to testify, was perhaps, after Dost Mohammad, the most able person of his family. Unlike his elder brother Rashid Ali and nephew Noor Khan, who wasted their patrimony – the former in his ambition of gaining the title of Nawab and the latter in mere profligacy – he managed to raise his status from a younger brother who was dependant on an allowance from the estate to that of a zamindar in his own right. However, though he wielded some influence both in Calcutta and Natore and was a member of the Bengal Legislative Council for a term, he was never a popular leader, in the real sense, of his community, and appears to have been only mildly interested in a political career. In this he was unlike one of his nephews, Nawab Nawab Ali Chowdhury of Dhanbari in Mymensingh (born in Natore on the homestead in 1863 and a student of Rajshahi Collegiate School in his boyhood), who his eldest sister’s son, only four years younger than him but who was already by the first decade of the century a leading Muslim politician of Bengal. Nevertheless, through his limited involvement in public affairs, Ershad Ali appears to have had some political connections outside his extended family as well. He was acquainted with Nawab Sir Salimullah of Dhaka, and was, along with his young son Ashraf Ali, among those who were invited by the Nawab in 1906 to the historic meeting of Muslim leaders at Dhaka that resulted in the founding of the Muslim League, the political party that was later to lead the demand for Pakistan. He had earlier the same year welcomed, as was only natural for a Bengali Muslim landholder, the partition of Bengal that had created the new province of East Bengal with its capital at Dhaka (a partition that was to be annulled in 1911 in the same proclamation that announced the shifting of the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi). Perhaps as an outcome of his support for the partition, he appears also to have been acquainted with Sir Bampfylde Fuller, the Lieutenant-Governor of the short-lived province of East Bengal.

Ershad Ali was educated only up to the Matriculation level (he had been a student at Rajshahi Collegiate School which had been founded in the 1830s) but he valued education highly. In this he was considerably different from many zamindars who were used to living off their property and took pride in being indifferent to formal education. Ershad Ali indeed was responsible for the education received by many of his relatives and close acquaintances. He had also founded an M.E. Madrasah in Natore. It was only natural therefore, that he insisted on the formal education of Ashraf Ali, his only son.

Ashraf Ali was born in 1878, was educated at home and at a school in Calcutta. He sat his Matriculation probably in 1893 or 94. Some two years later, at the age of 18, he was married to Shakera Khatun, daughter of Hafez Abdul Ghafur of Panchthupi, Murshidabad. Her maternal grandfather and great uncle, known as "Bare Kumar" and "Chhote Kumar," were among the largest zamindars of the region and were reputed to rival the Nawab of Murshidabad in wealth. Unfortunately, Shakera Khatun died, to the intense grief of Ashraf Ali, within two years of her marriage, after giving birth to a daughter who survived a bare twenty-one days. Some four years after her death, in 1902, Ashraf Ali was married to her younger sister, Sabera Khatun. This was a marriage that was to last until Ashraf Ali’s death in 1941. Their eldest and only son, Abdul Ali, was born in 1909, seven years after their marriage and some time after Ashraf Ali’s departure for England, on his father’s insistence, to train as a barrister. During his three years in London Ashraf Ali lived the life of a well-to-do young Indian gentleman, and was introduced to upper class and even aristocratic society by Sir Bampfylde Fuller, the former Lieutenant Governor of East Bengal, with whom he had renewed acquaintance on his arrival in England. He returned to India in 1912 after having been called to the bar from the Inner Temple, London and soon after set up practice at the High Court, Calcutta – or, to give it its formal name, the High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal.

The Calcutta to which Ashraf Ali returned in 1912 was no longer the imperial capital of India that it had been when he had left. The previous year, the government of India had announced that the capital was to be moved to Delhi where a new city – New Delhi – was to be built. Nevertheless, the government had as yet not moved from the city (and was not to begin to move until after the First World War). The great British monument of the Victoria Memorial, planned by Lord Curzon, was at this time still under construction and was not to be completed until the 1920s. The Calcutta of this time has perhaps been best – though idiosyncratically – described by Nirad C. Chaudhury in his famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. Chaudhury describes the city as it was in 1910 and before it had, in subsequent decades and especially after 1947, received millions of new migrants and had become the sprawling, crowded, overpopulated urban mass that it is today. But even in 1910-12 Calcutta was a large and cosmopolitan city, the largest in India. "In certain of its quarters," says Chaudhury,

