Syed Hasan Imam

Hasan Imam, son of Syed Imdad Imam and younger brother of Sir Ali Imam, was born at Neora village, Patna district, Bihar, on 31 August 1871 ¹. His father was a professor of history at Patna College, and one of his ancestors had been a private tutor to the emperor Aurangzeb ¹. After schooling frequently interrupted by ill-health, he left for England in July 1889, joined the Middle Temple, campaigned there for Dadabhai Naoroji in the 1891 general election, and was called to the Bar in 1892 ¹.

He practised at the Calcutta High Court and became its judge in 1912; when the Patna High Court was established in March 1916 he resigned the judgeship and practised at Patna ¹. Barristers such as Chittaranjan Das and H. D. Bose considered him the best barrister in British India ¹. In October 1909 he was elected president of the Bihar Congress Committee, and in November 1917 he was among the Indian leaders who called on Secretary of State Edwin Montagu, who listed him among "the real giants of the Indian Political World" ¹.

He presided over the special session of the Indian National Congress at Bombay in 1918, convened to consider the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms, playing a moderating role in a sharply divided session ¹. A staunch constitutionalist, he opposed the ideology of the Non-Cooperation movement ¹. He died on 19 April 1933 ¹.

The English article attests the man himself directly: "A Shia Muslim by faith, he belonged to a distinguished, educated landed family" ¹. Wikidata's structured religion statements also give Shia Islam ², but structured data is not a text, and no second independent text attesting his Shia faith has been found — the biographical-dictionary tradition behind the sentence keeps to his career — so the museum's data record leaves his school unknown, flagged for the founder, with the Shia attestation preserved exactly as the article gives it. The Urdu article names no school ³.

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