Person · revolutionary · Pakistan

Bhagat Singh

Date

1907–1931

Function

Military & resistance

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

31.550, 74.344

Worth knowing

He used the trial and a 116-day hunger strike over the treatment of political prisoners to make an argument in public, and wrote Why I Am an Atheist in jail. He was twenty-three when he was hanged at Lahore on 23 March 1931.

About the place

Placed at Lahore, where he shot Saunders, was tried and was hanged at the Central Jail. He was born at Banga in Lyallpur district, now in Pakistan, and his remains were burned at Hussainiwala on the Sutlej.

Connections (9)

• PrecursorGowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan

  Bhagat Singh's execution in March 1931 came a few weeks after the Gandhi-Irwin pact, and the Congress's failure to get the sentences commuted cost it a great deal among young people in Punjab and the United Provinces. The argument between the two methods was never settled: Quit India in 1942, once the entire leadership was arrested, was far closer to the revolutionaries' expectations of what a rising would look like than to anything Gandhi had planned.

• PrecursorSri Aurobindo

  The Bengal revolutionary tradition that Aurobindo's circle began after the 1905 partition — secret societies, bomb-making, the Alipore case — is the direct ancestor of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association that Bhagat Singh belonged to twenty years later, with the Punjab and United Provinces cells taking over what Bengal had started. What Bhagat Singh added was the socialism and the deliberate use of the trial as a public platform.

• Samadhi atHussainiwala

  The bodies of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were taken from Lahore Central Jail on the night of 23 March 1931 to the bank of the Sutlej at Hussainiwala, part-burned in haste and thrown in the river to prevent a funeral procession — villagers are said to have gathered the remains the next morning. The site went to Pakistan in 1947 and India exchanged twelve villages for it in 1961 specifically to get it back.

• Succession in timeMahārāja Ranjīt Singh

  Lahore was Ranjit Singh's capital and then, after annexation, a Company and Crown city — and it is where Bhagat Singh shot Saunders in 1928, was tried, and was hanged at the Central Jail in 1931, eighty-two years after the Punjab was taken. The Sikh kingdom's capital became the centre of the province's revolutionary movement, and both stories end at the Sutlej a few miles apart.

• AnalogueLala Lajpat Rai

  Lala Lajpat Rai's 30 October 1928 death from British lathi-charge injuries at Lahore directly caused the 17 December 1928 Lahore assassination of Deputy Superintendent John Saunders by Bhagat Singh and Rajguru. Saunders had been the officer in charge of the lathi-charge; Bhagat Singh's revenge connected the Punjab Arya Samajist Lal-Bal-Pal nationalist generation to the HSRA armed revolutionary generation.

• Court associationChandra Shekhar Azad

  Chandra Shekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh were the two chief organisers of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) between 1925 and 1931. Azad as commander-in-chief and Bhagat Singh as chief ideologue coordinated the Kakori Train Robbery (August 1925), the Lahore assassination of John Saunders (December 1928), the Delhi Assembly bombing (April 1929) and the 1930 Viceroy assassination attempt. Azad's 27 February 1931 suicide at Alfred Park followed Bhagat Singh's 23 March 1931 Lahore execution.

• Court associationRam Prasad Bismil

  Ram Prasad Bismil's 1925 Kakori Train Robbery and 1927 Gorakhpur hanging preceded Bhagat Singh's HSRA leadership. Bhagat Singh took over the organisation's Punjab unit from Bismil's Shahjahanpur unit after Bismil's December 1927 execution. Bhagat Singh explicitly cited Bismil's writings in his 1930 Lahore Conspiracy Trial defence statement.

• Court associationRajguru

  Shivaram Rajguru was the HSRA's sharpshooter and executed the 17 December 1928 Saunders assassination at Lahore alongside Bhagat Singh. The three were hanged together at Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931 — the same day — becoming the HSRA's iconic three martyrs. The Rajguru-Bhagat Singh-Sukhdev trinity is central to the Indian national memory of the independence movement.

• Court associationSukhdev

  Sukhdev Thapar and Bhagat Singh were co-founders of the Lahore Naujawan Bharat Sabha (1926) and the subsequent HSRA Lahore unit. Both were hanged at Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931 alongside Rajguru. Sukhdev was Bhagat Singh's chief organiser for the Lahore operations and the April 1929 Delhi Assembly bombing planning.

On these journeys

• The armed movement and the exiles

Sources

Wikipedia, “Bhagat Singh”. Bhagat Singh’s prison notebook and Why I Am an Atheist; Lahore Conspiracy Case judgment.

• Wikipedia — Bhagat Singh