Vinay Lal

Review of India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh by Chris Moffat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xi + 282 pp.

“This is the story of a phenomenon.”1 So begins a well-known biography of a famous Indian. The reference here is to Christopher Isherwood’s mesmerizing biography of Ramakrishna, an illiterate late 19th century Indian saint who became the cynosure of many learned young men of Calcutta who, while entranced by the material advancements of the West, viewed India as the repository of spiritual wisdom. But the phrase, “story of a phenomenon”, could just as aptly be used apropos of Bhagat Singh, a young Indian lad, a “revolutionary” in the received narrative as much as in the present book by Chris Moffat, who set the country on fire. His name is indelibly linked with those of Rajguru and Sukhdev, comrades-in-arms: hands linked together, they walked to the gallows while raising the slogan, “Inquilab Zindabad” (“Long Live Revolution”); but just as inextricably interwoven into the story of Bhagat Singh is the name of Mohandas Gandhi, a no mean figure himself who observed that “there has never been within the living memory so much romance round any life as had surrounded that of Bhagat Singh.”2 Though there would no “Bhagat Singh era” to match what their contemporary Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay characterized as “the Gandhi era” which inaugurated what to her generation marked “the real political history of India,”3 the Director of the colonial-era Intelligence Bureau, Sir Horace Williamson, was constrained to admit some years later that in his lifetime Bhagat Singh had succeeded in rousing the country “with his heroics” to such an extent that “his photograph was on sale in every city and township and for a time rivalled in popularity even that of Mr. Gandhi himself.”4

Whatever the popularity of Bhagat Singh in India, it did not translate into critical scholarly inquiry into his life, afterlives, or what might be called “the Bhagat Singh effect” in Indian public life. His contemporaries and some historians made a valiant attempt to disrupt the mainstream historiography of Indian nationalism with the suggestion that the armed revolutionaries—largely associated, in Punjab and north India, with the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA)—had spearheaded the “real” struggle for India’s freedom, but their efforts scarcely created a ripple in academic circles. Nor could Bhagat Singh’s name be invoked outside India with the anticipation of eliciting some attention, since there was barely any awareness of a young man who, as he went to the gallows in his early twenties, appeared to have been smitten by Lenin—and who, nearly a century after his death, still remains unknown outside South Asia and among small pockets of diasporic “desis” who like to speak of “revolution”. The visual anthropologist Christopher Pinney lamented some years ago that the “huge popularity” of Bhagat Singh remained “one of the puzzles of twentieth-century Indian history that academics don’t seem to have engaged with”,5 though it is evidently no puzzle to Pinney himself: as the “antithesis of Gandhianism not only because of its commitment to violence, but also in its militant atheism”, the HSRA had been eviscerated from the dominant bourgeois nationalist narrative.6 To suggest that Bhagat Singh and his fellow sojourners in the HSRA had a “commitment to violence” suggests that they were animated by some passion for violence, and even reveled in it (if only to signal their disenchantment with Gandhi), an interpretation that is bizarre and at best tendentious; as Bhagat Singh himself wrote in his short tract, “The Philosophy of the Bomb”, “Violence is physical force applied for committing injustice, and that is certainly not what the revolutionaries stand for.” Bhagat Singh did not doubt that revolutionaries of his ilk, much like Gandhi and the advocates of nonviolence, subscribed to soul-force; but he could not countenance the view that adherence to soul-force required the repudiation of violence.7 Moreover, on the view put forward by Pinney, it is evidently not merely the nation, and even some of the British, upon whom Gandhi was able to cast a spell, but also upon three generations of Indian historians and scholars who, standing their ground against Bhagat Singh’s (in Pinney’s words) “militant atheism”, were seduced by the religiosity of the Mahatma. There seems to be some slight trace of Orientalism in this outlook, resting as it does on the supposed adherence of Indians to a religious worldview which, even as it granted Bhagat Singh an iconic and reverential place in the pantheon of revolutionaries, could not accommodate him in that other register of the nation’s historiography.

