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 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.
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.
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 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.
World map by Cosmas Indicopleustes / Image Credit: upload.wikimedia.org Cosmas Indicopleustes (literally: "who sailed to India") ...
