Azimullah Khan

[1] He lost his father as a child and was rescued as a starving Muslim boy from the famine of 1837–38 along with his mother when they were provided shelter at a mission in Kanpur.

Nana Sahib was involved in an extended appeal to the British East India Company to pass on to him the £80,000 annual pension that his adoptive father (exiled to the Bithor) had been granted.

Nana Sahib chose Azimullah to lead a delegation to England in 1853 to plead his case with the Board of Control and the British Government.

[4] In England, Azimullah was taken under the wing of Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon; an intellectual and translator whose husband was a civil servant, court functionary and the cousin of the then Prime Minister.

Azimullah lodged with the Duff Gordons at their home in Esher, and in Lucie's company may have met her friends Dickens, Carlyle, Meredith, Tennyson, Browning and Thackeray (though there is no direct evidence).

There he met with the Times correspondent William Howard Russell, who noted the young Muslim official's interest in the losses and setbacks suffered by the British Army.

Although he was chief advisor to the Nana Sahib, one of the principal leaders of the rebellion, he was a Muslim at a Hindu court, a talker, at a time when military men were needed, and without personal wealth, nobility, or a following of supporters, and so he soon became a marginal figure.

[7] Azimullah Khan probably died of a fever in late 1859, after the crushing of the rebellion, on the run from the British in the inhospitable border country of the Nepalese Terai.

What many consider India's first national song was made during the Rebellion, Payam-e-Azadi or ‘The Message of Freedom’ was written by Azimullah Khan and was published from Delhi in Urdu and Hindi.

[10][11] It ran as follows:Hum haen iss ke malik, Hindoostan hamaaraa | Paak watan hae qaum kaa Jannat se bhee piyaaraa.