Ram Prasad Bismil Led the Kakori Raid, Then Wrote From Death Row That Revolutionaries Could Not Win for Fifty Years. The Raj Hanged Him at 30.

On 16 December 1927, in a condemned cell in Gorakhpur district jail, Ram Prasad Bismil, who was 30, began the last chapter of his autobiography with a date. “Today, 16 December 1927, I am setting down the following lines, now that the date for hanging this body has been fixed: six in the morning on Monday, 19 December 1927 (Paush Krishna 11, Samvat 1984). So at the appointed hour I will have to end my life here.”

The book, in four parts and 29 chapters, opens with the Chambal villages of Gwalior state where his grandfather was born and closes with a verse on the four men due to hang. The full Hindi text is online at Gadya Kosh, and the Internet Archive holds a second copy. Every English rendering in this article is the tuput Editors’ own, made from that Hindi.

A cell nine feet by nine

Bismil described the cell exactly. Nine feet long and nine wide, with a door six feet high and two feet wide, it stood on open sand with no shade. “Eating, bathing, relieving oneself and sleeping all happen in this one cell,” he wrote. Food came in clay pots, and he had two blankets and three or four hours of sleep a night, with mosquitoes singing until morning.

He blamed the government for the timing. “The government wants to choke me to death slowly,” he wrote. “That is why the appeal was set for hearing three and a half months away, in this hot season.” Then he added: “I am enjoying this cell very much. I had wished to spend some days in a sadhu’s cave, practising yoga. At the last, that wish too is fulfilled. If I did not find a sadhu’s cave, I found a cave for spiritual practice.”

The pages left the jail a few at a time. Ranu Uniyal, reviewing the English edition in The Book Review, quotes page xiii of the English edition saying they were “smuggled out of the prison in three parts with the help of a sympathetic warder.” Uniyal writes that Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, editor of the newspaper Pratap, published the book in 1928 as Kakori ke Shaheed (The Martyrs of Kakori), and that the British government banned it. Bismil’s own title, she gives as Nij Jiwan Ki Ek Chhata. Penguin India issued Awadhesh Tripathi’s English translation, A Glimpse of My Life, in April 2025.

Fifty cigarettes a day and a trunk of stolen rupees

Bismil was born on 11 June 1897 in Shahjahanpur, in the United Provinces. Muralidhar, his father, sold court stamps, lent money and kept three bullock carts for hire. His grandfather had come into the town with a wife and two small sons in a famine year, and the only work he could find paid three rupees a month.

The memoir starts his own story with his faults. Aged about 14, he began taking money from his father’s chest to buy novels. “I smoked a lot,” he wrote, “I got through fifty or sixty cigarettes a day.” One day, drunk on bhang (a cannabis drink), he rattled the chest while trying to open it, and his mother caught him, searched his trunk and found plenty of rupees. The novels were torn up on the spot.

Twice he failed the Urdu middle-school examination, and though his father wanted him in a trade, his mother got him sent to study English anyway. A temple priest taught him to pray and exercise, a classmate named Sushilchandra Sen got him off cigarettes, and a man named Munshi Indrajit pointed him to the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement founded by Swami Dayanand. Reading Dayanand’s Satyarth Prakash, Bismil wrote, turned everything over for him. For five years he ate no salt.

His mother had learned to read Hindi herself, starting from neighbours’ friends when Bismil was five to seven years old. His grandmother, he recorded, urged the family custom that baby girls be killed, but his mother refused. “In my family this was the first time that daughters were raised,” he wrote.

A sentence in the newspaper, a carriage and a banned book

Swami Somdev, born Brajlal Chopra in Lahore, was his teacher in politics and lived for a time in the Shahjahanpur Arya Samaj temple. Somdev told him to go to Europe after his Entrance examination and see Italy, the country of Mazzini.

Then a newspaper reported the verdict in the Lahore conspiracy case. Bismil had read Bhai Parmanand’s history of India and revered him. “Reading that Bhai Parmanand had been sentenced to hang set my body on fire,” he wrote. “I thought: the English are great tyrants. There is no justice in their rule if they can order the gallows for so great a man. I vowed that I would take revenge for this, and that all my life I would work to destroy English rule.” Somdev answered, “Making a vow is easy; staying firm in it is hard.”

