'The Immortal': Art Brings out Bhagat Singh's Spirit and Thoughts Beyond Stereotypes -- Replug

Chaman Lal | 28 Sep 2023

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Bhagat Singh has been turned into a stereotype in many art pieces. But a new painting sheds a rare light on the famous revolutionary.

Original painting by artist Amar Singh in 1975 assigned by Punjab Govt

‘The Immortal’ is a multi-layered painting of Bhagat Singh by Kanwal Dhaliwal, an Indian-origin artist from London, United Kingdom. He is associated with Progressive Writers Association (PWA) London branch, which comprises members from Indian and Pakistani origins.

Dhaliwal has created something unprecedented with ‘The Immortal’. Hundreds of artists have imagined Bhagat Singh in their own ways over the decades. But many a time, that imagination is a very crude representation of Bhagat Singh, one of the most famous heroes of the Indian freedom struggle. 

Bhagat Singh has been turned into a stereotype in many art pieces. The iconography of Bhagat Singh started very early when he was alive and in jail. At that time, only one actual photograph of the rising hero was in the public domain and imagination. That was his April 1929 photograph clicked by Ramnath, a photographer from Kashmiri Gate, Delhi. Both Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt had specially gone to the photographer's shop on April 3, 1929, to get this photograph to be used for publicity purposes after throwing bombs in the Central Assembly in Delhi. In fact, Bhagat Singh and Dutt had not seen the photograph till it got printed in Bande Matram, an Urdu daily published in Lahore, on April 12, and then in Hindustan Times, Delhi, on April 18, 1929.

15. Bhagat Singh painting by Sobha Singh.jpg

The photograph and its negatives were collected from the photography studio by Singh's comrades and supplied to the media. During Singh and his comrades' hunger strikes, artists started creating images of the heroes. However, after their execution on March 23 1931, there was an explosion of artistic creations. 

These paintings had imagined Bhagat Singh offering his head to Bharat Mata, or three martyrs -- Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev flying to the heavens and many more such imaginations. Most of these paintings were printed as posters from Kanpur and Lahore and proscribed immediately. Yet, many journals carried these, and many homes had these as calendrers or wall posters. Even matchboxes carried these painting-cum-photos. Most of these were in black and white. The trend of colour printings and posters/calendars started after the Independence. By that time, the crudity had taken over aesthetics! The twitching moustache, gun holding Bhagat Singh looking like a terrorist as the British called him, became the norm for even statue making in many places. This was also because most of these artists did not read Bhagat Singh's writings and ideas about life and society. 

Some more known photographs of these paintings are attached here to understand how Bhagat Singh has been imagined not just by Indian, but even by international artists. One is by Amar Singh, whose painting is being used by the Punjab Chief Minister in his office. This painting was commissioned by then Punjab Chief Minister Giani Zail Singh. Another painting is by Australian painter Daniel Connell, which has been identified by London-based Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan and used by the Indian Express in its stories without mentioning the artist name. Two more contrasting paintings by unknown painters are put up here. In one painting, Bhagat Singh is shown with a gun, and in the other, with a book. So, creative art perceives the reality through artist’s own prism; for a realist artist, as per Maxim Gorky’s views about art, it is close to the reality a little enhancement through art. However, in an artist’s imagining in the tradition of “art for just art’s sake”, it could take any shape, and especially in visual arts like painting, it could create altogether a different picture of a man who has been painted.

The Immortal-Singh.

The situation changed a bit after Bhagat Singh's writings and ideas started trickling in some poems, plays, and fiction, and also in ideological/academic debates. Few artists took a clue from this ideology-based image of Bhagat Singh and reverted to making paintings based on his original face. 

The actual photographs of Bhagat Singh are only four in number -- one was taken around when he was aged 11, another at about the age of 17, next at the age of 20, and the final photograph at the age of about 22 years. The first two photographs are white turbaned photographs, third one is in police custody with open long hair and beard, without his turban. The last one is the most iconic hat-wearing photograph, which Ramnath had clicked. Bhagat Singh never wore a yellow or saffron colour turban as the hundreds of distorted paintings would like us to believe. Photographer Ramnath had appeared in the Delhi Assembly bomb case as a prosecution witness to confirm that he had clicked Bhagat Singh and Dutt's photographs.

In all his real photographs, the face of Bhagat Singh is very soft and impressive, perhaps conveying some firmness as well. But by no stretch of imagination can that face be presented as the face of a gun-toting terrorist. Some painters tried to reimagine him like a book holding, white turbaned young man who was an intellectual or an activist! 