a man could easily fancy that he was in China. Other parts looked like mohallas torn out of the cities of upper India, and, in fact, till recently Calcutta had the largest Hindi-speaking population of any city in India. Along the Chowringhee and south of Park Street the city had an appearance which probably was not materially different from that of the European adjuncts of Chinese, Malay, or Egyptian ports, but even here it did not exhale mere commerce, club life, sport, and turf. Those who were historically conscious could sense these parts of Calcutta to be very perceptibly breathing the spirit of the builders of the British Empire in India. ("Calcutta," Chapter 1, Book 3 of The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian [London: Macmillan, 1951])

"The rest of the city," he goes on to say, "was purely Bengali" – by which he means Bengali Hindu, and adds that "between the European and Bengali parts … there always was a Eurasian and Muhammadan belt, very characteristic in appearance."

It was in this "Muhammadan belt" of Calcutta that Ashraf Ali took up residence when he returned to the city. His first home was a rented house at 63 Lower Circular Road, where he was to stay for 22 years. It was here that five of his seven children were born. (The two eldest, his only son Abdul Ali and eldest daughter Shafia Khatun, were born in Natore, the former, as mentioned earlier, in 1909 and the latter in 1914.) Shafia was followed by Razia (1915), Rabea (1918), Afya (1920), Asya (1922) and Zakia (1928). His father and mother too remained resident in the same house, though they both paid frequent visits to Natore, to the end of their lives. His father, Ershad Ali, died in 1928 and was buried in Medinipur; his mother, Masirunnessa Khanam, had died some eight years earlier, in 1921. Her mortal remains now lie interred in a small grave adjacent to a mosque just beside the present Station Road, Natore some hundred yards or so south of the town's railway station. It was from this house at Lower Circular Road too that his two eldest daughters were married.

Calcutta in the Early Part of the Twentieth Centrury

The High Court, Calcutta c. 1915
(Bourne and Shepherd Studio, Calcutta)

Writer’s Building, Calcutta c.1915
(Bourne and Shepherd Studio, Calcutta)

Hooghly River, Calcutta c.1915
(Bourne and Shepherd Studio, Calcutta)

Great Eastern Hotel, Calcutta c.1915
(Bourne and Shepherd Studio, Calcutta)

Clive Street, Calcutta 1915
(Bourne and Shepherd Studio, Calcutta)

It was from the Lower Circular Road house too that Ashraf Ali's children went to school. His son, Abdul Ali (also known by his nickname of "Phordu"), was sent to the Diocesan School, which was one of the best boy's schools in Calcutta at the time. Abdul Ali, as his sisters and other relatives later described him, was a high-spirited youngster. Typically for young men of his class and station in life, he was interested in guns and horses. He was a good shot with a rifle and had learnt to ride from an early age. He was also, at the appropriate age, fond of motor-cycles and fast cars. It was no wonder then that he aspired to a career in the Army. Despite his father's lack of enthusiasm regarding his choice of career, Abdul Ali entered the Indian Army's military academy at Dehra Dun. The Military Academy at Dehra Dun, founded to train Indians in India instead of, as formerly, at Sandhurst in England, had been inaugurated on 10 December 1932 and was therefore only about 3 years old at the time that Abdul Ali entered it (presumably in 1935). He was commissioned on 1 February 1937 as a second lieutenant in the III Cavalry Regiment. Two years later the Second World War broke out and the British Indian armed forces underwent sudden expansion to cope both with the emerging Middle East theatre and the latent threat of the Japanese on the eastern frontiers. A year or so after his commission Abdul Ali had opted for transfer to the Air Force and by the summer of 1941 he was a Flying Officer in 1 Squadron of the IAF at the military base of Ambala in the Punjab, awaiting assignment to a fighter squadron that would either be sent overseas to the Middle East or to Burma.

Ambala was the oldest airbase in India and in 1941 it was still a Royal Air Force station, though the Indian Air Force had been established in 1933. At Ambala, Abdul Ali, as one of the earliest of Indian pilots on transfer from the Imperial Indian army, may have been trained at the No 1 Service Flying Training School that had been established in October 1940 which flew a number of aircraft that included Hawker Hart, Hawker Audax, North American Harvard, Hawker Hurricane, Spitfire Vc, Spitfire VIII, Spitfire XIV. It is possible that, after his solo, he had been training on Hawker Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft.

