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Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya
- Serving on the Congress Working Committee when Quit India was launched in 1942, Pattabhi was arrested with the entire committee and incarcerated for three years without outside contact
in the fort in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. During this time he maintained a detailed diary of day-to-day life during imprisonment, which was published later as Feathers and Stones - Pattabhi also served as the Governor of Madhya Pradesh from 1952 to 1957.
- He established Andhra Bank in Machilipatnam on 28 November 1923 which is currently one of the major commercial banks of India.
Birendranath Sasmal
- Birendranath Sasmal was a lawyer and political leader
- He was known as Deshparan because of his work for the country and for his efforts in the Swadeshi movement.
John Marshall (archaeologist)
- Sir John Hubert Marshall was the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1902 to 1928. He was responsible for the excavation that led to the discovery of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, two of the main cities that comprise the Indus Valley Civilization
- In 1913, he began the excavations at Taxila, which lasted for twenty years. He laid the foundation stone for the Taxila museum in 1918
- He then moved on to other sites, including the Buddhist centres of Sanchi and Sarnath.
Sri Aurobindo
- The central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision was the evolution of human life into life divine.
- His principal philosophical writings are The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, while his principal poetic work is Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol.
- Sri Aurobindo's close spiritual collaborator, Mirra Richard , came to be known as The Mother simply because Sri Aurobindo started to call her by this name.
- Mirra was born in Paris to Turkish and Egyptian parents.
- When Sri Aurobindo died in 1950, the Mother continued their spiritual work and directed the Ashram and guided their disciples.
Chittaranjan Das
- Chittaranjan Das (popularly called Deshbandhu "Friend of the country") was an eminent Bengali lawyer and a major figure in the Indian independence movement.
- He successfully defended Aurobindo Ghosh on charges of involvement in the previous year's Alipore bomb case.
Motilal Nehru
- He served as President of the Congress Party, once in Amritsar (1919) and the second time in Calcutta (1928)
- Was arrested during the Non-Cooperation Movement
- Motilal joined the Swaraj Party
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
- He launched a movement for religious reform advocating dismantling the system of caste in Hindu culture
- Savarkar was a poet, writer and playwright.
- Savarkar created the term Hindutva, and emphasized its distinctiveness from Hinduism which he associated with social and political disunity.
- Savarkar published The Indian War of Independence about the Indian rebellion of 1857 that was banned by British authorities.
- Serving as the president of the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar endorsed the ideal of India as a Hindu Rashtra and opposed the Quit India struggle in 1942, calling it a "Quit India but keep your army" movement.
Khudiram Bose
- He was a Bengali revolutionary, one of the youngest revolutionaries early in the Indian independence movement. At the time of his hanging, he was 18 years, 7 months 11 days old—barely a legal adult.
- Khudiram earned the reputation of a dare-devil, maverick and adventurer even before reaching adolescence.
- In 1902 and 1903, when Sri Aurobindo (who was in the earlier stage of his life as a evolutionary leader and ideologue) and Sister Nivedita respectively visited Medinipur and held a series of public lectures along with secret planning sessions with the revolutionary groups.
- Bose was inspired by his teacher Satyendranath Bose
Prafulla Chaki
Khudiram and Prafulla watched the usual movements of Kingsford and prepared a plan to kill him. In the evening of April 30, 1908, the duo waited in front of the gate of European Club for the carriage of Kingsford to come. When a vehicle came out of the gate, they threw bombs and blew up the carriage. However, the vehicle was not carrying Kingsford, rather two British ladies - Mrs. and Miss Kennedy were killed. The revolutionaries fled.
Subramanya Bharathi
- He was Tamil poet from Tamil Nadu,
- Known as "Mahakavi Bharathiyar"
G. Subramania Iyer
- He was a leading Indian journalist, social reformer and freedom fighter who founded 'The Hindu' newspaper on September 20, 1878.
- In the second session of the Indian National Congress, Subramania Iyer was selected member of the Committee to report on the representation of Indians in the public services.
- When he conducted his widowed daughter's remarriage in 1889, for which he was socially boycotted by his own relatives and Indian National Congress conspire by some conservationist.
