Ram Prasad Bismil Poet · Revolutionary

Chapter 02 · 1897–1920

Before therevolution

A provincial schoolboy in a small town of the North-Western Provinces; a father who disapproved of English schooling; a reformist temple; a book that changed his reading; and a political atmosphere in which a young man's private conviction could become a public act.

The documented record

What can be stated plainly

Born

11 June 1897Shahjahanpur, North-Western Provinces of British India — today a district of Uttar Pradesh.

Father

MurlidharHeld a post in the Shahjahanpur municipality and later worked on his own account. He taught his son Hindi at home.

Mother

MoolmatiBismil's own account credits her with sustained support for his work, including money for printing. She outlived him.

Family origin

Tomarghar, Gwalior StateThe Chambal country of present-day Morena district, Madhya Pradesh; the family settled at Shahjahanpur in the previous generation.

Languages

Hindi · Urdu · EnglishHindi from his father; Urdu from a maulvi in the town; English at a government school he attended over his father's objection.

Formation

The Arya SamajHe joined the Shahjahanpur branch as a schoolboy. It was the setting in which he read, argued, and met older political men.

Where this comes from. Most of what is known about Bismil's childhood comes from the autobiography he wrote in the condemned cell at Gorakhpur in 1927. It is a first-hand source and an exceptionally valuable one, but it was written by a man of thirty looking back under sentence of death, and it should be read as testimony rather than as a neutral chronicle.

Childhood, schooling and early influences

i · The town

Shahjahanpur was a district town of the United Provinces with a cantonment, a sugar and cloth trade, and a mixed Hindu and Muslim population.

A small town, not a metropolis

Shahjahanpur in the first decade of the twentieth century was not Calcutta or Bombay. It had no university, no daily English press of consequence, and no established political salon. What it had was a railway line, a bazaar, a cantonment, a scattering of schools, and the reading rooms and debating habits of reform associations. This matters, because it explains the shape of Bismil's education: it was largely self-directed, conducted through cheap printed books, tracts and translations rather than through institutions.

The colonial state was present in the town in a very ordinary way — as courts, police, revenue offices and a school curriculum — and the nationalist movement reached it in the same ordinary way, as pamphlets, visiting speakers and news from elsewhere. A boy in such a town encountered politics as reading matter long before he encountered it as organisation.

ii · The household

Bismil's account of his father is affectionate but not uncritical; the disagreement over English schooling is one of the few domestic conflicts he records at length.

Father, mother, and an argument about school

Murlidhar taught his son to read Hindi at home and arranged for him to learn Urdu from a maulvi — a conventional and respectable education for a boy of his class and generation in the United Provinces. The disagreement came over English. Murlidhar did not want his son in an English-medium government school; Bismil went, and by his own account the decision was taken against his father's wishes.

The importance of this is not psychological but practical. It gave him three languages instead of two, and access to a world of English-language political writing that a Hindi-and-Urdu education alone would have closed. His later work as a translator — carrying Bengali and English texts into Hindi and Urdu — rests directly on that schooling.

Of his mother, Moolmati, Bismil writes with unqualified regard. He records that she supported his activity, including financially, at points when it was neither safe nor respectable to do so. Later nationalist writing turned her into an emblem; the first-hand record is narrower and more concrete than the emblem, and no less striking for it.

His education was three languages wide and largely self-directed — a fact that shaped everything he later wrote.

iii · The Arya Samaj

Founded by Dayanand Saraswati in 1875, the Arya Samaj was a Hindu reform movement with a strong emphasis on scriptural argument, education and social reform.

Where the reading happened

Bismil joined the Arya Samaj at Shahjahanpur while still at school. Its importance in his life is easy to misread. It was not, in itself, a revolutionary organisation, and the great majority of its members were not revolutionaries. What it offered a serious-minded adolescent in a district town was a library, a discipline of argument, a set of older men who took ideas seriously, and a habit of treating printed texts as things to be contested rather than received.