Ambala Flying School in 1943. A group of trainee pilots
with their RAF instructors.

Ambala Flying School, 1943. Trainee pilots with their instructors

Expecting at any time that summer to see action on either of the fronts – a prospect that had been causing his father considerable anxiety – Abdul Ali fell prey to a more mundane, and perhaps crueler fate, of death by accident at the early age of 32. In April 1941 he was playing polo at the military base in Ambala, a game that he loved and excelled in, when he suddenly fell from his horse and did not rise again. Groundsmen who rushed to his aid found him dead. It was never known whether he died of a sudden heart attack or of some effect of the fall from his horse. His funeral was held in the absence of any family members (Ambala being too far away from Calcutta for anyone to get to it in time) and he was buried with military honours in the cemetery at Ambala cantonment. The effect of his early and sudden death on his parents and family can clearly be imagined. He was a beloved only son of his parents and the adored elder brother of six sisters. His mother and sisters were reconciled to the loss in time, but his father survived only by a few months and it was the opinion of many in the family that he died of grief.

Abdul Ali, Lieutenant in the III Cavalry, c. 1938

Abdul Ali dressed for polo, c. 1939-40

In the early decades of the last century in Bengal very few Muslim girls "of good family" were ever sent to school to acquire formal education. Ashraf Ali's elder daughters too would probably have been educated privately at home had it not been for the establishment by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain of the famous Sakhawat Memorial School for girls in Calcutta in 1911. Begum Rokeya, who is today recognized and honoured as the first Muslim woman activist for women's education and rights in Bengal, was a relative by marriage of the family. When Ashraf Ali's two eldest daughters were about six years old Begum Rokeya's school had been running for nine years, and she personally visited Ashraf Ali and insisted that it was his duty, as a prominent Muslim gentleman of the city, to send his daughters to her school and thereby encourage other Muslim families to provide formal education for their daughters. In 1920 therefore, Shafia and Razia were admitted to the Sakhawat School, to be followed, in time, by their three younger sisters, Rabea, Afya and Asya. (His youngest daughter Zakia, however, went not to the Sakhawat School but to Loreto Convent.) It was regrettable, though, that Shafia and Razia stopped attending school after they were both married at the age of 14 when they were in Class VIII.

Although the two eldest daughters did not continue their education beyond school level, their two younger sisters, Rabea and Afya, did. They became, in fact, the only daughters of Ashraf Ali to become graduates. Rabea took her Matriculation examination from Sakhawat School in 1938. Afya, who had been sick of typhoid and had not attended school for more than six months, took the examination at the same time as a private candidate on the urging of her maternal uncle, Ghulam Ali, who volunteered to give her tuition at home since she had missed so much of school work. Both sisters passed the examinations; Rabea in the First Division and Afya in the Second Division. After their Matriculation they both entered Calcutta’s Loreto College and passed their Intermediate Arts examinations in 1939 – in which, once again Rabea was placed in the First and Afya in the Second Division. Both remained in Loreto College as undergraduates, Rabea opting for the regular BA Pass course and Afya for Honours in English. Both graduated in the summer of 1941.

Though he was known, in his hometown as well as Calcutta, as "Barrister Ashraf Ali," his law practice was, by all accounts, neither very large nor very lucrative. He attended court regularly throughout most of his life after 1912, but he did not go out of his way to take up important cases and was often content to offer his legal services for free to his tenants. Neither – again, by most accounts given of him by relatives and friends – did he take his other profession of zamindar very seriously. He made no effort, that is, to increase or develop his possessions, but was content merely to hold and maintain the lands he had inherited. Although at the death of his father in 1928 he had succeeded to the zamindari, most of the land and tenure deeds of his possessions remained in his father's name, showing that he made very few new purchases or acquisitions in his own name after his father's death. His reluctance to increase his landed property is also shown by the fact that though he lived most of his life in Calcutta (except for one extended stay in Natore in the 1930s), he never bought or built a house for himself in that city, preferring rented premises to property of his own.

