Swami Shraddhanand was born at Talwandi, District Jullundur, in the Punjab in 1856. His father Nanak Chand belonged to a middle class Khatri family, engaged in business in a small way. Nanak Chand received some education in Persian. When he had finished his education he left home in search of some lucrative job. It was not till after the birth of Munshi Ram that his father succeeded in getting a good job. He became a Police Inspector in the North-Western Province (modern U. P.) in 1857. He had four sons including Munshi Ram and two daughters. Young Munshi Ram joined his father in the North-Western Province after some time.
His father was a devout Shaivite and Munshi Ram followed in his footsteps. But no one could live long in the land of Rama without being attracted to Tulsi Das’s `Ramacharitmanas’. Munshi Ram was a devout attendant at its Katha whenever he heard of one in the neighborhood.
In 1877 Munshi Ram married Shiv Devi, daughter of Lala Salig Ram, a big landlord of Jullundur City. He had matriculated by then and had a good chance of getting a Government job.
On account of his father’s frequent transfers from one place to another, his early education was often interrupted. He received his secondary school education at Benares and passed his Matriculation examination in 1877 when he was twenty-one. He joined the Queen’s College for higher education but the fast life he led in the hostel brought about a breakdown in his health which compelled him to discontinue his studies in 1878. Back at Bareilly with his father, he spent some time in idle ease.
In 1882 he persuaded his father to allow him to study Law at the University Law College, Lahore. The medium of instruction here was Urdu, which was then the official language of the Province. He passed the Law examination in due course.
He had begun life as a devout Shaivite. But the time he spent at college turned him into a loose-living atheist. In 1882, however, he happened to be in Bareilly when Swami Dayanand visited the place. His father, as Kotwal, was deputed to keep order at the public meeting which the Swami addressed. He persuaded Munshi Ram to come to one of these meetings. Munshi Ram listened to what the Swami said about Godhead and was drawn to the speaker. A little closer contact followed, which made a serious breach in Munshi Ram’s atheism.
When he joined the Law classes in Lahore, he was soon converted to Dayanand’s views after he read the `Satyarth Prakash’. He joined the Arya Samaj at Lahore. Dayanand and his works influenced him most. He came in close contact with several prominent Arya Samajists at Lahore and elsewhere. He travelled widely throughout the length and the breadth of the country and visited Burma.
After obtaining his Law degree he started practising as a lawyer at Jullundur in 1885. Here he soon built up a practice as a successful District town lawyer. But much important than that was the high status which he soon acquired among the Arya Samajists at Jullundur and in the Punjab. He was the President of the Representative Assembly of the Arya Samajes in the Punjab in 1889.
When the Arya Samaj split in 1893 into two sections, the College Section and the Gurukula Section, he was the acknowledged leader of the Gurukula Section. But before this he had, in association with his brother-in-law, Lala Devraj of Jullundur, ventured out into another field, that of girls’ education. He had been shocked to find one of his daughters, who was studying at the Mission Girl’s School, Jullundur, singing songs in praise of Christ. The result was the foundation of the Kanya Maha Vidyalaya, Jullundur, as a residential school for girls where they were brought up in an atmosphere intensively Hindu or Aryan, as he would have liked to call it.
The split made more strenuous demands on his time for Arya Samajist work. He started a weekly newspaper, the Satya Dharma Pracharak, from Jullundur, of which he became the Editor. The split had ostensibly been caused by the insistence of Munshi Ram and his associates on the establishment of a Sanskrit Academy along with the D. A. V. College at Lahore. Whether or not any of his associates was very serious about the matter, Munshi Ram took up the cause of a Gurukula seriously. In 1902, abandoning his lucrative law practice, he left home and declared that he would not return till he had collected Rs. 30,000/-, then considered sufficient to start the institution.
He was as good as his word and in 1902 he founded the Gurukula at Hardware. Cynics declared that he would attract no students to such an outlandish scheme of studies. So he had to get the students as well. Out of the four students who joined the institution in 1902 two were his own sons. It was a very difficult experiment he was trying. To ensure its success he gave up his practice and became the Governor Director of the institution and continued in that position till 1917. He was then persuaded to enter upon the last stage of a Hindu’s life, becoming a Sannyasi with the name of `Shradhanand’. Naturally he could not now continue his active association with his pet child, the Gurukula, but was content to leave it in the hands of one of his lieutenants.
He now left hardware’s and moved to Delhi. He was already acknowledged as the leader of the Gurukula Section of the Arya Samaj.
