Key Points
- Ally Bahadur Khan is said to have ‘accidentally’ boarded a ship from Karachi bound for Brisbane in 1895
- Mumtaz Malik, an Islamabad-based lawyer, hopes to track down his long-lost family in Australia
- Mr Malik says the last communication between family members in pre-partition India and Australia was in the 1940s
Mumtaz Malik was about 12, living in what is today Pakistan-administered Kashmir, when he first heard the story of his grandfather’s "rebellious" brother, Ally Bahadur Khan.
According to family lore, Mr Malik's granduncle left the village of Tatta Paani in 1895 and boarded a ship he thought was bound for Britain, only to eventually arrive in Brisbane, Australia.
“One cold night, we were sitting around the old wood stove in the village and my dad started telling me about his uncle who left for the West and never came back,” Mr Malik tells SBS Urdu.
“We were told he had a rebellious nature, that he wanted to go to a better place where he could earn more. He had left his village before but came back on his brother’s advice.
“However, later he left for Karachi and boarded a ship which took him to Australia, when he thought he was going to the UK.”
Piecing together a puzzle
A lawyer by profession, Mr Malik is now aged in his seventies and lives in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
He says the recent explosion of social media spurred him to step up his search for his granduncle's descendants in Australia.
Armed with letters and other clues collected across more than a half a century, he likens the search to piecing together a complex jigsaw puzzle.
One such clue is an Elgin pocket watch Ally Bahadur Khan sent to his nephew - Mr Malik’s father - sometime in the early 1920s.
A pocket watch Mr Malik says his granduncle Ally Bahadur Khan sent his father from Australia sometime in the 1920s. Source: Supplied by Mumtaz Malik
Mr Malik also points to a letter written in 1934 by Ayoub Ally Bahadur Khan, who introduced himself as Ally Bahadur Khan’s son.
Ayoub’s letter, written in English and addressed to Mr Malik’s uncle, speaks of a desire to know more about his family back in India (before partition). He also mentions that he had four sisters and one daughter in Australia at the time.
Scanned copy of a letter written in 1934 by Ayoub Ally Bahadur Khan to his cousin Ghulam Muhammad. Source: Supplied by Mumtaz Malik
I don’t know why we stopped getting replies; was there a communication problem? At that time very few people understood the English language and usually you had to take a letter to someone to translate it.
“Sometimes that completely changed the meaning. I should know, I am a lawyer and it happened with me a lot,” he laughs.
Mr Malik claims many other letters have been lost over time.
“I still remember that Ayoub sent us an old black and white picture of himself in uniform wearing a cap. He told us he was a soldier of the king and that he had served during the Second World War,” he recalls.
Australian Defence Force records show that a man named Ayoub Ally Bahadur Khan served in the Australian army from June 1940 and was discharged in January 1944. He was enlisted for war service at Brisbane, Queensland, and his occupation was listed as mattress maker.
A picture of Ayoub Ally Bahadur Khan. Source: ADF archives
“I contacted one of my father’s cousins and found another letter, which was the last one written to us in the 1940s, and after that there was no contact,” he adds.
A letter Mr Malik's uncle sent to the Queensland police commissioner in 1954 in the hope of tracing Ally Bahadur Khan's descendants. Source: Supplied by Mumtaz Malik
His uncle wrote letters to the address provided, but never received any response.
Not giving up hope
Despite hitting many dead ends over the years, Mr Malik has not given up hope of tracking down his long-lost family members.
We want to see them; we want to see how they are doing in Australia. I want them to know about where their ancestors came from.
“I never saw him [Ally Bahadur Khan]. We have no pictures of him. We just came to know from Queensland Births, Deaths and Marriages that he died in 1955," an emotional Mr Malik says.
Mr Malik is a lawyer who lives in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. Source: Supplied by Mumtaz Malik
Ayoub Ally Bahadur Khan died in 1973, according to Queensland Births, Deaths and Marriages.
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