“Like a taper one should melt in pursuit of knowledge, this is thy duty even if thou has to travel over the whole earth. It is our duty to train and develop our mind and acquire as much knowledge as we possibly can obtain”. Har Dayal
Exactly one hundred and twenty years ago, in 1904, on a street crossing in the heart of Lahore, a large crowd gathered around a Delhi-born teenager. It was a hard-to-believe sight as the intelligent-looking Punjab University student pursuing an MA degree, 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 simultaneously and without much effort. An American Professor Dr. Hervey Griswold witnessed the mind-blowing event and recorded, “Eight or ten masses of strange unconnected material, including several long sentences in Pashto were successively sounded into his ears for him to assimilate and reproduce. Everything came out in the order in which it went in and perfectly.” The citizens of Lahore were astounded by this awesome demonstration of superhuman brain power and the young man’s fame spread like wildfire. From that moment onwards everyone he encountered called him - The Great Har Dayal.
Gifted with an eidetic memory, Har Dayal broke every academic record in school and college years. His brilliant scholastic gifts have never been equaled since. He possessed an intellectual's unrestrained curiosity, and an insatiable compulsion to acquire as much knowledge as possible in a lifetime. He immersed himself in academics more extravagantly, and grandiosely than anyone before him. Har Dayal’s memory was phenomenal; he systematically stockpiled in the vaults of his head, not just huge slices of unabridged literature but whole libraries, chapter by chapter, word for word. An exceptional polymath, this Sanskrit graduate could read, write, and teach in seventeen different languages from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu to Greek, French, German, Swedish, and Esperanto among others.
In his travels to Britain, Europe, Algeria, Turkey, the Caribbean Islands, the United States, and Hawaii, Har Dayal the global Indian intellectual, displayed a rock star’s charisma, gentlemanly behavior, exquisite speechmaking, a pronounced sense of humor, and an outstanding ability to read the room. The fame of his intellect ensured that he crossed paths with the high and mighty of his generation and they rarely forgot this unusually gifted person with sparkling eyes and a ready smile. Oxford Dons humbly claimed that they could not improve the tutorials of Har Dayal as he wrote better than them. In France Karl Marx’s grandson, Jean-Lauren Longuet the editor of L’humanite became his close associate and supporter. For the Germans, he was an extraordinary revolutionary leader and absolutely at par with Vladimir Lenin. Kaiser Wilhelm often referred to him as his ‘friend’. The New York Times (8 June 1919) praised the colossal power of Har Dayal’s mind and described him as “not only the brainiest man… but also the most cultured”. In Berkeley Professor Arthur Ryder, the foremost American intellectual, (who later taught Sanskrit to Oppenheimer) was so overwhelmed by the intellectual prowess of the twenty-seven-year-old Har Dayal that he straightaway asked Stanford to appoint him as a Lecturer – thereby breaking the glass ceiling by being the first Indian to teach at an American University. 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.
The term Genius is carelessly thrown around nowadays and sadly applied to all and sundry. In Latin, a Genius was a god presiding over the birth of a person of remarkable talents. The Oxford Dictionary terms Genius as “an exceptionally intelligent or talented person, or one with exceptional skill in a particular area of art, science, etc.” The nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788-1860) in his treatise defined genius far more precisely as “talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see”. Schopenhauer’s definition aptly describes Har Dayal. While talent could achieve what others could not achieve, it was the genius of this Dilliwallah who achieved what others could not imagine. Further, as per Schopenhauer’s thesis, talent speaks brilliantly to the moment and is of the moment, while a genius (like Har Dayal) speaks of the eternal and to eternity.
From all accounts, the unassuming Har Dayal was a smarter and better-read person than anyone else who lived in his era. However, Genius requires the application of the mind and the execution of ideas.
In those dark times when the blood never dried and the sun never set in Hukumat-i-Britannia (British Empire), Har Dayal’s audacious work as a revolutionary was extraordinary. Protesting against the colonization of India, Har Dayal the super brilliant rebel broke ranks and resigned from a hard-earned Oxford scholarship. He then walked away from being a member of the famed Indian Civil Service (ICS). His mission was to destroy the Hukumat-i-Britannia through an armed revolt and his weapon of choice was the colossal power of his intellect. In the pre-WW1 years, when the brutality of the Hukumat-i-Britannia ensured only a few Indians raised their voice against colonialism, the bravest of the brave Har Dayal became the architect of the largest international armed anti-colonial resistance movement - the Ghadr Party, with its nerve center in California. Rather than squandering his time negotiating with the colonial powers for a better future by employing legal arguments year after year in fancy surroundings, Har Dayal’s gigantic mind strategically attacked the dual instruments used by Hukumat-i-Britannia to subjugate India - the famed Indian Civil Service and the feared British Army. Har Dayal also went about effectively demolishing the time-tested British policy of divide and rule with his inclusive, non-sectarian, and gender-neutral Ghadr Party.
