by Kenneth X. Robbins and John Mcleod
In 1992 the editor of the Times of India telephoned one of Mumbai’s most prominent businessmen, Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied. The editor asked Hamied “as a Muslim leader” his opinion on the communal riots then taking place in the city. Hamied replied: “Why aren’t you asking me as an Indian Jew? Because my name is Hamied? My mother was Jewish!” His maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust.
K. A. and Luba
Hamied, chairman of one of India’s largest pharmaceutical firms, is the son of an aristocratic Muslim scientist from India and a Jewish Communist from what is now Lithuania. Defined by his parents’ extraordinary marriage, he unites his father’s scientific skills, business acumen, and Indian patriotism with his mother’s compassion for the less fortunate. He accuses the Western pharmaceutical industry of “holding 3 billion people in the Third World to ransom by using their monopoly status to charge higher prices,” and has devoted himself to making inexpensive, life-saving generic medications for the inhabitants of poorer countries.
India’s Robin Hood, Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied: maker of generic life-saving medications
and scourge of the giant multi-national pharmaceutical houses
Khwaja Abdul Hamied (1898-1972)
Yusuf Hamied’s father, Khwaja Abdul (K. A.) Hamied, was born in Aligarh in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His paternal grandfather Khwaja Abdul Ali (1862-1948) traced his lineage through spiritual guides to the Moghul emperors of India back to Khwaja Ubaidullah Ahrar (1403-1490), a great Naqshbandi Sufi in Uzbekistan. His mother Masud Jehan Begum (1872-1957) came from the family of Shah Shuja ul-Mulk, the pro-British emir of Afghanistan (1803-1809 and 1839-1842), whose family fled to India after his assassination in an anti-British uprising. Khwaja Abdul Ali’s uncle was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1819-1898), the great Muslim educational and social reformer.
K. A. Hamied with his his father, brothers, nieces, and son Yusuf
Family of K. A. Hamied
Khwaja Abdul Ali entered the judicial service of the British government in India, but his son K. A. Hamied passionately opposed “the evils of foreign rule.” When Mohandas Gandhi’s non-coöperation movement called for a boycott of government-run educational institutions, Hamied organized a strike at his school, Muir Central College. As a result he was expelled from the university, then arrested when he tried to disrupt graduation ceremonies.
Hamied now returned to Aligarh, where Muslim nationalist leaders founded a new university, Jamia Millia Islamia, which refused government funding. Hamied taught chemistry there. He also supervised the production and sale of khadi, or homespun cloth, which Gandhi had made a central element of Indian nationalism. At his maternal uncle’s home he first met Gandhi as well as Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal, later the first prime minister of India.
K. A. Hamied was active in Indian political affairs throughout his life
K. A. and Luba Hamied with his good friend Zakir Hussein, who became president of India
While teaching at Jamia, K. A. Hamied began a lifelong friendship with Zakir Hussain, later president of India. Hamied and Hussain later left for Germany to pursue graduate studies. Hamied studied with one of the world’s leading chemists, professor A. Rosenheim.
Luba Derczanska (1903-1991)
One day in 1925 Hamied joined some friends on a lake cruise near Berlin. One of the passengers on the boat was a young woman named, Luba Derczanska. Luba was born in Wilno in Russian Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) and had come to Berlin to study. From their first meeting, the romance between Abdul Hamied and Luba Derczanska blossomed. In 1928, Hamied married Luba in Berlin’s only mosque, and the following year they were again married in the Choral Synagogue in Wilno, and the marriage was “solemnized” at a register office in London.
Luba was active in Communist circles in Berlin and sought to bring her Indian beau into the movement: the first gift that she ever gave Hamied was a postcard of Lenin and for a time the couple were regulars at party meetings. (In later life, Hamied had very strong reservations and concerns about Communism.) Hamied was a prominent member of Indian revolutionary circles in India.
K. A. Hamied and Luba with maulana Mahommad Ali Jauhar
(with trademark crescent on his hat), the leader of the pan-
Islamic Khilafat movement. Berlin, 1928
Their parents were open-minded and welcoming, and the warmth with which Luba’s parents Rubin and Paulina greeted Hamied on his first visit to Wilno was matched by the welcome extended to Luba by Abdul Ali and Masud Jehan when she went to Aligarh.
