National Leaders

Important National Leaders

Dadabhai Naoroji 1825-1917 

Dadabhai Naoroji, the “Grand Old Man of India”, who was among the first leaders who stirred national consciousness in the country.

• Born in 1825 at Navsari, in present-day Gujarat.
• he was the first Indian to demand Swaraj in the Calcutta Session of INC, 1906
• He was closely involved with the Indian National Congress in its early phase.
• He served as the first Indian member of the British parliament.
• His first agitation, in 1859, concerned recruitment to the Indian Civil Service.
• In 1865 and 1866, Naoroji helped found the London Indian Society and the East India Association The two organisations sought to bring nationalist Indians and sympathetic Britons on one platform.
• As the secretary of the East India Association, Naoroji travelled in India to gather funds and raise national awareness.
• In 1885, Naoroji became a vice-president of the Bombay Presidency Association, was nominated to the Bombay legislative council by Governor Lord Reay, and helped form the Indian National Congress.
• He was Congress president thrice, in 1886, 1893, and 1906.
• In 1893, he helped form an Indian parliamentary committee to attend to Indian interests.
• In 1895, he became a member of the royal commission on Indian expenditure.
• Dadabhai Naoroji was among the key proponents of the ‘Drain Theory’, disseminating it in his 1901 book ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak 1857-1920 

• Birth: He was born on 23rd July 1856 in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra.
• Freedom fighter and lawyer, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, is also known as Lokmanya Tilak.
• Educationist:
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• Founder of the Deccan Education Society (1884) along with his associate Gopal Ganesh Agarkar and others.
• One of the founders of the Fergusson College (1885) in Pune through the Deccan Education Society.
• Ideology:
• He was a devout Hindu and used Hindu scriptures to rouse people to fight oppression.
• Stressed on the need for self-rule and believed that without self-rule or swarajya, no progress was possible.
• Slogan: “Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it!”
• A book ‘Indian Unrest’ written by Valentine Chirol, an English journalist, stated Tilak the ‘father of Indian unrest’.
• Emphasised the importance of a cultural and religious revival to go with the political movements.
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• Popularised the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in the Maharashtra region.
• Propounded the celebration of Shiv Jayanti on the birth anniversary of the monarch Chhatrapati Shivaji.
• Jail: Between 1908 and 1914, he spent 6 years in Mandalay Prison for defending the actions of revolutionaries Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki.
• Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki had tried to assassinate the District Judge, Mr. Kingsford by throwing bombs at the carriage in which he was supposed to travel.
• Newspapers: Weeklies Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English)
• Books: Gita Rhasya and Arctic Home of the Vedas.
• Death: He died on 1st August 1920.

Bipin Chandra Pal 1858-1932

• Bipin Chandra Pal was born to Ramchandra Pal in the village of Poil. His family was a wealthy Hindu family. Pal’s father was a Persian scholar.
• He joined the Presidency College, Calcutta but could not complete his education there. He then started work as a headmaster. Later he became a librarian in a public library. It was here that he met several political leaders of the day like Surendra Nath Banerjee, Shivnath Shastri and B K Goswami.
• This interaction propelled him to quit his profession and join active politics.
• Pal was also inspired by the ideas of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghosh.
• In 1898, he went to England to study comparative theology. He returned to India in one year and plunged into the freedom struggle.
• He started popularising the idea of ‘swaraj’ to Indians.
• Along with Lajpat Rai and Tilak, he preached an extremist form of nationalism that espoused revolutionary methods like boycotting British goods and shops, burning western clothes, and advocating strikes and lockouts of British factories. This trio was called ‘Lal-Bal-Pal’.
• Pal was sent to jail for six months for refusing to give evidence against Aurobindo Ghosh in the Vande Mataram sedition case.
• He was a brilliant orator and writer. He was also a journalist who used this platform to spread his message of patriotism and nationalism. He edited the journals ‘The Democrat’ and ‘The Independent’. He also started many newspapers and magazines such as ‘Paridarsak’, ‘Vande Mataram’, ‘New India’ and ‘Swaraj’.
• Some of the books he authored are ‘Indian Nationalism’, ‘Swaraj and the Present Situation, ‘Nationality and Empire’, ‘The Basis of Social Reform’, ‘The New Spirit and Studies in Hinduism’, and ‘The Soul of India’.
• He joined the Congress Party in 1886. He also participated in the Swadeshi movement and the non-cooperation movement. He agitated against the partition of Bengal of 1905.
• Pal was a fierce critic of Mahatma Gandhi and his pacifist ways. He was against the ‘Gandhi cult’ in the Congress party. 
• In 1920, Pal was among the senior Congress leaders who opposed Gandhi’s resolution on non-cooperation over the fact that it didn’t address self-government.
• After his first wife passed away, he married a widow and joined the Brahmo Samaj, which, among other things, denounced the caste system. He was also an ardent proponent of gender equality.
• He retired from active politics in 1920. He continued to contribute to magazines till his death on May 20, 1932. He was 73 years old.
• Aurobindo Ghosh called Pal ‘one of the mightiest prophets of nationalism.

Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941

• Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta on May 7, 1861. He was also referred to as ‘Gurudev’, ‘Kabiguru’, and ‘Biswakabi’.
• Regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India and hailed by W.B Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, novelist, and painter, who was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the west.
• Rabindranath was an exceptional literary figure and a renowned polymath who singlehandedly reshaped the region's literature and music.
• In 1913 Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work on Gitanjali.
• He was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize.
• In 1915 Tagore was awarded knighthood by the British King George V. In 1919, following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre he renounced his Knighthood.
• Besides all his literary achievements he was also a philosopher and educationist who in 1921 established the Vishwa-Bharati University, a university that challenged conventional education.
• Rabindranath Tagore was a good friend of Mahatma Gandhi and is said to have given him the title of Mahatma.
• Tagore had always stressed that unity in diversity is the only possible way for India’s national integration.
• He not only gave the national anthems for two countries, India and Bangladesh, but also inspired a Ceylonese student of his, to pen and compose the national anthem of Sri Lanka.

Lala Lajpat Rai 1865-1928 

• Lala Lajpat Rai was one of the greatest freedom fighters of India.
• He was also called ‘Punjab Kesari’ and 'Lion of Punjab'.
• He studied law at the Government College, Lahore.
• Was influenced by Swami Dayananda Saraswati and joined the Arya Samaj in Lahore.
• He believed that the ideals in Hinduism combined with nationalism will lead to the establishment of a secular state.
• Along with Bipin Chandra Pal and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, he formed the Lal-Bal-Pal trio of extremist leaders.
• He was also involved with the Hindu Mahasabha.
• He fought against untouchability.
• He was born on 28th January, 1865 in a small village named Dhudike in Punjab’s Ferozepur district.
• He joined the Indian National Congress (INC) and participated in many political agitations in Punjab.
• For his political agitation, he was deported to Burma without trial in 1907 but returned after a few months because of lack of evidence.
• He was opposed to the partition of Bengal.
• He founded the Home Rule League of America in 1917 in New York. In the USA, he worked to get moral support for the Indian independence movement from the international community.
• He was also elected President of the All India Trade Union Congress.
• He supported the non-cooperation movement of Gandhi at the Nagpur session of the Congress in 1920.
• He protested against the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that followed.
• He was elected deputy leader of the Central Legislative Assembly in 1926.
• In 1928, he moved a resolution in the assembly refusing cooperation with the Simon Commission since the Commission had no Indian members.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale 1866-1915

• In 1889, Gokhale joined the INC motivated by his mentor, social reformer M G Ranade.
• He fought along with a host of other leaders and reformers for more political rights for the Indian people. He was a moderate. He did not believe in radical demands altogether and wished for peaceful and non-confrontationist methods to acquire rights and privileges from the government.
• This is where he came into conflict with the extremist faction of the INC, especially Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
• He was elected as Honorary Secretary of the Sarvajanik Sabha, Pune in 1890.
• In 1893, Gokhale became the Secretary of the Bombay Provincial Conference and in 1895, he served as the Joint Secretary of the INC along with Tilak. 
• Gokhale believed in working with the colonial government to bring about social reforms in society. He was voted to the Legislative Council of Bombay in 1899, and also to the Governor-General’s Imperial Council in 1901.