Some 10–15 years ago, however, scholars began to display greater receptivity to this occluded past,8 and Moffat’s monograph is distinguished by the fact that it is unquestionably the most arresting scholarly study thus far of Bhagat Singh and in particular of what he has described as the “politics and promise of his revolutionary inheritance”. The traditional historiography has revolved around Bhagat Singh’s life, his youthfulness—what ipso facto was a perpetual youthfulness, since he was never permitted to age—and bravado, his revolutionary activities, the scent he left behind of an unapologetic patriotism not sullied by xenophobia, his abiding faith in communism, and the exemplary manner in which he forfeited his life for a higher cause. It is not as if all this is uninteresting, and Moffat’s book is attentive to some of these considerations, but his attention is directed elsewhere. The life of Bhagat Singh becomes India’s “revolutionary inheritance”: nearly every political constituency, including those such as modern-day Hindu nationalists who prima facie have very little in common with the professed atheist, has been adept at claiming him as one of their own. His admirers and chroniclers have never really thought to ask, as Moffat does, how he became an icon—and what it means to think of the afterlives of an icon. Moffat, however, is not alone in turning the scholarship on Bhagat Singh into new directions. Maia Ramnath, for example, has attempted to situate him under the ambit of anarchism, just as Kama Maclean—following the example set by Pinney—has been intrigued by the dance between the text and the image in representations of Bhagat Singh.9 Curiously, however, Moffat does not pause to consider what might have precipitated the shift in the academic lens, and whether the change in India’s political climate, which I suspect he deplores as much as this reviewer, has ironically not played a part in enabling scholarly work on Bhagat Singh. Gandhi is everywhere under attack: as I argued in a piece written more than a decade ago, every constituency loves to hate him.10 He was always, his critics held, in bed with the capitalists, and an outright defender of the caste system; but lately he has very confidently been pronounced a “racist”, a sexual predator, and an open sympathizer of the Nazis. He may officially be the “Father of the Nation”, but the leviathans in power in India have been raising memorials to his assassin and other ideologues who never had anything but contempt for Gandhi; meanwhile, outside India, statues of Gandhi have been vandalized, garroted, and caged, a matter that is unlikely to produce any serious introspection on the part of the Indian left which has, at least in the matter of the ‘Father of the Nation’, made common cause with Hindu nationalists.

When an icon falls, another icon must take its place: it won’t do to say that “unhappy is the land that needs a hero”,11 since we don’t know of any such country. Bhagat Singh has, in modern India, become such a hero, if not the person everyone loves to love. What is there not to love about a dashing young man who forswore romantic attachments owing to his love for the motherland, whose sense of dignity and unyielding adherence to his principles even led him to reprimand his own father for the weakness that led him to beg for his son’s life from his British captors (110), and who to the end displayed indomitable courage and remained fearless in the face of death. Bhagat Singh was certainly someone whose legacy, as I have already suggested, nearly every constituency—liberals, progressives, nationalists, Hindu extremists, Dalits, Marxists, and of course revolutionaries, whatever that procrustean term may mean—seeks to claim for themselves. The question of “inheritance” is critical for Moffat, since, as he argues, “the founding historicist presumption that the past is separate from the present promotes a principled distrust of the revenant and a preference for the corpse, immobile and amenable to excavation” (3). Some readers may blanch at this characterization of the discipline of history as fundamentally and embarrassingly positivist—and this after new historicism, subaltern studies, postcolonial theory, and the various other inflections given to historical studies by feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis. The suspicion that Moffat is trying rather too hard to appear revolutionary in his own fashion is further strengthened when he argues that “rather than a Rankean concern to uncover the past ‘the way it really was’, this book’s sensitivity to the spectral betrays a Nietzschean prejudice, wherein ‘only something which has no history can be defined’” (4).