The Hamieds with Luba’s family in 1929. In the center are Luba’s brother
Zorach and aunt. Zorach Derczanski came to India in 1934. The aunt came
to India in 1938 and was joined there in 1946 by her non-Jewish husband
Arthur Tänzler, a World War I German flying ace.
Their son Yusuf was born in Wilno during his parents’ last visit there before the Holocaust. Yusuf is the Arabic form of the Hebrew name Joseph. It was the name of Luba’s grandfather, and hence pleasing to her family, as well as the first name of Polish president Józef Piłsudski, and so flattering to the Hamieds’ Polish friends. A month after his birth, Yusuf’s parents took him back to Bombay.
The Hamieds with Luba’s parents and their children
Yusuf and Sophie
Yusuf and Sophie with their paternal grandmother Masud Jehan
Begum, who was descended from the family of emir Shuja ul-Mulk
of Afghanistan
Though Luba was not an observant Jew, her son Yusuf chose to memorialize her at the most active Indian synagogue. He heavily supported the reconstruction of the Shaar Hashamaim [Gate of Heaven] Synagogue in the city of Thane [now part of the greater Bombay/Mumbai metropolitan region].
Shaar Hashamaim Synagogue, Thane
Hamied’s Views on Religion
K. A. Hamied defined himself as an Indian who happened to be a Muslim and was openly hostile towards the Muslim League. He rejected the notion that Hindus and Muslims were “separate nations” as Muhammad Ali Jinnah argued. Unlike his brothers who opted for Pakistan, he always hoped for reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims within India.
In a speech to the Inter-Religious Seminar in Delhi on October 18, 1971, K. A. said that the “study of religion is my special hobby” and that “the basic attributes of this mysterious power, by whatever name we call it, are the same in all religions.” He quoted Zoroaster, Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and Guru Nanak [founder, prophet and first guru of Sikhims] as “prophets” and said that “an ideal man must be a good man by virtue of his actions in society [and] may belong to any religion so long as he follows the tenets of his religion.”
K. A. Hamied maintained there is “no compulsion in religion”
Hamied always and enthusiastically urged for a partnership between Jews and Muslims. He loved to talk about Islamic Spain, where Jews and Muslims had joined to create a golden age, and once said that “if the Jews with their wealth, knowledge and scientific skill and Arabs made a common cause, they would have a strong empire covering West Asia and the entire coast of [the] South Mediterranean”. He even “asked [Egyptian] president Nasser as to why he was seeking help from the Communists, who were mulhids [non-believers in God], to fight Jews, who were nearer to Islam.” He always emphasized “the Arabs and Israelis should see the necessity of getting out of this whirlpool of Russian and Western power politics” and “sit together at a round table conference away from Western powers to thrash out their differences and carve out a new future based on ancient friendship, alliance and mutual regard”.
The Holocaust
He regularly visited Germany where he had many friends as well as business dealings. Once Germans mistook him for a Jew and insulted him. He foresaw something far worse than discrimination and insults, and urged his Jewish friends to leave Germany. They insisted that, as members of the intellectual élite, they had nothing to worry about.
The horrors of the Holocaust were to touch Hamied and Luba directly. In June of 1941 Nazi troops occupied Wilno and almost immediately began the extermination of the city’s Jews. Luba’s siblings survived: her brother Zorach was working for Hamied in Bombay, and her Communist sisters had escaped to Moscow before the Germans arrived.
The Nazis murdered her elderly parents, however, who were unable to emigrate. Hamied tried to obtain visas so his in-laws could come to India. The papers finally came through two weeks after the Derczanskis were killed.
Their son Yusuf was very moved when in 2008, during a visit to his birthplace, Vilnius, he went to the Ponary forest, where German units massacred up to 100,000 people, the great majority of them Jews. Recently he commissioned statues of Gandhi and his Lithuanian Jewish disciple Hermann Kallenbach in Vilnius. In honor of his mother, he sponsored a concert there by his life-long friend Zubin Mehta.
Yusuf, though focused on the lessons of the Holocaust, does not feel threatened personally as a Jew. He sees anti-Muslim mob violence in Bombay as particularly chilling, since to him it evokes the fear that Indian Muslims could share the same fate as European Jews. He remembers his father’s stories of Jewish friends who believed that their elevated place in society would protect them, and he says that Indian Muslims who echo this sentiment are as naïve as European Jews were.
