The Great Indian Genius Har Dayal

 

This is a lost episode of Indian history. Before Bose, much before Nehru and even before Mahatma Gandhi…there was Har Dayal.

On the morning of December 23rd, 1912, a powerful bomb targeted at the Viceroy Lord Hardinge exploded as he entered the new capital city of Delhi. Though the assassination bid failed it brought back the spectre of the Ghadr of 1857 and challenged the might of the British Empire. The British Secret Service connected the bomb outrage to the brain of Har Dayal (1884-1939) a former Stanford University lecturer based in San Francisco.

The history of the Indian freedom struggle has produced no greater enigma than this heroic leader. Har Dayal was the architect of the largest international anti-colonial resistance movement - the Ghadr Party, with its nerve center in California. His mission was to destroy the British Empire by an armed revolt and his weapon of choice was the colossal power of his intellect. Cerebrally light-years ahead, Har Dayal a super brilliant scholar at Oxford and St. Stephen’s College was eloquent in seventeen languages and an author par excellence. Exiled from India for life Har Dayal became Ghadr personified. 

This gentleman revolutionary was the first Indian to teach at American and Swedish universities and an extraordinary mix of an Anarchist and a Pacifist, a Sanskritist and a Rationalist, a Marxist and a Buddhist, a Feminist and a Humanist as also an ultranationalist and an internationalist. For millions who sought to emulate the quintessential Dilliwallah, he was The Great Indian Genius.