Whoever reads Ranke these days—except, of course, as a chapter in the past of historiography? Every profession has its troglodytes and history is no exception; indeed, considering the public discourses of history, one might even grant that some—the anchors at PBS News Hour, the authors of school textbooks, the industrious “fact checkers”—are still beholden to the idea of history as committed to the task of giving us the past unvarnished, as “it really was”. As far as the “Nietzschean prejudice” goes, Moffat leans far more in the direction of the Dionysian rather than the Apollonian. The burden of his intellectual ambition is to understand the myriad ways in which Bhagat Singh lives on in the imaginary of the nation, and not only because so many constituencies, many at extreme odds both with each other and often with what the young “revolutionary” himself stood for, have embraced him as their own—an iterative testimony to the capacious hold that Bhagat Singh was able to exercise over the nation in his extraordinarily short-lived life. Moffat’s own peregrinations in search of his subject take him to two spots in the Punjab: to the museum and statue in honor of the shaheed [martyr] at Khatkar Kalan, the ancestral homeland of the family, and to the National Martyr’s Memorial at Hussainiwala (210). The local paves the way for the national, as Moffat arrives at the statue of Bhagat Singh unveiled outside the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of the Indian Parliament, on Independence Day, 2008 (218–20); and, considering both the importance of Lahore to Bhagat Singh’s life, and its place in anti-colonial lore, it is not surprising that in similar fashion the last phase of Moffat’s interrogation of the spectre of Bhagat Singh takes him to Lahore. Here, at Shadman Chowk, allegedly the very spot where the gallows yard of Lahore Central Jail once stood and where Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru were thus hanged, “a small group of leftist and liberal activists” gather at the hero’s birth anniversary each year to revive Bhagat Singh’s memory and to call for rechristening the holy spot into “Bhagat Singh Chowk” (226–32). A counter-demonstration takes place each time the activists gather, fueled by Pakistani patriots and religious zealots all too ready to denounce Bhagat Singh as a “terrorist and an atheist” (230).

There is much at stake here in this discussion. If Muslim zealots in Pakistan deprecate Bhagat Singh as a “terrorist and an atheist”, the communist activist Sohan Singh Josh, whose newspaper Kirti offered Bhagat Singh a platform for his ideas, insists that the revolutionaries were “not terrorists or anarchists as those terms were known in Europe.”12 Both views point equally to the limitations of a reading of Bhagat Singh, Moffat would argue, that betrays unawareness of the “anarchic potentiality” through which the “specificity of Bhagat Singh’s promise is [best] apprehended” (16). There is the question of political anarchy, in the sense of a profound suspicion towards the state and a belief in the desirability of political communities that are self-governing; but, for the moment, it is rather more necessary to linger on Moffat’s claim that “the book pursues an an-archic vision of politics”, read in the philosophical sense of an unmooring, an unseating of sovereignty, a move (to quote Levinas) “toward a pluralism that does not amalgamate into a whole.”13 Moffat elaborates thus: “Anarchy, by its very definition, resists institutionalization, even if it is bound necessarily to the existing order of things, prompting a disturbance within it” (16). This is what gives depth to what otherwise appears as a hollow gesture, the insistent shouting by Bhagat Singh and his comrades, most spectacularly from the gallows, of the slogan “Inquilab Zindabad,” “Long Live Revolution”. On the one hand, what is evoked is a certain sacrificial politics; but, on the other hand, what is intrinsic to the slogan itself is a “perpetual recalcitrance”, which Bhagat Singh adumbrated in his defense of the slogan to his critics: “The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate to check its eternal onward march. Old order should change, always and ever, yielding place to new, so that one ‘good’ order may not corrupt the world” (16).

One could also hover at length over the whole question of the cultural politics of naming. Shadman Chowk is officially known as Choudhry Rahmat Ali Chowk, named after the author of the word “Pakistan” who, notwithstanding his recognized place as one of the principal architects of the idea of Pakistan, nonetheless found himself exiled from the country he birthed after its creation since he was critical of Mohammed Ali Jinnah for having accepted a castrated Pakistan. Rahmat Ali, one historian informs us, substituted “Quisling-i-Azam” for the “Qaid-i-Azam [Great Leader]”.14 There are several levels of displacement here that would require extensive excavation, well outside the purview of this set of reflections. However, in the interest of addressing what is of greater consequence, for the purposes of my argument, it would be more productive to assess Moffat’s approbation of the idea of inconsequence in his discussion of these sites. He admits that “solitude characterizes the biography of all three sites. Each structure is relegated from the rhythms of everyday experience due to poor accessibility” (210). The statue of Bhagat Singh in India’s Parliament is certainly inaccessible, as are other statues in that complex, a consequence of the fetish that the post-colonial state attaches to “national security” and the ingrained habit of keeping ordinary citizens at arm’s length from the institutions of democracy.

