By Nitheesh Narayanan
Writer and former professor Chaman Lal has been a chronicler of Bhagat Singh’s life for decades now and is known to have brought out the many lesser known aspects of the revolutionary, whose ideals, courage, and spirit remain unmatched in Indian history. On Bhagat Singh’s 113rd birth anniversary, Nitheesh Narayanan speaks to Chaman Lal about a range of issues concerning the revolutionary — from what got him interested in his life, why he is India’s Che Guevara and the Indian Left’s relationship with him.
Nitheesh Narayanan (NN): You have rigorously been engaging with Bhagat Singh’s thoughts and activities, marking his unique role in different ways, over many decades. Tell us about what led you to dedicate such a vast amount of your life time on this? What was your entry point towards Bhagat Singh?
Chaman Lal (CL): It was just like any other young adult attracted towards Bhagat Singh seeing his image which has become so popular in India from his martyrdom in 1931. I was a regular reader at the Public Library in my home town Rampura Phul in Bathinda district of Punjab, from 1964 when I was 17. Later, I became a member of a book club of Hindi Pocket Books Delhi, which used to offer books worth nine rupees for eight rupees. Those days, pocket books cost just 1-3 rupees. So, in one lot, I got the copy of Manmathnath Gupt’s Hindi book, Bharat Ke Krantikari. Gupt himself was a revolutionary who skipped gallows as he was not even an adult in the Kakori Dacoity case of 1925 — the one in which Ramprasad Bismil and Ashfaq Ulla Khan and others were hanged. The book contained sketches of 16-18 young revolutionaries who had sacrificed their lives for the nation. Bhagat Singh was one among them. Gupt himself was a comrade of Bhagat Singh’s. The book inspired me so much that I decided to translate it to my mother tongue, Punjabi — and I did it in a few months’ time. All of its sketches were published during 1970-71 by Desh Bhagat Yaadan, a fortnightly edited by the legendary Ghadarite revolutionary Baba Gurmukh Singh Lalton from the Ghadar Memorial Hall in Jalandhar. From then onwards, my interest in the Indian freedom struggle and revolutionaries took shape and later got focussed on Bhagat Singh — India’s most ideologically advanced socialist revolutionary, inspired by Marxism-Leninism.
NN: What is Bhagat Singh’s place in the making of modern India?
CL: The place of Bhagat Singh was in creating the dream of a new India, which never came into being. Independence in 1947 never thought of making India of Bhagat Singh’s dreams, of his vision. His vision of India was an exploitation-free society, where workers and peasants are not exploited and where they get the fruits of their own hard labour. Where the youth of the country are not without employment and where students work for furthering the dream of a socialist society.
NN: Bhagat Singh is often portrayed as a brave freedom fighter, but very rarely do we see his portrayal as a man with an ideology. How do you see this gap?
CL: Of course, he was a brave and fearless freedom fighter, one of the rarest in the world, comparable only to Che Guevara in fearlessness. Yet, he was not just limited to this trait. He was much more than this in his personality. He was a socialist thinker with a clear ideological perspective about bringing socialist revolution in India, by organising workers and peasants as the main forces of this revolution. His writings, totalling 130 found till now, and his jail notebook, make this absolutely clear. As his writings were not brought to the focus till a few years ago, his personality was limited to a brave freedom fighter alone, which, of course, suited the political system in the country — as Bhagat Singh as a revolutionary thinker was a threat to post independence Indian rulers as well.
NN: You have called Bhagat Singh a ‘pathbreaking revolutionary on a Marxist path’. Could you explain Bhagat Singh’s engagement with Marxism in particular?
CL: The Indian revolutionary tradition against British colonialism is very long. Ever since 1757, when the East India company set up the colonial regime in India, there were revolutionary upsurges in various parts of the country from time to time. But prior to the Ghadar movement of 1913-15, all revolutionary movements had religious connotations. It was the Ghadar party that for the first time, kept religion away from political movements and made it a private and personal aspect of the revolutionaries. No religious ceremonies or rituals were part of the Ghadar movement — though for meetings, gurudwaras in the USA were used (where the party was formed in 1913).
As Shiv Verma, a comrade of Bhagat Singh’s, has defined, the Ghadar party was the first secular revolutionary movement. Bhagat Singh and his organisations, the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS) and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), were the next ideological advancements from the Ghadar movement, and were inspired by the Russian socialist revolution led by Lenin in 1917. The Russian revolution had not taken place during the Ghadar movement in 1915, but many Ghadarites had travelled to Moscow after it and when the University of the Eastern toilers was set up in Moscow in 1921. Bhagat Singh was in touch with many Ghadarite revolutionaries and had even worked in the Kirti-Punjabi and Urdu journals brought out by Ghadarites. He was also in touch with the early Communists of India in Kanpur, such as Muzzafar Ahmad, Shaukat Usmani, and Satyabhakat.
All of this churning led to the ideological development in Bhagat Singh as a Marxist, which is best reflected in his long perceptive article, Letter to Young Political Workers, written just one and half months before his execution. In it, what he provides is the clear programme of a socialist revolution based on Marxist principles.
NN: What are your thoughts on the political appropriation of Bhagat Singh? Earlier, the Khalistan movement and now the RSS is trying their best to appropriate Bhagat Singh, in a way that completely obliterates his Marxist politics.