Har Dayal’s global achievements present a thought-provoking distinctiveness between genius and intelligence. He creatively soared from one summit to another intuitively, astonishingly, and mostly magically. A pioneer far ahead of his time he introduced almost every major school of political thought covering the entire spectrum of political play in India. In contrast to the accepted social norms of his time, despite his overseas education, he propagated a life of modest living and elevated thinking in India. His band of political missionaries reached out to the youth in urban and rural India with anti-colonial messages decades before any such organization took shape. The young Indian students in Britain flocked to hear Har Dayal whenever he gave a speech and among them was a student at Harrow named Jawaharlal Nehru. Har Dayal even preempted Gandhi by at least a decade in launching the civil disobedience and non-violent passive resistance campaign in India. Har Dayal’s Principal, Professors, colleagues, and fellow students at St Stephens College in Delhi including Sushil Rudra and Rev Andrews played a key role in promoting his ideas. And much before Subhas Bose’s legendary Azad Hind Fauj, Har Dayal inspired the expat Indian population in North America, Europe, Africa, East Asia, and South East Asia as well as Indian prisoners of war in Germany to form the Ghadr Party an army of patriots to wrest freedom of India from the British. The timeworn records locked away in the archives now reveal Har Dayal’s visionary ideas of initiating American and German Governments at the highest level into India’s independence movement way back in 1912-14. Har Dayal’s tactical Berkley-Berlin-Baghdad-Bengal axis during WW1 stirred an entire generation of immortal revolutionaries. At one stage the audacious rebel unlike any other leader of the Indian freedom movement even proposed an invasion of Britain by a revolutionary army of Indians and intended to introduce Sanskrit among its natives to accomplish reverse colonization. Famed American historian Professor Nico Slate recently noted “No figure embodied that interconnected struggle more than the most famous Indian American intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, Har Dayal.” With an enlightening presentation before the immigration commission in Washington D.C. in February 1914, he also paved the path for the eventual naturalization of the Indian American community as citizens which has now led to Indians reaching the top in academic, corporate, medical, technical, and even political spheres in the USA.
Besides leisurely walking on London’s Oxford Street wearing a simple Pagri, Dhoti Kurta and speaking to everyone in Sanskrit, this bespeckled quintessential Dilliwallah in his early years 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 intercontinental mission from Istanbul to Kabul to form the first provisional government of Free India in December 1915, 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.
Har Dayal accomplished all of the above in just the first thirty years of his life. No wonder Har Dayal, who lived a life full of heroism, imagination, audacity, and sacrifices, was emulated by an entire generation and referred to as the Great Indian Genius.
In Har Dayal, the mighty Hukumat-i-Britannia finally met an admirable but frightening opponent. Hukumat-i-Britannia despite all its financial dominance, diplomatic influence, military assets, and secret agents of MI5 and MI6 was powerless to arrest the tsunami of nationalism unleashed by the genius of Har Dayal. During WW1 the rebellious ‘Ghadr ki Goonj’ became a phenomenon among the Indians settled worldwide. Hukumat-i-Britannia considered Har Dayal the single biggest threat to its existence as long as he was alive. Sir David Petrie, Director-General MI 5 (1941-46) & Chief of British Intelligence in India who had investigated the attack on Lord Hardinge in 1912 wrote, “No man in recent times has sinned more grievously against the (British) Government… than Har Dayal…” Year after year the secret intelligence records termed Har Dayal as the most brilliant person born in India, the most dangerous revolutionary the Hukumat-i-Britannia 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 typhoon called Har Dayal. He was always light years ahead cerebrally and remained far ahead of the top strategists of the intelligence community as well as the entire gamut of top British legal minds. He always managed to successfully evade British assassins and arrest warrants. Incensed, draconian laws like the Rowlatt Act were legislated to ban and outlaw the Ghadr Party in India. Additionally, Hukumat-i-Britannia exiled this remarkable individual from the land of his birth till the end of his life and systematically erased him from public memory.