The matter of the other two sites in the Punjab is rather more complicated. Moffat attributes the “solitude” or the sparse number of visitors to their “poor inaccessibility”. Though he himself senses that this argument will not suffice (211), his reading of the cultural politics of statuary is perfunctory and obscures some vital considerations. Three points may be noted, howsoever briefly, in this connection. First, even museums in the largest cities in India are often lonely places, shorn of visitors. On a good Sunday morning, when the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, or the British Museum will invariably be flooded with tourists, the National Museum in Delhi will almost certainly have more guards than visitors; the slightly smaller museums, when they are not in a decrepit state, are only open, as it were, on demand. The museum is a site of culture with a particular history and a bounded conception of space, and its very existence depends on certain registers of the gaze. Much of museum history has been written as though the archetype of the museum visitor is some universal museum-loving culture vulture type who inhabits the metropolitan cities of the West. What is required but not delivered here is an an-archic reading of the presumption of the arche-type. Secondly, the trouble with monuments and statuary is that they are often visibly invisible; moreover, their signification is wholly unstable, and it is not in India alone that the public statue has often become a place marker: the spot around which the fruit vendor sets up a stall, a useful point of reference in issuing directions, or the adda where the town gossips fuel the rumor mills. The most striking feature of monuments, Robert Musil wrote, is that that “are so conspicuously inconspicuous. There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment.”15 Thirdly, as Moffat must surely know, the remoteness of “religious” sites has never been a hindrance to the Indian pilgrim or even tourist: leaving aside the numerous great dhams, or pilgrimage centers, often in the remotest places, all the more so to test the diligence, piety, and faith of the devout follower of the faith, even somewhat lesser sites in otherwise obscure places receive thousands of visitors every day. The dargah (shrine) of the 11th century warrior saint, Ghazi Miyan, whose “afterlife” is the subject of an extraordinary book by Shahid Amin, attracts thousands of visitors every day.16 Yet, situated in northern Bihar, just south of the India-Nepal border, it is a considerable distance from any mid-sized city, let alone a metropolitan center. However appreciable the extent of Bhagat Singh’s appeal across divergent political constituencies, it is clear that he has never quite been assimilated into the pantheon of gods—a far cry, in this respect, from Gandhi’s frequent proximity and neighborliness to them in the mythopoeic imagination of Indians.17

Moffat seeks to apprehend Bhagat Singh’s “vitality” through a “spectral” presence that enjoins the living to enlist in the fight that still “continues,” “cajoling” them “to recognize the lingering ‘something-to-be-done’ in the present” (5). He adroitly enough omits any substantive discussion of what many commentators, eager to pronounce upon Bhagat Singh’s enduring popularity, unfailingly point out: in the year 2002 alone, three feature films in Hindi were produced on his life and exploits (4).18 Just as predictably, they omit to mention that two of the films, 23 March 1931: Shaheed and Shaheed-e-Azam descended into complete obscurity at once; the third, The Legend of Bhagat Singh, which won the National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi, nevertheless bombed at the box office and did not recover even half of its budget. Speaking of the first two films, an analyst in the movie industry in Mumbai was candid enough to state, “The craze and excitement for Bhagat Singh existed only in the film trade and failed to translate into box office euphoria at the turnstiles, as a result of which both films failed to generate any interest.”19 Moffat’s awareness of this inconsequence extends to his own sites of culture: the memorials are deserted, the Lahore demonstrations bring together a dozen or two people, and eight months after Bhagat Singh’s statue was unveiled in the Lok Sabha in the presence of the President of India, the Prime Minister, and major politicians, only one person showed up at the celebrations held in commemoration of Martyrs Day (220). He describes his book as chasing that “spectral excess produced at the intersection of sacrifice and politics” (11), and at one level the book is an elegant and thorough demonstration of the various idioms in which this excess is produced; yet, there is another kind of positivism in wholly disowning the “real”—as he says, the “objective of the book is not to present another account of the ‘real’ Bhagat Singh—and chasing an excess, all the while presupposing that the spectral is the only real. Interesting as Bhagat Singh’s life may be, from Moffat’s vantagepoint, it is but the backdrop to something more: to the awareness of politics as struggle, to a hunger for the spectral excess “produced at the intersection of sacrifice and politics” which so palpably demonstrates that his “death” remains, “in an important sense, irreducible” (13).

