New Delhi: The lion of Punjab has re-entered national conversations following the release of a new book, Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood by historian Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav. But the Servants of People Society, the pre-Partition institution Rai established in 1921 as an exercise in nation-building, has slipped through the decades, largely ignored.
The Servants of the People Society or SOPS was minted in the idealism of the freedom struggle to fight poverty. This 103-year-old institution is anything but a sleepy relic of the past. It has survived and even flourished with initiatives like yoga training and masala centres. But its mission of building an army of volunteers in service to the nation is floundering.
“The idea, from the very first, has been to produce a kind of national missionaries whose sole object would be to devote the whole of their time to national work, in a spirit of service, without hankering for promotion for furthering their worldly interests,” Rai wrote in a preamble, which was published in SOPS’ first annual report back in 1927.
Spread over five acres right next to the Moolchand metro station near Lajpat Nagar in South Delhi, one of the enduring legacies of SOPS is its ambitious library with more than 60,000 books. This is where students, who dream of joining India’s steel frame but are unable to afford private coaching fees, gather to study for the civil services examinations.
The headquarters at Lajpat Nagar conducts yoga classes, runs a naturopathy centre, has a medical clinic with diagnostics and dental services, and is equipped with a gym and massage rooms. It also has a thriving ‘marketplace’ where members sell spices and pulses. The Society remains central to the residents in the neighbourhood, both young and old. These initiatives are how SOPS raises money to meet its expenses, though the services are offered at discounted rates.
“There is a lack of service spirit in today’s generation. People do not want to do anything without personal gain.”
“The Society is changing and making additions to its activities and services according to the times we live in,” says Rai’s great-granddaughter Anita Goyal, adding that the Society’s core values have not changed. “Lala ji always wanted to bring change at the grassroots level. And the Society is still doing this by providing education, serving the elderly, and giving employment to women in their masala centres among other ways.”
Rai, who was popularly called ‘Punjab Kesari’, had an unwavering commitment to the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality.
“If I had the power to influence Indian journals, I would have the following headlines printed in bold letters on the first page: Milk for the Infants, Food for the Adults, and Education for All,” he had once said.
Having started his political career with the Arya Samaj, Rai was inspired by institutions like the Rand School of Social Science in New York, which provided “instruction in social sciences” to people whose circumstances did not allow them to study in regular universities. He wanted volunteers to be a beacon of light and an example to others. The Servants of the People Society was formally inaugurated by MK Gandhi on 9 November 1991.
But with every passing year, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Society to find volunteers.
“There is a lack of service spirit in today’s generation. People do not want to do anything without personal gain,” says an official at the Society on the condition of anonymity. “Life members have to join SOPS at a very early age and work for very little money. But today’s generation is more fond of living a lavish life.” Individuals who join SOPS in their 20s and dedicate their lifetime to serving the Society are called life members. The Delhi branch of SOPS currently has 40 volunteers.
Established in Lahore and shifted to Delhi after Partition, the Servants of the People Society now has 17 centres across India —Chandigarh, Mumbai, Berhampur, Kanpur, and Allahabad to name a few.
“We are still doing the same social welfare work, without any government help,” says Raj Kumar, president of the Society. He takes pride in SOPS being self-sustaining. “All our expenses are met by our internal earnings and donations given by people voluntarily. There are times when we lack funds, but still we manage,” Kumar adds.
As India marches toward Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, biographies of freedom fighters are being written anew. Some are getting memorials and museums in their name, and others are mentioned in history textbooks. However, a few of them can boast of enduring institutional legacy.
“There is so much misinformation about Lala ji. Most people have not read his work and therefore don’t know he was a great orator and big proponent of democratic rights for all religions,” Goyal tells ThePrint at the launch of Bhargav’s book.
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Shops, clinics, and spas
On a sunny afternoon, Sejal Keshawani, 25, steps out of the library and finds a bench in the park to eat her lunch. The landscape is peaceful and cheery but far from the solemn purpose for which it was created. It is now a spa, a medical centre, a library for people preparing for competitive exams, and even a masala centre.
“I find this place very peaceful, and the registration fee to use the library is low compared to others,” says Keshawani, who is preparing for the UPSC exam.
The Society’s headquarters is an oasis of calm in a busy neighbourhood, but it thrums at its rhythm. Office-goers sit under the shade of the many trees in the garden for a quick bite before heading back to the office. Married couples stop at the masala and namkeen centre to stock up on supplies. A juice stall does brisk trade as people queue up with their orders of orange, grape, pomegranate, and other seasonal fruit juices before catching the metro home.
“We have been buying masalas from here for decades. They are freshly made. We trust the spices here,” says an elderly gentleman, holding a white plastic bag of spices and snacks. His wife is busy reading the labels in packets along the shelves of a small store.
The masala centre is run entirely by women who are paid by the Society. “We dry the chillies and other ingredients on the terrace above and grind them in chakkis [mill stones],” says one of the women with quiet pride.
At one point, a woman approaches Jyoti Prakash Verma, Assistant secretary of SOPS, asking if the Society’s masseuse can make a house visit. It’s against the rules. “But it’s for my father; he’s 92 years old,” she says. Verma promises to look into it before pointing to the charitable medical clinic. Doctors volunteer their time and expertise, and patients can get a consultation and five-day dose of medicine for free with a nominal registration of Rs 50—the cost of a fresh fruit juice glass at the stall.
“I live nearby and we have been using the medical facilities for many years. The premise is very clean and the medical facilities here are very affordable and good,” says a Lajpat Nagar resident, Lalit Kumar. At the naturopathy centre, he can practise yoga, get a massage, and book himself for mud therapy. It is like a spa—without the trapping of luxury and the hefty price tag.
