It is easy to assume that national figures come from cities, because that is where their work usually ended up. Very often it is not where it began. The ten people below were born or raised in villages, and in most cases the village is still there, still small, still carrying the name. Each of them has a fuller profile elsewhere on this site; what follows is the short account of who they were and where they came from.

Bhagat Singh — Banga, Punjab

Born in 1907 in the village of Banga in Lyallpur district, in the part of Punjab now in Pakistan, he came from a family already deep in anti-colonial politics — his father and uncles were in jail at the time of his birth. He joined revolutionary circles as a student, took part in the assembly bombing meant as a protest rather than a killing, and used his trial and his prison writings to argue for a free India that would also be an equal one. He was hanged in Lahore in 1931, aged twenty-three, and became the most quoted young revolutionary in Indian memory.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — Karamsad, Gujarat

Born in 1875 into a farming family, Patel spent his boyhood in Karamsad in Kheda district, working his father's fields and walking to a village school before he ever saw a courtroom. He studied law late, made his name organising peasants against unjust revenue demands in Kheda and then at Bardoli, where the cultivators' victory earned him the title Sardar. As independent India's first Home Minister he took on the integration of the princely states, a task of persuasion and pressure that gave the new country its map. He never lost the plain, unadorned manner of the village he came from.

Birsa Munda — Ulihatu, Jharkhand

Born in 1875 at Ulihatu in what is now Khunti district, Birsa grew up among Munda families losing their ancestral land to outside landlords and a colonial legal system that did not recognise their customary rights. He became a religious teacher as well as a political leader, and the movement he led, the Ulgulan or Great Tumult, combined a call for reform within Munda society with armed resistance to land alienation. He died in colonial custody in 1900, not yet twenty-five. His birth anniversary is now observed nationally as a day for tribal pride.

Savitribai Phule — Naigaon, Maharashtra

Born in 1831 in Naigaon village in Satara district, she was married at about ten to Jyotirao Phule, learnt to read and write after that marriage, and in 1848 helped open a school for girls in Pune at a time when educating them was widely opposed. She went on to teach girls from communities that had been kept out of schooling altogether, worked against caste exclusion and against the treatment of widows, and wrote poetry in Marathi. She is usually called India's first woman teacher; whether or not the superlative holds, she was among the first, and certainly the most consequential.

Matangini Hazra — Hogla, West Bengal

Born in 1870 in Hogla village in the Tamluk area of Midnapore, she was widowed young, lived in poverty and came to the freedom movement in her sixties, taking part in salt protests and in relief work during epidemics. In September 1942, during the Quit India movement, she led one of the columns of volunteers marching on the Tamluk police station. She was shot by the police and, by every account, kept moving forward with the flag until she fell. She was seventy-two. Bengal remembers her simply as Gandhi Buri, the old Gandhian woman.

Premchand — Lamhi, Uttar Pradesh

Born Dhanpat Rai in 1880 in Lamhi, a village on the edge of Varanasi, he wrote in Urdu and then in Hindi and turned Indian fiction towards the people around him: tenant farmers, moneylenders, widows, village clerks, the small cruelties of caste and debt. An early patriotic collection was banned and burnt by the colonial government. Novels such as Godaan and stories that Indian schoolchildren still read gave rural India a literature written from the inside rather than about it from a distance. His house at Lamhi is preserved.

Abdul Hamid — Dhamupur, Uttar Pradesh

Born in 1933 in Dhamupur village in Ghazipur district to a family of tailors, he joined the army as a young man. In September 1965, in the tank battle at Asal Uttar during the war with Pakistan, he took a jeep-mounted recoilless gun into the open against advancing armour, destroyed several tanks and was killed while engaging another. He was awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously. His village keeps his memory closely, and the annual gathering there on the anniversary of his death is a local institution.

P. T. Usha — Payyoli, Kerala

Born in 1964 in Koothali near Perambra in Kozhikode district and raised at Payyoli on the Malabar coast, she was picked out for a state sports school as a schoolgirl and trained by the coach O. M. Nambiar. Over the 1980s she became the dominant sprinter and hurdler in Asia, collecting Asian Games golds and silvers. At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles she finished fourth in the 400 metres hurdles, missing a medal by one hundredth of a second — the closest an Indian woman had then come on an Olympic track. She is still called the Payyoli Express.

Mary Kom — Kangathei, Manipur

Born in 1982 at Kangathei village in Churachandpur district to tenant-farming parents, she took up boxing without her family's knowledge and against considerable local disapproval of the idea that a girl should fight. She went on to win the world amateur championship six times and an Olympic bronze at London in 2012, the first Indian woman boxer to win one, returning to competition after having children. She has since built a boxing academy in Manipur, which may in the long run matter as much as the medals.

Vikram Batra — Ghuggar, Himachal Pradesh

Born in 1974 at Ghuggar near Palampur in Kangra district, the son of a schoolteacher, he was commissioned into the Jammu and Kashmir Rifles and was twenty-four during the Kargil conflict of 1999. He led the recapture of Point 5140 and then of Point 4875 in the Drass sector, fighting at height and in the open, and was killed while pulling a wounded soldier to cover. He was awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously. His radio call after the first assault entered the language, and his village still receives visitors who come only to see where he grew up.

Between them these ten span nearly two centuries, five regions and half a dozen kinds of courage. What they had in common at the start was a small place with limited means — which is worth remembering in any village that thinks nothing much comes out of it.