The History of A Legend

Modern Asian Studies 46, 6 (2012) pp. 1540–1571.

C Cambridge University Press 2012
doi:10.1017/S0026749X12000042 First published online 16 February 2012
The History of a Legend: Accounting

for Popular Histories of Revolutionary
Nationalism in India∗
KAM A M ACLEAN
School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales,

Kensington, 2031 Sydney, Australia
Email: kama.maclean@unsw.edu.au
Abstract
Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve
of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out.
India’s best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British
in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more
in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes.
These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that
has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such
as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to
light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh’s life story has predominantly
prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy
of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was
subjected in the 1930s.
∗
The research for this paper and its first drafts were done in my capacity as
Professorial Research Fellow at the United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, in
2009, with the assistance of travel grants from the University of New South Wales,
Sydney. Thanks are due to the archival staff at the Nehru Library and the National
Archives in New Delhi, and of the Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections in the British
Library. I also wish to thank Gauhar Raza, Raj Mani, Rajesh Prasad, Max Harcourt,
Jim Masselos and Chaman Lal, and I remain indebted to Amit and Reema Sarwal for
their support. An early draft was presented at a seminar at the University of Sydney,
3 August 2009, and I am grateful to the audience for their feedback. Robin Jeffrey,
Michael Milne, Rochona Majumdar and Ian Tyrrell made insightful comments on
early drafts. Thanks are also due to the anonymous readers of Modern Asian Studies for
their constructive comments.
1540
THE HISTORY OF A LEGEND 1541
Introduction
On Indian Independence Day in 2008 a colossal bronze statue of

Bhagat Singh was inaugurated in the forecourt of the national
Parliament in New Delhi. The 18 feet high statue is not far from where
Bhagat Singh was arrested on 8 April 1929 in the Legislative Assembly
(now the Lok Sabha), along with his comrade B. K. Dutt. The two young
revolutionaries had thrown two low-impact bombs, fired two shots from
a pistol, and scattered propaganda leaflets into the Assembly before
offering themselves for arrest. In doing so, the pair interrupted the
passing of two controversial Bills, while simultaneously registering
their protest at the imperial-capitalist order on behalf of their party,
the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.∗∗ Within days of his
arrest, Bhagat Singh was implicated in the Lahore Conspiracy Case,
which centred around the 1928 murder by the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association of a police officer, John Poyantz Saunders, in
Lahore. This was a political murder; a reprisal for the lathi (baton)
charge on a protest aimed at the Simon Commission in October 1928,
in which the elderly Punjabi Congess leader Lala Lajpat Rai sustained
serious injuries and later died.1 Bhagat Singh was put on trial and
executed, along with his accomplices Shivram Rajguru and Sukhdev
Thapar on 23 March 1931. By the time of his death Bhagat Singh
had become a household name in India, and was widely eulogized
and mourned as a nationalist martyr.2 Consequently, bringing Bhagat
Singh back to the national parliament, nearly 80 years after his
surrender, was seen by many as being long overdue.3 However a
controversy erupted in the media as soon as the statue was unveiled,
largely revolving around its headwear.
In India, headwear frequently acts as an index to its wearer’s
regional, religious and/or caste identity.4 The debate in 2008 largely
∗∗
In fact the ‘A’ of HRSA stood for BOTH ‘Army’ and ‘Association’, with the
influence of the Irish Republican Army evident in the former, and the latter being
used more after late 1928, when they had a letterhead produced with ‘Association’.
For consistency, I will use the latter throughout.
1
‘Notice issued by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, December
1928, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (henceforth NMML), Private Papers,
Acc. 822.
2
Neeti Nair has recently attributed this popularity to Bhagat Singh’s adoption of
Gandhian tactics in jail. See ‘Bhagat Singh as “Satyagrahi”: the Limits to Non-violence
in Late Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 43, 3, 2009: 649–681.
3
‘Finally, Bhagat Singh statue unveiled in Parliament’, Sikh News, 2 September
2008.
4
Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst & Co.,
1996), p. 84.
1542 KAMA MACLEAN
Figure 1. Bhagat Singh, posing for Ramnath Photographers in Delhi, April 1929.5
revolved around whether the brass statue’s turban—tied in the

manner of a Sikh, with a shamla (tail) falling over his shoulder—
was an accurate reflection of Bhagat Singh’s identity, and ultimately
his politics. Some argue that Bhagat Singh’s renunciation of Indian
dress (Figure 1) equated to his ideological appreciation of Marxism
and subscription to atheism, which he wrote about shortly before his
death.6 Others claim that his rather stylish hat was simply a disguise
that he adopted in order to carry out his anti-imperial politics. For
those who subscribed to this latter view, it was a triumph ‘to see that
he looked tall and turbaned, and every inch himself’.7 Arguably, the
turbaned statue might be seen as a means of evoking and celebrating
memories of Panjabi Sikh contributions to the Indian independence
5
Courtesy of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
6
Bhagat Singh, ‘Why I am an Atheist’, in Shiv Verma (ed.), Bhagat Singh on the Path
of Liberation (Chennai: Bharathi Pustakalay, 2007), p. 116.
7
Aditi Tandon, ‘Bhagat Singh stands tall in Parliament’, Tribune, 16 August 2008.
movement. Its positioning within the parliamentary complex might
also be seen as a way of negating the claims of radical groups who see
Bhagat Singh as an icon of militant opposition to the state.8
Members of Bhagat Singh’s family, however, were quick to object to
the new statue. Jagmohan Singh, the son of Bhagat Singh’s sister,
‘reacted in outrage’, pointing out that Bhagat Singh was wearing
‘a European hat’ when he was arrested in 1929 in the parliament,
thus the statue was historically inaccurate.9 The statue’s creator, the
famous sculptor Ram Sutar, devolved it to his son to protest: ‘The
[Joint Parliamentary] Committee [on Portraits and Statues] asked us
to prepare a statue similar to the one in Hussainiwala [a small town
on the Indo-Pakistan border], where he was cremated. In that Bhagat
Singh does wear a turban’.10
Herein lay the problem: since independence, memorialization of
Bhagat Singh has followed many different trajectories. In his home
state of Punjab, he is frequently styled in regional dress, including a
turban.11 Such statues recall a photograph taken of Bhagat Singh in
college in the early 1920s (Figure 2), and a Criminal Intelligence
Department photograph, taken while he was in jail in 1927,12 as
opposed to the widely distributed photograph, taken in 1929 shortly
before his arrest, of him wearing a hat.13 In recent years there has been
a trend towards the representation of a turbaned Bhagat Singh beyond
the Punjab, in urban spaces in north India, most noticeably in the
capital. While posters, t-shirts and car stickers of a turbaned Bhagat
Singh are increasingly commonplace in Delhi, the positioning of him
on Independence Day in such a prominent, official space sparked a
debate about the true history of Bhagat Singh.
While the controversy might be seen as another in a long genealogy
of debates about the politics and conventions that inform the erection
8
See Louis E. Fenech, ‘Contested Nationalisms, Negotiated Terrains: The Way
Sikhs Remember Udham Singh “Shahid” (1899–1940)’, Modern Asian Studies, 36, 4,
2002: 827–870.
9
‘Family up in arms over Bhagat Singh statue’, Hindustan Times, 4 November 2008.
10
Ibid.
11
See, for example, pictures of the statues of Bhagat Singh erected in the 1960s in
Amar Shahid Bhagat Singh (Chandigarh: Suchna, Prachar and Paryatan Vibhag, Punjab
Government, 1968), p. 94.
12
Milkha Singh Nijhar, ‘Bhagat Singh ki chori-chhipe khinche gaya chitra (The
Secretly-taken Photograph of Bhagat Singh)’, in M. M. Juneja (ed.), Bhagat Singh par
Chuninda Lekh (Hisar: Modern Publishers, 2007), p. 205.
13
See Kama Maclean, ‘The Portrait’s Journey: The Image, Social Communication
and Martyr-Making in Colonial India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 70, 4, 2011: 1051–1082.
1544 KAMA MACLEAN
Figure 2. A portrait of Bhagat Singh, cropped from a class photograph taken in 1924
at Lahore Central College.14
of statues, a well established mode of political discourse in India,15

