Two words, coined in 1921 at a Congress session in Ahmedabad, would go on to be shouted by revolutionaries, scrawled on prison walls, and carried, decades later, to the gallows by Bhagat Singh himself: “Inquilab Zindabad” — Long Live the Revolution. The man who coined that immortal slogan was not a soldier or a firebrand orator but a gentle, devout ghazal-writer named Hasrat Mohani, who also happened to spend a good part of his life travelling to Mathura to sing to Krishna, wearing coarse hand-spun khadi years before Gandhi made it the uniform of the freedom movement, and refusing, on principle, every government perk that came his way — including, famously, upgrading past third-class train travel, on the grounds that “there is no fourth class.”

Mohani’s life defies easy categorisation: a practising Muslim who worshipped at Krishna temples, a member of the Muslim League who refused Partition and stayed in India, a founding figure of the Communist Party of India who called himself a “Sufi, momin, and Communist Muslim” in the very same breath, and a poet capable of writing one of Urdu’s most delicate love ghazals in a life otherwise dominated by prison cells and political combat.

Who Was Hasrat Mohani?

Hasrat Mohani was an Urdu poet, journalist, and Indian independence activist whose short, unforgettable slogan “Inquilab Zindabad” became the single most enduring rallying cry of the anti-colonial struggle, and remains widely used in Indian political life to this day. Born Syed Fazl-ul-Hasan, he worked simultaneously and with equal seriousness as a tender ghazal-writer in the classical tradition and as one of the freedom movement’s most uncompromising, ahead-of-his-time political voices — a man willing to argue against Gandhi, Jinnah, and Ambedkar alike whenever he felt a position fell short of genuine justice.

Despite this extraordinary record of firsts, historians have long noted that Mohani remains one of the more marginalised names in the popular memory of the Indian freedom struggle — a poet-revolutionary whose refusal to fit neatly into any single camp, religious or political, may be exactly why his story is less told than his slogan is shouted.

From a Zamindar’s Son to a Rebel in Khadi

Mohani was born on 1 January 1875 in Mohan, a small town in the Unnao district of the United Provinces, into a zamindar (landowning) family whose ancestors had migrated generations earlier from Nishapur, in Iran. He received his early education in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu at home before proving himself a genuinely brilliant student — topping entrance examinations at two different institutions simultaneously, a feat impressive enough to draw the attention of Sir Ziauddin of Aligarh, who summoned the young Fazl-ul-Hasan to join the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, the institution that would later become Aligarh Muslim University.

At Aligarh, alongside classmates including Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Maulana Shaukat Ali, Mohani earned his BA but abandoned subsequent legal studies to devote himself instead to journalism and activism. He cut a deliberately unconventional figure even as a student — eschewing the fashionable dress of his Aligarh peers for a plain kurta, carrying his paan daan (betel-leaf case) everywhere, and writing poetry that raised eyebrows among the college’s more orthodox community, who found his manner and dress irritatingly unorthodox.

A Journalist Jailed Before He Was Thirty

In 1903, the same year he graduated, Mohani launched the Urdu monthly journal Urdu-e-Mualla from Aligarh, using it as a platform to criticise British colonial policy and stoke nationalist sentiment among his readers — including, notably, an article criticising British policy in Egypt. The British response was swift and punitive: Mohani was fined 3,000 rupees, an amount his entire assessed property could not cover, since it summed to barely 50 rupees. Unable to pay, he was sent to prison — the first of what would become many imprisonments over the following decades, during which political prisoners of the era were treated as common criminals and forced into manual labour.

Mohani had joined the Indian National Congress in 1903 or 1904 and, in 1905, thrown himself into the Swadeshi movement associated with Bal Gangadhar Tilak — years before Gandhi’s own return to India would make swadeshi and khadi household terms. Mohani, in fact, had already adopted coarse, hand-spun khadi in his teens, well ahead of the movement Gandhi would later lead.

Inquilab Zindabad: A Slogan That Outlived Empires

The moment for which Mohani is now best remembered came at the 1921 Ahmedabad session of the Indian National Congress, where, alongside the communist leader Swami Kumaranand, he became the first political figure to demand complete independence — Poorna Swaraj — from British rule, years before this became official Congress policy. It was at this same historic session that he coined the phrase that would define the movement’s spirit for the rest of its history: “Inquilab Zindabad,” Long Live the Revolution.

The slogan Mohani coined took on a life far beyond his own, most famously carried by the revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who shouted “Inquilab Zindabad” while throwing a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly in 1929 and again before his execution — cementing the phrase permanently into the language of Indian resistance, and, later, into the vocabulary of protest movements well beyond India’s borders.

