Bhagat Singh was born that day in 1907, in a town called Banga, now in Pakistan. The town, like every year, plans to celebrate its birthday with pride. The birth of Bhagat Singh turned this remote dusty town into a place of pilgrimage. It has been declared as a national heritage by the government of Pakistan. Bhagat Singh evokes respect among many on the other side of the border, despite the bitter relationship of the two countries, because he always attested to human dignity and rights beyond the sectarian divide. He rebuked all those who wavered in these basic values, as is clear from the enormous body of writings that he bequeathed to us.
How could a young man, who did not live more than twenty years, think and write so deeply about complex social, philosophical, economic and political problems? A simple answer to this question is that he was a voracious reader, reading anything that helped him unravel the complexities of life in both prose and poetry. All his comrades reported in their memoirs that they never saw Bhagat Singh without a book in his hand and some in his pockets. Even his mother chided him for stuffing books into his jacket pockets, most of which were torn. He was also passionate about some significant and romantic movies. He learned a lot from the plays he participated in when he was young.
Not just a crude nationalist
When one speaks of Bhagat Singh as a thinking individual and not just a crude nationalist, it does not mean that he was a scholar in his teens. It only emphasizes his exposure to world literature through intense readings in his short life. It is also an attempt to steer him away from the image of a trigger-happy youth. This image was deliberately publicized by the colonial government, which many of us internalize and continue to idealize every day. We know that he had a very short life, most of which he spent under the surveillance of the colonial government. However, he was able to pursue his passion for reading and writing relentlessly.
Not much was known about him in the 1930s, except his martyrdom. Most of Bhagat Singh’s commendable traits were deciphered by family, friends, and researchers many decades later. His extraordinary hunger for reading was duly documented when he was arrested and imprisoned after the assembly bomb explosion. However, Ajoy Ghosh, one of his associates, wrote about his first impression of him in 1923, when he found him as a poor dressed boy without much intelligence and without confidence in himself. In five years, in 1928, he was transformed and when asked about the change, he responded with one word: “Study.” In his own words: “Study was the scream that reverberated in the corridors of my mind. Study to train yourself to face the arguments of the opposition. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favor of your cult. “
Before the assembly bomb explosion in April 1929, the revolutionaries stayed in Agra for some time and set up a small office in Hing ki mandi. Bhagat Singh soon established a small library, consisting of 175 books by around 70 authors, most of them compiled from his friends and followers. Although small, the library was rich in literature, mainly economics books. There were also books on the trade union movement, explosives and bomb making and some on the Russian revolutionaries. These books are still in a state of neglect in Maalkhana Registration in a Lahore trial court.
Intellectual life began after his arrest.
Bhagat Singh’s intellectual life really began after his arrest, although he was already an avid reader. Shiv Verma, one of his close comrades in jail, wrote about Singh’s love for books like this:
“We had easy access to the books in jail from day one and the atmosphere was quite pleasant for study and brainstorming … but the arrival of Bhagat Singh made this much more lively … one class per itself. Despite his soft spot for socialism, he was also passionate about fiction, particularly with political and economic issues. Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Hall Cane, Victor Hugo, Gorky and Oscar Wilde were among his favorites. “
While in prison, Bhagat Singh and his comrades went on a long hunger strike raising various demands from political prisoners. Two of those demands are relevant here:
- All except prohibited books with writing materials must be available without restriction.
- At least one newspaper must be given to each political prisoner
Bhagat Singh was almost certain that he would be executed, but he wanted to read as much as he could and wanted his companions to read as well. He could leave behind a huge corpus of written legacy just because his choice of reading material was diverse.
How did you manage to get all this literature, most of it suspicious in the eyes of the colonial administration? There were two main resources for books. One of them was the Dwarka Das Library, established by Lala Lajpat Rai in Lahore and the other was a bookstore called Ramkrishna and sons. This bookstore had resources to acquire books prohibited in England. Both were the main providers of Marxist and revolutionary literature. Rajaram Shastri, the young socialist library librarian, once told Shiv Verma that Bhagat Singh not only read books, he almost devoured them, yet his yearning to seek knowledge always remained unsatisfied.
Lala Lajpat Rai. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Young India, public domain
Over the years, it has now been established that Bhagat Singh was an avid reader. His friend Jaidev Gupta used to provide him with the specific books he needed in prison. He also recalled that in his late teens, Bhagat Singh “was always seen with an English book in his hands and a dictionary in his pocket.” Yashpal, a well-known writer and associate of Bhagat Singh, saw him driving his father’s camel cart as “an interesting sight: the camel was driving the cart and Bhagat Singh sat in the driver’s seat, reading his book.” Also read Bankim’s Anandamath and Savarkar’s book in 1857. Bhagwan Das Mahor recalls that Bhagat Singh had given him a copy of the Das Kapital and thus planted the first seed of socialism in his heart. Unfortunately, this is something that is neither safe nor wise to confess in public today.
I will conclude with the last moments of the life of Bhagat Singh, as reported by his close collaborator Manmathnath Gupta, he writes:
“When asked to climb the scaffold, Bhagat Singh was reading a book by Lenin or about Lenin. He continued reading and said: ‘Wait a minute. A revolutionary is talking to another revolutionary. ‘ Bhagat Singh read on. After a few moments, he threw the book up to the ceiling and said, ‘Let’s go. [Emphasis added]
This is the true legacy of Bhagat Singh that we must commemorate. He read as much revolutionary or even anarchic literature as possible to build his vision of independent India. It also tells us why we should listen to those who read and write; They may imagine India differently, but they do not deserve to be punished for what they read or write.
S. Irfan Habib served as President of Maulana Azad at the National University for Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.
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