The “spectral excess”, the “commitment to inconsequence” which, citing Leela Gandhi, he avers “reveals an attachment to minor forms of politics severed from teleological events”, and the all-too-easy disavowal of any interest in presenting “another account of the ‘real’ Bhagat Singh” leads to moral quandaries. Let us consider here Moffat’s treatment of the murder of John P. Saunders, an Assistant Superintendent of Police in Lahore. That city had been the site, on 30 October 1928, of a large demonstration against the imminent arrival of the Simon Commission, appointed by the British to consider constitutional reforms for the administration of India. Not one Indian was deemed worthy of sitting on the commission: reason enough for uproar and outrage. The demonstrators, gathered in large numbers and confronted by a police line that they sought to breach, were lathi-charged; felled by blows rained upon him, the so-called “Lion of the Punjab,” Lala Lajpat Rai, succumbed to his injuries some days later. The death of this nationalist icon enraged the nation, and Bhagat Singh and his comrades were determined to seek revenge. A plot was hatched to assassinate the Superintendent of Police, James Scott; however, in a case of mistaken identity—some variation, we might even say, of the legendary Indian folktale of ‘transposed heads’—they ended up killing Saunders.20 An Indian constable, Chanan Singh, who gave the assassins—Hari Shivaram Rajguru, Chandrasekhar Azad, and Bhagat Singh—chase was also killed.

“Amid the chaos”, engendered by the recognition, a split moment too late, that the wrong man had been targeted, “there was some room for farce” (80). The murderers—Moffat never characterizes them as such—had goofed up, perhaps an inadvertent and perforce necessary testament to the colonial rendering of Indians as careless and inefficient. Why call such a killing, void of any element of the comical, a “farce”, unless of course Moffat is on cue to deliver an exoneration of the killing—which he does. One historian has argued that “this act of terror did not get much support” among the public and she notes that Lajpat Rai’s own Lahore weekly, The People, condemned the killing as “nothing but desperate action.”21 Moffat, on the contrary, argues that “this censure was not as monolithic as historians like Neeti Nair have argued” (82). Let us leave aside for the present Moffat’s descent into a mode of interpretation that he purports to disavow: “The objective of the book is not to present another account of the ‘real’ Bhagat Singh nor to judge the validity of existing claims over others” (3, emphasis added). For Moffat, as for nearly everyone else writing on Bhagat Singh, the exoneration is redeemed by the fact that a poster that appeared under the name of Balraj—alias of Bhagat Singh—at various places in the city bore this message: “Sorry for the death of a man. But in this man has died the representative of an institution which is so cruel, lowly and so base that it must be abolished. In this man has died an agent of the British authority—the most tyrannical of government of governments in the world.”22 Maia Ramnath admits “this sounds callous”, but with alacrity moves to quash any queasiness that a reader may experience with the observation that “his point was that the true target was not the man but the system.”23 More than one genocide has been orchestrated at the helm of this bland truism.

It would be puerile to object that the British government was far from being the most “tyrannical” government in the world, just as Bhagat Singh would scarcely be the first nationalist to have engaged in such excess. But to understand the gravity of the ethical problems at hand, we must hone in on the details that Moffat either entirely obscures or grossly underplays. We are not told that Rajguru, a crack shot, killed Saunders at once: as Kuldip Nayar reminds us, “one bullet had done the job.” But that was not enough for Bhagat Singh, who then pumped six bullets into the corpse—no doubt, we will be told, to ensure that Saunders would not rise from the dead. It is Bhagat Singh the revenant that inspires Moffat, but the martyr himself had no use for the revenant. Moffat renders this scene, a staple of the Hollywood gangster film that often swirls around the figure of the manic and deranged mob man, in positively anodyne language, “He was shot once by Shivaram Rajguru, and then again by Bhagat Singh” (78). Moffat does admit to another distinct peculiarity of the entire affair without probing its implications: since the posters that were almost immediately plastered around town justifying the murder had been prepared beforehand, but “the wrong man” had been killed, “the revolutionaries scrambled to amend” them by substituting the name of Saunders for Scott (80).

