Friday, March 5, 2010

Choudhury Rahmat Ali

Choudhury Rahmat Ali was born in a Gujjar family in the town of Balachaur in Hoshiarpur District of Punjab, British India, on 16 Nov, 1897. After graduating from Islamia Madrasa Lahore in 1918, he taught at Aitchison College Lahore before continuing Law studies at Punjab University. In 1930 he moved to England to join Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1931. In 1933, he published a pamplet , Now or Never   , coining the word Pakistan for the first time . Subsequently, he obtained a B.A. degree in 1933 and MA in 1940 from University of Cambridge . 
He became the Secretary of Pakistan Movement in UK with Muhammad Aslam Khan Khattak as president, and Dr, Abdur Rahim as Vice-President. In this organisation the name PAKISTAN was first suggested. There are several accounts to the conceptualising of the name. According to a friend (Abdul Kareem Jabbar)the came up when Rahmat Ali was walking along the banks of the Tames in 1932 with his friends Pir Absan-ud-Din and Khawja Abdul Rahim. According to Rahmat Ali's secretary Miss Frost , he came up with the idea of the name Pakistan while riding on the top of a london bus. 
In the early 1930s Ali Began writing about the formation of a Muslim nation in India. On January, 28, 1933, he voiced his ideas in the pamplet entitled Now or never; Are we to live or Perish forever?     
The word Pakistan referred to the five northern units of India. Viz; Punjab, (Afghanistan Province), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan. By the end of 1933, Pakistan become common vocabulary where an "i" was added to ease pronunciation (as in Afghan-i-stan.
In a subsequent book Rahmat Ali discussed the etymologyin further detail. 'Pakistan' is both a Persian and an Urdu word. It is composed of letters taken from the names of  our South Asia homeland; that is Punjab, Afghania, kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan.Pak means the land of the pure.