it is also indicative of an ongoing struggle for hegemony between
popular and academic histories.16 Differing constructions of the life
of Bhagat Singh are only partially the product of different historical
14
Photograph courtesy of Raj Mani, of the Tribune, 13 April, 1929, p. 1.
15
One of the first scholarly interventions on this topic is Robin Jeffrey’s ‘What the
Statues Tell: The Politics of Choosing Symbols in Trivandrum’, Pacific Affairs, LIII, 3,
Fall, 1980: 484–502.
16
See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Public Life of History: An Argument
out of India’, Public Culture, 20, 1, 2008: 143–168.
methodologies and political sensibilities. Crucial to the problematic
of polarized popular and academic histories is understanding why
Bhagat Singh’s story has for so long been the domain of vibrant popular
histories, as opposed to its somewhat dowdy but more authoritative
academic counterpart.
Recent scholarship makes it clear that Bhagat Singh’s story has
been, since 1929 when he first came to public prominence after
his arrest and long, drawn-out trial, deeply enmeshed in popular
narratives and genres. Ishwar Dayal Gaur has written a lengthy
account describing how Bhagat Singh is uniquely remembered in
vernacular songs and poems as a colourful folk hero ‘rooted in the
heroic and chivalric traditions of the Punjab’.17 A large body of Bhagat
Singh literature has been produced since the 1930s in both Hindi and
Bengali (linguistic regions where he was briefly active during his short
life),18 and writings in regional languages such as Marathi, Gujarati
and Tamil, speak of an enduring all-India appeal.19
Christopher Pinney argues that Bhagat Singh’s extraordinary
prominence in Indian visual culture, when measured against his
neglect by historians, is ‘one of the puzzles of twentieth-century Indian
history’.20 Pinney is struck by the fact that ‘official history has diverged
so fundamentally from the popular narrative’,21 and he contends that
exploring a visual history has the potential to illuminate popular
narratives and unveil histories repressed by the biases of conventional
academic methodologies and nationalist history writing.22 While this
is a productive mode of inquiry, the problem is not simply one of visual
versus written histories. Written sources do exist, but they have been
17
Ishwar Dayal Gaur, Martyr as a Bridegroom: A Folk Representation of Bhagat Singh
(Delhi: Anthem, 2008), p. 6.
18
Himadri Banerjee, ‘Bhagat Singh in Bengali Writings’, at http://
bhagatsinghstudy.blogspot.com/2008/01/bhagat-singh-in-bengali-writings.html (ac-
cessed 15 December 2011).
19
See Prem Singh, ‘Bhagat Singh in Hindi Literature’, Ashok Chousalkar, ‘Bhagat
Singh in Marathi Literature’, and Raj Kumar Hans, ‘Bhagat Singh in Gujarati
Literature’, all in J. S. Grewal (ed.), Bhagat Singh and his Legend (Patiala: World Punjabi
Centre, 2008). For more regional language materials, see Gurdev Singh Sidhu (ed.),
The Hanging of Bhagat Singh, Vol. IV: the Banned Literature (Chandigarh, Unistar, 2007).
20
Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in
India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 126; see also Pritam Singh, ‘Why the Story
of Bhagat Singh Remains on the Margins?’ www.sacw.net/article22.html (accessed 21
December 2011).
21
Pinney, Photos of the Gods, p. 117.
22
Christopher Pinney, ‘Visual history tells us about repressed histories’, Tehelka,
Vol. 5, No. 37: 20 September 2008.
1546 KAMA MACLEAN
relegated to forms of chronicling the past which have, until relatively

recently, been eschewed by academics. It is true, however, that the
vibrant lithographs and colourful calendars featuring Bhagat Singh
which populate Indian urban spaces even today are the most visible
referent of a broader historiographical problem.
The following is an attempt to understand why Bhagat Singh’s life
has been predominantly celebrated outside academic history-writing.
I argue that censorship and censure of Bhagat Singh’s activities by
the colonial state have combined to deliver his memorialization to the
multifaceted domain of the popular. Indeed, Bhagat Singh’s life has
been the preserve of the popular domain for so long, that any attempt
to wrest it back—in effect, to determine a history of the legend—from
the decentred and diverse grasp of popular cultures is bound to be
met with resistance, as was seen when the statue was unveiled in the
National Parliament in 2008.
Clandestine histories
Bhagat Singh’s life has necessarily been the preserve of the popular
since his death, because several levels of censorship have colluded to
frustrate the documentation and retrieval of his story. The first among
these was self-censorship. As a key member of several organizations
labelled ‘seditious’ by the colonial government—namely, the Nau
Jawan Bharat Sabha, and the Hindustan Republican Army, after 1928
known as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association—Bhagat
Singh’s actions and whereabouts in the years before his arrest were
necessarily secretive. Members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican
Association were informed of ‘actions’, as they dubbed their strategic
attacks on selected imperial officials, purely on a need-to-know basis;
as a result, only members of the inner circle were informed of party
plans or the activities of key members at any given time.23 The
organization had learned much from the Kakori Conspiracy Case, in
which the testimonies of three former members were key in capturing
39 Hindustan Republican Army members, leaving few active members
at large (‘absconding’, in imperial legalese), and in sending four of the
accused to the gallows.
Bhagat Singh had once been pressured to turn government witness
himself, after his first arrest in May 1927, in connection with
23
Shri Jai Dev Gupta, Oral History Transcript (hereafter OHT), interviewed by
S. L. Manchanda, 10 May 1978, NMML Oral History Project, Acc no. 346, p. 88.
the Dussehra Bomb Case in Lahore. Bhagat Singh was innocent
on this count, but he was regarded with suspicion by colonial
authorities; not only did he hail from a family of revolutionaries,
but he was connected with several leftist youth movements which
had, as the Bureau of Intelligence put it, ‘adopted as their ideal
the inculcation of revolutionary sentiments and of disloyalty to the
government’.24 Bhagat Singh was contemptuous of the offer, of not
only freedom but a reward, in return for a statement.25 Realizing
the intense pressure that was brought to bear by inquisitors on
suspects and under-trial prisoners, the Hindustan Socialist Republican
Association conducted operations with as much discretion as possible,
to give interrogated members the benefit of deniability.26 Thus, the
statements of approvers could be both informative and frustrating. Jai
Gopal, a Hindustan Socialist Republican Association member whose
testimony helped to convict Bhagat Singh and his comrades in the
Lahore Conspiracy Case, made frequent reference in his testimony to
the fact that Sukhdev ‘used to keep all the facts concealed’ from him,
additionally forbidding him explicitly from ‘divulging any secret of the
society to Pandit Yashpal’, who himself was a party member.27
Similarly, the extensive use of multiple aliases in the party served
as a tactic to confuse investigators. While Sukhdev was identified in
the courtroom as ‘Sukhdev alias Dayal alias Swami alias Villager’,
many of Bhagat Singh’s identities remained uncompromised.28 In the
late 1920s, Bhagat Singh was known to many as Balwant, and he
used several adjectival pen-names when he wrote for newspapers and
periodicals, among which were Vidrohi (rebel), Agyat (unknown) and
Sainik (soldier).29 David Petrie in the Home Department declared
that the evidence was ‘incontrovertible’ that Bhagat Singh was ‘Balraj,
24
Extract from weekly report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau of the Home
Department, Government of India, 20 December 1928, India Office Library, (IOL),
L/P&J/12/60, p. 3.
25
Bhagat Singh, ‘Why I am an Atheist’, in Verma, (ed.), Bhagat Singh: on the Path to
Liberation, p. 120.
26
Manmathnath Gupta, OHT, interviewed by Dr Hari Sharma, 22 November
1969, NMML Oral History Project, Acc. No. 174, p. 61.
27
Letter by M. D. Thapar to Shanta Kumar, 18 April 1978, in Sukhdev Papers,
NMML, Acc. no. 190, LLXVI (116).
28
‘Crown Complainant Vs Sukh Dev and others’, in Wariach and Sidhu (eds), The
Hanging of Bhagat Singh: the Complete Judgement (Chandigarh: Unistar, 2005), p. 82.
29
Avinash Kumar, ‘Nationalism as Bestseller: The Case of Chand’s “Phansi Ank”’,
in Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty (eds), Moveable Type: Book History in India
(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008), p. 176.
1548 KAMA MACLEAN
Chief of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association’, the signatory

of the manifesto showered on the Assembly and the author of
posters fixed in public places throughout Lahore after Saunders’
murder.30 This was contradicted decades later by a member of the
Hindustan Socialist Republican Association inner circle, Shiv Verma,
who disclosed that Balraj was none other than Chandrashekhar
Azad.31 Similarly, the use of coded language among party members
requires today, as then, an inner party member to decipher the
meaning of party communications. Few would guess that a letter
requesting the recipient to observe a shraddha ceremony on a given date
was in fact an invitation to attend a provincial Hindustan Republican
Army council session, as Sohan Singh ‘Josh’ revealed in an interview
in the 1960s.32
Similarly, Hindustan Socialist Republican Association members
adopted different disguises as a means of passing through the various
towns in which they operated undetected. Criminal Intelligence
Department investigators had detailed physical descriptions of the
key party members, in which sartorial choices, including regional
styles, were often noted. Bhagat Singh, according to a 1926 Criminal
Intelligence Department description, reliably wore ‘khaddar’.33 It was
to spoil assumptions such as this that he abandoned his usual kurta-
pyjama and styled himself as a Gujarati businessman, wearing a
dhoti and coat.34 According to Shiv Verma, Bhagat Singh was the
hardest of all party members to disguise, because he was well known
to police, and besides, he ‘was a handsome figure—amongst hundreds
of people, obviously, he would be spotted’.35 His most famous and
elaborate disguise of all was as an Anglo-Indian sahib, wearing a trilby,
accompanied on a train to Calcutta by Durga Devi Vohra and her son
30
Letter by D. Petrie, Director of Intelligence, 25 May 1929, NAI, Home Political
192/1929, KW I.
31
Verma (ed.), Bhagat Singh on the Path of Liberation, p. 78, fn.
32
Max Harcourt, ‘Revolutionary Networks in North Indian Politics, 1907–1935
(D. Phil., University of Sussex, 1974), p. 264.
33
C.I.D. file no 9249/1926, facsimile reproduced in Malwinder Jit Singh Wariach,
Bhagat Singh: the Eternal Rebel (New Delhi: Government of India, Publications Division,
2007), p. 58.
34
Jaydev Kapoor, interviewed by S. L. Manchanda, 3 October 1974. NNML Oral
History Transcript (OHT), Acc. no. 431, p. 61.
35
Shiv Verma, interviewed by Hari Dev Sharma and S. L. Manchanda, 16 February
1972. NMML OHT, Acc. no 50, p. 87.
who posed as his family, as he escaped the police net in Lahore after
Saunders’ murder in late 1928.36
The shadowy movements of ‘absconding’ Hindustan Socialist Re-
publican Association members have established an unstable narrative
which allows for contention and allegation. It is often presumed that
Bhagat Singh attended the Calcutta Congress in disguise, in the weeks
overlapping late December 1928 and early January 1929, where he
had fled to avoid capture after Saunders’ murder on 18 December.37
Durga Devi Vohra denied this in an interview she gave in 1972,
remembering that while in Calcutta Bhagat Singh stayed indoors
during the day to avoid detection, only going out at night, and disguised
all the while.38 Sohan Singh ‘Josh’ recalled meeting Bhagat Singh
on 24 December 1929 in Calcutta at a secret location—a shaving
saloon: ‘Just think! Josh entering a shaving saloon in Calcutta with
a flowing beard and all the Sikh paraphernalia about him, and the
CID[Criminal Intelligence Department] shadowing him and hunting
everywhere for Bhagat Singh’.39 Chhabil Das, his former teacher from
Lahore College, happened to catch a fleeting glimpse of Bhagat Singh
in the home of a Calcutta-based Panjabi merchant. Das was asked
by Hindustan Socialist Republican Association ideologue, Bhagawati
Charan Vohra not to tell anyone of the chance meeting, or even that
Bhagat Singh was in town.40 Das presumed that Bhagat Singh was
attending sessions of the Congress meeting. This was not an altogether
unreasonable assumption, given that he had attended earlier Indian
National Congress meetings41 ; or that there were members in the
Congress who supported the revolutionaries.42
Moreover, as was well known by the Criminal Intelligence
Department at the time, it was the ‘consistent practice of
36
Verma, NMML OHT, p. 88; Durga Devi Vohra, interviewed by S. L. Manchanda,
7 October 1972, NMML OHT, Acc. 369, p. 11.
37
Jitendra Nath Sanyal, Sardar Bhagat Singh (a short life-sketch), Allahabad: J. N.
Sanyal, 1931, National Archives of India (NAI), Proscribed Literature section, Acc.
969, p. 42.
38
Vohra, NMML OHT, p. 15.
39
Sohan Singh Josh, ‘My Meetings with Bhagat Singh’, Link, 22 March 1981, p. 15.
40
Chhabil Das, interviewed by S. L. Manchanda, 17 May 1971, NMML OHT Acc.
No. 163, pp. 34–35.
41
The first Congress Session Bhagat Singh attended was in Ahmedabad, in 1921.
Jai Dev Gupta, NMML OHT, p. 28.
42
See S. Irfan Habib, ‘Trials, Congress and Revolutionaries’, in To Make the Deaf
Hear: Ideology and Programme of Bhagat Singh and His Comrades (New Delhi: Three Essays
Collective, 2007), pp. 73–102; Nair, ‘Bhagat Singh as “Satyagrahi”’, p. 30.
1550 KAMA MACLEAN
revolutionaries from various parts of India to take advantage of the

