The Collected Works of Lala Lajpat Rai (Volume V)

Lala Lajpat Rai was one of the outstanding leaders of modern India, a contemporary of Dadabhai Naoroji, 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 practised 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 Central Legislative Assembly and played a prominent role in provincial as well as national politics in the 1920s. While leading a demonstration against the Simon Commission at Lahore in 1928 he received injuries in an assault by the police which hastened his death. The fifth volume in the series of the Collected works of Lala Lajpat Rai covers a period of twelve months. It opens in June 1914. Lajpat Rai had just arrived in London as a member of the delegation of the Indian National Congress to canvass support for an official bill in British Parliament proposing an element of election in the selection of the Indian members of the London-based Council of the Secretary of State for India. The bill was introduced in the House of Lords, put to vote, and rejected. The Congress delegation was deeply disappointed, and returned to India except for Lajpat Rai who stayed on a few months. He was still in England when the first world war broke out. He decided to leave for the United States where he stayed on for five years doing whatever he could to educate public opinion in that country on India’s struggle for self government. Even though Lajpat Rai had a crowded programme of lectures and tours during the year, he wrote three books. The first book was on the Arya Samaj. The second was entitled The Story of My Life and the third was on the United States. The Story of My Life has been published in full in this volume and from the other two books extracts have been published.