- Lived:
- 1907–1931 · Banga village, Lyallpur district, Punjab (now in Pakistan) → Lahore, Kanpur, Delhi, and the jails of the Raj
- Field:
- revolutionary politics — the militant stream of the freedom struggle, and its most serious young thinker
- The Big Idea:
- A revolution is won in people's minds before it is won anywhere else — so he engineered his own arrest, turned a colonial courtroom into a printing press, and spent his last two years in a death cell reading and writing his way to a politics India still argues about.
- In their words:
- "Revolution is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol" — from his statement to the Sessions Court, Delhi, June 1929
- If you remember one thing:
- The boy on the martyrdom posters threw a bomb built not to kill and walked toward the police shouting a slogan; the man in the death cell filled a 404-page notebook with Marx and Wordsworth and wrote, with the rope weeks away, an essay on why he would not comfort himself with God. The poster is true. The notebook is truer.