However, Kanwal Dhaliwal has imagined him at multiple levels. His focus is more on what was in Sing's head, his thinking or ideas, and how his thoughts are still impacting society! He also dwells on the kind of analytical thinking and reasoning Singh's sharp and receptive mind had. All these aspects of Bhagat Singh and his relations to his people come forth brilliantly through his creatively imagined painting. Singh's face is that of the college-going 17-year-old young lad with a white turban on his head -- that is one layer. But watching minutely, the red coloured hat with the tools of farmer and worker's is superimposed over the turbaned head. It gives a glimpse of the revolutionary's ideological development. He began acquiring nationalist ideas from his days in the National College in Lahore as a young man. However, by the time he went for a click to Kashmiri Gate wearing a hat, albeit for safety purposes of not getting recognised by the revolutionaries hunting British police, he had changed. But the change inside his mind was also revolutionary, which is why the imagined hat is a red one with the hammer and the sickle on that hat, which means that he had turned into a committed socialist revolutionary by the time he got that photograph taken.

Only four real photograhs of Bhagat Singh at 11, 17, 20 and 21 years-The hat one being last

The session court statement of Singh and Dutt had been published by all the major newspapers of India and some even abroad, in full. That statement was a call for a revolution by workers and peasants. Now, what is around his photograph are student activists, farmers activists from Maharashtra, Tamilnadu to Punjab. His ideas' reach is international, as Pakistani women are also there holding his photograph, demanding Shadman Chowk to be named as Bhagat Singh Chowk. Contours of the red hat meet Karl Marx's book Das Capital, which Bhagat Singh used to give to his comrades to study, and on the other side, Krupskaya reminiscences of Lenin are displayed, perhaps it was the book Bhagat Singh was reading just before leaving for gallows! Thus, it is one of the rare paintings to reveal the spirit of the iconic hero!

(Chaman Lal is a Retired Professor from JNU and Honorary Advisor of the Bhagat Singh Archives and Resource Centre, Delhi.)

The Relevance of Bhagat Singh and his Martyrdom Today

Ram Puniyani | 23 Mar 2023

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Many use Bhagat Singh's name to get legitimacy for themselves without following his ideological understanding. What would he have thought about that?

Over nine decades ago, one of the greatest revolutionaries committed to the anti-colonial struggle against the British and to socialism was hanged by the colonisers. Bhagat Singh's life is an inspiration to those committed to a society with peace and justice. 

A lot has already been written about how a young man of 23 years dedicated himself to the cause of the country, and at such a young age, wrote very profound ideological tracts. Many controversies are being built around him by those totally opposed to his life’s mission and ideology. There are still many others who use his name to get legitimacy for themselves without following his ideological understanding.

Briefly, Singh joined the Hindustan Republican Association, and struggled to insert 'Socialism' into the name of the organisation. His role in the murder of John Saunders, an Assistant Superintendent of Police, was planned as their group felt that the death of Lala Lajpat Rai during the protest against the Simon Commission was an insult to the nation. So, they planned to take revenge for this. 

The second major incident was the throwing of the bomb into the Assembly. It was not meant to kill anyone but was strategically planned to make the ‘deaf hear’. As their voice was not reaching the masses, the idea was to make detailed statements in the court, which would be picked up by the media and reach people at large!

The impression that he was for violent means to overthrow British rule has no truth. During the course of the evolution of his ideas, he did come to the conclusion that non-violent mass movement is the core for changing the system and overthrowing British rule. This was first reflected in the advice of Ram Prasad Bismil, who advocated for giving up the “desire to keep revolvers and pistols” and instead join “the open movement”. 

Bhagat Singh, by 1929, came to the conclusion that Marxism and broad-based mass movements were the right road to revolution, not individual heroic action. In 1931, addressing his comrades from jail, he presented his nuanced understanding of this strategy for action. 

This is also confirmed by the advice Bhagat Singh gave to his father. His father, Kishan Singh, had pleaded that he should apologise to the British as he had a long life ahead. Reprimanding his father, he said that he was a revolutionary and rather than apologising, he would plead for getting killed by a firing squad. 

Notably, the contrast between Bhagat Singh and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar cannot be starker. Savarkar, after an initial anti-British stance, wrote several mercy petitions and then went on to assist the British in their efforts while getting a hefty pension of Rs 60 per month (then gold was roughly around Rs 10 for 10 grams). Revolutionaries like Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Sing and others were inspired by socialism, while Savarkar was inspired by Italy’s Mazzini, who became the patron saint of Fascist ideology.

There was criticism of the book ‘India’s Struggle for Independence’ (Bipan Chandra et al, Penguin) for using the phrase "revolutionary terrorism" even though Singh's group's documents referred to their path as that of revolutionary terrorism. This path was definitely abandoned by them over a period of time. The likes of Anurag Thakur and Smriti Irani criticised the book based on this. The word terrorism had a different connotation prior to 9/11 in 2001. The primary goal of the rightwing worthies in criticising the book was to undermine this book as it highlights the role of the Muslim League, Hindu Mahasabha and RSS in promoting communal politics in India and keeping away from the freedom movement. 

