THE month of October is always celebrated with great enthusiasm by the birth anniversaries of great sons of India like Mahatma Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri. They set-off revolutionary changes in modern India’s life and culture. I have often paid my tributes to them in my past columns, for their significant contribution to radical changes to modern Indian thought and vision. But today, I want to pay my tribute to a great son of Delhi, who was my revolutionary idol and intellectual dream, when I was a young man who dreamt to be a non-conformist and wander-bug like him. And that youth idol of mine, bitten by the freedom struggle bug, was none other than Lala Hardayal, son of a Kayasth family of Mathurs in Delhi. I always regret that I never had the opportunity of seeing him with my own eyes for he died in 1939 in the United States when I was nine-year-old. But I always found him a part of my own life through a Book Prize which I had received for topping in aggregate marks during my annual examination at college in Dharamsala. The book was entitled Hints on Self Culture. The book was one of my best possessions and perhaps the one which I read over and over again besides Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Belonging to an Arya Samajist family, with my own father, Raizada Harish Chandra Bali, well known as an educationist, revolutionary and staunch Arya Samajist, there was always stress on us to "build our character", something parents and teachers do not bother about in these days of other kinds of professionalism where theft, deceit and corruption have acquired the status of desirable professions.

My father, who had taught English in the Hindu College of Delhi in the beginning of the 20th Century, was also a great admirer of Lala Hardayal, with whom he agreed on many issues except for his views on god and faith which he termed "atheism". But then, being a revolutionary himself, he often told me "remember revolutionaries too were human beings and not gods and often hated their own colleagues more than their enemies because of their highly emotional an radical characters." My father was my first and best friend in my family and we had a very special kind of relationship because he seldom narrated his revolutionary tales to other members of the family. Lala Hardayal was one of his favourite subjects to talk about and mine to listen, till my father died in the early sixties and I had myself grown up to find out more and know more about the revolutionary.

My father always wondered how Hardayal, who had studied in St. Stephens College, turned out to be both an atheist and a revolutionary who founded the Chadar Party to fight for India’s liberation from the British colonial masters while he was in exile in North America.

Lala Hardayal, born in Delhi on October 4, 1884, had studied in the Cambridge Mission School and St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and yet became a staunch revolutionary. Having studied all the religions, he at one time wanted to start a "religion of his own" and broached the idea with Bhai Parma Nand, another revolutionary reformist. Bhai Ji dissuaded him with the remark, "My own view is that all religions are a kind of fraud on mankind. You will be merely adding one more fraud."

Lala Hardayal advocated an armed struggle against the British and said no to ICS and goodbye to Oxford and was thrown out of Britain. He got wise to the fake Aryanism of the fascist Germany and broke with Germans whom he considered great friends of India at one point, he got a job at a university in the United States but was thrown out because he advocated the concept of free love, which he even sometimes practiced. Otherwise a non-smoker, non-drinker and vegetarian, very un-Kayasth qualities for even a non-conformist, he was finally allowed permission by the British to return to India when he was about 54 years old, but was not destined to return home. He died in his sleep in Philadelphia in 1939.

Why I want to reminded the nation today about Lala Hardayal and the great revolutionaries of yesterday is to suggest that please spare the revolutionaries from your visions of hypocrisy and better make serious research and study on what they visualised, what they thought, what they did and why and how they did?

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