- Lived:
- 11 October 1902, Sitabdiara, a flood-prone village on the Bihar–United Provinces border → Patna, with long detours through California, a British jail, Gandhi's villages and, at the end, a prison of the republic he helped free
- Field:
- freedom movement · socialism · sarvodaya · democracy — the republic's conscience-keeper, who refused every office it offered
- The Big Idea:
- Power can be moved without being held. JP fought the British with sabotage and the republic's own government with a crowd, was jailed by both — and turned down every seat of power in between, betting his whole life that moral authority outranks office.
- In their words:
- "My world lies in shambles all around me." (his prison diary, July 1975)
- If you remember one thing:
- The same man went over a jail wall on Diwali night 1942 for India's first freedom, and went back behind one at seventy-two — arrested by free India's own government — for what his generation called the second.