01A boyhood in Saran
Rajendra Prasad was born here into a Kayastha family; his father Mahadev Sahay knew Persian and Sanskrit, and his mother taught him the Ramayana. He began Persian with a maulvi in the village, as was the custom, and went on to Chhapra and then Calcutta, where he stood first in the university entrance examination. He became a lawyer at Patna, and in 1917 left a large practice to work for Gandhi among the indigo farmers of Champaran. He presided over the Constituent Assembly from December 1946 and served as President of India from 1950 to 1962.
02The house at Ziradei
The family house, a large village home of brick around a courtyard, still stands in Ziradei and is kept as a memorial with objects from his life. Rajendra Babu came back to it through his life, and his autobiography, Atmakatha, written in jail in the 1940s, opens with the village, its people and its ways. On his birth anniversary each year people from the district gather here. He died at Patna on 28 February 1963.
The life of this place
- 3 December 1884Rajendra Prasad was born at Ziradei.
- 26 January 1950Ziradei’s son became the first President of India.
