Book Extract: Finding the man in the mythology

Title: Revolutionaries on Trial: Sedition, Betrayal, and Martyrdom / Author: Aparna Vaidik / Publisher: Aleph / Pages: 480 / Price: Rs 999 (hardcover)

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There was a flood of chromolithographs and bazaar prints that memorialised Bhagat Singh’s death as martyrdom. His sartorial photograph with moustache and felt hat, a fashionable accessory in those times, especially came to be reproduced and adapted into paintings, badges, drawings, posters, calendars, and cards that people could stick on the walls in their homes or keep in their alcoves with images of other gods or turn into placards to be displayed at protest sites or carry in their wallets at all times. These images capitalised on the mimetic power of photos to make him present (and available to view and touch) despite his absence. They evoked both memory and emotions. His image much like saintly relics acquired a historical and an emotive power and became ‘a perfect vehicle for production of nostalgia’.

In one of the images, Bhagat Singh was depicted as crucified Jesus Christ and in another one Gandhi was shown tearing open his chest to reveal the images of three hanged revolutionaries (referencing the episode in the epic Ramayana where Hanuman, Lord Ram’s devotee, tears open his chest to display an effervescent image of Lord Ram and his consort Sita).

These images, their reproduction, adaptation, and circulation spawned a new visual culture that galvanised the anti-imperial politics of the early 1930s. Hereafter, Bhagat Singh lived on in Punjab’s bolian (catch songs), ghorian (wedding songs), tappey (couplets), mari (songs of lament), qisse (love poetry), and its shaheedi melas (annual fairs held in memory of the martyrs). He was characterised in folk memory as a shaheed (martyr), sher (the lion), lal (son of Mother India) and a chiragh (lamp). Historical research shows that in this period, dominant cultural memorialisation did not yet celebrate ‘Bhagat Singh as a Marxist anti-bourgeois icon’, which would happen in the decades to come.

Notwithstanding Bhagat Singh’s popularity in Punjab’s folk memory, there was a general belief amongst the surviving revolutionaries that their contribution was progressively written out of the nationalist commemoration. The Congress, and especially Nehru, as they began campaigning for the 1935 Assembly elections, became increasingly ambivalent and reluctant to openly espouse the revolutionary cause. Congressmen gradually became censorious of the revolutionaries who were seen giving ‘inflammatory’ speeches on being released from jail or resorting to hunger strikes while still in custody. This discomfort heightened with the coming of Independence. Bhagat Singh’s family, as historian Chris Moffat shows, led the polemic regarding the obscuring of the legacy of the revolutionaries following India’s independence.

This angst surfaced, according to film historian Ravinder Singh, in the controversy surrounding the making and release of the first Bhagat Singh biopic Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954), which was directed by Jagdish Gautam and produced by Poonum Productions. Bijoy Kumar Sinha, who had set up the Shahid Memorial Trust around the time of Independence and headed the editorial board of Bhagat Singh Commemoration Volume (BSCV), had announced making of films on the lives of Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad. He and Bhagat Singh’s brothers took umbrage at the making of Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh because it was a ‘commercial film’. The Shahid Memorial Trust could not prevent it from being released despite creating a significant outcry. The Censor Board could not ban the film given Bhagat Singh’s popularity as a nationalist icon but asked director Jagdish Gautam to cut out certain scenes. On its release, it was condemned by Bhagat Singh’s brothers, Batukeshwar Dutt and several legislators and parliamentarians.

The film did ‘outstanding business’ despite media criticism, the melodrama, and its ‘factual’ inaccuracies. The popular memory of Bhagat Singh had clearly outstripped his own life. In 1965, the Manoj Kumar-starring S. Ram Sharma’s Shaheed was made in consultation with Batukeshwar Dutt and Bhagat Singh’s family members. The film was a stupendous success and won three national awards. It played a significant role in bringing Bhagat Singh’s memory to non-Punjabi audiences across India. Bijoy Kumar Sinha, the ‘primary initiator’ of the idea of the biopic was conspicuously absent from the credits of the film. According to Ravinder Singh, given that Bijoy was now a known communist, the filmmakers preferred not to associate with him because the government was wary of them at the time.

This attempt to create an authentic version of Bhagat Singh’s legacy, untainted by commercialism and communism, went in a different direction in 1967 with the establishment of a youth centre, Yuvak Kendra, in Bhagat Singh’s ancestral home in Khatkar Kalan. The support of a surviving Ghadar revolutionary, Baba Sohan Singh Bakhna was instrumental in setting it up. The Kendra embarked on an outreach campaign aimed at school- and college-goers. This was their way of addressing the marginalisation of the revolutionaries in the larger national narrative and preserving their memory for posterity. This re-energised Bhagat Singh’s memory in Punjab along with other Punjabi and Sikh revolutionaries associated with the Ghadar Movement and the Kirti Kisan Sabhas. The Kendra galvanised an archival momentum of collecting the writings of Bhagat Singh, reminiscences of his associates about him, his family records, letters that sought to challenge Bhagat Singh’s folk representation, his romanticised image as a ‘gun-toting vigilante’ and the cinematic focus on the hunger strikes as the primary focus of his political life.

The concurrent effort of the Nationalist-Marxist scholars to discover Bhagat Singh’s letters, essays and jail diary and other ‘primary evidence’ and consolidating it all into an archive led to a shift in his image as a scholarly revolutionary who was devoted to reading and writing; and one who would have eventually embraced Communism in the manner Bijoy Kumar Sinha, Ajoy Ghosh, Shiv Verma and Kundan Lal had. This archiving impulse corresponded with a growing discontent with India’s present, reflected in the labour strikes, environmental and popular protests, Naxalism and armed civil strife that were unfolding at the time. These events spawned a popular desire to reach back to a more radical anti-colonial past for inspiration. Until this time, Bhagat Singh was treasured in the public memory as the true son of Mother India, the martyr. As Moffat notes, it was ironic that the appeal to collection of evidence or primary sources was an attempt to ‘demystify’ Bhagat Singh’s image but instead it served ‘to embellish a hagiography rather than deflate it’.

Despite the curation and archiving of documentary evidence, Bhagat Singh’s memory continues to be invoked by people of all shades of politics in inconceivable ways to the present day. This is a testament to the numerous and often opposing ways in which people have made meaning of Bhagat Singh’s persona, his actions and his ideas. From the communist activists to the Maoist student groups, Naxalite youth, Sikh community, Akalis, people of Punjab, and right-wing groups (such as Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena), political parties (Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (Maoist), Communist Party of India (Maoist-Leninist), Indian National Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Akali Dal, Aam Aadmi Party), the Kashmiri nationalists, and the more recent largescale protest mobilisations—the Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act/ National Register of Citizens (2019) protests and the Farmers’ Protest (2020–21), all draw on different representations of Bhagat Singh—the trimmed-haired image of him in a felt hat or the white-turbaned image of a sombre young man or the more recent yellow-basanti turbaned portrait. The fact that these images are ubiquitous demonstrates the continued affect of Bhagat Singh’s memory and the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’.