- He supported widow remarriage and desired to abolish untouchability and child marriages.
Tanguturi Prakasam
- He was an Indian politician and Freedom Fighter and the first Chief Minister of the Indian province Andhra state. He was also known as Andhra Kesari (literally, the Lion of Andhra).
- In England, he joined the India Society and worked for the election of Dadabhai Naoroji to the House of Commons.
- In 1946, after the Congress' victory in elections in Madras Presidency Prakasam became the chief minister on 30th April 1946.
V. Krishnaswamy Iyer
- He was involved in the prosecution of a partner of the British banking Company Arbuthnot & Co after the bank crashed on 22 October 1906. Following the crash, Iyer gathered together eight Indians who started a bank funded by Chettiar Capital which later became the Indian Bank.
- He was an Indian lawyer and High Court judge of Madras.
- His involvement in public affairs drew him to the Congress party. He was instrumental in bringing together the moderate and extremist factions of the Congress Party at the 1907 session in Madras. This act of Krishnaswami was greatly appreciated by Gokhale.
- He was responsible for introducing a number of educational reforms in the University of Madras.
Dadabhai Naoroji
- His book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India brought attention to the draining of India's wealth into Britain
- He was a Member of Parliament (MP) in the British House of Commons between 1892 and 1895, and the first Asian to be a British MP
- In 1854, he also founded a fortnightly publication, the Rast Goftar (or The Truth Teller), to clarify Zoroastrian concepts.
- He was also a member of the Indian National Association founded by Sir Surendranath Banerjea from Calcutta a few years before the founding of the Indian National Congress in Bombay, with the same objectives and practices. The two groups later merged into the INC, and Naoroji was elected President of the Congress in 1886.
Gopal Krishna Gokhale
- He founded the Servants of India Society to specifically further one of the causes dearest to his heart: the expansion of Indian education.
- The Society took up the cause of promoting Indian education in earnest, and among its many projects organized mobile libraries, founded schools, and provided night classes for factory workers.
- Gokhale, though an earlier leader of the Indian nationalist movement, was not primarily concerned with independence but rather with social reform; he believed such reform would be best achieved by working within existing British government institutions
Surendranath Banerjee
- He founded the Indian National Association
- He was also known by Rashtraguru (the teacher of the nation)
- He cleared the competitive examination in 1869, but was barred owing to a dispute over his exact age.
V. O. Chidambaram Pillai
- He gets credit for launching the first indigenous Indian shipping service between Tuticorin and Colombo with the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, competing against British ships.
- He compiled ancient works of Tamil grammar, Tolkappiam.
Mahadev Govind Ranade
- He edit a Bombay Anglo-Marathi daily paper, the Induprakask, founded on his ideology of social and religious reform.
- During his life he helped establish the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Prarthana Samaj
Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar
- A great social reformer, through his researches he advocated widow marriages and castigated the evils of the caste system and child marriage.
- He reconstructed the political history of the Deccan of the Satavahanas
- Bhandarkar became a member of the Paramhansa Sabha, an association for furthering liberal ideas which was then secret to avoid the wrath of the powerful and orthodox elements of contemporary society.
Sivanath Sastri
- Sivanath Sastri was not only one of the leaders but also the principal ideologue of the group opposing Keshub Chunder Sen. They were initially called the Samadarshi group and in 1878 formed the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj.
- According to Sivanath Sastri in his History of the Brahmo Samaj, “At the time of its foundation, the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj was headed by three men universally esteemed in Brahmo society for their high moral character. They were Ananda Mohan Bose, Sib Chandra Deb and Umesh Chandra Dutta.
- His work include Paschim Banga, special issue on Shivanath Sastri
Keshub Chunder Sen
- In 1878 his followers abandoned him after the child marriage of his daughter by Hindu rituals.
Bipin Chandra Pal
- He was among the triumvirate of Lal Bal Pal.
- He was responsible for initiating the first popular upsurge against British colonial policy in the 1905 partition of Bengal, before the advent of Gandhi into Indian politics.
- Pal was also the founder of the journal Bande Mataram.
