Famous Hindi story, Novel and non-Fiction writer Yashpal was born on 3 December 1903 in Ferozepur (Punjab). His ancestors were from Bhumpal village in Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh. Grandfather Garduram did business in various places and was a resident of Tikkar Bhariya and Kharwariya in Bhoranj tehsil. Father Hiralal was a shopkeeper and tehsil clerk. He had moved to Hamirpur from Chandpur village in Arki state under Mahasu district. His mother was teaching at an orphanage in Ferozepur cantonment at that time. Yashpal's ancestors were residents of Kangra district and his father Hiralal did not inherit anything except a small piece of land and a mud house. His mother Premdevi sent him for education at 'Gurukul Kangri' with the aim of making him a brilliant preacher of the Arya Samaj.
Yashpal's childhood was spent in a time when no Indian in his Ferozepur Cantonment town could carry an umbrella in front of the British to protect himself from the rain or sun. The pain of poverty, humiliation and British oppression filled his mind. From childhood, a spark of hatred for the British started burning in his heart and mind. He first jumped into Mahatma Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement. In 1921, when the Non-Cooperation Movement was going on in the country, Yashpal was in his teens. The feeling of sacrifice for patriotism also started growing in him. He joined the Congress campaign. He felt that such movements had no meaning for the poor and common people of India. Also, this Non-Cooperation Movement would not have any effect on the British government.
He joined the National College in Lahore, founded by Lala Lajpat Rai, which was a centre of nationalist thought. There he came in contact with Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Bhagwati Charan Vohra. Later, he became active in the work of Bhagat Singh's Naujawan Bharat Sabha to fight against British rule. He began to dream of changing the country and take an active part in the armed revolution movement. He was further angered by the lathicharge and death of Lala Lajpat Rai by the British during the anti-Simon Commission movement and took an active part in planning the Saunders massacre. In 1929, he bombed the train of the British Viceroy Lord Irwin, participated in the attempt to free Bhagat Singh from Borstal Jail in Lahore, and killed two constables of the police force who had come to arrest his associates in Kanpur. It was during this period that he met his future wife, 17-year-old Prakashwati, who had left her family and joined his revolutionary movement. She was trained to use a gun by Chandrashekhar Azad.
Chandrashekhar Azad was martyred in an armed encounter with the police in Allahabad in 1931. The revolutionaries had so much faith in him that after Chandrashekhar Azad's martyrdom, Yashpal was appointed as the commander of the 'Hindustan Socialist Republican Army' (HSRA). At the same time, the Delhi and Lahore conspiracy cases were going on. Yashpal was the main accused in these cases, and the British had announced a reward of Rs 3000 for anyone who gave information about him. But he absconded and was not caught by the police. In the next two years, Yashpal secretly prepared explosives to make bombs in many places. In 1932, while he was taking refuge in a house in Allahabad (now Prayagraj), the British police surrounded him. He was arrested after running out of bullets in the encounter. He was the main accused in the Lahore conspiracy case. However, due to the lengthy court proceedings and pressure from the public movement, the government did not pursue these cases further. Several other cases against him were also dismissed due to lack of sufficient evidence and witnesses. He was finally sentenced to fourteen years of rigorous imprisonment or life imprisonment as punishment for armed conflict, at the age of just 28.
While he was in jail, an important event occurred in his life. The jail officer gave a government letter to Yashpal, in which his colleague Prakashwati Kapoor, who worked with him in the movement, expressed her desire to marry Yashpal and sought Yashpal's consent for the same. Prakashwati had been impressed by Yashpal's work since long and had also left her home for the freedom movement. Since there was no rule in the jail manual regarding the marriage of prisoners, the British superintendent allowed the marriage. The police were not ready to take such a dangerous prisoner to court for marriage without handcuffs. And Yashpal was not ready to get married while tied up. Finally, a compromise was reached when the commissioner himself came and agreed to the marriage in prison. The marriage took place in Bareilly Jail in August 1936 with only one witness. After the wedding, the groom was again kept in his barracks and the bride later went to Karachi to complete her education as a dental surgeon. The marriage of Yashpal-Prakashwati in prison was the only such incident in the history of India. The news was widely publicized in the newspapers. As a result of this uproar, the government later added a special clause to the prison manual, which prohibits future convicted prisoners from getting married in prison. After Yashpal agreed, the case became very public after the marriage was allowed in prison, and after that, restrictions were imposed on prisoners from getting married in prison.
During his free time in prison, he got to study and write different books, he studied many writers from home and abroad with great interest. During his imprisonment, Yashpal learned French, Russian and Italian and mastered reading the classic original languages of the world. He wrote the collections of stories 'Pinjre Ki Udan' and 'Woh Duniya' in prison. The book 'Meri Jail Diary', based on his prison experiences, shows Yashpal's concern to reach, see and understand contradictory ideologies like Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence and Satyagraha, Lenin's political method and Freud's psychoanalysis. It is a testament to his creative restlessness, which he overcame to shape himself as a journalist and writer.
