Guru Radha Kishan

Guru Radha Kishan was born in 1925 on Krishna Janmashtami in Bid village of district Harda (previously in Hoshangabad district) of Madhya Pradesh in a Brahmin family of farmers. He had to experience the hardships of the life very early, as his father died while he was a child. It was the passion for studies and firm belief that education is a must for progress in life that he got himself enrolled for studies in a school at Chipawad near Khirkiya, which was miles away from his native village.

There he read a book authored by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the revolutionary struggle of Russia and an article about Indian revolutionaries Pandit Ram Prasad Bismil, Sukhdev Thapar, Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad. He began his revolutionary career influenced by the martyrdom of these revolutionaries and hoisted the tricolour in his school and was sent to a reformatory school by the colonial authorities. It was the period Mahatma Gandhi visited Harda in December, 1933 when he listened to Mahatma Gandhi and decided to leave his native place for the freedom struggle of India.

Jayaprakash Narayan

Jayaprakash Narayan (Hindi:जयप्रकाश नारायण,Jayprakāśh Narāyan) (11 October 1902 – 8 October 1979), widely known as JP Narayan, Jayaprakash, or Loknayak, was an Indian independence activist and political leader, remembered especially for leading the opposition to Indira Gandhi in the 1970s and for giving a call for peaceful Total Revolution. His biography, Jayaprakash, was written by his nationalist friend and an eminent writer of Hindi literature, Ramavriksha Benipuri. In 1998, he was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, in recognition of his social work. Other awards include the Magsaysay award for Public Service in 1965. The airport of Patna is also named after him.

Motilal Nehru

Motilal Nehru (6 May 1861 – 6 February 1931) was a lawyer, an activist of the Indian National Movement and an important leader of the Indian National Congress, who also served as the Congress President twice, 1919–1920 and 1928–1929. He was the founder patriarch of India's most powerful political family, the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The Nehru's were originally Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir[2], settled in Delhi in the beginning of 18th century, where Motilal Nehru's grandfather, Lakshmi Narayan, became the first lawyer (Vakil) of the East India Company at the Mughal Imperial Court of Delhi after 1812. His father Gangadhar, was a police constable (Kotwal) in Delhi in 1857[3], and during the Bengal Mutiny, when the British troops began shelling their way into the city, he fled to Agra along with his wife Jeorani and four children. He died here four years later, and 3 months after his death, his youngest son Motilal was born.[citation needed]

He spent the early part of childhood in Khetri, second largest thikana estate within the princely Jaipur State, now in Rajasthan, where his elder brother, Nandlal was Diwan (Chief Minister). Thereafter in 1870, when Nandlal left his job, qualified as a lawyer and started practicing English law at Agra, the family moved with him. Subsequently the High Court shifted base to Allahabad, and the family settled there.[1][4][5][6][7]

He became one of the first generation of young Hindu's to receive a Western-style college education. He passed the matriculation examination from Kanpur, and went on to attend Muir Central College at Allahabad,[1] but failed to appear for the final year B.A. examinations. Later he qualified "Bar at law" from University of Cambridge and then enlisted as a lawyer in the English courts. Honored with “Proud Past Alumni" in the list of 42 members, from "Allahabad University Alumni Association", NCR[8]

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagoreα[›]β[›] (Bengali: রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941),γ[›] sobriquet Gurudev,δ[›] was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse",[2] he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.[3] In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and other-worldly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West. His "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.[4] Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India.[5]

A Pirali Brahmin[6][7][8][9] from Calcutta, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.[10] At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.[5][11] He graduated to his first short stories and dramas—and the aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident anti-nationalist he denounced the Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.[12]

Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: the Republic of India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The composer of Sri Lanka's national anthem: Sri Lanka Matha was a student of Tagore, and the song is inspired by Tagore's style.[13]

A. K. Fazlul Huq

Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq (Urdu: ابو قاسم فضلول حق; Bengali: আবুল কাসেম ফজলুল হক; 26 October 1873—27 April 1962)[1]; popularize as Sher-e-Bangla (Urdu phrase meaning The Tiger of Bengal), was a well-known East-Pakistani politician and a notable Bengali statesman in the first half of the 20th century.

Educated at the Calcutta University, he was originally the senior figure of the Congress Party, but defected to Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1930s. He played a crucial role in drafting the Lahore Resolution and had active public position in British India advocating for the Pakistan Movement in 1940s. After the establishment of Pakistan, he was appointed as chief minister of East Bengal in in 1954, but left the position after ascending as Interior Minister of Pakistan. In 1956, he was appointed as Governor of East Pakistan on platform of Communist Party led United Front and presided the provisional state until 1958 when he was ousted by the Awami League.[2] After a brief illness, he died in Dacca in 1962 and is buried at the Suhrawardy Udyan.

Subhas Chandra Bose

ubhas Chandra Bose ( listen (help·info); 23 January 1897 – unknown^[2]) also known as Netaji (Hindi/Bengali: “Respected Leader”), was one of the most prominent Indian nationalist leaders who attempted to liberate India from British rule during the waning years of World War II. Bose, who had been ousted from the Indian National Congress in 1939 following differences with the more conservative high command,^[3] and subsequently placed under house arrest by the British, escaped from India in early 1941.^[4] He turned to the Axis powers for help in gaining India's independence by force.^[5] With Japanese support, he organised the Indian National Army, composed largely of Indian soldiers of the British Indian army who had been captured in the Battle of Singapore by the Japanese. As the war turned against them the Japanese came to support a number of countries to form provisional governments in the captured regions, including those in Burma, the Philippines and Vietnam, and in addition, the Provisional Government of Azad Hind, presided by Bose.^[5] Bose's effort, however, was short lived; in 1945 the British army first halted and then reversed the Japanese U Go offensive, beginning the successful part of the Burma Campaign. Bose's Indian National Army was driven down the Malay Peninsula, and surrendered with the recapture of Singapore. It was reported that Bose died soon thereafter from third degree burns received after attempting to escape in an overloaded Japanese plane which crashed in Taiwan,^[6] which is disputed as there are no evidences.^[7] The trials of the INA soldiers at Red Fort, Delhi, in late 1945 caused huge public

Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna (Bengali: রামকৃষ্ণ পরমহংস About this sound Ramkṛiṣṇo Pôromôhongśo (help·info)) (18 February 1836 – 16 August 1886), born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay[2] (Bengali: গদাধর চট্টোপাধ্যায় Gôdadhor Chôṭṭopaddhae), was a famous mystic of 19th-century India.[3] His religious school of thought led to the formation of the Ramakrishna Mission by his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda[4][5][6][7] – both were influential figures in the Bengali Renaissance[8] as well as the Hindu renaissance during the 19th and 20th centuries.[9][10][11] Many of his disciples and devotees believe he was an Avatar or incarnation of God.[12] He is also referred to as "Paramahamsa" by his devotees, as such he is popularly known as Ramkrishna Paramhamsa.

Ramakrishna was born in a poor Brahmin Vaishnava family in rural Bengal. He became a priest of the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, dedicated to the goddess Kali, which had the influence of the main strands of Bengali bhakti tradition.[2] The most widely known amongst his first spiritual teachers was an ascetic woman, called Bhairavi Brahmani skilled in Tantra and Vaishnava bhakti.[13] Later an Advaita Vedantin ascetic taught him non-dual meditation, and according to Ramakrishna, he experienced nirvikalpa samadhi under his guidance. Ramakrishna also experimented with other religions, notably Islam and Christianity, and said that they all lead to the same God.[2] Though he quit conventional education, he attracted the attention of the middle class, upper middle class and numerous Bengali intellectuals.[citation needed]