A life in revolution: Bhagat Singh, a radical thinker and ideologue

Bhagat Singh's life and writings reflect a revolutionary thinker who challenged societal norms and fought for social progress.

In our age and clime, a radical notion is often simplified to its most primordial version. As if an entire ideology could be reduced to a haiku, and the worth of a man reduced to mere sloganeering. Whether it is Gandhi, Ambedkar, Bose, Savarkar, Nehru -- all are victims of this malaise; as if those who existed in the past serve merely the political interests of the present. One such figure of history is Bhagat Singh. A revolutionary, who was martyred in the fight against an imperialistic tyranny, has been reduced to a mere caricature, often cast in the role of a violent armed rebel. Given his birth anniversary, we take a look back at the thinker and ideologue who was Bhagat Singh; after all theory and praxis are ultimately inseparable from each other.

Singh was something of a polyglot being able to communicate in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and English. Having grown up in an Arya Samaj milieu he was also familiar with the fundaments of Sanskrit.

Singh’s jail notebook is also reflective of the eclecticism in his literary diet. He draws on the works of Omar Khayyam, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, Jack London, Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, Konko Hoshi, Thomas Jefferson, Maxim Gorky, Alfred Lord Tennyson, et al.

In one of his earliest writings, Vishwa Prem (Universal Love), published in November 1924, a 17-year-old Singh declares “Visvabandhuta (Universal Brotherhood)! For me the greatest meaning of this word is equality and nothing else.”

The idealism of youth seeps through each sentence that follows. “None will need to cry for bread when hungry. World trade would flourish spectacularly but France and Germany will not go to war for trade. America and Japan would be there but without any complex of belonging to the East or the West. The blacks and the whites will be there but the latter won’t be able to burn the former or the Red Indians alive. There would be peace without penal codes. There would be Britishers and Indians all right but not as rulers and the ruled.” Through the piece Singh extols figures of history as diverse as Rana Pratap, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Gandhi, Lenin, Washington, Savarkar, Tilak, MacSwiney, and harkens even to Brutus in Roman history, and to Krishna in the Mahabharata. “Be ready to die so that Mother India may live,” he declares at the end of the piece.

By 1928, the realities of the Indian situation had become more apparent to the young Singh. In the article Communal Riots and their Solution, Singh states, “These religions have left the country in a lurch. And we don’t know when these communal riots will leave Bharat alone. These riots have hurled notoriety upon the clean image of India, and we have seen that every blind faith-filled person starts drifting with the flow. There is hardly any Hindu, Sikh or Muslim who keeps his mind cool.”

Coming down hard on the journalists of his day, Singh writes, “These people arouse public sentiment by writing bold headlines in the newspapers against one or the other and compel people to start fighting with one another. Not limited to just one or two places, riots started in many locations just because of the fact that local newspapers had written articles that stoked passions.”