- He founded the Swaraj journal.
- However, due to political repercussions in the wake of Curson Wyllie's assassination in 1909 by Madanlal Dhingra lead to the collapse of this publication, driving Pal to penury and mental collapse in London
Narayan Apte
- He was a Hindu activist and enterpreneur who was executed for his role in the assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
- Apte graduated from Bombay University as a Bachelor of Science.
- Apte considered himself an expert prognisticator when it came to reading the stars and predicting the future. His predictions that killing Gandhi would somehow magically reunify India with Pakistan
- Nathuram Godse for almost 6 years under the Hindu Mahasabha. On 28 March, 1944 the publication of Marathi daily Agrani started at Pune.
Gopal Ganesh Agarkar
- He was the first editor of Kesari, a prominent Marathi weekly in those days which was started by Lokmanya Tilak
- He started his own periodical Sudharak in which he campaigned against the injustices of untouchability and the caste system.
- By nature Tilak tended toward extreme views while Agarkar tended toward the moderate.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
- Known as "Father of the Indian unrest"
- He organized the Deccan Education Society with a few of his college friends, including Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi and Vishnu shastri Chiplunkar
- Tilak opposed the 1891 Age of Consent bill, seeing it as interference with Hinduism and a dangerous precedent. The act raised the age at which a girl could get married from 10 to 12.
- Tilak took up the people's cause (as plague epidemic spread from Mumbai to Pune in late 1896) by publishing inflammatory articles in his paper Kesari.[Kesari was written in Marathi and Maratha was written in English]
- His slogan as "Swaraj (Self-Rule) is my birth right and I shall have it." was become very popular
- On 30 April 1908 two Bengali youths, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose, threw a bomb on a carriage at Muzzafarpur in order to kill the Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford of Calcutta fame, but erroneously killed some women travelling in it. While Chaki committed suicide when caught, Bose was hanged. Tilak in his paper Kesari defended the revolutionaries and called for immediate Swaraj or Self-rule. Thus he was imprisoned from 1908 to 1914 in the Mandalay Prison, Burma.
- While in the prison he wrote the most famous "Gita Rahasya".
- He helped to found the All India Home Rule League in 1916-18 with G. S. Khaparde and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
- He was the first Congress leader to suggest that Hindi written in the Devanagari script be accepted as the sole national language of India.
- Gopal Ganesh Agarkar subsequently left Kesari out of ideological differences with Bal Gangadhar Tilak concerning the primacy of political reforms over social reforms, and started his own periodical Sudharak.
Madan Mohan Malaviya
- He was well known as 'Mahamana'
- He was the President of the Indian National Congress on four occasions
- He was also the Chairman of Hindustan Times from 1924 to 1946.
Jagjivan Ram
- In 1946, he became the youngest minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's provisional government, the First Union Cabinet of India as a Labour minister, and also a member of Constituent Assembly of India, where he ensured that social justice was enshrined in the Constitution.
Ahilyabai Holkar
Punyashlok Rajmata Devi Ahilyabai Holkar (ruled 11 December 1767- 13 August 1795) also known as the Philosopher Queen was a Holkar dynasty Queen of the Malwa kingdom, India. She is often compared with Catherine II of Russia, Elizabeth I of England, Margaret I of Denmark. Ahilyabai was born in the village of Chaundi in Jamkhed, Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. She moved the capital to Maheshwar south of Indore on the Narmada River.
Jijabai
Jijabai was the mother of Shivaji, founder of the Maratha Empire.
Lala Lajpat Rai
- He was popularly known as Punjab Kesari (The Lion of Punjab) or Sher-e-Punjab
- On 30 October 1928, Lajpat Rai led a silent non-violent procession with Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya to protest against the Simon Commission at Lahore and died in lathi charge during protest.
Dinshaw Edulji Wacha
- He was a Parsi Indian politician from Bombay. He was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, and its President in 1901.
- His work includes
- Premchand Roychand: His early life and career
- The life and life work of J. N. Tata
Jivatram Kripalani
noted particularly for holding the presidency of the Indian National Congress during the transfer of power in 1947.
