On an early evening in 1904, at a street corner in Lahore, a crowd pressed in on a boy from Delhi, not yet twenty, a sharp-featured, and unassuming student, chasing an MA at Punjab University. He was playing chess, totaling the temple bells as they clanged in the heat, working out mathematical puzzles that twisted like vines, and echoing back long stretches of Pashto read to him by strangers - all at once, without a flicker of strain. A bewildered American professor, Dr. Hervey Griswold, just stood there, scribbling, “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 stared at the young Dilliwallah in disbelief, as if they’d glimpsed a trick of light, or something older, from the myths.
Word flew, and from that day, he was named the Great Har Dayal. Har Dayal had the gift of superhuman memory that held everything, whole and unblurred, like rooms in a house he could walk through blind. He shattered academic records at St Stephen’s College in Delhi and Punjab University in Lahore that no one had thought breakable, and no one has matched since. At Oxford, the tutors admitted they had nothing left to teach him; he wrote better than they did.
Author Khushwant Singh recalled, “While I was still at school, the one name that was on all lips as the paradigm of the ultimate in scholarship was that of Har Dayal.” Curiosity drove him, not like hunger but a compulsion, to cram the world’s learning into his head, entire libraries, chapter by chapter, word for word. A polymath, they called him, though the word feels small. This Sanskrit scholar could eventually teach in seventeen tongues—Arabic to Urdu, Greek to German, and even the universal world language Esperanto. Har Dayal was, by all records of that period, the sharpest mind of his age, better read than the libraries that birthed him.
The word Genius is now tossed around like loose change and pinned on anyone with a trick or two. In Latin, Genius was a god who presided over the birth of a person of remarkable talent. The Oxford Dictionary defines genius as an exceptional skill in art or science. However, Arthur Schopenhauer cut sharper when he wrote, “talent hits what others miss; genius hits what others can’t even see.” Talent dazzles the hour; genius echoes beyond it, into the forever.
That was Har Dayal, the genius and the rarest of the rare Indian who aimed at the impossible, who dreamed victories no one else could picture; who predicted a future no one dared to imagine. He thrust himself into a challenge that had never been accepted before. Har Dayal’s mission was India’s freedom, and his weapon of choice was his intellect. Suddenly, the barely twenty-two-year-old fired the imagination of a nation. Pro-independence leader Lala Lajpat Rai declared, “He is loved and respected by hundreds and thousands of his countrymen, including those who do not agree with his views or his propaganda or his programme. Even Mr. (Gopal Krishan) Gokhale admired him.”
In the pre-World War I era, the British Empire’s sun never dipped, and the blood was always fresh under its heel while trillions were transferred from the Indian shores to Britain’s coffers. Most believed that the despotic imperial misrule would continue forever. At that juncture of Indian history, Har Dayal turned away from the most sought-after enticements of the Hukumat-i-Britannia. He resigned the Oxford scholarship he’d clawed for, and walked out of the Indian Civil Service, that gilded trap for the brightest Indians. Breaking accepted social norms and going against the grain of his own Oxford polish, he advocated a life of modest living and elevated thinking. Dressed in Indian attire and preferring to converse in Sanskrit, he launched his war against the whole imperial machine, not by petitions and resolutions like the British-trained Indian barristers, but by revolt, armed and unyielding. Forced to leave his wife behind in India, he never saw his daughter as he wandered across continents - London, Oxford, Paris, Geneva, Algiers, Martinique, Harvard, Honolulu, and eventually reached Berkeley, California., He carried himself like a man at ease in the world’s drawing rooms, with a rock star’s easy charm, a fine sense of humor that cut through stiffness, and mesmerizing speeches that held rooms silent. His eyes sparked, his smile invited trust. The great names of his time – public intellectuals, university dons, reputed editors, top writers, known revolutionaries, respected philanthropists, and heads of state - crossed his path and admired the man from India who seemed to see further than everyone else.
Young Indian students in Britain flocked to hear Har Dayal whenever he gave a speech, drawn by his fervor, and among them was a young student at Harrow named Jawaharlal Nehru. In Paris, Jean-Laurent Longuet, Karl Marx’s grandson, took him as a brother in arms. The Germans saw a Lenin-like figure in him, a leader of fire; the Kaiser named him a friend. Writers like Somerset Maugham and Jack London wove him into their stories; even Hollywood produced a black-and-white silent film at Paramount Pictures inspired by Har Dayal’s life story. America’s intellectual giant, Professor Arthur Ryder, later Sanskrit master to Robert Oppenheimer, encountered Har Dayal, all of twenty-seven, at Berkeley in 1911, and immediately pushed Stanford to hire him on the spot. He became the first Indian to lecture at a University in the United States, thus cracking open a glass ceiling for Indians. The New York Times marveled at the colossal power of his mind and described him as “not only the brainiest man… but also the most cultured”.
At a time when Indian voices for independence were at best whispers, 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 shade of political thought and activism, covering the entire spectrum of modern-day political play in India. He even preempted Mahatma Gandhi by at least a decade in India, launching his civil disobedience and nonviolent passive resistance campaign. His band of political missionaries reached out to the Indian youth in towns and villages, with anti-colonial messages decades before any such organization took shape.
