8 freedom fighters and their forgotten families

Freedom fighter Bhagat Singh's ancestral village in Punjab wears a modern look with concrete roads, street lights, well-designed parks and palatial bungalows. His first blood relatives are no more, but his second cousins are present and live in Punjab.

Though Bollywood has kept alive freedom fighter Mangal pandey, his family line has remained forgotten.

When Satyasheel Rajguru, an automobile engineer, and his family mention that they are related to Rajguru, most people draw a blank.

Bismil's family live in a Madhya Pradesh village. Martyr's grandson, Vijendra Singh, is a farmer, who is struggling to educate his sons and marry off his daughter.

Descendants of freedom fighter Sukhdev, who was sentenced to death by the British in 1931 for the killing of police officer J P Saunders, lead a quiet life in Pune.

Sultana Begum, the great grand daughter-in-law of India’s last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, lives in a slum of Howrah in West Bengal.

The descendants of the legendary Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi Damodar Rao did survive the war and they even traced Rao's third generation descendant’s living in anonymity in India.

Vinayak Tope, his wife Saraswati Devi and three children, Pragati, Tripti and Ashutosh, are living in penury in Bithooor, about 20 km from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh. He runs a small grocery shop to make both ends meet.