By word of mouth, a rumour has been made the part of ‘social common sense’, that Gandhi did not save Bhagat Singh’s life. This is far from the truth. Gandhi had written two letters to Lord Irwin to postpone or dilute the death penalty. Gandhi drafted the resolution criticising the British for hanging a nationalist in Karachi Congress in 1931. At the occasion, Bhagat Singh’s father Kishan Singh also spoke, saying, “Bhagat Singh told me not to worry. Let me be hanged… He warned me against going to the Privy Council because he said slaves had no right to complain…You must support your general (Gandhi). You must support all Congress leaders. Only then will you be able to win independence for the country.”

Gandhi wrote in Navjivan, “I had interested myself in the movement for the commutation of the death sentence of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. I have put my whole being into the task.” The other fake news relates to Congress leaders not having met Bhagat Singh and his comrades when they were in jail. This is a blatant lie.

There are reports in the Tribune about Jawaharlal Nehru visiting the jail to meet Bhagat Sing and his comrades. The reports in Tribune on August 9 and 10 of 1929 tell us about Nehru’s meeting the jailed revolutionaries and inquiring about them. Motilal Nehru had even formed a committee to demand humane treatment for the revolutionaries on fast unto death. 

In his autobiography, ‘Towards Freedom’, Nehru gives a touching account of his meeting Bhagat Singh, Jatin Das and other young men: “I happened to be in Lahore when the hunger strike was already a month old. I was given permission to visit some of the prisoners in the prison, and I availed myself of this.”

How atheist would Bhagat Singh have seen today’s scenario? The very ideas of workers’ and farmer’s rights have been given a go-bye. He criticised the misuse of religion as some people exploited it to promote blind faith, and now a plethora of corrupt godmen like Asaram Bapu and Gurmeet Ram Rahman have mushroomed. Faith-based knowledge is also being promoted by the ruling government. How would Bhagat Singh have responded to some political tendencies which eulogise him and also spend fortunes building temples and promoting sectarianism in the garb of religion? It is something to think about.

https://www.newsclick.in/

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for Bhagat Singh 

 

India’s Revolutionary Spiritual Urge: Bhagat Singh and the Naxalites

by Bernard D’Mello

(Dec 01, 2021)

Topics: History  Movements  Revolutions Places: Asia  India

 MONTHLY REVIEW

Kartar Singh Sarabha and Bhagat Singh. Image credit: Saurav Kumar, "Remembering The Heroic Sacrifice Of Bhagat Singh’s Mentor–Kartar Singh Sarabha," YKA, November 26, 2017.

Bernard D’Mello is the author of India After Naxalbari (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.

This article is a consideration of three books. Two of these are on Bhagat Singh: Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Chaman Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader (Noida, India: HarperCollins, 2019); the other is related to the Naxalite movement: Kobad Ghandy, Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2021).

Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), the subject of Chris Moffat’s India’s Revolutionary Inheritance and Chaman Lal’s (edited and introduced) The Bhagat Singh Reader, is an iconic figure of the radical left tradition in India. In a trial by a special tribunal that chose to violate basic principles of law and criminal procedure for colonial-political ends, he was convicted of murdering an assistant superintendent of police in 1928. Singh, along with his comrades Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru, was executed in Lahore (now in Pakistan) on March 23, 1931, when he was just 23 years old, in the prime of his life.

Having come from the revolutionary strand of India’s struggle for independence, the elite nationalist leadership, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, remained ambivalent about Singh, and nationalist historiography has marginalized his political contributions. His substitution of the slogan “Vande Mataram!” (Salutations to Mother India!) with the rallying cries “Inquilab Zindabad!” (Long Live the Revolution!) and “Samrajyawad Ka Nash Ho!” (Death to Imperialism!) was alien to the political sense of India’s elite nationalist leaders. They were apprehensive of Singh’s brand of revolutionary politics appealing to the masses and displacing their own variety of a reformist nationalist mass movement. Indeed, “a confidential Intelligence Bureau account, Terrorism in India (1917–1936) went so far as to declare that ‘for a time, he [Bhagat Singh] bade fair to oust Mr. Gandhi as the foremost political figure of the day.’”1

Singh’s thoughts and deeds were significantly influenced by the memory of an anticolonial (would-have-been) uprising in India, planned by the Hindustan Ghadar (translated as mutiny, revolt, rebellion) Party, which was founded in 1913 in California by immigrant Punjabis, predominantly Sikhs. The Ghadar cause gained broad support internationally in Indian diasporic circles through its widely circulated weekly, Ghadar. Some of its members and followers returned to India, joining hands with homegrown “revolutionary terrorists” (not to be confused with the present-day meaning of terror or terrorists). They intended to bring about a mutiny in the British Indian army and wage an armed struggle against British colonialism in India.