Nonetheless surviving in hand-to-mouth situations in exile for over thirty years across three continents, Har Dayal emerged as Ghadr personified covertly altering his strategies to overthrow the British rule. The self-effacing man continued to singlehandedly battle the largest, richest, and the most powerful military empire the world had ever known. During this period several of his close associates in the revolutionary movement for reasons of envy, betrayed him and eventually denounced his enterprise. Yet the first President of the Ghadr movement Sohan Singh Bhakna always praised him, Rev. Charles Andrews, Bhai Parmanand, Maulvi Barkatullah, and Rash Behari Bose remained associated with him, and his friend from the India House days, Vinayak Savarkar stood by him till the end. In yet another act of Genius like none other, he emerged later in life as the author of five books and the foremost global authority on Buddhism completing a doctoral thesis in 1932 at the University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies). His fame peaked in India after the publication of his awe-inspiring book, “Hints for Self-Culture”.
In 1938 after much persuasion by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Bhai Parmanand, Rev. Charles Andrews, Mohanlal Saxena, Kishan Dayal, and others the Hukumat-i-Britannia reluctantly relented and conditionally rescinded the notification for exiling Har Dayal. The news of the imminent return of the national treasure back to his motherland created flutters across India. But it was too late. On 4 March 1939, Har Dayal, one of the greatest minds to have walked on our planet unexpectedly died in Philadelphia, while on a lecture tour in the United States. He was just 54. But by that time the baton had been passed on to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose whose efforts culminated in the end of the Hukumat-i-Britannia. Netaji led Azad Hind Fauj’s military enterprise climaxed in Delhi, the birthplace of Har Dayal, in the form of the Indian National Army trials at the Red Fort in November 1945. Hukumat-i-Britannia realized that despite successfully crushing the Quit India movement and winning WW2 they would have to let go of the jewel in the crown after losing the loyalty of the armed forces. That was the moment the mighty Hukumat-i-Britannia lost, and India gained its independence. Just as Har Dayal had foreseen.
After 1947, the electrifying personality of Har Dayal and the Ghadr party episode was deliberately removed for unknown reasons. Photographs fade, legends are painted out and history gets censored, yet stories of extraordinary persons live on even a century later.
I chased the life story of Har Dayal for over two decades and have written his biography which was published in December 2020 and launched by his grandson Pradeep Narain in Saint Tropez on 1 June 2024.
In the 140th year of Lala Har Dayal’s birth, his intellectual, spiritual, and revolutionary work is finally being recognized worldwide. Oxford has retained Har 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 Har 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 Har Dayal’s association with the village of Kinnastrom in a remote corner of Sweden. Har 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 Har Dayal’s 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. And on 15 August 2022, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence the Red Fort in Delhi was adorned with a large image of Har Dayal.
A house outside London at 34 Churchill Road in Edgware where Har Dayal resided has surprisingly remained much the same. We are also requesting the British Government's Heritage Department to put a blue plaque Edgware HA8 6NY UK as Har Dayal stayed here from 1927 – 1938 in exile as a gesture to honor this exceptionally gifted Indian who received a PhD from London University (SOAS now).
Last month, on Sunday, 1 September 2024, I stood in the main hall of Shattuck Hotel in Berkeley where exactly 111 years ago, on the first day of November 1913, a newspaper named Ghadr was launched by Har Dayal. That day will go down in history as a red-letter day for Indians as the newspaper signified a “new epoch in the history of India”. Later on 1 September 2024, I participated in a special event organized in association with the Indian Consulate in the USA at the Ghadr Museum in San Francisco. Together we honored and recalled the sacrifices of an entire generation of immortal revolutionaries from Har Dayal, Kartar Singh Sarabha, and Rash Behari Bose to Udham Singh and women revolutionaries like Gulab Kaur among others.
In the years to come a city, town, university, college, institution, and several neighborhoods and roads in India and overseas will be named after Har Dayal to inspire the coming generations and preserve the memory of the global Indian intellectual, spiritual, and revolutionary leader.
In 2024 the world needs Har Dayal more than it ever did before. Har Dayal’s inspirational words are here to stay with us forever, “Life is a wonderful privilege. It imposes great duties. It demands the fulfilment of great tasks and the realization of noble ideals.… You stand between the past and the future; the world is yours to enjoy, to organise, and to reconstruct…. Mankind (Humankind) anxiously asks if there is a way out of the gloom and horror of today into light and life. It is for you to blaze the trail for great movements that will build up a happier world.”
Jai Hind!
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