annual sessions of the Congress in order to discuss their plans in
secret, and to interchange their views’, and this almost certainly
accounts for Bhagat Singh’s activities in early January 1929.43
Other revolutionaries confirm that Bhagat Singh tried to establish
contacts with Bengali organizations, including the Anushilan Samiti,
during this period, as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
oriented its focus to bomb-making.44 By early 1929, the Hindustan
Socialist Republican Association had refocussed its activities in
the United Provinces, with its headquarters based in Agra, while
maintaining several satellite operations. Lalit Kumar Mukherji, in an
approver testimony, claimed to have met a Sardar (Sikh gentleman)
using the name of Ranjit—another alias that Bhagat Singh used—in
Allahabad in January 1929, at a secret meeting in which they discussed
assassinating Criminal Intelligence Department officers.45 The
Intelligence Bureau had registered that Bhagat Singh was ‘wandering
about India in a most suspicious manner during the past few months’
but until his attack on the Legislative Assembly, no concrete evidence
could be pinned on him.46 Given these layers of secrecy—disguises,
codes, and aliases—there is a certain amount of flexibility inherent in
the narrative of Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary life.
Proscribed histories
A related element in the repression of information on the activities of

revolutionaries was the censorship that the government applied to all
seditious literature. The inherently subversive nature of revolutionary
organizations meant that publicizing their aims and objectives—
necessary for winning broader public support—was dangerous and
risked undermining the entire revolutionary project. Few mainstream
newspapers, fearful of repressive press legislation that could levy
43
Extract, Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, 12 January 1928,
IOR/L/P&J/12/59, p. 17. See also Report by Fryer, 19 April 1929, NAI, Home Political,
192/1929, K.W. II, p. 14.
44
Sanyal, Sardar Bhagat Singh, p. 44; Kapoor, NMML OHT, p. 93.
45
Statement of Lalit Kumar Mukherji, Confession Exhibit PBV/1/28.6.29, in
Malwinderjit Singh Waraich and Harish Jain (eds), The Hanging of Bhagat Singh,
Confessions, Statements and Other Documents, Vol. III (Chandigarh: Unistar, 2007), p. 247.
46
Extract from Director, Intelligence Bureau (DIB) Report, 8 April 1929.
IOR/L/PJ/12/389, p. 3.
punitive fines and briskly bring financial ruin on a publisher, were
willing to print revolutionary material. Whenever the Hindustan
Socialist Republican Association managed to raise enough funds to
produce their own propaganda, it was quickly labelled seditious and
proscribed.47 They were therefore largely reduced to carrying out their
clandestine politics, as contrary as this seems, with minimal publicity.
It was frustration at the limitations of publicizing their cause and
philosophy that Bhagat Singh’s final ‘action’, dubbed by the press as
the ‘Assembly Bomb Case’, was devised. Whereas the British read
the act of the actual attack on the Assembly as being the moment of
subversion, for Bhagat Singh, it was just the beginning.48 He knew
that the trial would be transcribed and duly reported in the press, and
that it could therefore be used as an opportunity to communicate the
aims and objectives of the organization. It was for this reason that
Bhagat Singh, with his talent for oration, was chosen for the ‘action’
at the Assembly, even though the party knew that he would certainly
be connected to Saunders’ murder after arrest.49 When he went to
perform the Assembly Bombing with B. K. Dutt, Bhagat Singh and his
comrades knew he was walking into a death sentence.50
Once the trial began, the magistrate presiding, F. B. Pool,
recognized that their lengthy statement was a manifesto devised
as an attempt to evade censorship controls. On 9 June 1929, Pool
ruled that sections of Bhagat Singh’s statement were ‘expunged’,
and that the expunged portions ‘cannot be referred to here, nor
being irrelevant, could they affect the case’, despite the fact that
the attack on parliament had everything to do with the deleted
ideology.51 Unfortunately for the prosecutors, an abridged version of
the testimony had already been published in the press.52 A full Bengali
translation of it was being distributed in revolutionary circles in the
form of a pamphlet in Calcutta in October 1929.53 Nevertheless, the
deletion had a great bearing on the case’s progression in the courts.
47
Corinne Friend (ed.), Yashpal looks back: selections from an Autobiography (Delhi:
Vikas, 1981), p. 47.
48
Kapoor, NMML OHT, pp. 103–105.
49
This was in fact a point of much debate within the Hindustan Socialist Republican
Association. For details see Kapoor, NMML OHT, pp. 101–119.
50
Kapoor, NMML OHT, pp. 125–126.
51
‘Judgment: Session Court’, in Wariach and Sidhu (eds), Complete Judgement, p. 36.
52
‘Bhagat Singh and Dutt’s Sensational Statement’, Hindustan Times, 8 June 1929,
pp. 1, 5.
53
Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, of the Home Department,
3 October 1929. IOR/L/PJ/12/389, p. 25.
1552 KAMA MACLEAN
In an appeal before the High Court Bench, Bhagat Singh argued that
removing the rationale for the attack on the assembly from their
statement had the effect of reducing the revolutionaries to the status
of madmen and fanatics.54
The growing global consternation in Euro-America at the growth
of communism in the 1920s, combined with its utility in the
imperial situation, served to justify the Government’s attempts to
curtail activities of radical leftist groups such as the Hindustan
Socialist Republican Association. Throughout the protracted court
case, the accused made their socialist politics clear through their
frequent sloganeering, particularly ‘Long Live the Revolution’. Asked
to elaborate on what was meant by this, Bhagat Singh reasoned that
‘Revolution’ does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife nor is there any
place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol.
By ‘Revolution’ we mean that the present order of things, which is based on
manifest injustice, must change. Producers or labourers in spite of being
the most necessary element of society, are robbed, by their exploiters, of the
fruits of their labour and deprived of their elementary rights. The peasant who
grows corn for all, strives with his family, the weaver who supplies the world
market with textile fabrics, has not enough to cover his own and his children’s’
bodies, masons, smiths and carpenters who raise magnificent palaces, live like
pariahs in the slums.55
Marxist ideology was more than seditious; its transnational