As a landholder and a barrister by profession, it was inevitable that Ashraf Ali would gravitate towards politics. As mentioned earlier, he had been present at the meeting in Dhaka in 1906 when the Muslim League was founded and he continued to remain a member of this party. He was elected to the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1937 from his constituency of Natore and subsequently became the Deputy Speaker of the Assembly. However, since he was not by temperament an ambitious man, he apparently did not take wholeheartedly to the profession of politics. Although well-known and respected in political and social circles in Calcutta and Bengal generally, and, obviously, personally acquainted with the leading politicians of the time, he never became a popular leader or an influential member of the policy-making groups within his party. He was never, as far as is known, offered ministerial posts, and it is likely that he would have refused such positions had they been offered. Neither, apparently, did he take part in the political quarrels and maneuverings of the time for his name hardly ever crops up in standard political histories of the period. He must have taken part in debates in the Assembly but, without consulting the parliamentary records of the Assembly, it is difficult to say what policies and programmes he personally espoused or opposed or if he ever delivered significant speeches in the House.

It is difficult to say also if he would subsequently have come to occupy a more important position in the pre-Partition politics of Bengal or have emerged as a leader after the creation of Pakistan, for his career in the Assembly lasted a relatively short time, being cut short by his sudden death in late 1941, only a few months after the death of his son. It was generally held by most of his surviving family members that the death of his only son affected him to a great degree and that grief for this loss was partly responsible for his own death. He had had a minor heart attack sometime in 1941 and died of a second one on 7 December of that year. He was buried, as he had wished, beside his father in Medinipur, in a graveyard that was also the last resting place of the the Pir Sahib of Taltala, a Sufi saint of the Qadiriya order, whose murids or followers his family had been.

Ashraf Ali Khan Chowdhury may not have left, despite the considerable eminence to which he rose, a well-defined mark in the history of his times (which by many accounts he was capable of), but in his own time he was a well-known personality and acquainted with most, if not all of the eminent persons of Bengal. In appearance, he was blessed with striking good looks. Tall and fair-skinned and good humoured, he usually had, as many acquaintances later described him, a smile beneath his curling handlebar moustaches. Always courteous and affable in company, he maintained throughout his life the values of the Bengali Muslim gentleman: he was helpful to others, generous with all, respectful of elders, a loving father and a caring husband. The writer of this article, his grandson, can testify that in Rajshahi, some 25 to 30 years after Ashraf Ali’s death there were people of various stations in life, high and low, Hindus and Muslims, who remembered him not only with respect but also with genuine affection and would reminisce of the occasions he met them and, often, of what favours or gracious behaviour they had received from him. However, it is sad (for his lineal descendants, at least) that today, more than 60 years after he passed away, his name has been all but forgotten even in his hometown of Natore. Nevertheless, some historians and researchers have resuscitated his name and reputation and have written commemorations of him in various collections of local history.

Upon his death he left behind his wife Sabera Khatun who survived him for 23 years and died, after some eight years of physical paralysis, at the house of her eldest daughter Shafia in Tangail in the district of Mymensingh. She was buried beside her second daughter, Razia, in the family graveyard of her son-in-law, Nawabzada Syed Hasan Ali, at Dhanbari, in the district of Mymensingh.

Sabera Khatun, Swamibagh, Dhaka 1953

Of the six daughters whom he also left behind, two had been married in his lifetime. Shafia, the eldest, was married in 1928 to Syed Mohabbat Ali of Dilduar who belonged a distinguished zamindar family that had its principal seat (now demolished and extinct) at Dilduar, in the district of Mymensingh, near the subdivisional town of Tangail, where the family owned extensive property. Shafia had eight children, four sons and four daughters: Enayet (nicknamed Intu; died 1967), Marhamat (Mintu), Basharat (Chhutka; died 1991) , Munira, Muzia, Najabat (Nanna), Nayera and Nazera. Syed Mohabbat Ali died in Tangail in 1971, Shafia survived her husband for ten years and died in Dhaka in 1981. Ashraf Ali’s second daughter, Razia, was married in 1929 to his nephew, Syed Hasan Ali of Dhanbari, also in the district of Mymensingh, son of Ashraf Ali’s cousin, Nawab Nawab Ali Chowdhury. Dhanbari too was the seat (the residential mansion and adjuncts of which still survive) of an old and honoured zamindar family, and was the ancestral estate of Syed Hasan Ali. Razia died childless in 1948.