Catering to the young and old
Whether by design or accident, SOPS has carved out space for everyone—children, young working professionals, couples, and senior citizens.
More than 20 students are hunched over their books and laptops at the Purushottam Das Tandon library.
“My own books, maybe a thousand or more as I never counted them, formed the nucleus of this library,” Rai wrote in the preamble.
Today, row upon row of steel shelves are piled high with books on history, political science, accounting, medicine, and engineering in Hindi and English. There is even a fiction section where volumes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes share space with books written by Ruskin Bond, Robin Cook, Alex Haley (best known for Roots: The Saga of an American Family and The Autobiography of Malcolm X), Bill Bryson and even Swedish author Håkan Nesser’s crime thriller, Woman with Birthmark.
“Lala Lajpat Rai always wanted an education system that was available to everyone to promote Hindu-Muslim unity,” says KL Tuteja, former Professor of modern Indian history at Kurukshetra University. Rai was a proponent of Hindu nationalism and shared fears of VD Savarkar about ‘Muslim domination’ in India. However, in Being Hindu, Being Indian, Bhargav argues that Rai was never in favour of extremism.
There is no wi-fi in the library, but students—who have paid Rs 1,000 for unlimited access for the year—can use their hotspots. “I come to this library because there is no internet. There are no distractions, and I concentrate on my studies. I can focus here,” says a student.
“This place has now become my home.”
About 21 kilometres away from Lajpat Nagar is the old people’s home run by Rai’s Society in Sector 2, Dwarka–Godhuli Senior Citizens’ Home. Seema Bhattacharya, 65, helps herself to a roti fresh off the tawa. “Try this with ghiya [bottle gourd],” she says to the woman sitting next to her. Other male and female residents of the home— all in their 60s and 70s—join Bhattacharya in the dining hall.
Godhuli, which means flying dust from a cow’s feet, is run as a private enterprise where residents have to pay a security deposit of Rs 3-4 lakh. A staff of 25 takes care of over 50 elderly residents. It has all the facilities, says Bhattacharya, pointing to the garden, the temple, a gym, a recreational room, a medical clinic, and a prayer hall. Downstairs in the hall, a few men read the daily newspapers in silence. Most residents pay anywhere between Rs 9,000 – 14,000 for single and double rooms in the four-storey building in a well-to-do residential complex.
“I used to live with my son and daughter-in-law, but they were so busy with their work that I was left completely alone. So, I took a room here. Now, I have friends. I go out in the evening for walks or to meet my son who lives nearby,” says Bhattacharya.
“This place has now become my home.”
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Trip to America
“The society is changing and making additions to their activities and services, which is a great initiative,” Anita Goyal
Lala Lajpat Rai was inspired by social reformer and freedom fighter Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who established the Servants of India Society (SIS) in 1905 in Pune, Maharashtra.
“He never shied away from speaking or writing on any topic whether it was social, cultural, or religious. And he was already influenced by Gokhale’s Servants of India Society, which was preparing people not only for jobs or service according to the British education system but for something beyond that,” says Tuteja.
To get the initiative going, Rai donated his bungalow to the Servants of the People Society to enlist and train national missionaries to work for the educational, cultural, social, economic, and political advancement of India. It was the same house from where he was arrested ahead of his exile to Mandalay in Burma (now Myanmar) in 1907. It is now the headquarters of the Society at New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, a neighbourhood itself named after Rai.
During the five years Rai spent in the US, he met people like Columbia University economist Edwin RA Seligman, who invited him to attend the annual meetings of the American Economic, Sociological and Statistical Association in Princeton, writes Bhargav. He met then-editor of The New Republic, Walter Lippmann, and progressive intellectuals from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley. He travelled to Boston, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and was shocked by the “unabashed racism” of Jim Crow America.
It was around this time that his vision of nationhood underwent what Bhargav describes as akin to a “perfect inversion.”
“The fifty-year-old Rai now explicitly criticised ‘religious nationalism’ and ‘communal patriotism’ as ‘false ideas’, and consistently insisted that India’s Hindus and Muslims belonged to a single ‘Indian’ nation,” she writes. Bhargav attributes this shift to the “new remoteness from India”, which provided him with a “global sense through which differences between Hindus and Muslims began to look less significant”. It also informed his vision for the Servants of the People Society.
All 17 branches of the Society offer different services and activities, which are managed by life members. They constitute the general body of the Society, which elects a president and six members of the executive council. It is the seven members who are propelling this enterprise forward.
The pledge of life members is written at the back of the Society’s report, which gets published every year: “The service of the country will occupy first place in my thoughts and in serving the country I shall not be actuated by motives of personal advancement.”
“The society is changing and making additions to their activities and services, which is a great initiative,” says Goyal. She says she wishes more people would read her great-grandfather’s works. And she wants school and college textbooks to have chapters on Rai’s struggles and his lectures.
“But he is remembered only on his birth anniversary and the lathi charge that led to his death,” adds Goyal, referring to the non-violent march Rai led in Lahore on 30 October 1928 to protest the Simon Commission—a British-appointed committee to study the implementation of the Government of India Act 1919 (the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms).
Rai never recovered from that brutal beating. “I declare that the blows struck at me today will be the last nails in the coffin of British rule in India,” he said at the time. His death on 17 November 1928—a little over a fortnight after the incident—stoked the flames of an India bucking under British rule.
At the Society, members across all branches commemorate Rai’s death anniversary by organising different cultural programmes and seminars.
Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister of Railways; Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship; and S Regunathan, former Principal Secretary of Delhi Government, were some of the chief guests at Rai’s birth anniversary celebrations at the Society.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)