aspirations made it globally subversive. Moreover, it was sympathizers
and activists in the broader socialist movement who brought
Bhagat Singh’s predicament to the world stage. Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association members corresponded with a Polish student
who wrote in support to the Bhagat Singh Defence Committee in
Lahore, and who subsequently ‘proved a very good propagandist
for us in foreign countries’.56 In March 1931, the Secretariat of
the Communist Party of Great Britain issued circulars requesting
comrades to organize demonstrations in protest at Bhagat Singh’s
impending execution, protesting that:
this so-called trial, unparalleled in the history of political persecution, is
characterized by the most inhuman and brutal treatment which is the
54
‘Statement Before the Lahore High Court Bench’, in Verma (ed.), Bhagat Singh:
on the Path of Liberation, p. 147–148.
55
‘Statement in Sessions Court’, in Verma (ed.), Bhagat Singh: on the Path of
Liberation, p. 82.
56
outcome of a frantic desire on the part of the Labour Imperialist Government
to strike terror into the hearts of an oppressed people.57
Weeks later, the New York-based Daily Worker would describe Bhagat
Singh’s hanging as ‘one of the bloodiest deeds ever undertaken by the
British Labour Government’.58 The refrain of ‘Congress Keerthanai’, a
Tamil song, added to the proscribed list by the Government of Madras
in early 1932, was not exaggerating when it valorized Bhagat Singh
as ‘world renowned’.59
While comrades were perhaps the most vehement global supporters
of Bhagat Singh, his plight also came to the attention of others.
Concerns about the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners accused
of political violence, including the Government’s attempts to tailor
legislation and ordinances to allow them to hold and prosecute
suspects without due process, were widely expressed in the
mainstream nationalist press.60 The Society of Friends dispatched
one Professor Horace Gundry Alexander to Delhi in 1930 to research
a book, Political Prisoners In India. It was not released until 1937—
by which time the revolutionaries had been largely suppressed—
but the Intelligence Bureau viewed the Society of Friends’ report as
an unwelcome intervention, particularly after it failed to influence
Alexander’s findings.61 ‘Rubbish!’ was pencilled in the margins next to
the Professor’s statement that ‘it is often the finest students, men or
women of outstanding ability, integrity and courage, who get carried
into the revolutionary movement’.62
This pencilled outburst is indicative of a larger problem in the
colonial archives, which provide the most resources for historians
piecing together Bhagat Singh’s story, many of which were only
57
The Communist Party of Great Britain, Lahore Conspiracy Case, 5 March 1931.
IOR/L/PJ/12/377, pp. 23–25.
58
‘Labour Government. Executes 3 India Rebels Frame-up Revolutionists for
British Imperialism’, in Verma, (ed.), Bhagat Singh: on the Path to Liberation, pp. 181–
182.
59
Sidhu (ed.), Banned Literature, p. 196.
60
Two sources, each quoting different newspapers, provide graphic descriptions of
the torture that some of the Lahore Conspiracy Case prisoners were exposed to. See
C. S. Venu, Sirdar Bhagat Singh, p. 22; The Communist Party of Great Britain, ‘Lahore
Conspiracy Case’, 5 March 1931. IOR/L/PJ/12/377, p. 24.
61
See R. A. Butler’s undated letter to Mr Crombie of the Intelligence Bureau, IOR/
L/PJ/12/314, p. 40.
62
Political Prisoners In India: A Statement issued by Direction of the Society of Friends,
January 1937, p. 18, IOR/ L/PJ/12/314.
1554 KAMA MACLEAN
declassified relatively recently.63 The bulk of the existing documents

relating to his activism, trial and execution were authored by a
coterie of imperial investigators, administrators and prosecutors,
whose determination to convict him largely inhibited any attempt to
understand the revolutionary phenomenon. There is ample evidence
that many revolutionaries of the 1920s were just as Alexander
described, but to allow this would be to accept that a reasoned
critique of imperialism underpinned their recourse to violence. The
discourse of condemnation in the various reports, telegrams, and
memoranda that passed between intelligence officers and various
provincial authorities, the Home Department and the Viceroy, is
pervasive—and provides a stark contrast to nationalistic writings that
celebrate Bhagat Singh.
Aggrieved histories: eulogy literature
Although British attempts to manage seditious literature was

frustrating for the revolutionaries, the body of literature that was
proscribed was collected and held in the India Office, where it remains
today, a useful resource for historians.64 A similar collection exists in
the library at the National Archives of India, and a recently published
volume brings readers a taste of banned materials that relate to
Bhagat Singh.65 The editor of this volume, Gurdev Singh Sidhu, has
traced 153 proscribed publications, predominantly in Hindi, but also
in Tamil, Panjabi, Urdu, Gujarati and Sindhi.66 The exhaustive lists of
freshly proscribed material published in Fortnightly Reports in 1931
suggest that literature memorializing Bhagat Singh in the charged
months after his death found wide and receptive audiences.
63
The voluminous files of Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) in the L/PJ/12 series
were only made accessible to researchers in 1996. http://www.nationalarchives.
gov.uk/A2A/records.aspx?cat=059-lpj12&cid=-1&Gsm=2008–06-18 - -1 (accessed
21 December 2011).
64
N. G. Barrier, Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India,
1907–1947 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), pp. 206–209, lists 29
entries on Bhagat Singh; the more recent G. Shaw and M. Lloyd (eds), Publications
Proscribed by the Government of India: A catalogue of the collections in the India Office Library and
Records and the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, British Library Reference
Division (London: British Library, 1985), p. 192, has over 70 relevant entries.
65
Sidhu (ed.), Banned Literature.
66
Ibid., p. 8.
Most of these writings, predominantly small tracts and booklets,
were produced in the immediate aftermath of the executions,
constituting a powerful collection of eulogy literature. Given that
eulogies compiled in this tumultuous period constitute the first
histories of Bhagat Singh’s life, this phenomenon is worth considering
in some depth. To give an indication of the density of banned material,
in one fortnight in Bengal alone, a month after the executions,
three booklets (Desh Bhagat by Chaudhury Nathulal Jamal, published
in Lucknow; Shahid Bhagat Singh, by Sambhu Prasad Misra; and
Amar Shahid Bhagat Singh, published in Calcutta) were added to the
proscribed list, as were three different pictures, each featuring Bhagat
Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru on the scaffold.67 The eulogy literature
captured by the net of British intelligence and registered in Fortnightly
Reports, along with the regal, if unlikely, command that all copies ‘be
forfeited to his Majesty’ forthwith, is not likely to be an exhaustive list
of what was produced. Many examples of eulogy posters survived the
remaining decades of empire to be eventually sold on the collectors’
market, and many private collections have tracts unlisted by the
British Library.68
The intensity and volume of eulogy literature was reflective of the
extraordinary response to the executions, which many hoped would
be commuted at the last minute. Several public movements to have
the death sentence reduced to transportation for life sprang up after
the revolutionaries lost an appeal before a Special Tribunal in 1930,
and consequently suffered a cursory dismissal by the Privy Council
in February 1931. While demonstrations by the Nau Jawan Bharat
Sabha, in Lahore on 20 March 1931, might have been expected,
given the close relationship between it and the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association, the protest of the Nationalist Muslim Youth
Association in support of the revolutionaries, speaks of broader
appeal,69 as does the observance of ‘Bhagat Singh Day’ in Lahore
on 5 March, which was attended by ‘mammoth’ crowds and evidenced
by three photographs reproduced in the Tribune the following day.70
In early March, no date had been revealed for the executions, leaving
followers and family alike guessing, pinning their hopes on furtive
67
‘Report on the Political Situation in Bengal for the second half of April, 1931’.
NAI, F/18/3/1931.
68
See Chaman Lal, ‘Bibliography on Bhagat Singh’, in Grewal (ed.), Bhagat Singh
and his Legend, pp. 255–269.
69
Tribune, March 7, 1931, p. 7.
70
Tribune March 6, 1931, p. 5.
1556 KAMA MACLEAN
appeals.71 The relatives of the three were called for an interview

on 4 March, leading to speculation that execution was imminent,72
sparking a flurry of ‘Pray Stay Execution’ telegrams to the Viceroy.73
A number of formal appeal committees and private individuals sent
appeals to all levels of government.74 Subhas Chandra Bose later
reflected that the volume of appeals had induced Lord Irwin to tell
Gandhi that he would
postpone their execution for the time being and give serious consideration to
the matter, but beyond that he did not want to be pressed . . . the conclusion
which the Mahatma and everybody else drew from this attitude of the Viceroy,
was that the execution would be finally cancelled and there was jubilation all
over the country.75
And yet the trio were hanged on 23 March 1931.