The Ghadar Party’s main political influences came from European and Russian anarchist political thought, such as the anarcho-communist ideas of Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). They were also influenced by the Fenians, committed to the emancipation of Ireland, and, of course, the Punjabi Sikh vernacular revolutionary tradition. The anarchist doctrine of “propaganda of the deed,” launched at the Berne Congress of the “anti-authoritarian” International Workingmen’s Association in October 1876, an adventurist tactic meant to awaken the workers of Western Europe from their apathy, found favor with the Ghadarites.2 They felt that it had the merit of drawing colonial social injustice to public attention.

The sway of anarcho-communist political theory and practice led the Ghadar Party to want to liberate the country from colonialism through a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge. Revolutions, they seemed to believe, are produced by the force of events. Britain’s entry into war with Germany on August 4, 1914, was viewed as the perfect time to start a revolution in India, with tactical advice, money, and arms from Germany, Britain’s archenemy. Thousands of expatriate Indians in decentralized militant networks—influenced by one or a combination of the Ghadar Party’s strands of revolutionary nationalism, social anarchism, Marxism, and Pan-Islamism, and able to link the discrimination they suffered as low-wage immigrants to the colonization of their home country—left for India by November 1914.

But with the colonial state’s intelligence network’s early inroads, the plans for revolution were known in advance and all infiltrated regiments were disarmed or disbanded before the planned start of the revolt on February 21, 1915. The rebellion was brutally nipped in the bud. Many of the leaders and cadre were taken into custody and stood trial under the Defence of India Act of 1915 (and the rules thereof), a war-related instrument of political repression, in special tribunals. This was mainly in what came to be known as the First Lahore Conspiracy Case, against members of the Ghadar Party, a merciless lawsuit by the colonial state, in which the “conspirators” were tried in special tribunals, resulting in many executions and droves of life sentences.

Singh’s hero was the Ghadar martyr Kartar Singh Sarabha (1896–1915), who was reportedly an engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley, actively involved in the Ghadar Party since its inception. Temperamentally audacious, courageous in the face of extreme adversity, and totally dedicated to the Ghadar cause, Sarabha returned to India in 1914 to bring about the revolution but was captured in February 1915 and executed at the age of 19 for his role in planning and coordinating the would-have-been uprising. Historically, the Ghadarites need to be placed within the revolutionary socialist tradition as a whole, rather than merely that of revolutionary anticolonialism.3

Singh was a founding member and general secretary of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS), the open front of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA, founded in 1923). It was he who proposed, and his comrades concurred, HRA’s change of name to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) in September 1928. The HSRA, as stated in its manifesto, intended to “liberate…[India] from foreign domination by means of organized armed rebellion.” The NBS, as HSRA’s open mass front, was to propagate HSRA’s politics “to make the people really understand what the Indian revolution [a revolution by the masses and for the masses] would really mean.” The dream was of transforming the country into an independent socialist republic after the expropriation of both foreign and Indian capital.4

At his trial in the Assembly Bomb Case on June 6, 1929, Singh and B. K. Dutt clarified that revolution was “not the cult of the bomb and pistol” but “the ultimate establishment of an order of society…in which the sovereignty of the proletariat should be recognized, and a world federation should redeem humanity from the bondage of capitalism and misery of imperial wars.… The establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat [is required] to pave the way for the consummation of the ideal of revolution.” In jail, awaiting execution for the murder of assistant commissioner of police J. P. Saunders, Singh embarked on a study of Marxism and penned a moving essay entitled “Why I Am an Atheist,” defending his rejection of religion. The influence of Mikhail Bakunin is made clear in this article, as well as in a three-part essay Singh wrote on “What Is Anarchism?” for the Ghadar communist magazine Kirti in 1928.5

In one of his most important writings, a communication to young political workers on February 2, 1931, at a time when the Congress Party was contemplating a compromise with the British government, Singh proved prophetic: “What difference does it make to them [workers and peasants] whether Lord Reading is the head of the Indian government or Sir Purshottamdas Thakordas? What difference for a peasant if Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru replaces Lord Irwin!”6 It only became clear much later, in the post-independence period, that the Indian National Congress, supported by Indian big business, in its leadership of the national movement for independence, had successfully disguised what was a class project as the national project.

But the revolutionary traditions of the Ghadarites, Singh, the HSRA, and the NBS have not been left behind. They are still present today in India’s radical left, the Naxalites (Indian Marxist-Leninists/Maoists). Neither is repression a thing of the past. One important radical left intellectual “serving the oppressed” and seriously ailing senior citizen, Kobad Ghandy, was kept in jail for ten years (September 2009–October 2019) in spite of being acquitted of grave charges under the anti-terrorist 2008 amendment to the 1967 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and criminal conspiracy sections. He was only found guilty of impersonation charges. New cases were added just in time to maximize the length of his incarceration without sentence.7

