Swami Shraddhanand was a leading member of the famous reform movement Arya Samaj and tried his best to propagate the ideals and teachings of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the movement in 1875. A nationalist leader from Punjab, he strove hard to reform Hinduism of purging it all later degenerate features that had crept into it.
A successful lawyer and great educationist, Shraddhanand plunged headlong into the freedom movement. He started a weekly, Satya Dharma Peacharak, from Jalandhar and in 1902 founded the Gurukula at Kangri near Haridwar (now in Uttrakhand and an important place of Hindu pilgrimage). During the anti-Rowlatt Act agitation, he joined the National Movement and was the Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Amritsar session of the Congress in 1919.
Shraddhanand was a liberal social reformer who advocated widow remarriage and female education and opposed child marriage and caste discrimination. He was the president of the Suddhi (re-conversion) Sabha of the Arya Samaj. His conversion programme was not liked by the Muslims. A Muslim fanatic named Abdul Rashid murdered him on 23rd December, 1926.
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