The lane leading from the iconic Mahim Dargah to Mahim police station houses an important address: Nurie Villa. However, one may never know this unless they enter the haveli-like home and meet its owner, Owais Shakir Nurie. In the house's delightfully decorated drawing room, the 54-year-old Owais pores over a heap of old letters carefully kept in folders. These letters, mostly typed but many handwritten, reveal much about what Owais calls 'the unsung hero, the forgotten freedom fighter who took Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah head on.' The correspondence is addressed to Barrister Mohammed Yaseen (M Y) Nurie (1895-1971), Owais's grandfather, who lies forgotten in the saga of the freedom struggle.
If India's freedom movement, especially the years after the Quit India Movement leading to Independence and marred by Partition, was strikingly eventful, Nurie must occupy the place of an important player. Educated at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College (Aligarh Muslim University since 1920), a barrister from England, incarcerated for two years during the Quit India Movement (1942), Nurie opposed Jinnah so vehemently that Jinnah called him 'my fiercest competitor.' Elected as an MLA from Ahmedabad in the 1937 provincial elections for the Bombay province (which included Gujarat), he became Minister of Public Works in the B G Kher cabinet. Despite playing multiple roles, he remains largely unsung. Letters written to him by luminaries like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Morarji Desai, Syed Mahmud (External Affairs Minister), V K Krishna Menon (Defence Minister), and S K Patil (Transport and Communications Minister) testify to Nurie's importance in national and Maharashtra politics.
If Nurie does not figure immediately in the national imagination, created and promoted post-Independence through careful curation and diligent deletion, blame it on the 'syndicate' within the Congress party that suffered Indira Gandhi's wrath for opposing her politics. 'Since my grandfather was in the syndicate led by the likes of K Kamraj and Morarji Desai, he too was denied positions in the 1960s and a place in government-backed history projects,' says Owais, a government contractor. 'My father (Shakir Nurie) had seen how his father and the family suffered for siding with the Syndicate.' The family was evicted from its rented Colaba home. 'Nobody knew that there existed a tranche of letters, photographs, and other documents related to my grandfather's role in the freedom struggle and his interactions with so many important leaders till I opened the cloth bundle dumped at our Bewar (Rajasthan) haveli,' adds Owais.
In a handwritten letter dated November 17, 1956, Nehru profusely thanks Nurie for his birthday wishes. Through a July 31, 1954 letter from Istanbul (Turkey), a director friend informs Nurie how Mehboob Khan-directed, Dilip Kumar-starrer 'Aan' (1952) was a huge success in Egypt and expresses a desire to show it in Turkey as well. Among the Nurie papers is a detailed protest letter that Nurie lodged against a proposal to turn the historic Khilafat House in Byculla into a musafirkhana for Haj pilgrims. 'It was due to his protest that the Khilafat House did not become the Haj House (it came up much later near Crawford Market). Nurie sahab had served the Khilafat Movement and knew its importance in our national life,' observes Khilafat House's trustee Rauf Pathan, currently engaged in the redevelopment of this iconic building.
Owais thanks his friend Sunil Bhatia, who drew his attention to the blog created by the Ministry of Culture as part of its initiative on 'unsung heroes' under the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav. Ministry officials jumped with excitement when they saw some of the letters and requested Owais to collect and add more credible information to the project on Nurie's life. At a meeting in 2018 in Ahmedabad, held by businessman Zafar Sareshwala, a Hindu businessman felicitated Owais after learning that he carried the Nurie legacy—the freedom fighter who opposed Jinnah and, as PWD minister (1937-39), must have overseen work on Queen's Necklace, Marine Drive.