The book he singles out is Dayanand Saraswati's Satyarth Prakash — a work of religious and social polemic rather than of politics. Its effect on him appears to have been formal as much as doctrinal: it modelled the practice of taking a position and defending it in print, which is precisely what Bismil went on to do.

The meeting with Swami Somdev

It was at the Arya Samaj temple in Shahjahanpur that Bismil met Swami Somdev, an ascetic who was staying there and who was a friend of the nationalist Bhai Parmanand. Somdev is the first figure in Bismil's account who connects the boy's reading to a wider political world — a person, rather than a book, through whom national politics entered a provincial life.

iv · The first shock

Bhai Parmanand, a scholar associated with the Ghadar movement, was sentenced to death in the Lahore Conspiracy Case; the sentence was afterwards commuted.

A death sentence, and a first poem

Bismil records reading of the death sentence passed on Bhai Parmanand, and responding to it in the way that would define the rest of his life: he wrote. The poem was in Hindi and was titled Mera Janm — “My Birth”. He showed it to Swami Somdev.

This is the hinge of the early chapter, and it deserves to be stated carefully. The documented fact is that a piece of political news produced a poem, and that the poem was shown to an older man who took it seriously. It is not documented — and should not be asserted — that a single event “made him a revolutionary”. Political formation in this period was cumulative, and Bismil's own account presents it as such.

Geography

The four places that hold this life

Shahjahanpur

Birthplace, 11 June 1897. Home, school, the Arya Samaj branch, the silk-trade work of the early 1920s, and later his district of responsibility within the Hindustan Republican Association.

Tomarghar, Gwalior

The Chambal country from which the family had come to Shahjahanpur, in what is now Morena district, Madhya Pradesh. A remembered origin rather than a lived one, but part of how Bismil described himself.

Mainpuri

The district that gave its name to the 1918 conspiracy case in which Bismil was named. He was not taken; he was declared an absconder in November 1919 and spent the following months underground.

Delhi & Agra

Where proscribed literature was carried and sold in 1918, including at the Congress session at Delhi. The circulation of banned books, rather than any dramatic act, is what first brought Bismil to police attention.

v · Context

Bismil turned twenty in 1917. His political adolescence coincides exactly with the most turbulent decade in the history of the Indian nationalist movement to that point.

The making of a political consciousness

To understand why a schoolboy in Shahjahanpur came to hold the views he held, it is necessary to look past the individual and at the decade. Between 1905 and 1922 the terms of Indian politics changed several times over, and each change reached the provincial towns.

The inheritance of 1905

The partition of Bengal in 1905 and the Swadeshi agitation that followed established two things that outlasted the agitation itself: a vocabulary of boycott and self-reliance, and the existence of a revolutionary current that regarded constitutional petitioning as futile. Bismil was a small child at the time. He inherited the vocabulary and the current as settled facts of the political landscape.

The First World War and its promises

India's participation in the war of 1914–18 was accompanied by an expectation of political reward. Indian soldiers served in Europe, West Asia and Africa; Indian revenues were drawn on heavily. The Lucknow Pact of 1916 between the Congress and the Muslim League, and the Home Rule Leagues of Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, raised expectations of substantial self-government.

The Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh

What arrived instead, in 1919, was the Rowlatt legislation extending wartime emergency powers into peacetime, and in April of that year the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. The effect on a generation then in its early twenties is difficult to overstate. It converted an argument about the pace of reform into an argument about the legitimacy of the state itself.

Non-Cooperation, and its suspension

The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22 drew Bismil, like a very large number of young men, into open Congress politics. He returned to Shahjahanpur under the amnesty of February 1920, entered the silk trade, and attended the Ahmedabad Congress of 1921. When Gandhi suspended the movement in February 1922 after the killings at Chauri Chaura, that opening closed. The revolutionary turn that followed was not the beginning of Bismil's politics; it was the second phase of a politics that had already been ten years in formation.

A caution. Later accounts frequently supply Bismil with interior motives — rage, vengeance, a single decisive moment of conversion. The documentary record does not support such narration. What it supports is a sequence: reading, association, writing, proscription, flight, amnesty, open politics, and then a decision taken in 1922–23 in company with others.