Some of us in the civil liberties and democratic rights movement began to fear that Ghandy could be a victim of “judicial death,” but his legal team and some fair and sensitive judges saved his life. Unlike the idealist core of the HSRA accused, who considered themselves “not accountable to a tyrant’s justice” and thus not concerned with pleading to their cases in a manner that could have foiled the prosecution on its own terms, Ghandy’s defense councils did exactly what the norms of bourgeois law permitted, and he eventually got bail.8 This, despite constant big media portrayal of him as one of the top leaders of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), which, if proved in court, would have led to life imprisonment under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Bail enabled Ghandy to complete Fractured Freedom, which he called a “prison memoir.” But Fractured Freedom is really much more than that. It covers his years of radical left activism from the early 1970s onward, with its roots in the late 1960s, when he radicalized in response to the racism he encountered in England while training to be a chartered accountant. This is followed by an account of his “four decades of grassroots activism” in India and a decade in (mostly the high security wards of) seven Indian jails in five states as an undertrial, accompanied by “the torturous procedures of the courts.”9

Observed malpractices by Naxalite prisoners in Jharkhand’s jails, and authentic information from two Naxalite prisoners about the dismal reality of the Naxalite movement in parts of the states of Odisha and Jharkhand, deeply troubled Ghandy. Regarding his own plight, ten years of incarceration for four decades of serving the people: “Such is the fate of all those sincerely working for the oppressed of the country.” While imprisoned, he “drew courage from people like [the] Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Che [Guevara], Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose.” He rounds all of this off with ethical and philosophical reflections (in Section III of the book) on his and the radical left’s past in India, and the failures of the socialist project in post-revolutionary Russia and China.10

The subject matter of the three books, taken together, then becomes Bhagat Singh in colonial India and Naxalites in “independent” India. If Singh, killed in the resistance to British colonialism, were to return from the dead, would he feel that the India of today, brought about by its ruling classes and their political representatives, was really worth his and his comrades’ martyrdom? I have no doubt that he would discover betrayal—an India turned neofascist (“semi-fascist,” retaining the legal framework of “free competition” for votes and public office) and a junior partner of U.S. imperialism; an India of monstrous inequalities, with most of its population still inadequately fed, miserably clothed, wretchedly housed, poorly educated, and without access to decent medical care; an India of a deeply oppressive and exploitative social order crying out for revolutionary change.11

But, in India’s Revolutionary Inheritance, Moffat, adhering to the theoretical framework of postcolonialism, which draws on poststructuralism to deal with colonial questions, is not interested in presenting “the ‘real’ Bhagat Singh nor in judging the validity of existing claims over others.” India’s Revolutionary Inheritance “aims instead to open Bhagat Singh out into his afterlives, providing a language with which to comprehend his widespread popular appeal and continuing potential as interlocutor and instigator in modern Indian politics.” In Part II of the book, Moffat explores how Singh is differently conceived in independent India by various sections of the Indian left, by Hindutva nationalists, by Sikh militants for an independent nation of Khalistan, and so on—all claiming a responsibility to Bhagat Singh and his “revolutionary inheritance.”12

Moffat is not interested in the validity of the different claims to truth being made or in assessing the authenticity of the documents invoked by the various claimants to Singh’s inheritance. He seems to opine that Singh’s writings, given their “fragmented, ‘unfinished’ nature” and with “the often-contradictory propositions of a young man finding his way in politics,” are inherently open to abuse and misappropriation, and that purposeful citation to prove one’s own assessment is futile. The poststructuralist in Moffat seems to be suspicious of Enlightenment norms of notions of truth, reason, and objectivity. India’s Revolutionary Inheritance draws from poststructuralist thought (mainly the abstruse theorist Jacques Derrida) to deal with Singh’s promise and the politics of his revolutionary inheritance. In the historical part of the book, in Section I, however, Moffat largely keeps aside Derrida’s “practice” of “deconstructing” history.13

However, in his introduction to The Bhagat Singh Reader, Lal seeks an understanding of Singh not only through his political actions, but through his writings, and it is wonderful that, though he views Singh as embracing Marxism-Leninism, readers are left to form their own opinion about Singh through these writings. In a way, the putting together of all of Singh’s available documents and writings in the form of The Bhagat Singh Reader in English is the culmination of work that began in the late 1960s and early ’70s by the revolutionary’s nephew, Jagmohan Singh, and HSRA veteran Shiv Verma, joined later by persons like M. J. S. Waraich, Bhupender Hooja, and Lal. One shortcoming on the part of the publisher is the lack of a complete table of contents and an index.

Let me then come to Singh’s complete available writings in English in The Bhagat Singh Reader and my first impressions of this oeuvre. For reasons of length, I choose to focus on the evolution of his political thought. These are the writings of an angry man, but not the outpourings of a spontaneous, uncontrolled anger. The fire in Singh’s writings comes from his grasping of the truths about colonialism. The anger is controlled—he was searching and struggling to get to the roots of the colonial situation and what needed to be done to transcend it.