Not only were the executions unexpected, but the manner in which
they were carried out added to an overwhelming sense of grievance. By
the 1930s, the British had considerable experience in martyr-making,
and had come to understand something of the process. The death
of Jatindranath Das, a Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
member and friend of Bhagat Singh, who had fasted beyond the point
of no return in protest at jail conditions in September 1929, had gained
the revolutionaries much public sympathy.76 The prison authorities
had duly handed Das’s wasted body over to family members, who,
with the support of the Bengal Provincial Congress, repatriated him
to Calcutta by train, where his remains were taken on procession,
accompanied by wailing crowds.77 Keen to avoid such a situation with
the hangings of the condemned trio in the Lahore Conspiracy Case,
the Home Department resorted to subterfuge.
Firstly, the date of the executions, secretly fixed for 24 March, was
abruptly moved to 23 March, with no prior warning, and the time
71
It would appear from correspondence between the Home Department and
Punjab Government that a date for the executions was not fixed until as late as
17 March. Telegram XV no. 797-S, 17 March 1931, NAI, Home Political 4/21/31,
p. 18.
72
Tribune, 4 March 1931, p. 7.
73
Tribune, 5 March 1931, p. 7.
74
See NAI, Home Judicial, 152/I/31 and K.W.
75
Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle: 1920–1942 (New York: Asia
Publishing House, 1964), p. 204.
76
Nair, ‘Bhagat Singh as “Satyagrahi”’, p. 17.
77
Kapoor, NMML OHT, p. 184; ‘Report on the political situation in Bengal for
the fortnight ending the first half of September 1929’, IOR/ L/PJ/12/686.
of the execution put at 7.00 pm, instead of the standard execution
time of daybreak. Secondly, when the families of Sukhdev and Bhagat
Singh arrived for their final interview on the afternoon of 23 March,
such a large crowd of extended relatives arrived that the prison
authorities refused them entry, stipulating that only immediate family
were eligible for interview. Heavily aggrieved, Bhagat Singh’s family
refused to accept this, instead boycotting the right for a final meeting,
and they were joined by Sukhdev’s family.78 ‘No “Last Interview” with
Relations’ was widely reported in the nationalist press.79 Finally, after
the execution was carried out, the bodies were not given over to the
families. Instead they were secreted out of the prison and ‘disposed of
according to a pre-arranged plan, being taken at night to the bund of
the Sutlej near Ferozepore and cremated with due ceremony’.80 This
unorthodox night-time cremation was allegedly carried out in the
presence of representatives of the Hindu, and Arya and Sikh faiths;
by 5.00 a.m., the bodies were ‘completely burnt’ and ‘the ashes were
thrown midstream in the Sutlej’.81
The authorities felt that depriving the families of their sons’ bodies
would remove a focal point for public grieving, which they anticipated
would be intense.82 From his office in the Home Department,
Emerson prevailed upon Gandhi to do all he could in his power to
‘check the creation of conditions which, if uncontrolled, may have
serious consequences’.83 Gandhi declined.84 Writing in ‘strict secrecy’
and in cipher, the Home Department instructed District Magistrates
around the country to expect, at some stage in the coming weeks, a
simple, one-word telegram which would signal impending execution:
78
Bhagat Singh had been partly raised by his childless aunt, Harnam Kaur, and
so the question of who constituted ‘immediate family’ even within the context of the
Indian extended family unit, was not a straightforward one. Jai Dev Gupta, NMML
OHT, p. 14.
79
Tribune, 25 March, 1931, p. 1.
80
‘Report on the political situation in the Punjab for the fortnight ending the 31st
of March, 1931.’ NAI, F/18/3/1931.
81
Statement of Sir Henry Craik, Finance Minister in the Punjab Legislative
Council, The Indian Annual Register: an Annual Digest of Public Affairs of India, Vol 1,
January–June 1931. Calcutta: Annual Register Office, 1932, p. 215.
82
‘Report on the political situation in the Punjab for the fortnight ending the 31st
of March, 1931’, NAI, F/18/3/1931.
83
Letter from Emerson, Secretary to the Home Department, Government of India,
to Gandhi, 20 March 1931, NAI, Home Political 4/21/31, p. 66.
84
‘Irritation is undoubtedly there. It would be better to allow it to find vent through
meetings etc.’ Letter from M. K. Gandhi to Emerson, 20 March 1931. NAI, Home
Political, 4/21/31, p. 65.
1558 KAMA MACLEAN
‘Tomorrow’.85 This would alert them to rally troops to standby in case

of emergency.86 Once the news of the executions spread, Lahore,
Bombay, Kanpur and Madras observed hartal,87 and in Calcutta,
‘intense excitement prevailed and armed flying squads patrolled the
city’.88
Jai Dev Gupta, a lifelong friend of Bhagat Singh, was with a crowd
of mourners in Lahore who had been tipped off about a cremation
late in the night of 23 March. Finding a spot on the Sutlej where
the sand was hot and the smell of kerosene strong, Gupta found a
long bone, ‘cut in a diagonal form at the wrist’, which he suspected
was evidence that the bodies had been mutilated.89 The mourners
gathered what they could, and it was these remains that Sardar Kishan
Singh, Bhagat Singh’s father, took to the Karachi Congress on 5 April
to show the audience that gathered to hear him speak about his son.90
The Tribune’s front page asked ‘Was Bhagat Singh’s body mutilated?’91
The Punjab Provincial Congress undertook an inquiry into the issue,
headed by Doctors Gopi Chand Bhargawa and Satya Pal; the ensuing
report ruled that the cut was accidental.92 However the idea that the
bodies had been maliciously desecrated was widespread and impossible
to retract. Yashpal would later reflect in his autobiography that
the people’s hearts filled with fierce, helpless hatred toward the foreign
government. Consequently they spread stories about the cruelties inflicted
on Bhagat Singh and his companions and of their courage as they faced the
gallows. To demonstrate their hatred and anger towards the Government
and their reverence for the martyrs, the people exaggerated these stories.
Whoever heard them added something, and that is how those tales gained
currency.93
85
Letter from Emerson, 18 February 1931. NAI, Home Political 4/21/31, p. 43.
86
Cawnpore Riots Enquiry Committee Report, in The Indian Annual Register: an
Annual Digest of Public Affairs of India, Vol 1, January–June 1931. Calcutta: Annual
Register Office, p. 96.
87
Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Communal Outbreak at Cawnpore,
Cmd. 3891, June 1931, p. 4.
88
The Indian Annual Register: an Annual Digest of Public Affairs of India, Vol. 1, January–
June, Calcutta: Annual Register Office, 1931, p. 30.
89
90
Letter to Emerson, Secretary to the GOI, Home Political from G. F. S. Collins,
1 April 1931. Fortnightly Reports for the second half of March 1931, NAI, F/18/3/1931.
91
Tribune, 4 April 1931, p. 1.
92
Jai Dev Gupta, NMML OHT, p. 62; ‘Bhagat Singh Cremation Enquiry
Committee’, The Indian Annual Register: an Annual Digest of Public Affairs of India, Vol 1,
January–June 1931. Calcutta: Annual Register Office, p. 253.
93
Corrine Friend (ed.), Selections from Autobiography: Yashpal looks back (Delhi:
Vikas, 1981), p. 218.
Such contentions have resurfaced recently with the publication of
Some Hidden Facts: The Martyrdom of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, based on
the reminiscences of Dalip Singh Alahabadi, (a Criminal Intelligence
Department officer in the 1930s), as told to Giani Tirlok Singh Kooner,
as told to Kulwant Singh Kooner.94 The book extends the desecration
narrative, claiming that Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were
tortured, half-hanged and then shot by Saunders’ vengeful family
members. Given the gaps in the historical record, combined with
the deeply ingrained grievance around the manner of Bhagat Singh’s
death, and a general post-colonial scepticism of British governance
and legal proceedings,95 it is no surprise that this book has found an
audience. The theory has not been widely accepted,96 but has nonethe-
less been added to the lore surrounding the subterfuge and perfidy of
the British rulers’ attempts to suppress the nationalist movement.
The political environment in which Bhagat Singh was executed was
a charged one, which was reflected in eulogy literature. The opening
months of 1931 were intended to mark a period of rapprochement in
British India with the Gandhi-Irwin pact, concluded in early March,
following in the wake of the Civil Disobedience Movement and the
Round Table Conference in London. As a result of the pact, Gandhi
had called an end to Civil Disobedience, and the British freed all non-
violent political prisoners who had been arrested during its course. It
was in this atmosphere of truce that many hoped that the sentences
on Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru would be commuted, and
considerable pressure was brought to bear on Gandhi to make it one
of the conditions of the pact. Subhas Chandra Bose was of the opinion
that ‘Gandhi did try his very best’ to stay the executions, and so ‘it
was [a] most painful and unexpected surprise when on March 24th,
while we were on our way to Karachi from Calcutta, the news was
received that Sardar Bhagat Singh and his comrades had been hanged
the night before’.97
It is no exaggeration to say that the announcement that Bhagat
Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev had been executed was met with
94
K. S. Kooner and G. S. Sindhra, Some Hidden Facts: Martyrdom of Shaheed Bhagat
Singh, Secrets unfolded by an Officer of the Intelligence Bureau of British India (Chandigarh:
Unistar, 2005).
95
The legal proceedings which sent Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev to the
gallows have been rigorously questioned by A. G. Noorani, The Trial of Bhagat Singh:
the Politics of Justice (Delhi: Oxford University Press [1996]), 2008.
96
‘Was Bhagat Singh shot dead?’, The Tribune, 11 December 2005.
97
Bose, Indian Struggle, pp. 204–205.
1560 KAMA MACLEAN
devastation. The newspapers were filled with reports of condolence