Britain’s own Sedition Committee, reporting in 1918, counted nine batches of conspirators tried before special tribunals under the Defence of India Act, with 28 hanged and 29 acquitted, and records Parmanand’s final sentence as transportation for life.

At the Lucknow Congress of Christmas 1916, as Jawaharlal Nehru dates it, the Moderate leaders on the reception committee meant to put Bal Gangadhar Tilak into a car at the station and drive him out around the city, with no procession, but Bismil and a college student lay down in front of the car. “I could not get a word out,” he wrote, “I only wept and said, drive over me.” Young men unhitched the horses from a hired carriage and pulled Tilak through Lucknow by hand.

At the same Congress he heard of a secret society that meant to join the revolutionary movement, and he was soon on its executive. It needed money and arms. He told his mother he wanted to start a business with a good profit, and she gave him 200 rupees, and later 200 more; he wrote a book, How America Gained Its Independence, and repaid her from the sales. A leaflet, A Message to Countrymen, went out to several districts. The United Provinces government seized both.

Three shots on the Yamuna bank

The banned book went on sale again at the Delhi Congress of December 1918. Young men stood outside the pandal calling out “Book seized in U.P., How America Gained Its Independence,” and detectives surrounded the Congress camp. Having come with the Shahjahanpur ambulance squad, Bismil wrapped about 200 copies in his overcoat. “I was in uniform and a hat, with a big red ambulance badge on my arm,” he wrote. “Nobody suspected anything.”

Around then the Mainpuri group came apart. A member set up a rival band and ordered another to rob a relative; threatened with death, the man went to the police. Bismil fled to Prayag, where his companions decided that a weak member who might talk should be killed. “I said, killing a human being is not right,” he wrote. They went ahead and planned it for the next day.

That evening, 22 January by his own date, he sat on the bank of the Yamuna with his eyes closed, praying. One of the three men sitting near him had quarrelled with him days earlier, and Bismil thought it was settled. The man fired a Mauser from about two yards. “The bullet whizzed past my ear,” Bismil wrote. The first cartridge had misfired. Three shots were fired and none hit him. “I could not understand how I had survived.”

He spent months feverish and thinking of revenge, and once went out with a revolver to kill the man, without success. His mother understood and asked him to promise that he would not kill those who had tried to kill him, but he hesitated. “She said she was asking in repayment of a mother’s debt,” he wrote, “I said I had already vowed to take revenge. Mother made me break my vow. She kept her own word firm. It was I who had to bow my head.” His fever began to fall that day. Elsewhere he gives her order in full: “never put even your enemy to death.”

The police then threatened to auction his share of his grandfather’s property, and his father sold a house worth 2,000 rupees for 800 and left Shahjahanpur. Living as a villager, Bismil ploughed and grazed cattle on barren ground, and translated a Bengali book in a notebook, breaking off to chase the animals with a stick. For months the fugitives lived on gram. Under the names Ram and Agyat (the Unknown) he wrote articles, and as Bismil, an Urdu word meaning sacrificed or slaughtered, he wrote verse. The couplet “Sarfaroshi ki tamanna” often pinned to him is by another man, Bismil Azimabadi, according to Rekhta, and it is not in the autobiography.

When the King-Emperor’s message of clemency for political offenders reached the Amritsar Congress at the end of December 1919, more than eight months after the troops fired at Jallianwala Bagh, Motilal Nehru told the delegates it had come “on the eve of this great meeting.” Bismil went home, and in Shahjahanpur, he wrote, whoever he stood beside said namaste and walked off. Friends who had refused to stand surety for 200 rupees were later leaving bags of 4,000 rupees and their licensed guns with him for safekeeping. “I laughed at this turn of time.”

The train near Kakori

After Non-Cooperation faded, Bismil rebuilt the party and found it starving. Members had no whole clothes, he wrote. Some posed as students to eat at charity kitchens, and he, who had drunk milk once a day for 15 years, gave it up when he saw their state and ate roasted-flour sattu with them. “I often wept,” he wrote.

Money came from a train. On a journey he had watched a station master load a bag into an iron box in the guard’s van, and at Lucknow he saw coolies unloading such boxes with no chain or lock. From the timetable he reckoned the train from Saharanpur would carry about 10,000 rupees by Lucknow. “We did not want to take anyone’s private property,” he wrote. “If we must loot, why not the government’s money?”

