The Poet of Shahjahanpur
The Mainpuri pamphlet, the Kakori trial, the autobiography smuggled out of the condemned cell, and the morning of 19 December 1927
Ram Prasad Bismil was an Arya Samaj boy from Shahjahanpur who wrote verse, ran a silk shop, and organised the Hindustan Republican Association across the United Provinces. This lesson follows him from the Mainpuri pamphlets of 1918 to the Lucknow trial, the autobiography he wrote in the condemned cell at Gorakhpur, and the morning he and Ashfaqulla Khan were hanged in two different jails. It also corrects the one thing everybody thinks they know about him.
The Pamphlet and the Press
It is 1918, somewhere in the Mainpuri district of the United Provinces. A young man of twenty-one is folding printed sheets into bundles. The paper is cheap and still smells of ink. His name is Ram Prasad, and the pen-name he signs his verse with is Bismil, which in Urdu means the wounded one, the one laid out for sacrifice.
The pamphlet in his hands is called Deshvasiyon ke Naam Sandesh, a message to the people of the country. He has written it, paid for the printing with money taken in two village raids, and now he has to get it into hands that will read it. Copies go out with the poem Mainpuri ki Pratigya, the Mainpuri pledge.
He is doing this with a schoolteacher named Genda Lal Dixit, who runs a body of young men called Matrivedi, the altar of the mother. Between them they have a few country-made weapons, a printing job, and no money at all.
Within months the police have the list of names. Dixit is arrested. Bismil is not. He walks out of Mainpuri and does not come back for two years, and the government of the United Provinces spends those two years looking for a poet.
The Boy Who Failed His Exams
Bismil was born at Shahjahanpur on 11 June 1897. His father Murlidhar worked for the municipality and later lent money; his mother Moolmati taught herself to read so that she could teach her children. In his own account of his life, Bismil is honest about the middle of his boyhood. He was caught stealing from his father's cashbox. He failed at school more than once. He was not a promising child.
What changed him was the Arya Samaj, the reform movement founded by Dayananda Saraswati in 1875, which had a strong branch in Shahjahanpur. The Samaj taught a plain religion with no priest standing between the person and the Veda, and it taught it in Hindi, to anybody. Bismil took the daily havan seriously for the rest of his life, including in the condemned cell.