Har Dayal: The Genius That Time Forgot

Eighty-five years ago,  on 4 March 1939, an Indian revolutionary thinker Har Dayal passed away on a very cold day in Philadelphia.  He was miles away from his matrabhumi (motherland) and his life had ended in his karambhumi (land where one works). He was just 54. Three days later his obituary appeared in The New York Times.

Earlier in 1904, on a street crossing in the heart of Lahore, a large crowd gathered around a twenty-year-old boy. It was a hard-to-believe sight as an intelligent-looking Punjab University student was winning a game of chess, solving complex mathematics problems, counting the number of bells being rung at the local temple, and instantly repeating long passages in Pushto that were being read out to him. He was accomplishing all these activities at the same time and without much effort. It was an awesome demonstration of superhuman brain power. From that moment onwards everyone he encountered called him - The Great Har Dayal. As his biographer, I have met several octogenarians and nonagenarians who recalled usually with tears in their eyes that their grandfathers and forefathers deferentially mentioned the illustrious Lala Har Dayal as the exemplar of the ultimate in scholarship and patriotism as well as a Genius ahead of his time.

Har Dayal was no ordinary man. He was one of the greatest minds to have walked on our planet. You may not have heard his name nor read about him in your school and college books, but St. Stephens College, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford have preserved the memory of this unforgettable man. From all accounts, this exceptional polymath was intellectually superior and a better-read person than anyone else who lived in his era. His extensive writings and life’s work including being the foremost global authority on Buddhism stand proof of that gift. The New York Times recognizing the colossal power of his mind, praised him in 1919 as “not only the brainiest man… but also the most cultured”. Renowned authors including Somerset Maugham and Jack London immortalized him as a key character in their works. Even Paramount Pictures in Hollywood produced a black and white film in the silent era (1922) inspired by Har Dayal’s life story. In 2020, Professor Mark Juergensmeyer, Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara stated, “Har Dayal was a pioneer in India’s independence movement and a remarkable man. We in California are proud that for a time he called it his home.”

Protesting against the colonisation of India, Dayal the super brilliant rebel resigned from an Oxford scholarship, gave up the opportunity to enter the Indian Civil Service (ICS), introduced civil disobedience in India decades before Mahatma Gandhi, and even before World War 1 launched Ghadr Party the largest global armed resistance movement against British Empire with its headquarters in California. After surviving in hand-to-mouth situations and leisurely walking on London’s Oxford Street speaking to everyone in Sanskrit, this Dilliwallah became a significant protagonist in the Oxford debates, the India House in London, the attack on Viceroy Hardinge in Delhi, the Berlin India committee, the 1915 mission to form the first provisional government of Free India from Istanbul to Kabul, the Komagata Maru saga in Vancouver, the Indo German trial in San Francisco, the Lahore Conspiracy trials in India and the Singapore Mutiny of 1915.

Over a hundred years ago, Dayal’s audacious intercontinental enterprise created the Berkley-Berlin-Baghdad-Bengal axis that stirred an entire generation of immortal revolutionaries including Gulab Kaur, Amir Chand, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Bagha Jatin, Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh. Several prominent individuals Rev. Charles Andrews, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhai Pramanand, Shyamji Krishnavarma, Vinayak Savarkar, Bhikaji Cama, S. R. Rana, Asaf Ali, Arthur Pope, Emma Goldman, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Gobind Behari Lal, Maulvi Barkatullah, M.N. Roy and Rash Behari Bose came out in support of Har Dayal. He singlehandedly battled the largest, richest and most powerful military empire the world had ever known, and his weapon of choice was his formidable intellect.

According to the timeworn, intelligence reports and records locked away in the archives, Hukumat-i-Britannia considered Har Dayal the single biggest threat to the empire as long as he was alive. The origin of Britain’s MI6 was intertwined with the life of Har Dayal. Sir David Petrie, Director-General MI 5 (1941-46) & Chief of British Intelligence in India wrote, “No man in recent times has sinned more grievously against the (British) Government… than Har Dayal…” Year after year Hukumat-i-Britannia termed him as the most brilliant person born in India, the most dangerous revolutionary the British Empire had encountered in India, and the most decent human being one could meet on Planet Earth. However, despite many attempts, Hukumat-i-Britannia could never silence or arrest the phenomenon called Har Dayal. He was always light years ahead of the top strategists of the intelligence community as well as the entire gamut of British legal minds. So, they exiled this remarkable individual from the land of his birth till the end of his life and systematically destroyed his life’s work. They also denied him permission to meet his wife and daughter for the rest of his life. On his passing in 1939, they also ensured that Har Dayal’s name was erased from our collective memory. After 1947, this electrifying personality’s life story and the Ghadr party episode of India’s history were mysteriously removed from Indian textbooks.

Not anymore. 

Photographs fade, legends are painted out and history gets erased… yet stories of extraordinary persons live on even a century later. In the 140th year of Lala Har Dayal’s birth (1884-1939), the life of the Architect of the Ghadr Party is being celebrated with events, lectures, and films. 

Today his spiritual, intellectual, and revolutionary work is recognized worldwide. Oxford has retained Dayal’s reflections during University debates in 1906-7 and in 2021 St. Johns College celebrated the life of their famous former student. Stanford University has preserved Professor Dayal’s memory in the form of letters from 1912-14. The University of California at Berkeley has dedicated a section of its archives and history section to the Ghadr patriots including Har Dayal, and there exists a small memorial to Dayal’s association with the village of Kinnastrom in a remote corner of Sweden. A house outside London at Churchill Road in Edgware where Har Dayal resided from 1927-1938 has surprisingly remained much the same.

Dayal’s image also appears in the Ghadr Memorial Museum in San Francisco and the Jallianwala Bagh Museum in Amritsar. In Delhi, the city of his birth there are public libraries in his name, he is distinctively mentioned in the book on the official history of St. Stephens College, and a DDA District Park at Jasola was dedicated to the memory of the Gentleman Revolutionary in 2022.

On Monday 3 October 2022, the name of Ghadr Party and Lala Har Dayal was once again heard across India and among the expat South Asian population - this time in the world-famous baritone of Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan as part of the top-rated TV show KBC (Who wants to be a Millionaire). Thanks to SET India and Producers of KBC millions of Indians who had never heard of Lala Har Dayal (1884-1939) now are somewhat aware of his significant contribution to India’s freedom movement. 

In the years to come, the legend of Dayal will continue to inspire the coming generations and preserve the memory of this mind-blowing great Indian genius. This is not the end. This is just the beginning. 

The writer is the biographer of Subhas Chandra Bose and Har Dayal and is the author of India on the World Stage. He can be reached at writerlall@gmail.com.