Shri Lala Har Dayal was born on 14th October 1884, Delhi. ‘Lala’ was not a nickname for him, instead, it was a sub-caste designation for the Kayastha community at that time. Apart from that, they give ‘Pandit’ (sub-caste designation) to the educated people of their caste. Lala Har Dayal was immensely influenced by Arya Samaj in the early days of his life. He also joined Shyam Krishna Verma, Bhikaji Cama, and Vinayak Damodar Savartax, etc. He studied at Cambridge Mission School and obtained his bachelor’s degree in Sanskrit from St. Stephen’s College, Oxford on a Government of India scholarship, where he became a supporter of the Indian revolutionary movement. In 1907, he resigned his scholarship and returned to India (1908) to raise his countrymen against British rule, but the government stopped his work, and he returned to Europe. In 1913, he gathered some workers from India and established the “Gadar Party” as a rebellion against the British government. Har Dayal served as its General Secretary. In March 1914 he was arrested by U.S. immigration authorities. As soon as he was released on bail, Har Dayal fled to Switzerland and later to Berlin, where he tried to arouse an anti-British rising in Northwestern India. Later he moved to the United States in the late 1920s and became a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley. He passed away on 4th March 1938, in Philadelphia, but reserved his place in millions of hearts.
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