Since the common theoretical paraphernalia of the day—Derrida, Agamben, Heidegger, Ranciere, and such—is so much putty in Moffat’s hands, one might have thought that he would pay some attention to the politics of erasure, or more precisely to what Derrida (following Heidegger) calls sous rature (“under erasure”).24 The live man was struck out, the dead put in his place; but the dead man was not quite dead, as his trace remained. Let us put it in plain language: So it wasn’t “the wrong man” after all that was killed: in such a revolution, is there ever a wrong man? Indeed, is there a man at all behind the victim, or only a cipher: “But in this man has died the representative . . . In this man has died the agent of the British authority in India . . .”25 That “sorry” with which the message on the poster begins is perfunctory, almost mechanical: there is no hint that Bhagat Singh felt any remorse, nor is there any reason to believe that, reading him something like a century later, Moffat was struck by the absence of such remorse. One of the more enduring images of Bhagat Singh in the gargantuan hagiography around him, from which Moffat stirs not more than a jot, has him reading Lenin just before he goes to the gallows: a necessary nod both to the wholesome notion of the ‘eternal student’ and to the undying fidelity of Bhagat Singh to the idea of revolution. But Bhagat Singh was evidently reading Lenin and others of the revolutionary flock for several years before that, since, after expressing cursory atonement for the killing of Saunders/Scott, he had no recourse but to the fall for the argument that “the sacrifice of individuals at the altar of the Revolution that will bring freedom to all and make the exploitation of man by man impossible, is inevitable.”26

Saunders and Scott could easily be substituted for each other, just as easily both of them could be substituted for other agents of British imperialism. But if Bhagat Singh is to be characterized as a “revolutionary”, what precisely is so revolutionary about a posture that makes his views indistinguishable from those of the very state against which he was pledged to fight to the end? A decade earlier, during what came to be termed the “Punjab Disturbances”, two boys at a school in Kasur were identified as having taken part in the riots in that town. They were duly arrested and sentenced, and this would have sufficed had the colonial regime been operating under the majesty of the “rule of law”.27 Submissiveness requires a regime of what the English in India, evoking the ugly memory of German conduct in the Low Countries during World War I, called “frightfulness” (schrecklichkeit): thus the principal of the school was asked to send another six boys, not implicated in the disturbances, to the authorities on the understanding that they would bear punishment for the entire school. These six boys, selected rather randomly, were sent back, and it was ordered that the six biggest boys from the school be sent to the police station, where they were given six stripes each. The unimpeachable logic of this transaction is conveyed in the exchange that took place between Colonel McRae, Commanding Officer, Kasur, and the Disorders Inquiry Committee, a characteristically English modality of governance:

“Whatever may be the political atom in India,” the Economist had famously declared on 27 February 1909, “it is certainly not the individual of Western democratic theory, but the community of some sort.”29 A pervasive colonial sociology of knowledge informs such a view. But just what kind of sociology and politics of knowledge informs the readings of Bhagat Singh advanced by Moffat? He certainly marshals an impressive array of sources—the writings of European theorists, postcolonial critics, some subaltern history, some facets of the historiography of Indian nationalism—and is equally attentive to folklore, the visual turn in history and anthropology, and what until quite recently was dismissed by most scholars as ephemera, including bazaar prints, pamphlets, and posters. Yet, crucially, it remains unclear what politics of knowledge Moffat embraces, a politics that perforce would have necessitated a more detailed treatment of the spectre of Gandhi in Bhagat Singh’s own life. By this, as should be amply clear from my reference to the “spectre of Gandhi”, I do not mean to invoke at all the vexed and tiresome question, which Bhagat Singh’s acolytes and devotees cannot desist from entertaining, of whether Gandhi did enough, or anything, to save Bhagat Singh from the gallows.30 Gandhi appears here and there in Moffat’s book, but he is something of a shadowy presence, or, as has happened too often in the literature on Bhagat Singh, the counterpoint to his life.