meetings, hartals, fasts and mass observances of death rituals. In
Amritsar’s Jallianwalah Bagh, the site of the infamous 1919 massacre,
30 police who had been sent to keep the peace at a condolence meeting
were stoned, injuring 23.98 Terrible violence broke out in Kanpur,
where existing tensions were inflamed when Hindu shopkeepers
attempted to enforce a Congress-declared hartal on their Muslim
neighbours. The death toll was placed at approximately 300.99 A
motion for the adjournment of the Legislative Assembly in Delhi in
protest at the executions failed when put to the vote, but the debate
on its desirability ‘gave an opportunity for the delivery of a number
of speeches from which glorification of murder and eulogy of the
Lahore assassins was not absent’.100 The executions were widely read
as being vindictive, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s words, ‘an act of wanton
vengeance and a deliberate flouting of the unanimous demand for
commutation’.101 This is perhaps best encapsulated in the proscribed
poster (Figure 3), in which a British officer in a sola topi solemnly
farewells the trio on the scaffold.
The announcement of the hangings caused such grief and shock that
the more radical newspapers, such as Kirti, Bande Mataram, Milap, and
Tufan, went to press with direct incitements to violence. One Lahori
newspaper, Zamindar (Landlord), urged its readership to:
Give an answer to England with action and not with words. India esteems
these three martyrs more than the whole British nation. We cannot fully
avenge them even if we kill thousands and lakhs of Englishmen. The revenge
can only be complete if you free India. Thus the glory of England will be mixed
with dust. O Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukh Dev! The British are glad that
they have murdered you but they are mistaken. They have not murdered you
but have supplied a knife to their future. You are alive and will ever remain
so.102
Literature compiled in this heavily charged atmosphere of grief
included plays (a report of one such drama, performed ‘40 miles
98
Report on the political situation in the Punjab for the fortnight ending the 31st
of March, 1931. NAI, F/18/3/1931.
99
Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Communal Outbreak at Cawnpore,
Cmd. 3891, June 1931.
100
Report on Bengal for second half of March 1931. NAI, F/18/3/1931.
101
Speech by Jawaharlal Nehru, originally in Hindi, delivered at the Karachi
Congress, 1931, in A. M. Zaidi (ed.), Congress Presidential Addresses, Vol. 10: 1930–
35 (Delhi: Indian Institute of Applied Political Research, 1988), p. 77.
102
Reproduced from Piyam in the Zamindar (Lahore) on 3 April, 1931. NAI, Home
Political 1931, 13/XI and K. W.
Figure 3. A proscribed poster of Rajguru, Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev on the scaffold,
circa 1931.103
from Mangalore in the “far south”’, had it that the entire village
began to wail when the hanging scene was enacted),104 poems and
songs which drew on images of Bhagat Singh as a brave hero who
played holi with his own blood. Faced with an ‘epidemic of murderer-
adulation’ literature, the Home Department began to keep a ‘Bhagat
Singh Celebration File’, with a view to proving that ‘the eulogy of
“martyrs” is a subtle method of incitement to violence which usually
escapes prosecution’.105
Many of these writings were biographical in nature, some of which
were written by persons who had known Bhagat Singh.106 Chandravati
Devi, who had attended National College in Lahore, was one such
author. She wrote a ‘small booklet of 100 to 150 pages in prattling
103
Courtesy of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
104
‘The Martyr, Sardar Bhagat Singh’, in NAI, Home Political 1931, 13/XI and
K. W.
105
Letter from P. C. Bamford, Deputy Director, Home Department, 16 April 1931,
NAI, Home Political, 4/22/1931.
106
Jatindranath Sanyal, the author of Sardar Bhagat Singh, was also trialled in the
Lahore Conspiracy Case. He was acquitted, only to be jailed for two years for sedition
for writing and publishing his book.
1562 KAMA MACLEAN
style and lacking in coherence’ about his life, recounting his childhood
in fond detail (once, running to get sweets, he fell over, and his nose
bled profusely), giving a sketch of early indications of his revolutionary
proclivities (he was trained as a cultivator, but planned to open a gun
shop when he grew up).107 Bhagat Singh’s comrades also submitted
materials for publication; in a letter that was smuggled out of jail,
B. K. Dutt wrote to Bhagat Singh: ‘Mother India is running mad in
your memory’.108 Other articles divulged facts and occurrences which
revealed that the writers had followed the events closely in the press,
or knew or had heard first hand from family members of the final days
of the condemned. Watan de Lal (Rubies of the Nation), for example,
included details about a letter Bhagat Singh wrote to his young brother
Kultar before his execution, which reflected on seeing Kultar’s tears
in their final meeting and urged him to be brave.109
But in the immediate aftermath of the executions many writings
purporting to be histories sprang up, some of which made questionable
claims. One example is Rishabhcharan Jain’s ‘Hartal’, written during
the strikes in the aftermath of the executions, overtly claiming to
constitute an itihas (history), arguing that Bhagat Singh was ‘in fact’
innocent of the Lahore Conspiracy Case.110 Such an idea might have
been formed by Sardar Kishan Singh’s final petition to the courts,
written in late 1930,111 which argued that his son could not possibly
have been involved in Saunders’ murder because he was in Calcutta
at the time (Bhagat Singh had responded to this, contradicting his
father in an open letter).112 C. S. Venu’s Sirdar Bhagat Singh also
argued that the trio were innocent of Saunders’ murder, extending
well-founded scepticism with the imperial justice system, by alleging
that the police had planted false evidence in order to convict the trio.113
Other writings, whose authors were too far away and disconnected to
107
Chandravati Devi, ‘Shahid Sardar Bhagat Singh’, NAI, Home Political
4/22/1931, p. 32.
108
Vir Bharat, 9 July 1931, NAI, Home Political 4/22/1931, p. 63.
109
See ‘Watan de Lal’, in Sidhu (ed.), Banned Literature, pp. 47–48.
110
Thus it was recently published in a collection of short stories, Rustom Rai (ed.),
Pratibandhit Hindi Sahitya, Part 1 (Delhi: Radhakrishnan Prakashan, 1999), p. 185.
Two other eulogies, ‘Bhagat Singh Kirtanamrutam’, in Sidhu (ed.), Banned Literature,
p. 131; and ‘Quami Shahid’, Sidhu (ed.), Banned Literature, p. 119, also allege that he
was innocent of Saunders’ murder.
111
‘Petition of Sardar Kishan Singh’, in Wariach and Sidhu (eds), Complete Judgment,
p. 244.
112
See ‘Letter to Father’, in Verma (ed.), Bhagat Singh: on the path of liberation, p. 170.
113
C. S. Venu, Sirdar Bhagat Singh, Madras, circa 1931, p. 65.
the events in Lahore, also made claims which were uncorroborated,
satisfying an overwhelming demand for information in the absence of
any.114 Thus one 1931 publication mourned the death of B. K. Dutt,
who in fact survived both his life sentence and the British Raj, before
he succumbed in a Delhi hospital in 1965.115 But in the atmosphere of
grief in which Bhagat Singh loomed large as a martyred hero, to point
out such inaccuracies would seem churlish, or worse, to mitigate the
oppression of the imperial order.
The intensity of eulogy literature in the Punjab alone caused much
consternation among the British—the Zamindar’s reference to killing
‘lakhs of Englishmen’ had been underlined in pencil by an alarmed
official—that they re-introduced a Special Press Ordinance which
had been originally devized to muzzle the press during the Civil
Disobedience campaign, but which had since expired.116 In 1933, this
press ordinance was credited in an official report with bringing an era
of ‘laudation of murderers in the press’ to a definitive close, thereby
reducing the incidence of revolutionary violence.117
Counter Congress
Arguably the most powerful censure of Bhagat Singh’s politics and

thus his story has been the imperial allegation that his resort to
violence was illegitimate; as such, he was consistently styled by the
British as a ‘terrorist’. As governments do, the British viewed any
nationalist recourse to violence as fundamentally different to their
own. As we have seen, dismissing Bhagat Singh as a ‘terrorist’ gave
the British the necessary pretext to expunge elaborate arguments
in court that explained and qualified his resort to violence. In his
memoirs, Sohan Singh ‘Josh’ contended that the persistent use of
‘terrorist’ terminology served to defame the revolutionaries ‘in the
eyes of the Indian people’.118
The revolutionary resort to violence stood in sharp distinction to the
Gandhian platform of non-violence, which dominated Congress policy
114
Sidhu (ed.), Banned Literature, p. 34.
115
‘Khoon ke Ansu’, in Sidhu (ed.), Banned Literature, p. 75.
116
See ‘Denigration in the tone of the Press in the Punjab’, NAI, Home Political
1931, 13/XI and K. W.
117
Letter from the Chief Secretary to Government, Punjab, no. 14360-SB, 2
September 1933, ‘Terrorism in India’, IOR/L/PJ/12/397, p. 90.
118
Josh, My Meetings with Bhagat Singh, p. 19.
1564 KAMA MACLEAN
throughout the 1920s and beyond. Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence

was perhaps best exemplified by his response to the outbreak of
violence in Chauri Chaura in 1921, which was to unilaterally suspend
the non-cooperation movement. While outbreaks of violence during
subsequent campaigns did not lead to such drastic measures, as long as
Gandhi could influence the Congress platform, any use of violence was
formally condemned. In practice, the platform of non-violence faced
considerable resistance, and in some cases was ignored by rank and file
Congress members. The Intelligence Bureau dedicated much energy
to documenting instances where Congress leaders and workers made
statements that seemed to endorse revolutionary violence. Foremost
amongst these was a resolution, initiated by Gandhi at the 1929
Lahore Congress, which congratulated Lord and Lady Irwin on their
‘providential escape’ from a failed attack on their train, masterminded
by Hindustan Socialist Republican Association operative Yashpal.
‘This resolution was passed it was true’, observes a “Brief note on
the Alliance of Congress with Terrorism”, ‘but only by a majority of
148, no fewer than 794 votes being recorded against it.’119
In their rejection of Bhagat Singh’s methods the British no doubt
received great comfort from Gandhi’s comprehensive disapproval
at the revolutionary resort to violence. Gandhi implied that the
revolutionaries were random and irrational, referring rhetorically to
revolutionary praxis as ‘the Bomb’, arguing that it was underpinned
by a philosophy of ‘mad revenge and impotent rage’.120 This was true,
to a point: the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association themselves
declared that Saunders’ murder was to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat
Rai. However, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association was a
largely well-disciplined organization. Such terms as ‘mad’ failed to
reflect their strategic choice of targets and their attempts to minimize
harm to bystanders.121 The posters issued by the party in the wake of
Saunders’ murder revealed the extent to which the action was planned,
119
‘Brief note on the Alliance of Congress with Terrorism’, IOR/L/PJ/12/391, p. 9.
120
M. K. Gandhi, ‘The Bomb and the Knife’, CWMG, Vol. XL, pp. 259–260.
121
It is true that revolutionary errors were made despite well-laid plans—for
example Jai Gopal’s failure to identify the correct target, Superintendent Scott,
in Lahore on 18 December 1928, which resulted in Saunders being shot instead.
However, an entire ‘action’ in Delhi was aborted at the last minute when the intended
target, the Viceroy, failed to attend. Verma, NMML OHT, p. 95. When he went
to bomb the Legislative Assembly, Bhagat Singh passed up an opportunity to shoot
Sir John Simon, who was sitting in the visitors’ gallery next to the brother of the
Speaker, Mr Patel, because ‘it was feared that if the shot missed Sir John it would
kill the brother of Mr Patel’. This reluctance to take advantage of any situation was
indicating a sense of organizational formality in the proclamation,
plastered around Lahore: ‘Under the rules and regulations of the
Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (Rule 10th B & C), it is
hereby notified that this was a retaliatory action of none but a direct
political nature’.122 Later in a similar document, they twice expressed
remorse for taking human life, explaining that in Saunders they saw
‘the representative of an institution which is so cruel, lowly and so base
that it must be abolished’.123
Bhagat Singh’s critique of Gandhian non-violence has rhetorically
positioned him in opposition to the Congress Party as a whole. This is
despite the fact that the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
had many interesting and at times close interactions with the broader
Congress movement.124 Many prominent Congress leaders went to
visit Bhagat Singh in jail or in court, including Subhas Chandra Bose,
Motilal Nehru and Jawaharlal Nehru.125 Leading Congress members
in the Punjab constituted and supported the Bhagat Singh Defence
Committee and the Bhagat Singh Memorial Fund.126 Bhagat Singh
was well acquainted with the Congress programme, and had in fact
been a part of the Non-cooperation movement in the early 1920s. Like
many, he had been elated at Gandhi’s promise of freedom within a
year; with his friend Jai Dev Gupta he went to the homes of well-to-do
Lahore families and asked for their foreign clothes, which they then
took to the Congress office to be burned.127 When Gandhi suspended
Non-cooperation they became despondent and embarked upon a
interpreted by David Petrie, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, as ‘abnormal’.