Sarojini Naidu 1879-1949

• Popularly known as the Nightingale of India 
• Her political career started in 1905 when she became the part of Indian National Movement. In India in 1915-18, she travelled to different regions, places and deliver lectures on social welfare, women's empowerment and nationalism. In 1917, she established the Women's Indian Association (WIA).
• In 1925, she became the president of the Indian National Congress. She participated in Salt Satyagraha in 1930 and in South Africa she also presided the East African Indian Congress.
• British government also awarded her the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal for her work during the plague epidemic in India
• She played an important role in Quit India Movement. During this period, British government arrested and put her in jail.
• In 1905, her first collection of poems was published named 'The Golden Threshold'. Also, in 1961, Padmaja Naidu the daughter of Sarojini Naidu, published her second collection of poems named 'The Feather of the Dawn' which was written in 1927.
• Sarojini Naidu became the first women governor of India and served as the governor of United Provinces of Agra and Awadh from 1947 to 1949.
• Several institutions like Sarojini Naidu Medical College, Sarojini Naidu College for Women, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, Sarojini Devi Eye hospital have been attributed to the most influential personality of India i.e. Sarojini Naidu.
• She died on 2 March, 1949 due to cardiac arrest at the Government House in Lucknow. 
• She had been the strongest advocate of the Father of the Nation "Gandhiji" and had supported him in every ideology to make India free form the British rule. 
• She was nick named as Mahatma Gandhi’s “Mickey Mouse”.

Dr Rajendra Prasad 1884-1963

• Dr. Prasad attended the 1906 Calcutta session of Indian National Congress.
• He joined the party in 1911 and later elected to the All India Congress Committee after which he met Mahatma Gandhi.
• He was highly impressed by Mahatma Gandhi and he supported Gandhi during the Satyagrah Movement against Indigo Planters in Champaran, Bihar.
• He later quit his lucrative career as a lawyer in 1920 and jumped into Freedom Struggle Movement and participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement.
• He led the Non-Cooperation Movement in Bihar holding meetings, touring state and making speeches.
• He urged people to boycott government schools, colleges, jobs.
• He also started the National College in Patna in 1921 to promote Swadeshi asking people to boycott foreign goods.
• He even asked his son, Mrityunjaya Prasad, to drop out of his studies and enrol in Bihar Vidyapeeth, an institution founded by him and along with his colleagues on the traditional Indian model.
• He took an active part in rehabilitation work after 1914 floods and 1934  earthquake in Bihar. He was released 2 days after the earthquake and then he formed Bihar Central Relief Committee.
• He also set up the Quetta Central Relief Committee in Sindh and Punjab under his own presidency after 1935 Quetta Earthquake.
• Dr. Prasad was elected as the President of the Bombay Session of the Indian National Congress in October 1934.
• He was also elected as the President for second time in 1939 after Subhash Chandra Bose resigned from his post and third time President of INC in 1947 when J.B.Kripalani resigned from his post.
• He also worked as a journalist in the national interest and wrote for Searchlight in English and founded and edited the Hindi weekly Desh and collected funds for these papers.
• He also started his long life campaign to establish Hindi as the national language.
• Dr. Prasad was arrested several times during the national struggle and imprisoned by British authorities during the Salt Satyagraha of 1931 and the Quit India Movement of 1942.
• He was very much active in Quit India Movement in 1942 and led protests, demonstrations in Bihar.
• He was arrested in Sadaqat Ashram, Patna and sent to Bankipur Central Jail in 1942 and he was released after 3 years in 1945.