In the elections held after India got political home rule in 1937, the Congress party had promised to release all political prisoners. When the first Swadeshi government was formed in 1938, it was releasing all political prisoners. The prisoners who were imprisoned during Gandhiji's Satyagraha were released, but the government made revolutionaries like Yashpal renounce armed and violent activities in order to release them. Yashpal refused to accept this government condition. Finally, he was released on 02 March 1938. He was banned from entering the Punjab province. After his release from Lucknow Jail, Yashpal decided to settle in Lucknow, the capital of the United Provinces. At that time, food, clothing and shelter were the problems facing him. Yashpal and his wife had no place to live. After his release from prison, he did not go to the court of any big man, as some of them had expected. Together, his wife and Yashpal made clay and paper toys, sold them, collected twine lying on the streets, made bags from it, made and sold shoe polish, and then rented a house with their meager resources.
After spending a few months in difficult circumstances, in November 1938, he borrowed some money from his mother and converted the rented house into an office. While working in the revolutionary movement, Yashpal already had a hand-operated machine for printing leaflets. He started publishing the magazine 'Viplav'. This magazine became famous. Along with this, Prakashwati, who had now become Dr. Prakashwati Pal, started practicing dentistry from the 'Viplav Office'. Since the number of women doctors was very less at that time, Prakashwati achieved great success in her field, but after some time she stopped practicing in order to devote her full time to her husband. The slogan on the cover of the magazine was: 'You preach peace and equality, Viplav sings your own song.'
'Viplav' played an unprecedented and remarkable role in the history of Hindi political journalism. Due to its immense popularity, this magazine became an open platform where staunch Gandhians, Marxists and supporters of socio-political revolution could all express their views in one place. By 1939, Viplav had become so popular that its Urdu edition, Baaghi, also started coming out. While taking a stand on the economic issue, his wife Prakashwati Pal pursued her medical studies and when Yashpal fell ill in 1940, Prakashwati took over the responsibility of editing the magazine. In the meantime, he had started writing stories and novels. Considering the difficulties of printing and publishing, and the restrictions imposed by the British, he thought, why not publish his own writings himself? He and Prakashwati started 'Viplav Prakashan'. Yashpal started writing more and more seriously as a writer. A revolutionary had now become a full-fledged writer.
Direct challenge was part of his nature. His article ‘Sevagram Ke Darshan’ is proof of this, in which he goes to Sevagram Ashram to meet Mahatma Gandhi, who demanded that the two mandatory conditions for participating in the Non-Cooperation Movement during World War II, namely personal Satyagraha and faith in God as inspiration, be removed and that the condition of public Satyagraha and faith in God be removed so that even those who do not believe in God can participate. Yashpal argued with Gandhiji that the condition of having faith in God meant destroying the democratic base of the Congress and driving away the revolutionaries who were fighting for a change in the system. After an argument, Gandhiji did not agree. Yashpal walked out. Later, Yashpal published his experience and inconveniences at Sevagram Ashram in ‘Viplav’.
To quell the anti-British rebellious sentiments of Dr. Prakashwati and Yashpal, the British District Magistrate issued a notice against 'Viplav'. Yashpal was asked to give an explanation within thirty-six hours or stop publication. The very next day, Yashpal went to meet him and when he was sitting on the chair opposite, the British officer placed both his legs on the table towards Yashpal as an insult. Yashpal could not bear it. Immediately, he also spread both his legs on the same table. The officer said very patiently, "Thank you Mr. Yashpal! We have received your explanation, now you can go." And Yashpal left. A government order demanded a guarantee of 12,000 rupees from the magazine. The publication of Viplav stopped. Then both of them closed 'Viplav' and started publishing a magazine under the name 'Viplav Tract'. Due to arrests, prison rounds and frequent police raids, the publication of this magazine, which had set new records, had to be stopped in 1941. After independence, the publication of 'Viplav' resumed in 1947, but due to the Press Censorship Act of independent India, it stopped permanently after a few issues.
After being imprisoned by the British for 6 years, he published a collection of 21 stories, ‘Pinjre Ki Udan’, from his Viplav office in 1939. At that time, ‘Viplav’ was about to take shape as a publishing house. It received a good response. In the same year, a collection of 12 stories, ‘Woh Duniya’ Viplav’, written with a dream of a world free from exploitation, was published. In his 1941 novel ‘Dada Comrade’, he showed the reality-based mental and moral confusion of a young man working in the revolutionary movement, which made the novel very popular. Revolutionaries also criticized it. It is still discussed today. He has strongly criticized Gandhianism and Congress and has insisted on a socialist system.
During this period, since there was a lot of Marxist literature in English, he wrote a simple book, 'Marxism', based on the theories of Karl Marx, to make it understandable to people who were interested in socialism and hostile to it. This book is still read today as an introduction to Marxism. His writing was sharp and bold. (To Be Continued)

Email:-----------------------------------kalpanasfi@gmail.com