01Prayag, the press and the Congress
He was born at Prayag (Allahabad) in a family of Sanskrit scholars and kathavachaks from Malwa. He taught school, edited the Hindi daily Hindustan at Kalakankar, practised law at the Allahabad High Court, and founded the Hindi weekly Abhyudaya in 1907 and the English daily The Leader in 1909. He joined the Congress in 1886 and was elected its president in 1909 and 1918, and again in 1932 and 1933, when he was arrested before he could take the chair. He presided over sessions of the Hindu Mahasabha in the 1920s and worked for the use of Hindi in Devanagari in the courts of the United Provinces.
02Banaras Hindu University
His great work was a university at Kashi that would teach the Vedas and Sanskrit beside engineering, medicine and the sciences. He travelled the country asking princes, merchants and ordinary families for money; the Banaras Hindu University Act was passed in 1915 and the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, laid the foundation stone on Vasant Panchami, 4 February 1916. Malaviya was its Vice-Chancellor from 1919 to 1938, and the campus with its Vishwanath temple remains one of the largest residential universities in Asia. He popularised ‘Satyameva Jayate’ from the Mundaka Upanishad as a national motto. He died at Kashi on 12 November 1946 and was given the Bharat Ratna in 2015.