The Maulana Who Loved Krishna

Perhaps no detail of Mohani’s life captures his unusual spirit better than his devotion to Krishna. A practising Muslim throughout his life who performed the Hajj pilgrimage several times, Mohani was also a regular visitor to Mathura, where he celebrated Krishna Janmashtami and wrote ghazals of tender, unmistakably devotional longing for the god — verse indistinguishable in its intensity from any traditional love poem, except that its beloved was divine.

This syncretic devotion was never a contradiction for Mohani, who identified himself in verse as simultaneously a Sufi, a momin (a faithful Muslim), and a Communist — a rare, deliberate refusal to let any single label exhaust who he was.

Communist, Congressman, and League Member — All at Once

Mohani’s political career was genuinely unusual in its breadth. He worked within the Indian National Congress for years, took an active part in the Khilafat Movement of 1919, and was also a founding figure of the Communist Party of India — his house in Kanpur served as the organising centre for the landmark 1925 Kanpur Communist Conference, India’s first all-India communist gathering, at which he was elected chairman of the reception committee and later joined the party’s Central Executive Committee. Deeply influenced by the Russian Revolution, Mohani discussed Marxism directly with Gandhi during their shared time in prison and earned praise from Subhas Chandra Bose for his revolutionary conviction.

At the same time, Mohani was also active in the All India Muslim League, winning a seat in the 1946 provincial assembly elections on a League ticket — even as he remained staunchly, publicly opposed to the partition of India that the League’s leadership was pursuing. After independence, when most League members who remained in the country either migrated to Pakistan or fell silent, Mohani was one of only 28 League members who stayed on to participate in India’s Constituent Assembly, determined to represent India’s Muslim population directly rather than abandon them to a divided future.

A Life of Deliberate Poverty

Mohani wore his simplicity, in the words of one biographer, almost as “a badge of courage.” As a member of the Constituent Assembly tasked with drafting India’s Constitution, he refused government allowances and declined an official residence, choosing instead to live in mosques and travel to Parliament in a shared tonga. He habitually rode in third-class railway carriages, and when asked why, is said to have replied, with characteristic dry wit, that there was no fourth class available.

Within the Constituent Assembly itself, Mohani proved just as uncompromising as he had been throughout his political career — intervening in debates on federalism, the Preamble, minority reservations, and the abolition of the zamindari system (a striking position for a man born into a zamindar family himself), and expressing open dissatisfaction with the final constitutional text. He ultimately declined to sign the finished Constitution, holding firm to his own reservations even at the moment of the document’s completion.

Poet of the Classical and the Contemporary

Away from politics, Mohani is remembered as a ghazal-writer who managed to keep the classical form alive at a moment when it was in danger of being marginalised by more overtly modernist and political poetry. He combined the best values of classical craft with a willingness to admit contemporary social and political reality into his verse — writing on love and romance in the traditional register while also finding room for the urgent realities of his own era.

His ghazal “Chupke Chupke Raat Din,” a tender, aching meditation on secret love and remembered intimacy, remains one of the most beloved compositions in the ghazal repertoire, memorably sung by both Ghulam Ali and Jagjit Singh and later featured in the 1982 film Nikaah — proof that the same man who coined a revolutionary slogan could also write some of Urdu’s gentlest romantic poetry. His scholarly output included an annotated edition of Ghalib’s poetry, Sharh-e-Kalam-e-Ghalib, and a prison diary, Mushahidaat-e-Zindaan (“Observations in Prison”), documenting firsthand the conditions he endured across his many incarcerations.

Final Years and Death

Mohani remained politically active and outspoken until close to the end of his life, continuing to challenge figures across the political spectrum — Gandhi, Jinnah, and Ambedkar among them — whenever he judged a position insufficiently just. He died in Lucknow on 13 May 1951, having lived to see the independence he had demanded thirty years before anyone else in the Congress was willing to say the words aloud.

Legacy: The Slogan and the Man Behind It

Hasrat Mohani’s most visible legacy is, without question, “Inquilab Zindabad” — a phrase that has long since outgrown its coiner, chanted at protests and political rallies across the subcontinent and beyond, more than a century after Mohani first spoke it. The Indian government issued a commemorative postage stamp in his honour in 2014, recognising him as poet, journalist, freedom fighter, and parliamentarian all at once — an accurate, if necessarily incomplete, summary of a life that resists tidy labels.

What deserves equal remembering, though, is the quieter half of that legacy: a man who could travel third class by principle, worship Krishna as a devout Muslim, argue fearlessly with the most powerful leaders of his age, and still find, somewhere in the middle of all that conviction, the tenderness to write one of Urdu’s most delicate love ghazals. Few revolutionaries have carried both fire and gentleness so completely, or so unapologetically, side by side.

Frequently Asked Questions

Explore more: All Shayars · Mirza Ghalib · Allama Iqbal · Browse Categories