Of the four remaining daughters, Rabea was married in 1942 to Hamoodur Rahman, then a practising barrister in the Calcutta High Court and who, before the Partition of 1947, also served a term as the Deputy Mayor of Calcutta. After Partition, he moved to Dhaka and, after practicing law for a while, became a Judge of the East Pakistan High Court in 1954. In 1958, he was appointed Vice Chancellor of the University of Dhaka. He was elevated to a bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 1960, and ended his career in the distinguished position of Chief Justice of Pakistan in 1976 before his death in 1981. Rabea had nine children, four daughters and five sons: Farzana, Raihana (died 2005), Mahmood, Farhana (died 1998), Erfana (died 1980), Hamed, Hameed, Reaz and Mahfuz. She died in Lahore on 9 August 2002.

Afya was married in 1944 to Mutazz Obaydur Rehman of Allahabad, UP who was the part owner of one of pre-Partition India’s most famous publishing houses, Kitabistan of Allahabad. The firm was confiscated by the Government of India in 1949 under the provisions of the Evacuee Property Act and Afya’s family migrated to East Pakistan in 1956 and eventually settled in the city of Rajshahi where her husband died in September 1971. Afya had three children, two sons and a daughter: Ain, Aali and Areefa. She died on 5 April 2005, at her younger son’s residence in Rajshahi University, and lies buried in the University graveyard.

Asya, the fifth daughter, was married in 1948 to Nawabzada Syed Hasan Ali after the death the same year of his first wife, Asya’s elder sister, Razia. Nawabzada Hasan Ali was active in electoral politics in both pre- and post-Partition Bengal. He had been a member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly and later, after he moved to Dhaka, was elected to the East Pakistan Provincial Assembly from his constituency of Dhanbari in Mymensingh. He served as provincial Minister of Commerce and Industry in 1961-62. He was elected to the Bangladesh Jatiyo Sangsad (Parliament) in 1979, a little more than a year before his death in 1981. Asya died in 1986, leaving behind an only child, Ashiqua (Shahla). She was buried in her husband’s ancestral graveyard at Dhanbari, beside her husband, her elder sister Razia and her mother.

Zakia, Ashraf Ali’s youngest daughter, married, in 1950, Badruddin Ahmed who was at the time a Major in the Indian Army. Retiring from the army in 1955 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, Badruddin Ahmed migrated to Pakistan that year and resided for a while at Karachi. In 1956 he moved to Dhaka to practice law and eventually became the senior and founding partner of B.Ahmed and Company, the most reputed law firm in Bangladesh. He died in 2000, survived by his wife, two sons and five daughters, Sharfuddin, Adiba, Anisa, Adina, Aliya, Shamsuddin and Amina. Zakia resides at present in Dhaka.

Sons-in-law of Ashraf Ali Khan Chowdhury: from left to right: Mr. Badruddin Ahmed, Nawabzada Syed Hasan Ali Chowdhury, Justice Hamoodur Rahman, Mr. Syed Mohabbat Ali, Mr. Mutazz Obaydur Rehman at the marriage of Mr Mohabbat Ali’s eldest daughter Munira to Captain M. Atiqur Rahman at Shahbagh Hotel, Dhaka in March 1961.

The progeny of Ashraf Ali Khan Chowdhury and Sabera Khatun are today spread over two countries of the subcontinent, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and there are some who have settled permanently in countries abroad such as the UK and the USA. Though none of their lineal descendants remain at the homestead in Natore, collateral branches of the family continue to reside there, some members of whom have achieved distinction locally and nationally in different fields. Some are leading businessmen of the town (which is no longer the tiny hamlet it was in his lifetime but has become a sizeable community); some are, and have been, involved in politics in the tradition of their ancestors. To mention a few, Abdus Sobhan Khan Chowdhury began his career in the Education Service of pre-Partition Bengal and eventually retired as a distinguished civil servant. Abdus Sattar Khan Chowdhury (popularly known as Madhu Mia) was, since the 1950’s, a leading politician associated with the Council Muslim League, who held several elective positions. His cousin Hurum Khan Chowdhury, was involved in business as well as politics and held for many years the office of the Chairman of Natore Municipality. One of the leading business houses of Bangladesh, the Pran Group, is owned by Major General (retired) Amjad Khan Chowdhury (though he does not live in Natore) and who is today perhaps the most distinguished representative of his family. The Natore Khan Chowdhurys therefore still very much retain an honoured and active presence in the home that has been theirs for over two centuries.