01Shahjahanpur and Mainpuri
He was born at Shahjahanpur and as a boy came under the influence of the Arya Samaj, reading Swami Dayananda’s Satyarth Prakash and taking up brahmacharya and daily exercise. He wrote verse in Hindi and Urdu under the names Bismil, Ram and Agyat. In 1918 he and Genda Lal Dixit organised the Matrivedi group, which was broken in the Mainpuri conspiracy case; Bismil went underground for two years. In 1924, with Sachindranath Sanyal and others, he founded the Hindustan Republican Association, whose aim was a federal republic won by armed revolution.
02Kakori and Gorakhpur jail
On 9 August 1925 he and his comrades stopped the 8 Down train at Kakori near Lucknow and took the government treasury bags from the guard’s van. Arrests followed from 26 September. After a trial of more than a year, he, Ashfaqulla Khan, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were sentenced to death. Rajendra Lahiri was hanged at Gonda on 17 December 1927; Bismil at Gorakhpur, Ashfaqulla at Faizabad and Roshan Singh at Allahabad on 19 December. In the days before his hanging he finished his autobiography, which was smuggled out of the jail. The friendship of Bismil the Arya Samaji and Ashfaqulla the Pathan is remembered in Uttar Pradesh to this day.