CIPLA
After several years in India Hamied acgieved success as a businessman and in 1935 he founded the Chemical, Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories, or CIPLA. It has grown to become one of India’s most important pharmaceutical companies.
K. A. and Yusuf Hamied created a successful multinational
pharmaceutical company with a social conscience.
K. A. Hamied had written in the Times of India on December 11, 1964, that patent law should enforce “compulsory licensing” to other manufacturers to prevent monopolistic predatory pricing. Later Yusuf returned to this same cause in the case of the astronomical pricing of AIDS medications by patent holders. By reverse-engineering the first medication and anti-retroviral cocktails effective against HIV and AIDS and selling them at a fraction of the price, he helped save millions of lives.
Perhaps with the murders of his own grandparents and six million other Jews fresh in his mind, Yusuf has called Big Pharma “global serial killers,” “merchants of death,” and “death profiteers.” He sees the lack of access to life-saving medication by poor people in the developing world due to cost as a form of “selective genocide in healthcare” driven by Big Pharma’s desire for profits.
Yusuf Hamied addressing the Indian Drug Manufacturers Association, 1976
Note: A more comprehensive study of the Hamieds by the authors will be included in one of seven forthcoming volumes dealing with Jews in South Asia. This project, conceived by Kenneth X. Robbins, has already resulted in the publication of “Western Jews in India” and “Jews and the Indian National Art Project” as well as the current American Sephardi Federation exhibition “Baghdadis and the Bene Israel in Bollywood and Beyond: Indian Jews in the Movies. Objects and Artifacts from the Kenneth and Joyce Robbins Collection.” Dr. Robbins is presently working with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts on a comprehensive exhibition dealing with Jewish communities in India and contributions to India made by Jews.
Authors:
Dr. Kenneth X. Robbins is a collector and independent scholar. He has curated more than a dozen Indian exhibits and five scholarly conferences. In addition to publishing more than seventy articles, he is co-editor of “Western Jews in India: From the Fifteenth Century to the Present” (2013), “Jews and the Indian National Art Project” (2015) and several other volumes about Jews in South Asia.
Dr. John McLeod holds a PhD in Indian history from the University of Toronto and is professor of history at the University of Louisville. He is the author of “Sovereignty, Power, Control: Politics in the States of Western India, 1916-1947” (Brill, 1999; South Asian edition Decent Books, 2007) and “The History of India” (2nd edition, ABC-Clio, 2015), and with Kenneth X. Robbins is the co-editor of “African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat” (Mapin, 2006). He is currently completing a biography of the Indian statesman and community leader Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree.
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For more stories, read Café Dissensus Everyday, the blog of Café Dissensus Magazine. Cafe Dissensus is an alternative magazine dealing in art, culture, literature, and politics. It’s based in New York City, USA. We DISSENT. Our ISSN No: ISSN 2373-177X. A very specific urge behind this magazine is to challenge the contemporary parochial attitude in Indian media. Every “mainstream”–we know the term is contentious and yet we know the newspapers and magazines that fit this bill–newspaper/magazine in India seems to be influenced by their business interests which force them to align with particular political parties–Congress, BJP, CPIM/CPI, etc., despite their claim to the contrary. There is a flourishing community media in India as well. But they cater to narrow community interests, despite their excellent service to their cause. For example, the dalit magazines or the Muslim/Islamic webzines. While ‘Cafe Dissensus’ will certainly try to undermine the covert majoritarian biases of the ‘mainstream’ media, we believe, ‘minoritarian media’ is not the way to go. Then there are webzines which align themselves to various straight-jacketed ideologies–Left, Right, Center etc. Such ideologies make it imperative that one views the world through jaundiced eyes. We always wanted a magazine on issues that will offer a space for dissenting voices. Dissenting voices, broadly conceived. We are the free thinkers. Despite our own ideological leanings, we will strive to preserve this magazine as a space for free thinkers. We want honest debate and discussion that should not be colored by any fear or favor. We are not a magazine for news reporting. We want to devote ourselves to analyzing issues that need to be discussed and debated.
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