It is seriously to be doubted, however, whether any reading of the life or even afterlife of Bhagat Singh can yield any real insights without an acknowledgement of the dialectical and dialogic presence of Gandhi in the young martyr’s life. We may take note of a few points, at least in passing. There is the question of sartorial affect: it may be said of Gandhi that he began his adult life in London vastly overdressed and, by the canons of customary notions of modest clothing, ended it vastly underdressed. Bhagat Singh was not similarly committed to a metaphysics of nakedness, even if I am inclined to see the noose around his neck as a Gandhian gesture of reducing one’s life to zero (sunyata), but the Gandhi topi (cap) and Bhagat Singh’s fedora both belong to the semiotic register of resistance. Similarly, Gandhi was the master of the fast and could, as commentators noted with marvel and often exasperation, bring the country to a standstill with his fasts, but Bhagat Singh himself made quite a splash around India with his hunger-strike (95–97). Gandhi’s distinction between fasting (which belongs to the grammar of satyagraha, soul-force in common parlance but more accurately ‘firmness in truth’) and hunger-striking (which partakes of the vocabulary of duragraha, ‘firmness in wrong-doing’) may appear spurious to many, and was probably lost upon Bhagat Singh, but what is striking is that Moffat uses the words interchangeably and shows little if any awareness of the very different ways in which both situated the body in the body politic and in the politics of the self. It is unlikely—even keeping in mind the other trajectory of the politics of hunger-striking among Irish Republicans with which Bhagat Singh may have had some familiarity—that, without the precedence of Gandhi’s fasts, Bhagat Singh would have engaged in the theatrics of hunger-striking.

The thick lore that surrounds the lives of Gandhi and Bhagat Singh would suggest to most that they should be viewed, following Pinney and (though, as I have suggested, this is far from being unequivocally clear) Moffat, as the antithesis of each other. One story has it that the young Bhagat was all of three years old when his father and a fellow sojourner in revolutionary politics found him digging in the field outside the family home. When Bhagat was asked what he was planting, he replied: “I am sowing guns, so that we will be able to get rid of the British” (23). Another story, accepted by most biographers and given a prominent place in Bollywood films such as the aforementioned The Legend of Bhagat Singh, places the young Bhagat, now eleven years old, at the site of Jallianwala Bagh the day after General Dyer and his troops mowed down thousands of Indians and left at least 379 dead. Bhagat collected, writes his biographer Hansraj Rabhar, “a thimbleful of soil which was coloured with the blood of martyrs” and applied some to his forehead while preserving the rest in a glass vial (23–24). Some say that he took a vow to avenge this atrocity.

We can, and here one must agree entirely with Moffat, let the positivist-minded historians worry about whether these stories are apocryphal or not. What cannot be doubted, more to the point, is that the lore around Gandhi, which need not be rehearsed at this juncture, could not be more different: the idea of seeking revenge, and similarly of fetishizing the blood of martyrs, was utterly alien to his way of being in the world. But, as Moffat suggests in passing, and as I have myself pointed out, there are many points of intersection in their lives and much that, as Bhagat Singh’s dramatic idea of exploding a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly suggests, might have drawn each to the other. It has been argued, quite rightly, that Bhagat Singh and his comrades desired that they should be taken captive. The idea was that the British would launch a prosecution: Bhagat Singh must have learned something about how publicity can act as the oxygen of a nationalist movement; he doubtless also understood, from his study of nationalism, how Gandhi and many others had mastered the dramaturgy of the courtroom and turned that quintessential British space against the colonizers themselves. In throwing the bomb, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt carefully picked a spot within the Assembly Hall where it would explode without likely injuring anyone; nevertheless, to commit such an act was to invite a death sentence. Indeed, no one was injured. Bhagat Singh, it may be said, had had enough of killing. There may have been a Gandhi in that Bhagat Singh who threw a bomb with the express intention of not killing anyone. There is something more profound at stake here: If violence is inescapably present to the practitioner of nonviolence at every turn, we should also think of the nonviolence within some forms of violence that signals the reverence for life. I should like to think that, in the end, it was the spectre of Gandhi with which we might start probing the spectral presence of Bhagat Singh in the Indian imaginary.

Vinay Lal is a writer, cultural critic, blogger, and Professor of History & Asian American Studies at UCLA. He writes widely on Indian history, global politics, historiography, Gandhi and histories of nonviolence, cinema, and public culture. His eighteen authored and edited books include Empire of Knowledge (Pluto Press, 2002) and The Fury of Covid-19 (Pan Macmillan, 2020).