Vishnu Ramkrishna Karkare

Vishnu Ramakrishna Karkare (C. 1910 - 6 April 1974), a Hindu Mahasabha activist was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in an attempt to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi.

Early life

Vishnu Ramkrishna Karkare was born of Marathi speaking Karhade Brahmin or Chitpavan parents, which is about all he knew of his early days. He did not even know the date of his birth, because both his parents had died when he was a small child, and he had been brought up in the Northcote Orphanage in Bombay, which put down his approximate date of birth as 1910. As a boy he had received little or no schooling even though later he taught himself to read and write Marathi and Hindi. At the age of ten he began to work as a tea shop drudge in Bombay, and later move to Poona.

Life at Ahmednagar

After fifteen years of hard work, he moved to Ahmednagar from Pune. In a disused cowshed near the motor stand, he started his own tea shop. The only food he served beside tea was puris and, to go with it, a chilli concoctions. The tea shop was a success, and Karkare was able to expand it into a cheap hotel and referred it as a ‘lodging and boarding house'. The hotel, too, did well, and Karkare erected his own building to house it. He married, and employed servants to work in his hotel The Deccan Guest House. Prosperity was at his home.

Relief work during partition

During the partition of India and Pakistan a huge hindu muslium tragedy had occurred at Noakhali. So on the day of the "Bhaubeej"...
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