Aziz Ahmad

1870s–1925

Aziz Ahmad set up the Mission to Lascars or Indian Musalman Seamen in 1897 to provide support to Glasgow’s growing community of transient South Asian seafarers.

Ahmad was born in Lucknow, where he grew up. He arrived in Britain in the early to mid-1870s and went on to study at Glasgow University in 1883. However, he did not graduate. He had spent some time in London, accompanying the Reverend G. Small visiting lascar crews at London’s Victoria Dock and the Strangers’ Home.

Married to a Scottish woman with whom he had three children, his main source of income was lecturing, especially on Islam, further supplementing his income as a language tutor. During the 1880s Ahmad became active among the local community of South Asian seafarers, which led to the setting up of the Mission to Lascars in 1897. Ahmad was a converted Muslim, but his Mission took a distinct ecumenical approach. At the height of his activities, Ahmad provided support and comforts for some 2,000 lascars annually.

Beyond his missionary work, Ahmad was a regular contributor to local newspapers in the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, voicing his criticism of India’s colonial administration, leading to his surveillance by Glasgow’s local police force.

In 1909 he petitioned the India Office in London to not execute Madan Lal Dhingra, who had been sentenced for the murder of the Indian Army officer Curzon Wyllie. During the First World War, in 1916, Ahmad was forced to relocate to Bruntingthorpe, having been barred from entry to restricted areas in Scotland.

Aziz Ahmad’s name disappears from the official record around 1925. Ahmad found a way of connecting his welfare work and missionary work among lascars and Christian missionary societies with his criticism of the imperial administration of India in his journalism. In Britain, he instrumentalized the rhetoric of Christian charity and discourses of imperial loyalty in relation to his Mission to Lascars and accompanying campaigning literature to solicit subscriptions and donations.