The “us” for him was the anticolonial revolutionary nationalist and all those who supported the anticolonial struggle. The “them,” overlapping with the “us,” were those whom he was trying to reach out to through his writings, and these writings show that he firmly believed they could be reached by appealing to reason, logic, and emotion. In his writings, the appeal of the Ghadar martyr to attract and retain youth in the revolutionary movement is evident. Singh held that the anarchist tactic of propaganda of the deed, accompanied by written or publicly spoken explanation, would free the millions of victims of colonialism from inaction or despair, make them fearless, and restore their sense of dignity and self-respect.

With the nomenclatural change of the HRA into the HSRA, Singh takes on the more difficult task of explanation in his writings, justifying why the revolutionary nationalist movement of which he was a part should develop into a socialist, humanist, social revolutionary movement, or else risked going awry, down a blind alley. To Singh, this was a difficult struggle, which required organization for the long haul. Indeed, how prescient? In India, over the last decade, the Congress Party’s nationalism has been upstaged by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva nationalism, an Indian variant of Nazism, seriously undermining India’s future.

There is much controversy over whether Singh was a social anarchist or a Marxist. I sense the need to clarify aspects of the social anarchist and Marxist traditions. The idea that socialism as the embodiment of liberty, equality, cooperation, and solidarity would be a sham, if the system were to be controlled by an autocratic elite in command of a vanguard party, a technocracy, and a state bureaucracy, was common to Karl Marx and Bakunin (after 1864). In the Marxian conception of revolution, the revolutionary period came to be divided into three sub-periods: (1) capitalism in the process of being overthrown, (2) the transitional period to a classless society, during which there would be the need for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and (3) the initial period of socialism. There was an awareness that even after the first sub-period, the counterrevolution, invariably backed by imperialism, would have to be combated and vanquished, or there would be a likelihood of failure, defeat, or betrayal.

However, in practice, in every case, after the first sub-period of the revolution, tightly organized revolutionary parties under non-proletarian elite leaderships came to power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and the landowners, and more or less centralized all the instruments of production in the hands of the state. That state was, however, not that of the proletariat (and the semi-proletarian poor peasantry) organized as the ruling class. The societies in the second sub-period of the revolution, therefore, could not be properly called, in the original Marxist meaning, societies in transition to socialism. Needless to say, the state was never in a process of withering away. Indeed, it was quite the contrary, with an autocratic elite—in command of the vanguard party, the technocracy, and the state bureaucracy—metamorphosing into a ruling class and, with the passage of time, in a great leap backward, even restoring capitalism.

I will try to restrict my inclination to make guesses about the manner in which Singh’s political thought would likely have evolved had he lived longer. As mentioned, he wrote a very favorable three-part article on “What Is Anarchism?” in Kirti magazine in 1928. And, when he was on death row, he was engaged in a serious study of some available texts of Marx, Frederick Engels, and V. I. Lenin. What is clear from his writings is that he considered the thoughts of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman, as well as Marx, Engels, and Lenin to be very valuable. Perhaps if he had more time, he would have begun to concretize a synthesis of Marxism and social anarchism.

It is likely that Singh would have known of or read Kropotkin’s 1890 pieces admitting to “the sterility” of the anarchist doctrine of propaganda of the deed and affirming that “‘one must be with the people, who no longer want isolated acts, but want men of action inside their ranks.’”14 I say this because a few more pages from Singh’s “To Young Political Workers” were later found containing, among other things, a critique of revolutionary terrorism, including the tactic of propaganda of the deed, although this phrase is not used therein.15

As is perhaps evident, I am interested not just in Singh as a historical figure, but also as an emerging anarchist and Marxist thinker. His writings suggest that he had developed an aesthetic sensibility and the ability to think and reflect deeply, and that he would certainly have been a lifelong learner. It is unlikely that he would have been at home in a Communist party with the democratic component largely stamped out of the inner-party organizational practice of democratic centralism, and with the rank and file’s deference to the top leadership in all matters concerning the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism.

The 1920s in India had its revolutionary possibilities, from the time Singh came on the political scene in the midst of massive numbers of youth exasperated by and deeply resentful of Gandhi calling off the Non-Cooperation Movement after movement participants set a police station on fire in Chauri Chaura, in retaliation for at least two comrades being killed by police fire. They viewed mere nonviolent resistance as a totally inappropriate tactic against the highly repressive colonial capitalist order.

