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In the memory of a hero

On April 8, 1931, a meeting chaired by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Amritsar declared that a mela would be held at the spot of cremation of Bhagat Singh and his comrades and that this would be an annual affair.

In the memory of a hero

A revolution unfinished: Bhagat Singh’s statue at Khatkar Kalan.



Sarika Sharma

On April 8, 1931, a meeting chaired by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Amritsar declared that a mela would be held at the spot of cremation of Bhagat Singh and his comrades and that this would be an annual affair. The mela is held even today at the National Martyrs’ Memorial at Hussainiwala. Thirty-two years later, his ancestral house in Khatkar Kalan materialised as a memorial site in 1963. Another 45 years later, a statue of him and his comrades was to come up in the grounds of the Lok Sabha, the same building Bhagat Singh had bombed in 1929. It is the relevance of such “monumental renditions” that British scholar Chris Moffat explores in his book, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh.

Right from the first memorial, debate has surrounded memorialisation. Moffat writes that entreated by a newly founded Martyrs’ Memorial Committee to offer his support for a monument soon after the Lahore executions of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, Mahatma Gandhi immediately distanced himself from the proposal based precisely on an anxiety over the site’s declarative potential. In a letter to nationalist campaigner Mehta Anand Kishore, the Mahatma wrote: “...a memorial erected in honour of anybody undoubtedly means that the memorialists would copy the deeds of those in whose memory they erect the memorial. It is also an invitation to posterity to copy such deeds. I am therefore unable to identify myself in any way with the memorial.” Moffat says in Gandhi’s vision, it is as if the monument, by its very existence, would carry on the work of the revolutionaries, giving a new life and legitimising their message.

The land in Khatkar Kalan had always been kept by the family to preserve Bhagat Singh’s memories and a statue was installed in 1963 after collecting donations from public. Official recognition for the place, however, came when the then home minister Giani Zail Singh erected a bigger bronze statue in the 1970s. In 1980, he also supported the transformation of the Yuvak Kendra hall, a common space for assembly, into the state-funded Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh Museum.

The third major tribute, the statue in Lok Sabha, has been mired in controversy. It was a result of a long campaign spearheaded by the then Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports, MS Gill, and a parallel plea from CPI (M) MP Mohd Salim. “…it was condemned by leftist commentators and members of the revolutionary’s family for its presentation of the martyr as a portly Sikh in turban, instead of the more familiar figuration of a young man in trilby hat.” Moffat says it was accepted as a mistake by the celebrated Parliament sculptor Ram Suthar or derided at worst as a purposeful attempt to subsume a radical, atheist revolutionary into a communal identity.” Salim boycotted the unveiling and Urdu poet Fahmida Riaz lamented in Bhagat Singh ki Moorat:

There is news from Delhi

Alas! Alas!

What a mess they have made

Of Bhagat Singh

In the Parliament Square!

For sixty years they petitioned

The British rejected him

But you, our own government

Erect his statue

in the Parliament Square.

At last the government beat its breast

and said why not!

and erected the statue in the Parliament Square.

But when the veil was lifted

You discover it is not Bhagat Singh

That 24-year-old beautiful lad

Nor his young limbs that they could not properly burn

On the fateful night when they hanged him.

All debates around these monuments seem like efforts to appropriate Bhagat Singh’s personality, a search for one’s own Bhagat Singh...

Post the memorials comes the commemoration. Every year, on March 23, Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom day, and September 28, his birth anniversary, these monuments, characterised by “solitude” all through the year, come alive. Whether it is the launch of political parties or protest marches, these have often been the starting point for many, for decades.

Three of the most important sites dedicated to Bhagat Singh in India are located in the north of the country. Move a little further and in Lahore, a handful of activists and leftists have been trying to earn the atheist his due space in a country built on religious lines.

Bhagat Singh was born in a village now in Pakistan’s Faisalabad, lived his political life in Lahore and died there too. “Bhagat Singh is recognised by many in Lahore as someone deeply embedded in the cultural and political traditions of this city. He is celebrated by some as a charismatic, local connection to global histories of twentieth century revolution, and by others as a figure who personifies the traditional characteristics of Punjabi folk heroes. 

But for many, he is seen as both — someone who demonstrates the possibility of a radical Punjabiyat, one that affirms the value of resistance and transcends parochialism in its connection to the wider world and solidarity with other struggles,” says Moffat.

He credits Lahore-based theatre group Punjab Lok Rahs for actively telling Bhagat Singh’s story through street plays in recent years and affirming his importance as part of the long-standing Punjabi traditions of resistance, and Diep Saeeda, director of Institute of Peace and Secular Studies, engaged in the renaming of Shadman Chowk (where the revolutionary was hanged) as Bhagat Singh Chowk. Earlier Saeeda had consulted municipal records to locate the cell where Bhagat Singh was lodged at the Lahore Central Jail which was demolished in the 1960s. The chowk had come up at the same place.

Every year, on March 23, activists gather at the spot for remembrance and call for official recognition of the “martyr of Lahore”, giving, as Moffat writes, “the dead Bhagat Singh a visible body in Pakistan’s national space, positioning him as a hero in its national story...”


A dream lost, a due tribute

The book notes that the first tribute planned for Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev was not a statue or a samadhi. “Some weeks after the executions, an All-India Martyrs’ Memorial Committee was established at Bradlaugh Hall, Lahore, drawing together several prominent public figures in the city, including Bhagat Singh’s father Kishan Singh.” The committee resolved to raise Rs 10,00,000 to build a workers’ home and lecture hall, to found a library and reading room, to establish a fund that would ease the suffering of political prisoners and their families, to establish another fund to help conduct the defence of political cases, and, finally, to publish political literature. It is not clear what came of these efforts, Moffat writes.

For him, the most politically productive ways to commemorate Bhagat Singh would be memorial activities that bring to light the difficult questions Bhagat Singh asked about freedom, responsibility and political commitment in his time, and which connect these questions to the 21st  present. He says statues are often good for promoting reverence for a figure, but they can also silence them, freezing them in bronze or stone. Many people are inspired by Bhagat Singh today because he continues to represent a revolution left unfinished, a struggle for freedom caught halfway. He is a figure who demands active engagement, who asks for something more than the laying of flowers or the saluting of a statue.


Machismo overpowers

For long, efforts have been made to present Bhagat Singh’s intellectual side, but it is his image as a brave, masculine, macho patriot that remains so prominent and popular. “Why do people continue to accept him as an icon of youthful self-sacrifice rather than a serious theorist of revolution?” To answer this question, he offers a re-reading of Bhagat Singh’s life to understand the promise he represents, rather than any particular programme he might have authored. “Only in this way, I argue, can we understand the long-term significance of this history and the enduring popularity of the revolutionary today.”

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