Report by Mr Petrie, 10 June 1929, NAI, Home Political, 192/1929, K.W. II, p. 90.
122
‘Notice issued by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and a
Statement issued to the Commissioner on behalf of J. N. Sanyal and five others, the
Special Tribunal, Lahore Conspiracy Case, December 1928–1930. NMML, Private
Papers, Acc. 822.
123
‘Beware, Ye Bureaucracy’, in Verma (ed.), Bhagat Singh: on the Path to Liberation,
pp. 72–73.
124
This has been indicated in S. K. Mittal and Irfan Habib, ‘The Congress and the
Revolutionaries in the 1920s’, Social Scientist, Vol. 10, No. 6, June 1982, pp. 20–37.
125
Connections between Motilal Nehru and the revolutionaries are further alluded
to in J. N. Sahni, Truth about the Indian Press (Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1974), p. 748;
Bhikshu Chaman Lal, interviewed by Uma Shankar, Centre of South Asian Studies,
Cambridge, Oral History Collection, 19 August 1976, no. s110, p. 15.
126
Extract from Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau of the Home
Department, Government of India, 27 August 1931, no. 33. IOR/L/PJ/12/369, p. 8;
Manmathnath Gupta, interviewed by Uma Shankar, Centre of South Asian Studies,
Cambridge, Oral History Collection, 28 August 1974, s104, p. 10.
127
1566 KAMA MACLEAN
distinct revolutionary programme. A former Hindustan Socialist

Republican Association member, Manmathnath Gupta argued that
the revolutionaries were critical of, but by no means hostile to
Gandhi—‘we always welcomed Gandhi’s movements and his men
whenever they came. The satyagrahis also became our good friends’.128
Bhagat Singh’s rhetorical opposition to Gandhi reached a crescendo
in the month before his hanging, as the latter was pressured to make
clemency a condition of his pact with the Viceroy, negotiated in early
1931. Whether Gandhi did all he could to save the trio has for long
been a matter of contention, but as Neeti Nair notes, the debate ‘has
long been decided against’ Gandhi.129 Sukhdev wrote a polemical open
letter to Gandhi, which was delivered posthumously by his younger
brother Mathura Das Thapar, which explained the revolutionaries’
position, which the Mahatma published and responded to in Young
India.130 Many feared that the Karachi Congress, held within days
of the executions, would herald yet another split over the issue of
Gandhi’s failure to save Bhagat Singh,131 and others supposed that
the execution had been timed precisely to do just that.132
After the Mahatma’s murder in 1948, and the ongoing reaction to
it in the Indian body politic, many of Gandhi’s critics—including those
who attacked his most cherished and broadly appreciated contribution,
non-violent conflict resolution—were marginalized. This censure of
violent narratives of nationalism has further contributed to a relative
neglect of revolutionary history. Manmathnath Gupta went so far as to
label this as a ‘conspiracy’, which he attributed to the ‘hired historians’
of the independent nation state who, he alleged, sought to downplay
the revolutionary contribution to the struggle for independence.133
The dominance of the Congress Party in post-independent India has
undoubtedly informed a party-centric teleology in history-writing.
When the independent nation state set about crafting the history
128
Manmathnath Gupta, NMML OHT, p. 68; See also Manmathnath Gupta, They
Lived Dangerously: Reminiscences of a Revolutionary (Delhi: People’s Publishing House,
1969), Chapter 9.
129
Nair, ‘Bhagat Singh as “Satyagrahi”’, p. 22.
130
See Sukhdev’s letter and Gandhi’s response, in Young India, 23 April 1931,
pp. 82–84; CWMG, vol. XLVI, pp. 397–399.
131
Geetanjali Pandey, Between Two Worlds: an Intellectual Biography of Premchand, New
Delhi: Manohar, 1989, p. 53.
132
See note from a Congress meeting at Kalka, Ambala District on 6 July, 1931,
in NAI, Home Political, 33/9/1931.
133
Manmathnath Gupta, NMML OHT, p. 54. See also the introduction of his book,
They Lived Dangerously.
of the freedom struggle, it was the Gandhian narrative that took
centre stage; this is perhaps best exemplified in the mammoth state-
sponsored project The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.134
By comparison, Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook—admittedly a very
different form of prose—was not published until 1994.135 In the years
after Bhagat Singh’s trial and death, Jai Dev Gupta revealed that his
family faced harassment and intimidation from unnamed elements,
who knew that the colonial police force would not intervene.136 Such
an atmosphere encouraged the family to keep a low profile and to
suppress any memorabilia, for fear of it being confiscated. As many as
four manuscripts written by Bhagat Singh in jail have been lost, after
they were smuggled out of jail and placed in the custody of the Bhagat
Singh Defence Committee.137 According to Shiv Verma, the custodian
of the works was fearful that the Criminal Intelligence Department
would discover the manuscripts during raids on nationalist activists
during the Quit India movement, so he destroyed them.138
While this situation of censure began to be reversed in the
decades after independence, most notably in the state of Punjab, it
remained a source of bitterness to families of revolutionaries that
they were excluded from the state benefits that ‘Freedom Fighters’
were entitled to.139 A change in the attitudes towards revolutionaries
was discernible by the 1960s.140 A number of statues were erected
remembering Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev, such as the
Shaheed Smarak in Husainiwala; and the Punjab government issued a
series of commemoration volumes.141 Bhagat Singh’s mother, Srimati
134
Vinay Lal, The History of History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 88.
135
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ‘Inaugural Address’, in Grewal (ed.), Bhagat Singh
and his Legend, p. 14. Bhupindra Hooja (ed.), A Martyr’s Notebook, Jaipur, Indian Book
Chronicle, 1994.
136
These disputes appear to have been over land. Jai Dev Gupta, OHT, pp. 39–40.
137
Verma, Bhagat Singh: on the Path to Liberation, ‘Preface’, pp. 15–16.
138
Ibid., p. 16. The scholar Chaman Lal suggests that the custodian may have been
Bijoy Kumar Sinha. See Lal, ‘Political Correspondence of Bhagat Singh’, Mainstream,
Vol. XLVI, No. 14, 22 March, 2008.
139
M. D. Thapar, Sukhdev’s brother, wrote to Kuldip Nayar that ‘other political
sufferers like Dr Kichloo’s son, got a monthly packet of Rs. 5,000 and a flat free of
cost. Against Dr Kichloo’s son, compare our clan’s sacrifice’. Kuldip Nayar, Without
Fear: The Life and Trial of Bhagat Singh (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2007), p. xiii.
140
See, for example, entries on Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
members in P. N. Chopra (chief ed.), Who’s Who of Indian Martyrs (New Delhi:
Government of India, 1969).
141
Amar Shahid Bhagat Singh, Chandigarh: Suchna, Prachar and Paryatan Vibhag,
Punjab, 1968; Fiftieth Anniversary of Martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev
(Chandigarh: Punjab Government Publication, 1981).
1568 KAMA MACLEAN
Vidyavati, was publicly honoured as ‘Mother of the Punjab’ in the

