Mostly people in their twenties, several of them in their teens, who concluded that petitions were not working and who wrote a great deal in prison.
18 entries on this part of the floor. 1900 CE – 1947 CE.
Kala Pani · lower level
Seven wings radiating from a central tower, 693 cells, each facing the back of another wing so that no prisoner could see another human being. It is now a national memorial.
Find it on the floor: The Cellular Jail Corridor
A sentence designed to be worse than prison: exile to an island, loss of caste through the sea crossing, and hard labour at an oil mill. Hundreds died there.
Find it on the floor: The Cellular Jail Corridor
c. 1930 CE
Political prisoners were shipped 1,200 km across the Bay of Bengal to a jail designed so that no cell faced another. Solitary confinement as architecture.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Raised a hundred thousand unarmed Pathan volunteers in the North-West Frontier, sworn to non-violence, in a region with no tradition of it whatsoever. Spent about thirty years of his life in prison, under three different governments.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Organised the Lahore student wing and ran the study circles where much of the group's politics was actually worked out. Hanged at 23.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Presented dozens of designs, and the two-colour flag he brought to Gandhi in 1921 — who added a white band and a spinning wheel — became the ancestor of the tricolour the Congress adopted in 1931. He died in obscurity in 1963.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Gave his name in court at fifteen as "Azad", his father's name as "Independence", and his address as "Prison". Kept the promise never to be taken alive.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
One of the youngest people ever hanged by the Raj. Bengali weavers began producing dhotis with his name on the border, which the government promptly banned.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
A crowd gathered in a walled garden with one narrow exit on Baisakhi. Troops fired for about ten minutes without warning. The official count was 379; Indian estimates ran far higher. Tagore returned his knighthood within weeks.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Demonstrated millimetre-wave radio in Calcutta in 1895, refused to patent almost any of it, and then spent decades proving that plants respond to stimuli with instruments he built himself.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
A schoolteacher who planned and led an armoury raid with a group of teenagers, held a hill for a few days, and was betrayed and hanged in 1934.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Has a slide showing the total addressable market as the population of India, which is technically true and commercially meaningless.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Deputy operations director on Mangalyaan and mission director on Chandrayaan-3, which is a fairly comprehensive answer to anybody asking what Indian women do in engineering.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Moves down the aisle with a clipboard and the calm authority of a man who has heard every excuse twice before lunch.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
A handful of revolutionaries stopped a train to take the government treasury it was carrying. The trial that followed made them household names, which was rather the point.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Unfurled an early version of an Indian flag at an international socialist congress in Germany and asked the delegates to salute it. Lived in exile for thirty-five years and was not allowed home until she was dying.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
Led an Adivasi revolt in the Godavari hills against forest laws that criminalised the way people had always lived, raiding police stations for weapons. Shot in 1924, aged 27.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House
The word "Socialist" was added in 1928 deliberately: the group had decided that replacing British rulers with Indian ones would not, on its own, be independence.
Find it on the floor: The Revolutionaries' Safe House