In 30 Seconds
Story
He was twenty three years old when the empire hanged him, and he had spent his last two years turning his trial and his cell into a university for a nation. Bhagat Singh remains, a century after his birth, the most beloved of India’s revolutionaries, his image on the walls of villages that hold no other portrait but the gods, and the affection rests on something rarer than martyrdom, which the movement had in plenty. He was the martyr who thought, the young man of the gun who insisted, to his last pamphlet, that revolutions are made not by bombs but by ideas, and who left behind, from a condemned cell, a body of writing that reads like the future arguing with the present.
The making began in a family already at war. Born in September 1907 at Banga in Lyallpur district, into a Jat Sikh household of Sandhu farmers, he arrived, the family story ran, on a day of good omen, his father Kishan Singh and uncle Swaran Singh released from prison and the legendary uncle Ajit Singh, exiled leader of the 1907 agrarian agitation, the household’s absent presence. The Punjab of his boyhood supplied the curriculum, at twelve he travelled to Amritsar after the massacre and brought home, the tradition holds, a phial of Jallianwala’s blood soaked earth, and at fourteen he burned his school books in the Non Cooperation bonfires, transferring to the movement’s own National College at Lahore, the institution founded by Lajpat Rai, where the history lecturer Jaya Chandra Vidyalankar and the Dwarkadas library completed what the family had begun. When Gandhi halted the movement at Chauri Chaura, the fifteen year old’s generation drew its conclusion, and when his family pressed marriage upon him, he left for Kanpur with a note that his life was pledged to the noblest cause, the freedom of the country, entering there the HRA’s orbit and the newspaper trade under Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi.
The years between the flight and the fame built the mind that jail would reveal. Back in Lahore he founded, in 1926, the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the open youth wing of the revolution, whose manifesto and rules carried his signature ideas, members to place country above community, religious politics named the enemy of freedom, and he organised study circles, lantern lectures on the martyrs, and the reading, always the reading, his prison notebooks later mapping a mind that moved through Marx and Engels, Bertrand Russell, Victor Hugo and Upton Sinclair, the literature of Ireland and the Narodniks. Arrested and released on surety in the Dussehra bomb case of 1927, a false implication that taught him the state’s methods, he wrote through these years under pen names for the movement’s press, on communalism and untouchability, on the language question, and in 1928, in the essay published later as Why I Am an Atheist, the young movement’s most audacious document, a revolutionary examining and discarding God with the same instrument he turned on the empire, criticism, and answering, in advance, those who would read his coming courage as faith, that a man who fights without hope of paradise fights on reason alone.
By 1928 the pieces of the legend were assembled, the HSRA’s founding that September with Bhagat Singh the political mind beside Azad’s command, and the year’s events supplied the ignition, the Simon Commission, the lathis of Lahore, the death of Lajpat Rai, the vengeance at the district police office in December in which Saunders fell, and the escape from Lahore that Durga Devi’s courage made possible, the revolutionary crossing the city as a sahib with the lady and child, Rajguru the servant behind. The Assembly bomb, the trials, the hunger strikes and the gallows belong to the next chapters. What the making explains is why those chapters read as they do, why the man in the dock quoted political philosophy rather than scripture, campaigned from his cell for the rights of all prisoners, and spent his last morning, the jail’s accounts record, with a book. The Punjab gave the movement many brave men. In Bhagat Singh it gave the revolution a mind, and the mind, more than the martyrdom, is why he has never left.