1970s, and after her passing she was given a state funeral. It was
also in the 1970s that the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library’s
Oral History Project began to document the recollections of surviving
revolutionaries amongst its interviews with freedom fighters, many of
whose testimonies have been drawn upon here.
The dramatic story of Bhagat Singh’s life and untimely death,
redolent with stirring anti-imperial themes—what Avinash Kumar has
aptly called ‘thriller nationalism’142 —made it eminently translatable
to celluloid. Several films have been made on his life since
independence, and many television dramas. Whilst the ‘Bhagat
Singh in Bollywood’ phenomenon deserves an article of its own,143
it is important to note here that the frequent remakes of Bhagat
Singh’s story have strongly influenced public conceptions of historical
narrative, even as they have been challenged for their facticity. The
first film, Shaheed-e-Azam (directed by Jagdish Gautam), was released
in 1954 and even in production was the subject of considerable debate
about its representation of history. The Central Board of Film Censors
was lobbied by the board of editors of a Bhagat Singh Commemoration
Volume and the Punjab Congress Committee, including one of Bhagat
Singh’s brothers, who made submissions about what the film should,
and should not, depict. They were successful in appealing to have two
cuts made from the film, but were still unhappy with the result.144
A second film was made in 1963, starring Shammi Kapoor; and in
1965 came the third and perhaps the most enduring version, Shaheed,
starring Manoj Kumar; arguably Shaheed established Kumar’s persona
as the quintessential patriotic hero. The film’s opening scenes carried
a disclaimer warning viewers that
every care has been taken in this film to present the heroic struggle
and personality of the famous revolutionary personality Shaheed Bhagat
Singh.[. . .]But it is possible that the depiction of certain incidents, costumes,
procedures etc. might have involved some inadvertent deviation from
actuality for the purpose of cinematic presentation.
142
Kumar, ‘Nationalism as Bestseller’, p. 178.
143
For a discussion of the recent Bhagat Singh film phenomenon, see Philip
Lutgendorf’s review of ‘The Legend of Bhagat Singh’, http://www.uiowa.edu/
∼incinema/LegendBhagat.html (accessed 15 December 2011).
144
The film’s ‘distortion of facts about Bhagat Singh and other national figures’
was raised by P. Sundarayya (Communist Party of India, Maxist) in the Rajya Sabha.
‘Film on Bhagat Singh’, The Hindu, 11 September 1954 (reproduced in The Hindu, 11
September 2004).
The influence of Kumar’s film has been felt in other visual cultures,
overseeing a revival in Bhagat Singh as a favourite subject in calendar
art from the 1960s. Pinney notes that scenes from Manoj Kumar’s
film were frequently referenced in popular posters of Bhagat Singh
produced by the prolific Meerut-based artist, H. R. Raja.145
In 2002, came no less than three Bhagat Singh movies: 23 March
1931: Shaheed (starring Bobby Deol) and—released on the same day—
The Legend of Bhagat Singh (featuring Ajay Devgan in the titular
role). Deol’s film was released with the byline: ‘Some stories are
not written—they write themselves’.146 Within weeks, Shaheed-e-Azam
(with Sonu Sood as Bhagat Singh) hit the cinemas.147 The release
of the three films prompted Professor Jagmohan Singh, Bhagat
Singh’s nephew and General Secretary of the Bhagat Singh Research
Committee, to issue a press release protesting that the films were
‘distorting Bhagat Singh’s legacy’.148 None of the 2002 films could
be called box office hits, although in 2006, Rang de Basanti (directed
by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra), which featured Bhagat Singh and his
revolutionary colleagues in a subplot which slowly comes to inform and
highlight the film’s main narrative, enjoyed considerable success and
was India’s official (but unsuccessful) entry in the Academy Awards
that year in the Best Foreign Film category.
In recent years, enduring and popular cultural commodities such
as posters, comics, and bazaar histories featuring Bhagat Singh have
been matched by innumerable virtual tributes, particularly on social
networking sites, wikis and blogs.149 Bhagat Singh’s popularity have
made it tempting for a wide range of groups to claim Bhagat Singh’s
legacy, which given multiple narratives and uncertainties described
145
Pinney, Photos of the Gods, p. 177. Scenes from subsequent Bhagat Singh films
have likewise influenced calendar and bazaar art; indeed the statue installed in the
parliamentary complex in 2007 could be said to resemble a popular film still from 23
March 1931: Shaheed. See the photograph of Bobby Deol in the lead role, in ‘Celluloid
Tribute’, The Hindu, 4 June 2002.
146
23rd March 1931: Shaheed, directed by Guddu Dhanoa, 2002, Captain DVD.
147
Lutgendorf, ‘Legend of Bhagat Singh’.
148
Jagmohan Singh, ‘Distorting Bhagat Singh’s Legacy’, Alpjan, April–June 2002,
pp. 65–66.
149
To give a very brief sense of these: the most widely used social networking site in
India, Orkut, has hundreds of fan sites. Frequently intense debates about historicity
lie concealed under the ‘discussion’ tab on Wikipedia’s ‘Bhagat Singh’ entry, and the
‘history’ tab on the right hand side of the same page reveals that the page is altered
several times a day; 75 wikipedia users are registered as ‘watchers’ of the page, and
are alerted to edits as they are made.
1570 KAMA MACLEAN
above, creates heated contestation.150 Pritam Singh’s tally of such

groups span the political spectrum and include ‘Gandhi-inspired
leftists, Hindu nationalists, Sikh nationalists, the parliamentary Left,
[and] the pro-armed struggle Naxalite Left’.151 As a result a particular
anxiety—represented by the very existence of a Shaheed Bhagat Singh
Research Committee—can be discerned around the need to pare back
the accretions of popular tellings of Bhagat Singh’s story.
Accounting for popular histories
The centenary of Bhagat Singh’s birth in 2007 was celebrated by a

number of unrelated publications and celebrations, including several
Central Government-sponsored initiatives, among which was the
installation of a certain statue. Many of these publications advocated
a return to primary sources: the publication of a multivolume series
of historical documents connected to his trial and execution152 ;
fresh editions of revolutionary memoirs153 ; an exhibition of historical
documents and memorabilia at the Supreme Court Museum in Delhi
and at the Nehru Memorial Museum; the establishment of a Bhagat
Singh Chair at the Jawaharlal Nehru University154 ; and the production
of a documentary backed by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
specifically aimed as a corrective to the narrative posed in popular
Hindi films.155 This project, Inquilab, was aimed at senior school
students, featuring interviews with academic historians, and drew
150
Ramchandra Guha, ‘The Challenge of Contemporary History’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 28 June 2008, p. 198.
151
Pritam Singh, ‘Bhagat Singh Review Article’, Journal of Punjab Studies, 14, 2,
p. 298 (viewed online, 11 November 2009, no longer available).
152
The Hanging of Bhagat Singh, a ten-volume project still in progress, under the
general editorship of Malwinderjit Singh Waraich.
153
For example: K. C. Yadav and Babar Singh (eds), Bhagat Singh, ideas on freedom,
liberty and revolution: jail notes of a revolutionary (Gurgaon: Hope India Publications,
2007); Shiv Verma (ed.), Bhagat Singh: on the Path to Liberation (Chennai: Bharathi
Puthakalaya, 2007); and Chaman Lal (ed.), The Jail Notebook and Other Writings (Delhi:
LeftWord Press, 2007). All three anthologies include the prison notebooks, with the
first offering a facsimile of each diary page, so that the reader is able to see Bhagat
Singh’s own handwriting, where necessary translated into English; the latter two have
additional writings and useful introductions.
154
See Rajya Sabha Debates, 3 May 2007, p. 331; ‘JNU to set up Bhagat Singh chair’,
Hindustan Times, 16 September 2007, p. 6.
155
Inquilab, directed by Gauhar Raza, 2007. ‘New film tells “real” Bhagat Singh
story’, Hindustan Times, 14 July 2008, p. 3.
on press clippings to illustrate the narrative, unlike a Doordarshan
production released in the same year—also called Inquilab—which
featured montages from several of the above mentioned Bollywood
films to provide the necessary visuals. 156
Above I have accounted for the main reasons why Bhagat Singh’s
history has been predominantly celebrated in the domain of the
popular, locating the related issues of censor and censure as being
key inhibitors to the establishment of a clear chronicle of his life.
As Chandravati Devi reflected in 1931, ‘in these days is it easy to
write the life of Bhagat Singh? Can the Sardar’s true life be written
in this slave country or if written can it be printed and if printed
can it ever be published?’.157 These issues are further beset by the
multiple and competing narratives which were born in the charged
atmosphere of Bhagat Singh’s execution, and the clamour to save him
from his fate. These factors, along with a not unreasonable suspicion of
colonial justice systems and of the clandestine operations of imperial
investigators, have left a legacy of accounts which variously challenge
the colonial narrative, including the very accusations that led him to
the gallows.
The difficulties in working around the constraints of censor and
censure were effectively counteracted by the fact that Bhagat Singh’s
story was a compelling one, combining elements of extraordinary
bravery and patriotism with the tragedy of his young death. As a result,
his story remains the basis of much contemporary popular culture,
such as bazaar literature, invariably published unreferenced and
predominantly in vernacular languages, in which new twists and turns
of narrative have been added to the palimpsest that has become his
biography. Add to this the phenomenon of the Bhagat Singh ‘historical’
film—one of which self-consciously celebrates ‘the legend’ of Bhagat
Singh—and the estrangement of popular and academic accounts of a
revolutionary life is understandable, and perhaps irrevocable.
156
‘Documentary on DD today’, Hindustan Times, 27 September 2007, p. 17.
157
Chandravati Devi, ‘Sardar Bhagat Singh’, quoted in NAI, Home Political, 4/36
Part 1, 1931, p. 28.
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Modern Asian Studies 46, 6 (2012) pp. 1540–1571.

The History of a Legend: Accounting

School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales,

On Indian Independence Day in 2008 a colossal bronze statue of

revolved around whether the brass statue’s turban—tied in the

of statues, a well established mode of political discourse in India,15

relegated to forms of chronicling the past which have, until relatively

Chief of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association’, the signatory

revolutionaries from various parts of India to take advantage of the

A related element in the repression of information on the activities of

Marxist ideology was more than seditious; its transnational

declassified relatively recently.63 The bulk of the existing documents

Aggrieved histories: eulogy literature

Although British attempts to manage seditious literature was

appeals.71 The relatives of the three were called for an interview

And yet the trio were hanged on 23 March 1931.

‘Tomorrow’.85 This would alert them to rally troops to standby in case

devastation. The newspapers were filled with reports of condolence

Arguably the most powerful censure of Bhagat Singh’s politics and

throughout the 1920s and beyond. Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence

interpreted by David Petrie, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, as ‘abnormal’.

distinct revolutionary programme. A former Hindustan Socialist

Vidyavati, was publicly honoured as ‘Mother of the Punjab’ in the

above, creates heated contestation.150 Pritam Singh’s tally of such

Accounting for popular histories

The centenary of Bhagat Singh’s birth in 2007 was celebrated by a

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