The glory of cause: mythical renditions of Bhagat Singh

ADITI

Zaalim falak ne lakh mitane ki fikr ki
Har dil me aks reh gayatasveer reh gayi.1

IN the larger historical narrative of India, Bhagat Singh has always been somewhat of an enigma. In the official narrative of the freedom struggle, his presence is often shunned to a footnote, an aberration of radical actions in what is heralded as a non-violent struggle for independence. That being said, his exclusion from the official narrative is not reflected in the popular conception of him. His popular iconography presents him as an alternative future lost, a man symbolic with a higher ideal of justice, a martyr lost in time, betrayed by history, who now presents the tipping point for an exciting ‘what if’ moment. While History’s ignorance may have been an act of betrayal to his narrative, his character has gradually grown way past the limited bounds of historical comprehension.

To paraphrase Piyush Mishra, who wrote a theatrical rendition of his life,2 he is the one character who does not have any controversies as to his greatness, be it in India or Pakistan. One way to explain this can be his short political career of seven years, and the way the possibilities attached to his counter narrative cannot be sullied in the complexity of reality. Bhagat Singh’s appeal has a mythic dimension to it, a heroic symbol that transforms in the meaning it generates.

As Chris Moffat rightly argues, the revolutionary functions, more properly as a Sorelian3 myth, as a ‘body of images’ which brings together ‘the noblest, deepest and most moving sentiments’ to animate struggle in the present. The struggle in question can take diverse, even conflicting forms, often stirring the debate as to the ‘real’ content of his life. Who can lay a legitimate claim to the glory of his sacrifice? Who can claim fidelity to the fantastic narrative that his name resonates with? Despite the conflicting contents however, the attempt to align his narrative to the ‘isms’ of the day does not seize. You seek his validation. You seek his support. You want to lay your claim to the glory of his heroic deed.

The conflict claims eventually present very fragmented meaning to his narrative, each holding on to a part that is comfortable to their cause. However, while his historiography discredits him on account of violence, the questions remain as to how his different renditions reconcile with it. There can be little doubts about the sheer transcendence of Bhagat Singh in the socio-political sphere of India. Has the violence inherent in his narrative, however, also transcended with it?

The first rendition to be discussed here is the most overt one: The Bhagat Singh of Action. The image I would like to invoke here is the cover art of the Amar Chitra Katha on Bhagat Singh4 – cover photo of a man in an iconic trilby hat, accompanied by an accomplice carrying pamphlets, swinging a bomb in the assembly hall. There is a serious look on his face, very masculine, very aggressive. The bomb can be seen to have exploded in the middle of the hall, with the people, panicked in their expression, running for shelter. Thesesemiotics of action in Bhagat Singh’s narrative are the ones invoked in popular imagination. A messiah with the courage to act against the tyrant and avenge the masses. This is the Bhagat Singh of teatime conversations on the failure of the state. This is the Bhagat Singh of gossip.

Bhagat Singh in this rendition is often invoked as an anecdote for stagnation. In the historical context, Bhagat Singh steps in as a contrast to Gandhi, a counter narrative of masculinity and power that could have been. In the political context, the inadequacies of the present, the discontent from the ever-sustaining complexity of reality finds expression in his drastic actions. The pistol shots and the bomb here become a counter narrative of an aggressive, overt response, something that stirs the calm waters of the status quo. The angry young man on the afore-mentioned cover then, which incidentally was published in 1981 in the nascent years of Indira Gandhi’s second term, becomes the hero for your cause. He resonates with your anger and discontent, and of course, he is on your side. The historical underpinnings of ideology do not matter. He dared to act for the greater good.

Violence here plays the central role in creating Bhagat Singh, his association with the bomb and the bullet becoming the creation myth of his appeal. The spectacle that the violence creates in his narrative, the sheer audacity of shooting a British police officer, or bombing the legislative assembly is the definitional aspect of ‘revolution’ in this narrative. In an imperfect system operated by corrupted, tyrant individuals, the bomb and the bullet present an opportunity to start over. It invokes a sense of vigilante justice where the established order cannot serve the cause of the masses. It presents a site for the disillusioned and discontented to claim power.Violence takes the central stage here to establish a new ‘order’ of dominance by annihilating the present chaos.

