Born in 1910 at Akbarpur, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, Lohia was one of the sharpest minds of India’s independence struggle, a socialist who matched intellect with nerve. As a young man, he studied economics in Berlin, and it was there that he befriended a Goan medical student named Julião Menezes. The two were drawn together in the Indian Students’ Union, far from home, bound by a shared anger at colonial rule. By 1946, Lohia had already paid dearly for his politics. Arrested during the Quit India Movement, he had been held and tortured in Lahore Fort, and was released, gaunt and worn, only that April.