The political situation was abundant in unforeseen possibilities, and the appearance of unexpected circumstances and opportunities could not be ruled out. The emergence of a revolutionary mass movement was a distinct possibility if a radical left party with a strategic vision of revolutionary action, able to seize an exceptional moment, had come on the scene. To argue that the HSRA conceived of and practiced the Blanquist model of revolution—conspiracy of a revolutionary minority, a coup de main by such a group—is wrong. Singh criticized models of revolution not rooted in real movements from below, calling for “train[ing] and educat[ing]…the masses…in the struggles…[as part of a] programme [that] requires at least twenty years for its fulfilment.”16

Singh and the HSRA were willing to engage in political action that involved high risk and great danger of failure, but also hope of success, to which they had committed their lives. They were inspired by an ethical imperative and a moral exigency to overthrow the unjust and inhuman colonial system, even if the chances of succeeding were not favorable. Their confidence, their courage, their fortitude, even their wit and their guile in the course of struggle, call into question the “superiority” of their vicious and powerful opponent. Of course, one should not idealize them. Indignation at what the Indian people were suffering and unyielding hostility to colonial oppression should not have led the HSRA to target individuals for assassination. Marxism does not advocate hatred of (and vengeance against) individuals—those who have been degraded to instruments that carry out the imperatives of an unjust and oppressive system—but rather of the system itself.

Importantly, questions raised now about the history and remembrance of Singh and the HSRA have come up in “a moment of danger.”17 The historical-materialist intellectual and the socialist revolutionary have to weave the weft of Singh and the HSRA’s struggles against colonialism into the present struggles in India against neofascism. Both neofascism now and colonialism then are and were deeply rooted in capitalism and imperialism, combining scientific and technological progress, especially in the realms of intelligence and militarism, with social and political barbarism, wielding power by a combination of manipulation and violence, backed by a repressive apparatus, coercive legal structure, and colonial value system. This “moment of danger” adds up to a two-fold menace.

First, neofascist politics are bent on rewriting the history of India to serve their own ends, which entails the falsification of history on an unprecedented scale. Second, fascist politicians are bent on turning large sections of the oppressed into tools they can manipulate at will. If the far right gets its way, Singh and the HSRA, on one hand, and the oppressed and those moved by their plight in India today, on the other, will not be safe from the neofascist enemy: servile, conformist historians and the Hindutva nationalist regime, respectively.

Applying Walter Benjamin’s conception of history, which to me is a revolutionary understanding of history, the life and death struggles of the past, such as Singh and the HSRA’s, viewed from the standpoint of the oppressed, can be clarified by the light of the budding antifascist struggles in India today, with the thus intelligible past itself becoming an inspiring force in the present. Left to itself, the Indian variant of Nazism presents grave dangers in the form of new wars against Pakistan and China; anti-Muslim pogroms; Dalits beaten, raped, or killed at the whim of upper-caste privileged persons; crude colonial oppression, with a belittling disdain, in Kashmir; and other thoroughly modern manifestations of barbarism. “Redemption,” inspired by the victims of our past—understood in a secular sense as emancipation of the oppressed by the oppressed and their accomplices, and as a “collective reparation on the terrain of history”—would, if put on track, interrupt the ongoing “historical evolution [that is] leading to catastrophe.”18

However, in view of the specific failure of the Marxist socialist project in the twentieth century, Marxism as heir and fulfiller of the emancipatory dreams and struggles of the past needs moral discourse. This is what Ghandy comes to in Part III of Fractured Freedom. Reflecting on the relevance of four decades of political activity, Ghandy sees his and his beloved wife and comrade Anuradha Ghandy’s (1954–2008, known as Anu or comrade Janaki) “work among Dalits” in their “role in creating a new consciousness,” drawing on both the thought of B. R. Ambedkar and Marx, as having been somewhat sustained. This, he thinks, has “been made possible by working with them and living in their midst.”19 Ghandy also credits Anu’s constant efforts to undermine and upturn deeply entrenched patriarchal relationships, a very difficult and protracted struggle in India against both brutally patriarchal, caste-based feudal culture and capitalist patriarchy.

Brought up by communist parents, Anu did not have the mentality of someone socialized in the institutions, values, and habits of thought inculcated by the culture of capitalism and caste-based semi-feudalism in India. Never seeking any privileges, never resorting to self-promotion, full of love and inspiration, and never suppressing her inherent spontaneity, she was a source of human happiness. Tragically, Anu, who had underlying autoimmunity syndrome and systemic sclerosis, died prematurely at the age of 54 in 2008 when she did not receive proper diagnosis and medical care in time after being stricken with falciparum malaria while in Jharkhand to conduct classes on women’s oppression for the Maoists there.

A prominent leader of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the last phase of her life, always leading by example, Anu was deeply involved in enabling women comrades to take on “greater leadership responsibilities” in the Maoist movement. Her thoughtful and incisive tract on the “Caste Question in India,” posthumously published in 2011, needs to be carefully read and considered by all those who have put the “annihilation of caste” on their learning, research, teaching, and revolutionary agendas.20

