The son of an army doctor from Assam, he was educated in India and studied history at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1927. After returnin… - Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed

He studied at Cambridge University’s Catherine College and became barrister from the Inner Temple of London. He could not complete his parents’ dream of appearing for ICS examination due to severe bout of illness. When he returned to India, he began practicing law in the Lahore High Court in 1928. In October that year, his father took him to Guwahati in Assam to take care of some paternal property, which included a few hundred acres of land in and around Guwahati. Thus the Ahmed family connection to Assam, which had been severed abruptly by his father’s posting to the northwest many years ago was restored... and two years later he returned in 1931 to become a primary member of the Congress, a move which greatly influenced his future development. **In: p. 49

As a Congressman he actively participated in the freedom movement...offered personal satyagraha in 1940 and was imprisoned for a year….Again in the Quit India Movement he was detained as a security prisoner for three and half years until April 1945.

His initiative in introducing the Assam Agricultural Income Tax Bill, the first of its kind in India, in 1939, that levied taxes on tea garden lands in the State and his pro-labour policy in the British-owned Assam Oil Company Limited at Digboi irked the European planters and their henchman who considered that the measures of the Congress Coalition Government were radical and, therefore, constituted a danger signal tot eh interests of the British commercial community.