From a quiet UP village, a boy's journey to the corridors of power: Tracing Iran’s first Supreme Leader's connection to India

West Asia stands at a precipice. With Israel’s escalating strikes on Iranian military and nuclear sites and Tehran’s retaliation, the region is teetering on the edge of another war — one that could alter the balance of power across the Middle East and beyond.

At the heart of Iran’s resistance is its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose sermons are now dissected word by word in capitals around the world. From fiery warnings against Israel to declarations of unwavering faith, Khamenei has come to embody Iran’s unyielding posture.

Long before Iran’s 1979 revolution, long before Khamenei or even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, there was a boy born in a town called Kintoor.

The boy from Barabanki

Kintoor, a small village in the Barabanki district of Uttar Pradesh, is far removed from the tumult of West Asian geopolitics. But in the early 1800s, it was home to Syed Ahmad Musavi, a devout Shia cleric born into a family that had originally migrated to India from Iran a generation earlier.

At a time when the British East India Company was steadily tightening its grip on the Indian subcontinent and Mughal influence was fading, Ahmad Musavi embarked on a journey that would quietly shape Iran’s future. In 1830, he left Kintoor for Najaf, Iraq — one of the holiest cities in Shia Islam — to visit the tomb of Imam Ali. He never returned.

What began as a pilgrimage evolved into migration. Within a few years, Ahmad Musavi settled in the Iranian city of Khomeyn. He married, raised children, and integrated into Iranian clerical society. But he never gave up the name "Hindi" — a title he carried for the rest of his life, a permanent nod to his Indian birthplace. Media reports note that this title, “Hindi,” remains in Iranian records to this day.

Ahmad Musavi died in 1869 and is buried in Karbala. But his religious legacy — his teachings, his vision of faith — lived on. It would come to shape not just his descendants, but the very structure of Iran’s statehood.

From a cleric’s son to the voice of revolution

One of Ahmad Musavi's grandsons was named Ruhollah. Born in 1902, Ruhollah Khomeini would go on to become the father of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and its first Supreme Leader. By the 1960s, Khomeini had emerged as a sharp critic of the Western-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the aggressive secularisation of Iranian society.

But Khomeini’s ideological compass, forged in the fire of clerical tradition and Shia theology, can be traced back to the influence of his grandfather from Barabanki. Though the two never met, family teachings passed down through the generations instilled in Khomeini the same call for Islamic revival that Ahmad Hindi once believed in.

When the Shah’s rule collapsed in 1979 under the weight of mass protests and Khomeini’s own powerful sermons, the Islamic Republic of Iran was born. Khomeini became its Supreme Leader, and Iran — once a liberal monarchy — turned into a hardline theocracy.

Under his rule, Iran reoriented itself in opposition to the United States and its regional allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Laws, governance, and foreign policy became anchored in Islamic jurisprudence. Khomeini’s face began to appear on currency and murals, his teachings in schoolbooks. But quietly preserved in his poetry and ghazals was a recurring word — Hind — the land of his grandfather.

Although Iran’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, traced his origins to a UP village—his grandfather, Syed Ahmad Musavi Hindi—the family of current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei belongs to a separate clerical lineage with no verifiable ancestral link to India. While Khamenei and Khomeini share ideological roots and religious education within the Shia clerical tradition, their familial backgrounds diverge.