Gopal Hari Deshmukh: A voice against women's oppression

Famous by the pen-name of ‘Lokahitawadi’, Gopal Hari Deshmukh was a social reformer from western India. Born in 1893 in Pune, Gopal Hari Deshmukh was a rational thinker who worked as a member of the Governor General's Council.

He advocated widow remarriage and opposed child marriage, caste system and slavery in any form through a Marathi monthly magazine Lokahitawadi of which he was the editor.

Gopal Hari Deshmukh started the Punarvivah Mandal (Widow Remarriage Institute) at Ahmedabad and helped to launch Marathi newspapers, Induprakash and Jnanprakash, in Bombay and Poona.

A champion of national self-reliance, Gopal Hari Deshmukh made it a point to wear handspun khadi cloth while attending the Delhi Durbar in 1877.

Gopal Hari Deshmukh died in 1892. 

Manindra Nath Banerjee: Unsung Revolutionary of India

Born on 13th January in 1907 at Varanasi, Manindra Nath Banerji was a revolutionary who had shot his maternal uncle J.N. Banerji, the Deputy Superintend of Police investigating the Kakori Conspiracy case. J.N. Banerji had played a dubious role in getting Rajendra Lahiri hanged. Rajendra Lahiri was convicted in the famous Kakori conspiracy case and hanged in the Gonda District Jail.

Manindra Nath Banerjee was arrested and sentenced to ten years of rigorous imprisonment. While demanding better treatment for the political prisoners he breathed his last on June 20  in 1934 in the Fatehgarh Central Jail in Farrukhabad district in the Uttar Pradesh after 66 days of hunger strike.

George Yule, First English President of Indian National Congress

George Yule was a Scottish entrepreneur who was the first British to serve as president of the Indian National Congress.  He was elected to that position in the fourth session of the Congress in 1888 at Allahabad. 

He served as Sheriff of Calcutta and President of the Indian Chamber of Commerce.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, First Education Minister in India

Born in Mecca (now in Saudi Arabia) in 1888, Abul Kalam Azad was an Islamic theologian and a great scholar of Arabic, Persian and Urdu. He adopted the pen-name of Azad at the age of 16. He published a number of papers such as Al-Nadwah, the Vakil, Al-Hilal (“The Crescent”) and Al-Balagh. 

He was 35 when he was elected President of the INC in its Delhi session in 1923, becoming the youngest to hold that office. He was again elected to the presidentship of Congress in 1940 and continued to hold that position until 1946.

After Indian independence in 1947, he became the Education Minister in Jawahar Lal Nehru’s cabinet. He had written autobiographical narrative, 'India Wins Freedom' which holds more than religion politics was responsible for the partition of the country. 

Azad died in 1958. In 1992, he was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award.

Annie Besant (1847-1933)

A leading member of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant was an Irish English woman who came to India in 1893 to spread the beliefs of the society which she had joined in 1889.   

In India, Annie Besant settled in Varanasi where she founded the Central Hindu College in 1898. In 1907, she was elected president of the Theosophical Society. In 1914 she started the publication of the Commonweal and New India. These journals soon became her chief vehicle for propagating the beliefs of India’s freedom.

In 1916 Besant established the Indian Home Rule League. She was a leading member of the Indian National Congress of which she was elected president in the Calcutta session in 1917.  She was also the founder of Indian Boy Scouts Association and Indian Woman’s Association.  

Credited with the foundations of several schools and colleges, she had also established the National University at Adyar in 1918. Besant died in 1933.

Badruddin Tyabji: First Muslim President of Indian National Congress

Badruddin Tyabji was the third President of the Indian National Congress (INC) after Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee (1885) and Dadabhai Naoroji (1886). He was the first Muslim president of INC. 

Together with Pherozeshah Mehta and K. T. Telang, he formed the Bombay Presidency Association in 1885. Bombay Presidency Association came into being as a result of the reactionary policies of Lytton, governor-general of India, and dissatisfaction with the Ilbert Bill. 

He died of heart attack in London in 1906.

Dadabhai Naoroji: First Indian MP in British Parliament

Born of priestly Parsi family in 1825 in Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji took a leading part in founding the Indian National Congress of which he was the president for three times (in 1886, 1893 and 1906). Affectionately called the 'Grand Old Man of India', he was the first Indian to be elected to the British Parliament. He entered the British House of Commons as a member of the Liberal Party in 1892. 

In 1852, Naoroji established Bombay Association, India’s first political association.  In 1867 he helped establish the East India Association which aimed to put across Indian viewpoints across to the British public 

A critic of British economic policy in India, Naoroji is known for his enunciations of the Drain Theory in his long paper, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.

Dadabhai Naoroji died in 1917 in Mumbai.