ਲਾਲਾ ਲਾਜਪਤ ਰਾਏਲਾਲਾ ਲਾਜਪਤ ਰਾਏ

Early life and education

Lala Lajpat Rai was born on 28 January 1865 in the village of Dhudike, in what is now the Moga district of Punjab. His father, Munshi Radha Krishna, was a teacher of Urdu and Persian, and his mother, Gulab Devi, was a devout and strong-willed woman who shaped his moral outlook. The family was of modest means but valued learning. Young Lajpat was a brilliant student; he studied law at Lahore and began practising at Hissar, later moving his practice to Lahore.

His early schooling was at the Government Higher Secondary School in Rewari, where his father was posted as an Urdu teacher. In 1880 he joined Government College at Lahore to study law, where he came in contact with Lala Hans Raj and Pandit Gurudutta, fellow students who became fellow workers in public life. He spent much of his youth in Jagraon, in Ludhiana district, where his family home still stands and now houses a library and museum.

Two influences defined his youth: the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement founded by Dayanand Saraswati, and the example of his father, who had himself joined the Samaj. Lajpat Rai threw himself into the work of the Samaj: its schools, its campaign against caste and superstition, and its ethic of selfless service, which became the template of his public life. At Lahore he also became a member of the Arya Samaj there and founder-editor of the Arya Gazette.

Entry into public life

Lajpat Rai helped build institutions as well as movements. He was associated in their early stages with the Punjab National Bank, founded in 1894, and the Lakshmi Insurance Company. He helped Mahatma Hansraj establish the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic School at Lahore in 1886 and was instrumental in building the wider DAV network of schools and colleges, which brought modern education across Punjab. In Lahore he also founded the National College, an Indian alternative to government institutions, whose students in later years included Bhagat Singh.

His public work was practical as well as political. During the famine of 1897 he organised relief and set up orphanages for affected families. He worked for the abolition of untouchability and argued that everyone should be free to read and learn from the Vedas, whatever their caste. In 1921 he founded the Servants of the People Society at Lahore, a non-profit welfare organisation dedicated to training selfless workers for the nation; after Partition it shifted its base to Delhi. Journalism was another of his tools: he contributed regularly to newspapers including The Tribune and founded and edited journals in English, Urdu and Hindi.

Why is Lala Lajpat Rai called Punjab Kesari?

Lala Lajpat Rai is called Punjab Kesari, which means Lion of Punjab, because of the courage and force of his leadership against British rule in Punjab. The name summed up a public life spent speaking, writing and organising against colonial power when doing so carried real personal risk, from his Arya Samaj work in the 1880s to the protest march he led, aged sixty-three, in 1928.

He entered the Indian National Congress and quickly became one of its most forceful voices. Along with Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra and Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal, he formed the famous Lal Bal Pal trio: the leaders who demanded swaraj, or self-rule, as a right, in contrast to the moderates who sought gradual reform within British rule. They argued for swadeshi, the boycott of foreign goods and national education as the means to win it. The British considered him dangerous: in May 1907, after political agitation in Punjab, he was arrested and deported to Mandalay in Burma without trial. In November the viceroy, Lord Minto, allowed him to return, deciding there was insufficient evidence to hold him for subversion, and the episode made him a national hero.

Writings and the years in America

Writing was central to his politics. His best known book, The Story of My Deportation (1908), told the story of his removal to Mandalay and the unrest in Punjab behind it. Arya Samaj (1915) set out the principles and impact of the reform movement he had served since his student days. From his travels came The United States of America: A Hindu's Impression (1916), followed by England's Debt to India (1917), on Britain's fiscal policy in India, and Unhappy India (1928), among other works.

He spent much of the First World War period abroad. In October 1917, in New York City, he founded the Indian Home Rule League of America and wrote for American readers, introducing India's cause to the United States through books, lectures and a monthly journal. He returned to India in early 1920, to a country changed by Gandhi's rising non-cooperation movement. Though he differed with Gandhi on tactics at times, he presided over the special Calcutta session of Congress in 1920 that launched non-cooperation. He was imprisoned from 1921 to 1923, and on his release he was elected to the legislative assembly.

The Simon Commission protest and his death

His final battle came in 1928, when the British sent the Simon Commission to India: a body appointed in 1927 to review the working of the constitution, with not a single Indian member. Indian parties boycotted it, and Lajpat Rai led the protest in Punjab. On 30 October 1928 the Commission visited Lahore, and he headed a peaceful, silent march against it, with protesters chanting Simon Go Back and carrying black flags. The superintendent of police in Lahore, James A. Scott, ordered a lathi charge and personally assaulted Rai. Badly injured, Rai addressed the crowd that same evening and declared that the blows struck at him that day would be the last nails in the coffin of British rule in India.

Lajpat Rai never recovered from the assault. He died on 17 November 1928, less than three weeks later, and doctors thought Scott's blows had hastened his death, though the British government denied any role when the matter was raised in Parliament. The nation was convulsed. Bhagat Singh, who revered him and whose associates had witnessed the assault, joined Shivaram Rajguru, Sukhdev Thapar and Chandra Shekhar Azad in a plot to kill Scott in revenge. In a case of mistaken identity, Singh and Rajguru shot John Saunders, an assistant superintendent of police, in Lahore on 17 December 1928. Lajpat Rai's martyrdom thus became the spark of the revolutionary movement's most famous chapter.

Legacy

Lala Lajpat Rai is remembered as the Punjab Kesari and as one of the great builders of modern India: banker, educator, journalist, social reformer and freedom fighter in one life. His Servants of the People Society continued his work after his death and still runs service programmes from Delhi. Statues of him stand across India, colleges, hospitals, markets and neighbourhoods carry his name, and his birthday, 28 January, is commemorated in Punjab each year. He embodied the idea that freedom must be built as well as won: in banks and schools and newspapers, not only on the streets.

In Dhudike, his birthplace in Moga tehsil, villagers and supporters formed a birthplace memorial committee in 1956, and a memorial and library now mark his birthplace, with functions held there on his birthday. In 1927 he had set up a trust in memory of his mother to build a tuberculosis hospital for women in Lahore; it opened in 1934 as the Gulab Devi hospital. Jagraon, where he spent much of his youth, also keeps his memory in a college and a library in his family home.