On 9 August 1925, the Indian Quarterly Register records, a passenger train was stopped and looted within ten miles of Lucknow Junction. Ten young men did it, Bismil says, mostly about 22. They pulled the second-class chain, tried chisels on the iron chest and then used an axe. Passengers were told to stay in their compartments, and the guard was told to lie on the ground. Two men were posted in the grass to fire one round every five minutes, which was his order, and he had told all of them not to shoot at anyone unless someone armed resisted.

A man leaving the guard’s van fired a Mauser anyway, and Bismil scolded him. “He thought, when would such a chance come again?” he wrote. A passenger who had stepped down to go to his wife was shot dead, and Bismil believed the bullet was that man’s. By his count 14 passengers had guns, two of them British soldiers, and nobody moved.

What the special court heard

On 25 September 1925, the Register says, a CID officer named R. A. Horton issued warrants, and over 30 people were picked up the next day. Arrested at four in the morning, in a towel, Bismil went politely and without handcuffs. At the police station an officer told him things only he and one other man knew. “I was tired of the work,” he wrote of those weeks, “When I thought of how much more killing the work ahead would need, I was left stunned.”

Two Shahjahanpur men turned approver, Banarsilal and Indubhushan Mitra, and the court pardoned both. A third, Banwari Lal of Rae Bareli, confessed and got five years. Bismil’s friends had said Banarsilal would betray them. A collector told him he would hang unless he made a statement. The CID captain went further, he wrote: a short sentence, a passage to England and a reward of 15,000 rupees if he spoke of a Bengal link and Bolshevik contacts. “I laughed a great deal inside.” On the captain’s last visit he would not come out of his cell.

The Special Magistrate, Syed Ainuddin, sent 21 people to the Sessions. Ainuddin, Bismil said, “helped the police to his heart’s content,” was sweet-tongued with the accused, and wrote everything against them. During the prisoners’ hunger strike, Bismil wrote, he lived on water for 15 days and was fed milk through the nose on the sixteenth. Damodar Swarup Seth fell so ill the Register says his trial was put off.

On 6 April 1927, in front of Special Judge A. H. De B. Hamilton at Lucknow, after over 250 witnesses and nearly 1,100 exhibits, three men were sentenced to hang: Bismil, Rajendra Lahiri and Roshan Singh. Ashfaqulla Khan, tried after the main case, was sentenced to hang as well. Never having been inside a court before this case, Bismil had argued his own defence, and he recalled the public prosecutor saying it was better than hundreds of lawyers had managed. Hamilton found him the most important member of the conspiracy, in the Register’s summary of the verdict, and also remarked, “I do believe myself that the great majority of the accused did join this conspiracy for no personal gain or advantage.”

The judge listed the other side as well, naming two men at Bamrauli hit by bullets, four wounded at Dwarkapur, a man at Bichpuri tortured with a burning cloth, and Ahmad Ali shot at Kakori. Hamilton thought it improbable that Ahmad Ali was deliberately aimed at, but said the shooting along the train showed “a disregard of human life.”

The Register for 17 May 1927 logs “40th day of Kakori Prisoner’s hunger strike as a protest against Jail treatment.” The next morning the All-India Congress Committee passed a resolution condemning their ill-treatment.

A friend who ate from the same plate

A chapter of the autobiography is a letter to Ashfaqulla Khan. When Bismil came back to Shahjahanpur after the amnesty, a Muslim schoolboy wanted to talk to him about Mainpuri, and Bismil brushed him off. Ashfaq kept coming, and his elder brother had been Bismil’s classmate in Urdu middle school. Working in the Arya Samaj’s shuddhi (ritual reconversion of Muslims) and living in its temple, Bismil wrote that people were astonished at the friendship, and some of his comrades looked at Ashfaq with hatred for being a Muslim.

“You won,” he wrote. “There was no difference between you and me. We often ate from the same plate. The thought that there is any difference between Hindu and Muslim left my heart.” Ashfaq never called him by name, only “Ram.” Once, in an attack of heart palpitations, Ashfaq lay unconscious calling “Ram, hai Ram.” Ashfaq’s relatives told him to say “Allah, Allah,” but he kept on, until a friend who knew what the name meant fetched Bismil, and Ashfaq grew calm when he came.