There is an inherent duality in the conception of violence here, with the ‘evil’ located in a certain other. Bhagat Singh’s narrative legitimizes violence on this tyrant ‘other’ through an act of cleansing, an act of retribution even. The ethic of violence here, the legitimacy, is sought by claiming fidelity to the ‘greater good’ that may stem from it. That greater good here inherently stems from, and resonates with the self, and mutates as the perceived enemy transforms – taking a cultural dimension, a religious dimension, or a purely nationalistic dimension.

Moffat’s analysis of the cinematic rendition of this conception in Rang De Basanti is quite telling here, which locates a middle class fantasy about corruption in India in its narrative.5Bhagat Singh provides an easy possibility of resolving the complexity of these questions – an action man for quick solutions, avenging the Indian masses. The bomb and the bullet become the sites of power, masked as courage. Action, in this sense, becomes a desperate act to usher in a better time. What that ‘better time’ would mean displays a plurality of different singularities, each locating its redemption in action against a specific ‘other’.

The Action Man narrative claims the imagery of violence in Bhagat Singh’s narrative, to an extent that his character loses relevance without it. There is a distinct physical dimension to this image, in that the body is the site of action. It is where the evil is located, it is where the response generates, and it is the site where the heroic deed of the bomb and the bullet would be done. The second rendition of The Bhagat Singh of the Idealogues flips this attention to the mind instead. The central aspect, in this narrative are his ideas and his political leanings, and his writings become the site to draw his narrative.

The creation of Bhagat Singh at this juncture brings in the question of authenticity: the ‘real’ Bhagat Singh is defined through his intellectual experience – the books he read, the ideologies he endorsed, the articles and statements he wrote. The chaos and conflicts in this exercise pose a challenge, but an attempt is made to construct a coherent young man who, on one hand is frozen in the structures and specificities of his time, and on the other hand still has a stake in the political dialogues of the country.The ideology of Bhagat Singh presents an opportunity to claim ownership – the terms ‘Socialist’, ‘Communist’ and ‘Revolution’, anecdotes and parallels featuring Lenin and Marx are invoked to claim him as an essential leftist ideologue.6

Bhagat Singh’s relevance in the present is then invoked by asking and simultaneously answering a surreal question – What would Bhagat Singh do? Would he be a Marxist? Would he join the Communist Party of Independent India? Would he have transformed it? Would he support the incumbent government?7 It is a strange exercise of historiography, combining a sense of objectivity of source, seeking authenticity, and the sheer subjectivity of the character and his voice in the present. Bhagat Singh becomes an ideologue, a historical character to be followed, a promise that could have been. He is claimed as an authentic pioneer of the left, their own moment of historical relevance, and that they alone canclaim the exclusive rights of ‘properly’ remembering and following his ideal.

The emphasis placed on his written word for creation of the ideologue becomes allegorically relevant on two counts. First, much like the essays and articles it is sources from, the character so created personifies the prose of Bhagat Singh’s narrative. It focuses on the denotations of his words and his ideas, at least to the extent that they do not conflict with the narrative being built around it. The poetry, the humour of his character is not able to pierce the veil of ideological seriousness constructed around him. He is made into an essentially political figure in this exercise, with the dimensions of the ‘self’ lost to the cause of ideology.

Second, the alleged authenticity of Bhagat Singh generated from this exercise is completely divorced from the idea of violence. The pen and paper acts as an exercise of deception – a trick almost, to hide away the violence in his narrative. In the construction of authenticity is a request to look beyond the bullet and the bomb, into his ideas, as if the two conceptions cannot coexist. In a way, the significance of foregrounding his ideas and obscuring the violence can be understood in the context of the aforementioned Action Man narrative, which, though plural in its invocation, appears to be ontologically impoverished. Violence in such a form just needs a convincing enough rhetoric to turn into a deathly, genocidal force. As such, the ideologue does introduce a sense of nuance to this perception. Bhagat Singh’ s own words are invoked to critique the mindless acts of violence just for the sake of violence. However, in generating a critique to violence8 from the writings of Bhagat Singh, in however fragmented manner, the left fails to engage with it.

