[a] Such gurukuls were considered by the colonial administration to be "hotbeds of sedition" because they fostered pride in Hindu culture and Indian achievements, encouraging the notion that British rule was a "temporary setback or punishment for having permitted laxity in the Aryan religion."

He toured villages to promote Gandhi's message of non-cooperation among peasant people but they appeared disinterested and he realised that there was nothing in the Congress programme that addressed issues that affected them.

Encouraged by the tutelage of Jaichandra Vidyalankar, a historian and associate of Ghadarites, this group of students read widely of political theory and past revolutionaries from Europe and India.

His work for the HSRA was generally behind the scenes and he had a lower public profile than people who physically engaged in acts of revolution, such as Singh, Rajguru and Chandrashekar Azad.

While continuing his activism, he was employed as a clerk by the Lakshmi Insurance Company, a role that he deeply disliked and described Before this, no one had ever been dissatisfied with me; in fact, I was always praised for my hard work and ability.

Where were my lofty aspirations to be a successful lawyer or professor or effective political figure, sitting all day on my clerk's seat, sending interim receipts and writing dunning letters to clients to pay up their overdue premiums? ...

[1]Yashpal became a fugitive in April 1929, hiding for a few weeks with a relative (Pandit Shyama) in the Kangra area (village Samhoon near Rail in Hamirpur) after a recently established HSRA bomb factory in Lahore was raided by police.

Sukhdev Thapar was able to give him details of another member after Yashpal visited him in prison, posing as a lawyer, but the information was voided soon after due to a police raid on the HSRA's other bomb factory, in Saharanpur.

In September 1930, despite his personal acceptance of Yashpal's false integrity and honour, Azad felt it necessary to disband the fractured movement, distributing its weapons among the membership and telling them to go fight for the revolutionary cause on a decentralised, provincial basis rather than under direction from the committee.

[1][8] While making various abortive attempts to visit Russia in order to investigate the outcomes of the revolution there, Yashpal continued to work with Azad until the latter died in February 1931 during a shoot-out with police in Allahabad.

As events turned out, and after facing further charges in May 1932, resulting from the deliberations of the Delhi Conspiracy Commission and later abandoned, Yashpal served six years before being among those released under an amnesty agreement for political prisoners that was brokered by the newly formed Congress government in the United Provinces.

A public outcry at his arrest ensued and the government had to back down in a humiliating manner, although they did succeed in banning him from Lucknow for a period of six months and thus caused the final closure of Viplav.

[1] His autobiography, Sinhavalokan (A Lion's Eye-View or A Backward Glance), was published in three volumes between 1951–55[9] and is recognized for its detailed account of the armed struggle for independence in India as well as for information on his own early life.

Yogendra Malik notes that as a Marxist novelist, Yashpal formed a part of one of the most important literary groups in Hindi dedicated to an ideological interpretation of politics.

[13] Writing on behalf of the same institution, Bhisham Sahni described Yashpal's short stories as carrying on the tradition of Premchand, although focussed more on urban society than that of the rural and lower-middle class.

[1] The two volumes of Jhutha Sach (1958 and 1960), Yashpal's voluminous novel based on events surrounding the Partition of India, have been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace by many writers and critics.

Harish Trivedi, a professor of English, says that these comparisons were sufficiently numerous that "with his eyesight failing, Yashpal arranged for someone to read Tolstoy's great work to him — perhaps to figure out what the fuss was all about".

Among his publications are: He also wrote two works based on his travels in Eastern Europe, Rah Beeti ("the story of the journey") and Dekha Socha Samjha ("Saw Thought Understood").