M. C. Chagla

Mahommedali Currim Chagla (30 September 1900 – 9 February 1981), known as M. C. Chagla, was an Indian jurist, diplomat and cabinet minister. Chief justice of the Bombay High Court from 1947 to 1958, he went on to represent India in Washington and London before joining the Union cabinet, and his autobiography Roses in December (1973) made him one of the best-known Indian judges of his century. ^{1 2}

Chagla was born in Bombay to a well-off Gujarati Ismaili Khoja family and educated at St Xavier's and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read modern history. Called to the Bombay bar in 1922, he worked alongside Jamshedji Kanga and Muhammad Ali Jinnah and taught law at the Government Law College with B. R. Ambedkar. He became a judge of the Bombay High Court in 1941 and its chief justice in 1947 — the first Indian to hold that office after independence — serving until 1958, and also acted as governor of Bombay state in 1956. As the one-man commission on the Mundhra scandal his findings forced the resignation of Finance Minister T. T. Krishnamachari. ¹

After a term as an ad hoc judge of the International Court of Justice, Chagla served as ambassador to the United States (1958–1961) and high commissioner to the United Kingdom (1962–1963). On his return he joined the Union cabinet as minister of education (1963–1966) and then minister of external affairs (1966–1967), after which he returned to legal practice and writing. He protested vehemently against the Emergency of 1975–1977. He died of heart failure at his club in Bombay on 9 February 1981; by his own wish he was cremated instead of receiving a traditional Muslim burial, and the Bombay High Court closed in his honour. His Ismaili Khoja origin is his family's background, recorded in his data note; no source read names a personal school for the man himself, and none is recorded. ^{1 2}

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