In the late fifties and sixties of the last century, a lawyer would fly his L5 two-seater plane all the way from Patna to Delhi with a refuelling halt at Lucknow. He parked his little aircraft at the Safdarjung airport and used to argue his appeals in the Supreme Court.
He would also fly in it from Patna to small towns in Bihar and Jharkhand for trials, if there was a proper landing area. The clients would then take him as a pillion on their bicycles. This rare lawyer was Akbar Imam, whose birth centenary is today, the 11th of August.
Akbar belonged to the famous Imam family, which has been talked about by Justice Sudhir Katriar, the historian of the Patna High Court in his book, “The Patna High Court: A Century of Glory” (Universal, 2015). He says that among the families who were pillars of the Patna High Court, the greatest of them all was the Imam family, for their illustrious achievements in the field of law as lawyers or judges, in diverse other fields, and for their integrity.
He was born in Patna to Syed Jafar Imam and Asma Imam. His father was the senior-most puisne judge of the Supreme Court, and was supposed to become the Chief Justice of India after Justice B.P. Sinha's retirement in February 1964, but his illness couldn’t make it happen.
Akbar Imam studied at St. George's, Mussoorie, and then went on to study science at Trinity College, Cambridge. He then pursued law, and was called to the Bar from the Middle Temple. He returned to Patna to practise and then had a thriving practice specialising in criminal law. Younger colleagues included Justice Leila Seth, recalled about Akbar. “He would give potential clients glowing accounts of how good and serious a lawyer his master was. But when the client would see round-faced Akbar sitting and eating a bar of chocolate, he would think he was a child and run away.”