At Delhi he plunged into its work as never before. He organised famine relief in Gharwal in 1918. When Mahatma Gandhi gave the call for a strike in Delhi in April 1919, as a protest against the enactment of the Rowlatt Acts. Swami Shraddhanand made a dramatic entry into the political field. A furious mob was going in a procession in the Chandni Chauk; it was fired upon and it got out of hand. With a staff in his hand, Shraddhanand guaranteed the peaceful behavior of the crowed provided the parade of force was removed.
The authorities happily saw sense and agreed. It was then announced that a memorial meeting would be held at the Pataudi House to mourn the death of the person who was killed in the police firing. In a panic the authorities banned such a demonstration against their ill-deeds and barred the way with Gurkha Rifles. Undaunted, the Swami proceeded on his way at the head of the procession. It was a tense moment. In good time the bureaucracy remembered that he had pacified the crowd earlier. The bayonets were lowered and the procession was allowed to pass on its way.
When the meeting was over, the Muslims were so moved by the action of the Swami that they carried him into the Jamie Masjid. Here from the pulpit, which had never had a non-Muslim speak from it, he delivered a fiery speech on Hindu-Muslim unity. Followed the martial law in the Punjab. Like other outsiders, the Swami was not allowed to visit the Punjab. But when it was withdrawn, he was back at Lahore organising relief for the distressed. He persuaded the Punjab nationalists to invite the annual session of the Congress to the Punjab and as the Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Amritsar session in December 1919, he was greatly responsible for its success.
He was invited to take charge of the Gurukula once more and served as its Director for two years again. Meanwhile, as one who had demonstrated the strength of non-violent Satyagraha, he was elected a member of the Congress sub-committee on Satyagraha.
Towards the end of 1922, a movement started for taking back into Hinduism Malkana Rajputs who had probably been converted by force long ago but who still clung to their Hindu ways. He became President of the Shuddhi Sabha. When Muslims branded the campaign as communal, he was able to convince the Congress sub-committee that toured the areas that the malkanas were more Hindus than Muslims and their full admission into Hinduism could not be reasonably considered as disruptive of Hindu-Muslim unity.
The last years of his life were mostly spent in the cause of the uplift of the depressed classes, reconversion of the former Hindus to Hinduism and bringing Hindus of various views together. In 1926 a Muslim, Abdur Rasheed, came to him ostensibly seeking to be converted to Hinduism. Swamiji gave him shelter at his own residence and he repaid it by shooting him dead.
As Munshi Ram, he started life as a loose-living young man. But his conversion to the Arya Samajist view of life entirely changed his way of life. He became a disciplined and enthusiastic puritan. He became a Vanaprasthi in 1902 when he took over as the Governor of the Gurukula, thus renouncing all worldly passions and possessions. As a Sannyasi he lived an austere and well-regulated life.
He was above all an educational reformer. He experimented successfully with the use of Hindi as the medium of instruction even at the college level at a time when the idea was not even mooted as a distant project. He believed in training the entire nation before this idea had even been born elsewhere in Bharat.
His attitude towards social problems was that of a liberal reformer. He favoured giving women equal status with men in society. He favoured widow-marriage and warred against early marriage, both of boys and girls. He firmly believed that the depressed classes-Harijans of today-had been given a raw deal by the Hindus and felt that they owed it to them to ameliorate their condition.
He entered politics late in life, swept into it by Gandhiji’s call for civil disobedience in 1919. His speech, as the Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Congress, breathes a spirit of realism so far as the political questions before the country were concerned. He resigned from the Satyagraha Committee when Gandhiji called a halt to it after the Chauri Chaura incident. A nationalist to the core, he believed that nationalism must be based on a virile Hinduism.
As an Arya Samajist he believed that Hinduism must be emancipated from the grip of the evil practices that had been sapping its vitality. Shraddhanand’s greatest contribution lies in the field of education. The Gurukula movement is a living monument to his work in that cause. He was a fearless worker in whatever cause he espoused. His persuading the Delhi authorities to let him deal with a roused mob, his baring his breast to the Gurkhas’ bayonets before the people whom he happened to lead were molested was dramatic acts of a life in which fear had never dictated his line of action.
His belief in Hindu-Muslim amity pitched him into the pulpit of the greatest mosque in Bharat, an honour never paid to any Hindu before. With all that he died a martyr to his faith at the hands of a Muslim fanatic. Not given to guile, he could not see it in others and died happy.