A pledge to the Governor

Before his appeal, Bismil wrote, he sent the Governor of the United Provinces a memorial promising to have no more to do with the revolutionary party. The Chief Court of Oudh, he said, called him a dreaded conspirator and a cruel murderer and doubted that the written defence he sent in was his own. His father collected 250 landholders and honorary magistrates for a petition, nearly every elected member of the provincial council signed another, and 78 members of the Assembly and Council of State asked the Viceroy for mercy (the Kirti abridgement says 108). Madan Mohan Malaviya met the Viceroy. The answer arrived two days before Dussehra: telegrams to the jails fixing the dates. The Privy Council, to which he appealed, refused.

He explained why he had bothered. “Politics is like a game of chess,” he wrote, and a player knows when pieces must be lost. In the Assembly, he recalled, the government had said it held full proof against the Bengal detainees but could not show it in open court, and might release them if they gave a written pledge, and his pledge was a test of that claim. “The Kakori case ran a full year and a half in open courts,” he wrote. “The prosecution produced about three hundred witnesses. Several approvers and confessors walked about openly, yet the police reported no mishap and no threat to anyone.”

Escape from jail was another thing he tried, he wrote, and no help came from outside. “This is where the heart is struck. In a country where I built so large a revolutionary movement, I could not get even a revolver to save my life. Not one young man could come to help.”

Ashfaq had not wanted to petition the British at all, because he believed one should pray only to God, but Bismil pressed him, and he signed. “I alone am to blame,” Bismil wrote. On Bhai Dooj he wrote to Ashfaq from Gorakhpur asking forgiveness, and added that God alone knew whether the letter reached him.

What he told the young

The chapter titled “Result” weighs eleven years of work. “From the political point of view our work is worth only this,” Bismil wrote: “we made the lives of a few promising young men painful and joyless, and some of them threw away their lives.” Historically, he thought it had great value. Of the method, he was blunt. “Had we put our whole strength into educating the people, our effort would have been far more useful, and its result lasting.”

Then came the sentence the title of this article rests on. “My firm conviction now is that for fifty years yet a revolutionary party cannot find success in India, because conditions here do not suit it.” His last message to young men was to “give up the wish to keep a revolver or pistol and become true servants of the country,” with complete independence as the aim.

The villages and the mills were where he wanted them, teaching and organising. A labourer’s day wage was still two annas, the same as 20 years before, though the man now had a wife and four children. “In a country where six crore people are held to be untouchable, what right do its people have to be free?” he asked. Women, he wrote, should not be treated as “the shoe at the foot and the doll of the house.” Salil Misra, in Scroll, reads these last three months as the point where Bismil began to doubt that violence worked.

Near the end of the Hindi text comes a request. “Hindu-Muslim unity alone is our memorial and our last wish, however hard it may be to achieve.” The text also says that Lord Birkenhead, the Secretary of State, had found a way to exploit the Hindu-Muslim quarrels and tighten the chains. The final verse says: “Bismil, Roshan, Lahiri, Ashfaq die by tyranny. From the stream of their blood hundreds will be born.”

What happened on 19 December

Rajendra Lahiri was hanged at Gonda on 17 December 1927. On 19 December Bismil was hanged at Gorakhpur, Ashfaqulla Khan at Faizabad and Roshan Singh at Allahabad. The Hindi text online fixes the hour at six in the morning, while the Penguin translation, as quoted in The Book Review, and the Kirti abridgement give half past six.

Later retellings give Bismil words at the gallows. The Gorakhpur district website prints his last words as “I wish the downfall of the British Empire.” None of the contemporary documents we opened, his own autobiography, the Quarterly Register and the Kirti abridgement, records them.

Amritsar received his last message the next month. The monthly Kirti printed an abridgement in Punjabi in January 1928, translated by Bhagat Singh, and the piece was signed “Vidrohi,” the rebel, a name Bhagat Singh used for most of his articles.

India Post issued a stamp on 19 December 1997, the 70th anniversary of the hangings, marking Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan on one stamp. The Free Press Journal reported on 24 March 2026 that the statues of Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan and Roshan Singh outside the municipal corporation office in Shahjahanpur had allegedly been demolished by a contractor on a 40 lakh rupee road project. Municipal sources said replacements were planned for another spot, and the mayor, Archana Verma, summoned officials.