His friends, Principal Sushil Rudra, Charles Andrews, of St Stephen’s College, and many followers, spread his words like seeds. In 1913, Har Dayal built the Ghadr Party on Californian soil—the biggest anti-colonial storm yet, a nerve center in the diaspora. He shattered the time-tested Divide-and-Rule policy of the Hukumat-i-Britannia with his political start-up, open to all faiths, all castes, women and men alike, with no lines drawn in the dust. The echo of Ghadr’s publications strategically struck at the Hukumat-i-Britannia’s twin pillars: the famed Indian Civil Service, that cadre of state administrators, and the feared British armed forces, that drew blood. His writings roused Indians in America, Europe, Africa, the East - exiles, prisoners in German camps - to form an army for the freedom of the motherland. Archives hint now of his covert relationship with America and Germany, pulling them into India’s endeavor for freedom. The Berkeley-Berlin-Baghdad-Bengal line he created during World War 1 gave birth to legends.
At one stage, the audacious rebel, unlike any other leader of the Indian freedom movement, even proposed an invasion of Britain by a revolutionary Indian army, and intended to introduce Sanskrit among its natives, turning the tide inside out. Russian-born political activist, Emma Goldman acknowledged, “Har Dayal, one of the biggest intellects of India, has long been a thorn in the side of the British government because of his effective work in spreading revolutionary ideas among his fellow countrymen.”
By the age of thirty-five, Har Dayal the architect of the Ghadr movement had already became a significant protagonist in the Oxford debates, the India House in London, Madame Bhikaji Cama’s publication Bande Mataram in Paris, the attack on Viceroy Hardinge in Delhi, the Berlin India committee, , the intercontinental mission to Kabul to form the first provisional government of Free India, the Komagata Maru episode in Vancouver, the Indo German trial in San-Francisco, the Lahore Conspiracy trials in India, the Singapore Mutiny and the first ever presentation before the immigration department in Washington DC to grant American citizenship to Indians – the path to the heights they hold now. Noted American historian Professor Nico Slate recently wrote, “No figure embodied that interconnected struggle more than the most famous Indian American intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, than Har Dayal”.
In Har Dayal, the powerful Hukumat-i-Britannia finally met an admirable but formidable opponent. Despite all its financial dominance, diplomatic influence, military assets, and secret agents, they found themselves powerless to arrest the tsunami of nationalism unleashed by his genius. Year after year, Hukumat-i-Britannia considered Har Dayal the single greatest threat to its existence as long as he lived. Sir David Petrie, Director-General of MI5 (1941-46) and Chief of British Intelligence in India, who had investigated the attack on Lord Hardinge in 1912, recorded in a top secret report, “No man in recent times has sinned more grievously against the (British) Government… than Har Dayal…”, Keen to dispatch their deadliest foe to the wilderness of the Cellular Jail in the Andamans, they couldn’t touch him. Cerebrally light years ahead of all his tormentors, he always slipped away, outfoxing them. Incensed, the Hukumat-i-Britannia exiled the brightest blade India had forged from the land of his birth and systematically erased him from public memory. Additionally, they enacted draconian laws like the Rowlatt Act to outlaw the Ghadr Party.
Living in exile in a small village in Sweden, mainly in hand-to-mouth situations, Har Dayal became a ghost in his own story. Yet he mastered Swedish, discovered cosmopolitanism, wrote five books, studied Buddhism like no other, and completed a doctoral thesis at the University of London in 1932. His fame peaked in India after the publication of his awe-inspiring book, “Hints for Self-Culture”. Due to an intense campaign by his well-wishers, the Hukumat-i-Britannia conditionally rescinded the notification of Har Dayal’s exile in 1938. But it was too late. On the cold night of March 4, 1939, Har Dayal slipped away in his sleep in Philadelphia. He was just fifty-four. Reverend Charles Andrews, in a tribute, wrote, “Lala Har Dayal was one of India’s noblest children, and who, in happier times, would have done wonders with his gigantic intellectual power. For his mind was one of the greatest I have ever known, and his character also was true and pure…”
The baton then fell on yet another trailblazer, Subhas Chandra Bose, and his Azad Hind marched echoes of Ghadr to Delhi’s Red Fort. The INA trials in 1945, followed by nationwide mutinies, broke the spine of Hukumat-i-Britannia as they lost the loyalty of the British Indian armed forces just as Har Dayal had mapped with Ghadr decades earlier. That was the moment the mighty Hukumat-i-Britannia saw the crown slip, and India gained its independence.
Now, in 2025’s haze, we need Har Dayal sharper than ever. His words linger, a quiet command: “Life is a wonderful privilege. It imposes great duties. It demands the fulfillment of great tasks and the realization of noble ideals.… You stand between the past and the future; the world is yours to enjoy, to organize, 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.”
The author is the biographer of Har Dayal, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patal. He can be reached at writerlall@gmail.com. |
