Well Argued · Advocate

Bhulabhai Desai: the advocacy that left a mark

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

Bhulabhai Jivanji Desai is remembered as one of the finest advocates of the late colonial Bar, a courtroom craftsman who came to the law late and then made it look effortless. He is best known for leading the defence in the Indian National Army trials of 1945, when the right of Indians to take up arms for independence was argued in open court inside the Red Fort. But the measure of him is the whole career: the professor who became a commercial giant at the Bombay High Court, the parliamentarian who led the Congress benches, and the counsel whose closing arguments drew crowds. This is a profile, not an endorsement.

01The man and his era

Bhulabhai Desai was born in 1877 in Valsad, in what is now Gujarat, and died in 1946, months before the independence he had spent his life working toward. He belonged to the generation of Indian advocates who learned the law of an empire and then turned that law back on the empire itself, using the courtroom as one of the few public stages a colonised people were allowed to occupy.

His years at the Bar ran through the decades when the Bombay High Court was one of the busiest commercial courts in Asia and when the freedom movement was moving from petition to confrontation. An advocate of his standing could have simply grown rich on company work. Desai did that, and then chose to spend the reputation it bought him on cases that mattered to the nation.

This is an editorial profile written for readers who admire good advocacy. It is not legal advice.

02From the lecture hall to the Bar

Desai did not begin in the law. He first made his name as a teacher of English and history at Gujarat College in Ahmedabad, where he was admired for the clarity and force of his lectures. That training showed for the rest of his life: he argued in plain, well-shaped English, and he knew how to hold an audience that was not obliged to agree with him.

When he turned to the law and moved to the Bombay High Court, he rose quickly in the demanding world of commercial and civil litigation. Solicitors learned that a brief in his hands would be mastered to the last document, and that he could reduce a tangled commercial dispute to the single question a judge actually had to decide. Within a relatively short span he was among the most sought-after seniors in the city, respected by the English judges and juniors alike.

Stories of advocacy like his are exactly what Claw's Well Argued exists to keep in front of the next generation, so that the craft is studied and not simply forgotten.

03The arguments he is known for

Desai's reputation rested first on his command of commercial and constitutional argument. He appeared in major civil disputes of his day and in matters before the highest appellate courts of the colonial system, and he was trusted to carry the Congress position in the Central Legislative Assembly, where he led the party benches in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1945 he was also a party to the Desai-Liaquat talks with Liaquat Ali Khan, an attempt to find a formula for sharing power in an interim government between the Congress and the Muslim League. The talks did not hold, but they showed the trust that leaders across the divide placed in his judgement.

None of that, however, is what fixed his name in public memory. That came at the very end of his life, in a military courtroom inside the Red Fort.

04The INA trials

In late 1945 the British put on trial, before a court martial at the Red Fort in Delhi, three officers of the Indian National Army raised by Subhas Chandra Bose: Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Kumar Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon. The charge was waging war against the King Emperor. The trial became a national event, and the Congress assembled a defence team in which Desai, by then seriously unwell, took the lead.

His argument went to the heart of the matter. He contended that the men were soldiers of a lawfully constituted force fighting for the freedom of their own country, and that international law recognised the right of a subject people to wage a war of liberation; they were therefore entitled to be treated as belligerents, not as traitors. It was advocacy pitched at once to the court and to a watching nation.

The officers were convicted of waging war, but the sentences of transportation were remitted, and the three walked free amid extraordinary public feeling. For a defence lawyer, the legal result was mixed. As an act of advocacy, it was a landmark: Desai had turned a court martial into a public hearing on the legitimacy of the freedom struggle itself.

05What he gave the profession

Desai gave Indian advocacy a model of the complete counsel: a man equally at home in a dry commercial appeal and in a trial charged with the emotion of a nation. He showed that preparation and restraint, not theatre, were the foundation of persuasion, and that an advocate could serve a client and a cause without confusing the two.

He also demonstrated something about courage. He took the INA brief when his health was failing and when the political stakes were enormous, because he believed the argument needed to be made properly. Younger lawyers took from him the lesson that the profession is at its best when it lends its skill to those who most need a careful hearing.

His move from the lecture hall to the Bar left a further mark: he treated advocacy as a form of teaching, an attempt to make a hard thing clear to someone who had the power to decide. That remains a good description of the craft at its height.

06His public life and legacy

Beyond the courtroom, Desai was a central figure in the constitutional politics of the 1930s and 1940s. As leader of the Congress party in the Central Legislative Assembly he carried the nationalist case into the one elected forum the colonial system allowed, and he was involved in the delicate negotiations over how a self-governing India might be organised.

He died in 1946, before the transfer of power, and so never saw the Republic whose foundations he had helped argue for. His name survives in the memory of the Bar and in the story of the INA trials, which is still told as one of the great set-piece defences in Indian legal history.

His legacy is a reminder that a reputation is built across a whole career and sometimes sealed by a single act of principle late in it. The arguments that outlast an advocate are usually the ones made with the most care and the least calculation.

07Related profiles

Desai belongs to a line of advocates whose work shaped the profession. More profiles in the Well Argued series:

• Ashok Desai, a later senior and law officer of the Supreme Court Bar.
• Gopal Subramanium, the advocate and former Solicitor General.

08About Well Argued

Well Argued is a free, curated publication by Claw that gives an advocate a hard-won court victory an audience, turning a winning judgement into a short, well-told story that Claw shares across its social channels, its website and the AI answer engines. Advocates like Bhulabhai Desai are remembered because someone set their work down and told the story well. Good advocacy still happens in trial courts and High Courts across India every week, and most of it is never seen beyond the cause list. Recording work that deserves to be seen is exactly what Well Argued exists to do.

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