Remembering Lala Har Dayal on his death anniversary

 Lala Har Dayal was a smarter and better-read person than anyone else who lived in his era and could teach seventeen languages from Arabic, Greek, and Pali to French, Swedish, and Urdu.

Har Dayal was no ordinary man. The archives of Britain, America, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and India reveal that Har Dayal was an extraordinarily brilliant, highly cultured, and extremely dangerous Indian revolutionary whom Hukumat-i-Britannia, the greatest empire on Earth, feared like no one else.

Over a hundred years ago, this dazzling man from Delhi as the architect of the non-sectarian California-based Ghadr Party (1913-1919) stirred an entire generation of Indian youth. An exceptional polymath, this Sanskrit graduate from St Stephen’s College of Delhi could teach seventeen languages from Arabic, Greek, and Pali to French, Swedish, and Urdu.

From all accounts, he was a smarter and better-read person than anyone else who lived in his era, and his extensive writings and life’s work stands proof of that gift. Even his detractors and severest critics, including The New York Times, had to recognize the colossal power of his mind and praised him in 1919 as “not only the brainiest man… but also the most cultured”.

This amazing individual became, among many things, the first Indian to teach at an American university (Stanford 1912) and, later in life, the foremost global authority on Buddhism. Lala Har Dayal passed away in his sleep on the cold winter night of 4 March 1939 in distant Philadelphia in America when he was just 54.