CL: Due to Bhagat Singh’s popularity amid the Indian people, all parties desire to appropriate him for their narrow political interests — similar to B R Ambedkar’s appropriation. The appropriation of Bhagat Singh is happening at two levels: One, deliberately to obliterate his ideological perception, two, at a level of ignorance about his revolutionary nature. The Khalistanis and the RSS are trying to obfuscate Bhagat Singh’s ideological perception deliberately and are trying to appropriate him in their own narrow sectarian, fascist vision.
Such attempts need to be exposed using Bhagat Singh’s own writings. At another level, many don’t know about Bhagat Singh as an ideologically advanced revolutionary thinker — they love him simply as a “hero”, brave and fearless. Such groups need to be made aware of the thinker he was, through his writings, which have now been published in several languages — English, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Marathi in complete, and partly in Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil etc.
NN: The RSS has been violently intolerant towards a more substantial understanding of Bhagat Singh’s politics — they have disrupted some of your lectures, demanded a ban on Bipan Chandra’s writings on him, and more. What do you read out of this intolerance of RSS towards the real politics of Bhagat Singh?
CL: There is nothing surprising in it. RSS, like all religious fundamentalist organisations, don’t tolerate the facts of history. Therefore, they create myths, call it “history”, and anyone who questions or challenges these myths becomes their target of attack. Historian Bipan Chandra was someone from the academic world who focussed on Bhagat Singh as an ideologically oriented revolutionary thinker for the first time, and I advanced this perception further by collecting writings of Bhagat Singh in various anthologies. When I speak of Bhagat Singh’s ideas through his own writings, the RSS or their followers don’t enter into debate or discussion, as they are incapable of debate — instead, they attack the speaker, that is what they tried to do with my lecture at Delhi University, though they did not succeed in it. I continued to speak and focus on Bhagat Singh’s ideas, despite their disruptive efforts. The progressive students of Delhi University, who invited me to speak, stood their ground throughout the lecture.
NN: Bhagat Singh deserves worldwide recognition like Che Guevara. How do you see that comparison and what is the global relevance of Bhagat Singh and his ideas?
CL: Yes, Bhagat Singh does deserve worldwide recognition as a young anti colonial thinker revolutionary who adopted Marxism, for both liberation from colonial exploitation and human liberation in general. Slowly, he is indeed being recognised as a South Asian revolutionary and he will surely find his place with revolutionaries like Che Guevara. Bhagat Singh and Che Guevara are comparable in terms of their absolute fearlessness and also their adoption of Marxism for human liberation. As India, like China, is a big country, if Indian masses achieve liberation from Bhagat Singh’s ideas, his global relevance will increase manifold, in my opinion.
NN: The Indian Left faces criticism for not having fully realised or utilised Bhagat Singh’s image as a revolutionary Marxist. How do you see that?
CL: Sadly, that’s true. Bhagat Singh was associated with the Communist movement from its inception; as mentioned before, he was in touch with the earliest founders of the Communist movement in India, like Shaukat Usmani, Muzzafar Ahmad, Satyabhakat, Radha Mohan Gokul ji in Kanpur; in Punjab, he was closely connected with Sohan Singh Josh; Ajoy Ghosh, the Secretary of the CPI at later stage was part of HSRA and was acquitted in the Lahore Conspiracy case. His image as a true revolutionary had travelled even to Moscow at the time — as Shaukat Usmani mentions in his memoirs, Stalin had asked him to arrange Bhagat Singh to be sent to Moscow. Jawaharlal Nehru too had wished for Bhagat Singh to be able to go to Moscow.
Despite all this, when Congress limited Bhagat Singh simply to a freedom fighter and RSS tried to colour him as a narrow sectarian nationalist, the CPI accepted him as progressive revolutionary, but not part of the Left’s own legacy in the freedom struggle. Ajoy Ghosh to Shiv Verma, who was later central committee member of the CPM, acknowledged Bhagat Singh as their most charismatic leader when they worked with him, yet neither the united CPI, nor the CPM, and not even the Naxal groups treated him as their own as an icon. His writings were not published in their collections till 1970’s, even though people like Periyar had gotten his important essays like Why I am An Atheist translated into Tamil as early as 1934. In my opinion, it’s only in recent years, seeing the kind of popularity that Bhagat Singh has among the youth and others, like Ambedkar does, the Left has realised that they have not been able to own their powerful patriotic legacy completely.
NN: How did Bhagat Singh envisage a democratic society? Why do we need Bhagat Singh today?
CL: Bhagat Singh by nature was a democratic person and was always in dialogue with his comrades — that is how he became popular among his own comrades and a close friend to all of them. He used to distribute books amid them. Bhagwan Das Mahaur, in his memoirs, mentions how he got a copy of Karl Marx’s Capital from him. In prison too, he used to get books from the Dwarka Das Library in Lahore through his friends. He was so concerned about his co-prisoners that he once asked for a book to be sent for Congress worker Dr. Alam, who was in jail for the Congress movement. Bhagat Singh’s relations with the Congress party and its leaders were very warm, though both sides kept the critical outlook for each other. He would have liked to build socialism with a democratic outlook — where opinions and views could be freely expressed. Today’s students, youth groups and other mass organisations have many crucial lessons to learn from Bhagat Singh — lessons on how to respect each other despite differences and understand each other to form unity in action.
Chaman Lal retired as a professor in Hindi translation from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He is now Honorary Advisor to Bhagat Singh Archives and Resource Centre, Delhi Archives of the Delhi Government.
Nitheesh Narayanan is the editor of Student Struggle, a Central Secretariat member of SFI, and a PhD scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy. He is also a Researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Chamal Lal’s Cover Photo: Times of India
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