The First Shot
Shivaram Rajguru, the Sanskrit student who was the HSRA's best shot
On 17 December 1928 a twenty-year-old from Khed near Pune fired the first shot at John Saunders outside DAV College in Lahore. He had come to the party through Benares, where he went as a boy to study Sanskrit and stayed to learn shooting. Nine months on the run ended at Pune, and the rope at Lahore ended the rest.
Four O'Clock at the College Gate
It is Monday, 17 December 1928, a little after four in the afternoon. Lahore is cold. Across the road from the gate of DAV College stands a young man of twenty, thin and dark, wrapped against the wind. He is watching the exit of the District Police Lines. His name is Shivaram Hari Rajguru. In the party he is called Raghunath. He has a revolver under his clothes and one job in the plan: fire first, and do not miss.
A police officer walks his motorcycle out of the gate. He is John Poyantz Saunders, an Assistant Superintendent of Police, twenty-one years old. He kicks the engine over. Rajguru steps forward and fires. Saunders falls off the machine. Bhagat Singh fires again, several times. A head constable named Chanan Singh runs after the two men and is shot down by Chandrashekhar Azad, who is covering the retreat from the compound wall.
The whole thing takes less than a minute. The three men run through the college grounds and are gone.
Most photographs of that minute have one face in them. Bhagat Singh's picture is on lorries, on office walls, on the back of auto-rickshaws in every Indian city. The man who fired the first shot is usually a footnote in his own killing. He was a Sanskrit student from a small town on the Bhima river. The reason he was chosen to fire first is worth knowing.
The Boy Who Walked to Benares
Rajguru was born on 24 August 1908 at Khed, a small town on the Bhima river about fifty kilometres north of Pune. The surname comes from an old family role as priests to the Peshwa court, which is where the Sanskrit in the house came from. By his childhood there was very little money left. His father, Hari Narayan Rajguru, died when Shivaram was about six.