Publisher's Synopsis
Lala Lajpat Rai was one of the outstanding leaders of modern India, a contemporary of Dadabhai Naroji, Tilak, Gokhale and Gandhi. His public life spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. He practiced law at the Lahore Chief Court and built up a lucrative practice, but was drawn very early into public activities pertaining to religious, educational and social reforms and then into nationalist politics. Lajpat Rai was one of the foremost leaders of the Indian National Congress. His arrest and deportation without trial to Burma in 1907 created a great sensation in India. He spent the war years (1914-18) in the United States propagating the Indian case for self- government. He returned to India in 1920 and had the honour of presiding over the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress which approved of Gandhi's campaign for non-cooperation with the government. He was deputy leader of the Swaraj Party in the Legislative Assembly and played a prominent role in provincial as well as national politics in the 1920s. While leading a demonstration against the Simmon Commision at Lahore in 1928 he received injuries in an assault by the police which hastened his death. The second volume in this series covers the period from 1901 to 1906 which witnessed a great spurt in Lajpat Rai's political activities. In the summer of 1905 he visited England as a delegate of the Indian National Congress along with Gokhale, when general elections were imminent in that country, and put forward the claims of nationalist India before the British electorate and political leaders. He also undertook, on the suggestion of Sir William Wedderburn, a month-long tour of America. On his return to India he attended the annual Congress session at Banaras in December 1905 and played an important part in the efforts to avert a clash between the Moderates' and Extremists'. Though engrossed in nationalist politics, Lajpat Rai continued during this period to work for the Arya Samaj and D.AV. College and to participate in the relief work when there was a famine or a natural disaster, such as an earthquake.
