Brahmabandhav Upadhyay

Brahmabandhav Upadhyay (born Bhavani Charan Banerjee) (1 February 1861 – 27 October 1907) was an Indian freedom fighter, journalist, theologian, and mystic.

He was born in Khanyan, a small village in the district of Hooghly in southern Bengal on 11 February 1861. He received his education in institutions such as Scottish Mission School, Hooghly Collegiate School, Metropolitan Institution (now Vidyasagar College), and the General Assembly's Institution (now Scottish Church College in Calcutta. In the General Assembly's Institution, his classmate was Narendranath Dutta, the future Swami Vivekananda.

When he was in the high school, Upadhyay became inclined towards the Indian nationalist movement for freedom, and during his college education, he plunged into the freedom movement. It is regrettable that despite his active participation in the freedom struggle Upadhyay has not been given the due recognition that he deserves. His biographer, Julius Lipner, says that Upadhyay "made a significant contribution to the shaping of the new India whose identity began to emerge from the first half of the nineteenth century". He was contemporary to and friend of the poet Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekananda. According to Lipner, “Vivekananda lit the sacrificial flame or revolution, Brahmabandhab in fuelling it, safeguarded and fanned the sacrifice.”

• Hundreds of articles in Bengali and English in short-lived journals and magazines of Bengal such as Sophia, Jote, Sandhya, The Twentieth Century, Svaraj, etc.
• The Writings of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (ed. by J.Lipner and G.Gispert-Sauch), 2 vols., Bangalore, 1991 and 2001.