Reform & Renaissance

Read Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English and Greek, argued against sati from within the scriptures rather than against them, founded a newspaper and a school, and sailed to England where he died.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

An Irish-British socialist who moved to India, founded a Home Rule League, was interned for it, and became the first woman President of the Indian National Congress in 1917.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Deliberately turned away from oil and perspective to build a self-consciously Indian modern style, borrowing from Mughal miniature and Japanese wash. Founded what became the Bengal School and taught most of the generation that followed.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Trained in academic oil painting, became successful at it, then abandoned it entirely for the flat bold line of Kalighat pat and Bengal folk painting. Priced his work so ordinary people could afford it, and painted the same few subjects for decades without apology.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Regulation XVII, argued for by Ram Mohan Roy on scriptural grounds and pushed through by Bentinck. The debate about whether reform should come from inside or outside a tradition starts here and has not stopped.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Taught alongside Savitribai in the first school and housed the Phules when they were evicted. India's first Muslim woman teacher, and almost entirely missing from the textbooks until recently.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Wondered on a sea voyage why the Mediterranean was blue, decided the standard explanation was wrong, and went home and proved it with equipment costing a few hundred rupees. First Asian to win a science Nobel.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

An Irish teacher who moved to Calcutta, opened a girls' school in a conservative neighbourhood, nursed through a plague epidemic, and designed an early proposal for an Indian flag.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Made monumental public sculpture out of cement and laterite gravel at Santiniketan because bronze was unaffordable. His figures are labourers, Santhal families and mill workers, built at a scale usually reserved for kings.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Consecrated a temple that anyone could enter, at a time when that was unthinkable in Kerala, and summed up his position in a phrase about one caste, one religion, one god for humankind.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Ran a kitchen that fed anyone who came, refused to visit any sultan's court, and outlived several rulers who took that personally.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Seventy-two delegates in a Bombay college hall, initially asking for a slightly larger share of the civil service. It took thirty years to start asking for the whole thing.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Turned up at the World's Parliament of Religions with no formal invitation, opened by addressing the hall as sisters and brothers, and got a standing ovation before he had finished the sentence.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Took up arms in his eighties, won several engagements in Bihar, and when a bullet shattered his arm during a river crossing he cut it off himself and threw it in the Ganga. Died a few days later, undefeated.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Rebuilt Tamil poetry in a plainer, faster idiom and used it for nationalism, women's freedom and the abolition of caste, often in the same poem. Spent years in exile in Pondicherry to stay out of British reach.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

First non-European Nobel laureate in Literature, 1913. Wrote the national anthems of two countries, painted seriously in his sixties, built a university under trees at Santiniketan, and returned his knighthood after Jallianwala Bagh.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Broke Hindi verse out of strict metre almost single-handedly and spent much of his life poor and unwell for the trouble. The name he chose for himself means "the unique one", which was either confidence or a very long joke.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Announced as an administrative convenience and correctly read as an attempt to split the province along religious lines. The Swadeshi movement that followed made boycott a political weapon for the first time.

Find it on the floor: The Reform Room

Gujarat and Rajasthan spend a full day on their roofs cutting each other's strings. The traditional glass-coated manja has been banned in several states for the excellent reason that it also cuts birds and motorcyclists.

Find it on the floor: The Kite Sky

Two spools, one kite, zero fear of edges. Will be shouted at by four separate aunties before noon.

Find it on the floor: The Kite Sky