Freedom Struggle Personalities and Their Titles: Full List

Every competitive paper carries at least one question that gives a title, a slogan or a newspaper and asks for the person behind it. The facts are fixed, they never change with a new year, and they are among the cheapest marks in the general awareness section. This note arranges them as pairs so that the leader, the epithet, the person who conferred it and the work by which the leader is remembered can be revised together.

Titles and epithets

Three of these pairings have a second half that papers love. Rabindranath Tagore is credited with calling Gandhi a Mahatma, and Gandhi in turn called Tagore Gurudev. Subhas Chandra Bose addressed Gandhi as the Father of the Nation in a radio broadcast in 1944. The British journalist Valentine Chirol called Tilak the Father of Indian Unrest in his book on Indian unrest, and Tilak wore the insult as a badge. Vallabhbhai Patel became Sardar when the peasant women of Bardoli gave him the title after the successful no-tax satyagraha of 1928.

Slogans

Newspapers and journals

A leader was often known by the paper he ran, and the pairing is asked directly. Bal Gangadhar Tilak published Kesari in Marathi and Maratha in English. Gandhi edited Indian Opinion in South Africa and Young India, Navajivan and Harijan in India. Aurobindo Ghosh wrote in Vande Mataram, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh, and B. R. Ambedkar founded Mooknayak in 1920 and later Bahishkrit Bharat and Janata. Gopal Krishna Gokhale brought out Sudharak, Annie Besant ran New India and Common Weal, Shyamji Krishna Varma published The Indian Sociologist in London, and Pherozeshah Mehta founded the Bombay Chronicle.

The moderates and the extremists

The early Congress was led by the moderates: Dadabhai Naoroji, who sat in the British House of Commons as the first Indian member and explained the drain of wealth in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India; Surendranath Banerjee, who founded the Indian Association in 1876; and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who founded the Servants of India Society in 1905 and whom Gandhi called his political guru. Against them stood the extremists, Lal, Bal and Pal, that is Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal, who pressed for swaraj, swadeshi, boycott and national education during the anti-partition movement of 1905.

Revolutionaries

The revolutionary stream produced its own household names. Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan of the Hindustan Republican Association carried out the Kakori train action of 1925. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association were hanged on 23 March 1931, the day India keeps as Martyrs Day. Chandra Shekhar Azad died fighting at Alfred Park in Allahabad in 1931. Surya Sen led the Chittagong armoury raid of 1930, and Jatin Das died in Lahore jail in 1929 after a hunger strike of sixty-three days against the treatment of political prisoners. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar founded Abhinav Bharat, and Madan Lal Dhingra was executed in London in 1909.

Women of the struggle

Sarojini Naidu was the first Indian woman to be president of the Indian National Congress, at Kanpur in 1925, and later the first woman Governor of a province in independent India; Annie Besant had been the first woman president of the Congress, at Calcutta in 1917. Madam Bhikaji Cama unfurled an early version of an Indian national flag at Stuttgart in Germany in 1907. Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the Congress flag at Gowalia Tank in Bombay in 1942 and is remembered as the heroine of the Quit India movement, while Usha Mehta ran the underground Congress Radio. Kasturba Gandhi, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Rani Gaidinliu of the Naga hills and Matangini Hazra of Bengal belong to the same list.

Firsts worth memorising

• First president of the Indian National Congress: Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Bombay, 1885.
• Founder of the Congress: Allan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant.
• Youngest president of the Congress: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, in 1923.
• First Indian member of the British House of Commons: Dadabhai Naoroji.
• First Governor-General of independent India who was Indian: C. Rajagopalachari, known as Rajaji.
• Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution: B. R. Ambedkar.
• First individual satyagrahi chosen by Gandhi in 1940: Vinoba Bhave.