Inspired by Anu, Ghandy’s meditative thought (in the confines of the jail) led him to suggest that “an environment of freedom…a new set of values…epitomized by…Anuradha…and [the] goal [of] universal happiness” needed to be woven into the socialist project from the start and carefully “nursed.”21 Anu’s “inner feelings,” he writes,

were very much in tune with her outward reactions; as a result, she was closest to what we may call a free person. Yes, here we have the naturalism Marx referred to: “Communism, as a fully developed naturalism, is humanism, and as a fully developed humanism, is naturalism.”… Happiness, Freedom and Good Values…have remained in the realm of dreams not turned into reality. The importance here is to evolve a beautiful mosaic of the three interwoven into the fabric of a just economic order. This, in fact Marx, sought to do, but somewhere in the stream of the practical movements it got lost, or at least took a back seat. The point is to bring it to the forefront…[learning from] the rich experiences of the past.… The building of the new order…[needs to be] reflected in organizational work—whether mass organizations, cultural organizations…and most important, the party organization and the structures and organs of state power when they arise. In all these [structures and organizations]…the three aspects of happiness, freedom and good values need to be interwoven. After all, our goals should be reflected in embryonic form throughout the entire process of its achievements. Only then will the final outcome not get reversed and sustain after the seizure of power as well. Unfortunately, I don’t see such a process in India.22

Basically, Ghandy, the spiritual revolutionary, is saying that the emancipation Marx called “human” has to begin to be made real, albeit in embryonic form, within the revolutionary process itself, and it has to be practiced by revolutionaries themselves in revolutionary organizations and their social life. The leaders and rank and file, and the people among whom they have been working and living, must begin to discern freedom in relationships of equality, cooperation, community, and solidarity, even as they are in the process of trying to get rid of the structures, institutions, values, habits of thought, dogmas, and the ever-pernicious privileges of capitalism and caste-based semi-feudalism.

What about Singh’s moral, ethical, and spiritual concerns? He did not set them aside in his writings, but transposed them into the domain of concrete action. For instance, in an ethical indictment of untouchability, in 1928 Singh wrote: “We can worship beasts but cannot make a human being sit next to us.” What must not, however, be forgotten is that, in concrete action, he “treated and respected…[a] manual scavenger [working] in [the] jail just like his mother.”23

The spiritual dimensions of social anarchism and Marxism can throw light on how to make a revolution without vitiating it; how to struggle for the attainment of freedom without destroying it. “Criticism and independent thinking are the two indispensable qualities of a revolutionary,” Singh once wrote. In practice, he never separated politics from ethics.24

The incorrigible romantic that I am draws me to a stanza from a poem by the Telugu poet, Sri Sri, a tribute to Singh and the Naxalites, the translation of which I have adapted here:

The colonial tyrant called you the terrorist Bhagat Singh that day,
The neofascist despot calls you the terrorist Naxalite today.
But everyone will call you the morning star tomorrow.25

Notes

1. ↩ Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 268–69.
2. ↩ Much of the West European working class had by then come over to social-democratic reformism.
3. ↩ Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). My brief introduction to the Ghadar movement has drawn on, albeit not uncritically, Ramnath’s book.
4. ↩ Chaman Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader (Noida, India: HarperCollins, 2019), 549, 551.
5. ↩ Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader, 115, 175–76, 183–84, 200.
6. ↩ Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader, 231–32.
7. ↩ Kobad Ghandy, Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2021), 12.
8. ↩ Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 94.
9. ↩ Ghandy, Fractured Freedom, 22.
10. ↩ Ghandy, Fractured Freedom, 20, 22. Unfortunately, Fractured Freedom is impaired by the publisher’s poor copyediting.
11. ↩ Bernard D’Mello, India After Naxalbari: Unfinished History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
12. ↩ Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance, 3.
13. ↩ Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance, 124, 147.
14. ↩ Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 78.
15. ↩ Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader, 236–37.
16. ↩ Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader, 228, 234.
17. ↩ “To articulate what is past…means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” Walter Benjamin, “Thesis VI,” in “On the Concept of History,” often referred to as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Dennis Redmond (1940; repr. 2005), available at marxists.org.
18. ↩ Dalit is a self-description of India’s outcasts—those who have been relegated below the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy, as the “crushed” or “oppressed.” Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 9, 30. My interpretation and application of Benjamin’s Theses to and for India have greatly benefited from reading Löwy’s Fire Alarm.
19. ↩ Ghandy, Fractured Freedom, 222–23.
20. ↩ Ghandy, Fractured Freedom, 91. Anuradha Ghandy, “Caste Question in India” and “The Caste Question Returns,” in Scripting the Change: Selected Writings of Anuradha Ghandy, ed. Anand Teltumbde and Shoma Sen (Delhi: Daanish Books, 2011), 7–91; Hiren Gohain, “Towards a Revival of Revolutionary Ideas,” Economic & Political Weekly 47, no. 18 (2012): 35–40.
21. ↩ Ghandy, Fractured Freedom, 220.
22. ↩ Ghandy, Fractured Freedom, 231–33. Emphasis added.
23. ↩ Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader, xliv–xlv, 153.
24. ↩ Lal, ed., The Bhagat Singh Reader, 202.
25. ↩ Sumanta Banerjee, ed., Thema Book of Naxalite Poetry (Calcutta: Thema, 1987), 92.