The martyr and the urn: How Bhagat Singh's story lives on

On the eve of Bhagat Singh’s 118th birth anniversary (he was born on September 27, 1907), the memory of India’s most iconic martyr has been rekindled in Ludhiana. Not in marble or bronze, but in something far more fragile, a handful of earth carried across borders, cradled like a relic of faith.

That soil, dark and ordinary to the eye, was dug from Lahore’s Shadman Chowk, the place where Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, and Shivaram Rajguru were hanged in 1931.

Preserved in a silver urn in the home of Ravindra Vatsyayan, a 72-year-old ayurvedic consultant, it has become a shrine for strangers. “People suffering from low spirits or anxiety come and see the urn,” he told me in a soft, steady voice from Ludhiana. “I tell them not to be depressed but to be inspired by Bhagat Singh, who was only 23 when he faced the gallows. Some days two or three visitors arrive, other times three or four. Each one comes searching for courage.”

The urn itself was a gift. “I had taken some mithai to friends in Kartarpur Sahib,” Dr Vatsyayan recalled of his last visit to Pakistan two years ago. “In return, they gave me the soil, dug out with a ‘khurpa’ from the ground that still remembers his last steps.”

Bhagat Singh’s story remains both luminous and bitter, for it speaks of fearless defiance and of cruelty without mercy. Lajpat Rai died on November 17, 1928, scarcely three weeks after he was struck down during the anti-Simon Commission protest. In his last days, he called on the young to redress the nation’s shame, a summons that lit a torch in Lahore and helped set a very young Bhagat Singh on the path that followed.

On December 17, 1928, together with Rajguru, he set out to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai, who had been fatally injured after a lathi charge ordered by police officer James A. Scott. Mistaking Assistant Superintendent John Saunders for Scott, the young men ambushed him outside the police headquarters in Lahore. Rajguru fired first, Bhagat Singh followed with several bullets.

He never denied it. In court, he called it not murder but vengeance, political justice, a blow struck for a nation gasping under colonial rule. To the British, he was a criminal. To millions of Indians, he was a warrior-prophet of freedom.

When he was later arrested after throwing harmless bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in 1929, the colonial government saw its chance. They stripped him of the protections of law. A special tribunal created by the Viceroy rushed through the case, silenced challenges, denied appeals. Gandhi and Nehru begged for mercy, but Lord Irwin turned them away.

On March 23, 1931, the three revolutionaries were led to the gallows inside Lahore Central Jail. The execution came a day early, in secret, to keep the city from rising in fury. Even in death they were robbed of dignity. Their bodies were smuggled out in the dark, burned in haste on the banks of the Sutlej at Hussainiwala, and their ashes scattered into the river.

Dr Vatsyayan recalled what his elders had told him: “One of my father’s friends, Pandit Laghu Ram, was just a boy of 14 or 15. He followed the van on a bicycle. When they got to the site, the earth was still hot from the cremations.

“Some other boys leapt into the river and managed to recover a few bones. Those remains are still kept in the Bhagat Singh Museum at Khatkar Kalan, near Banga, his ancestral village. The boys were furious. They swore never to forget.”

Mourners still visit Hussainiwala every March 23, and in Lahore families light candles for the martyrs. They have even pleaded for Shadman Chowk to be renamed Bhagat Singh Chowk, but their appeals have gone unanswered.

What additionally endures are not only the wounds, but the gentler stories that soften Bhagat Singh’s flame. He adored a street dog who wandered into the family home who always lay quietly beside him. “Such a peaceful creature,” he once laughed, “he must have been a sadhu in a previous life.”

That, perhaps, is why people still come to bow before a modest urn in a Ludhiana home, because in Bhagat Singh they see both the fire of a martyr who embraced death at 23, and the tenderness of a young man who could still smile at a dog’s serenity. It is this fusion of fury and gentleness, defiance and compassion, that keeps his spirit alive. Not in monuments, but in the living earth, and in every heart that still remembers.