There is a fear of falling into the old historical categories of radicalism at best and terrorism at worst, which deters such engagement. Conventional history has long ignored Bhagat Singh’s narrative on these very counts. In reclaiming Bhagat Singh as an ideologue, the left tries to make a clean break from such semiotics which may discredit not just Bhagat Singh, but the entire left movement as its intellectual descendent. It claims a sense of relevance in mainstream politics Political aspirations need to operate in the preset ‘fronts’ of perception.9 It needs to function within the larger political order. So, Bhagat Singh is constructed to be a force of change within the system. An ideology to learn from, to derive inspiration from, to aggregate under. Violence is something that is outdated in this narrative, a phase that his ideas outgrew, and an element that is no longer relevant to his memory. As such, the ideologue Bhagat Singh becomes a constrained myth, limited by a general ideology but flexible enough to overcome any contradictions in the present.

A corollary of this conceptualization of Bhagat Singh is that the element of struggle against a stagnant order is qualified with ideological labels. It may even be argued that the state, as the manifestation of a stable, and often stagnant order, is uneasy with the Bhagat Singh’s idea of revolution and struggle against any outdated ‘good order’. As a result, his iconography becomes an ideal resource for a political campaign and call for cohesion but is discarded once the struggling faction gains stability and power.

‘The Ideologue’ becomes another instance, in sum, which tries to take ownership of his narrative as an act of seeking legitimacy. Though it is pertinent to mention here that the myth of the ideologue also, to some extent, legitimizes the character of Bhagat Singh in the process, bringing forth the richness of ideological context to the imagery of his actions. However, it also has an effect of binding him to a singular dimension. It forgets that the categories of communism, socialism, Lenin and Marx are to an extent temporally fixed in his narrative. They represent the possibilities of his time, rather than being the creation myths of his story. It addresses what it sets out to do, create a potent political resource from his story. However, the poetry in his narrative is lost in the process. The depth of endurance, love, pain, and courage that his narrative touches need a different language to comprehend, which political ideology may not be able to facilitate.

To comprehend the transcendental elements of Bhagat Singh, to understand the poetry in his narrative, the analytical dimension of mythology can be of relevance. Looking at Bhagat Singh’s story as a mythological hero’s journey, we could locate the potential of the narrative in absorbing the consciousness of the masses, rather than a fragmented narrative being absorbed, or claimed by a faction. Campbell defines a mythic hero to be someone who has done something beyond the normal range of experience, someone who has sacrificed himself for something bigger than himself.10 Bhagat Singh squarely fits the description, making the gallows central image of comprehension in this rendition.

The mythical metaphor of journey of the hero gives a sense of the metaphysical, as well as wholeness to the narrative, where the elements defining the self, and its transformation also gain significance. We are able to humanize Bhagat Singh, and witness the humour, the liveliness of his character, which further accentuates his heroic deed. We are able to locate the semiotic congruence of the transformation of consciousness of his self, and his heroic project, which transforms the larger context.

In this rendition, ideology enriches the narrative through its connotations of the possibility of transformation, and emancipation for the weaker masses. Borrowing Campbell’s terminology, Lenin in this context embodies the lure of the feather, an invitation, an experiment of hope that lures our hero into action. Lenin, to that extent, actually presents himself as a myth, within the mythical narrative of Bhagat Singh. The ideology of the left is the new possibility of his time, but his action, his consciousness is essentially moved by the sentiments of emancipation that the ideology connotes, which transcends the temporal political categorizations.

So, our hero leaves for the realm of the extra-ordinary, courting his cause. What becomes crucial here is that his journey becomes a struggle for the sake of his cause, a new possibility. His actions, his struggle in this instance, are not directed to instigate violence against a perceived enemy to annihilate it. They are directed to expose and struggle against the tyranny of the perceived stagnant order. For that, he offers his self, his body, the ultimate sacrifice, for something that he considers being much greater than him. This heroic deed, however, needs to be a spectacle, a theatrical event. Bhagat Singh looks at his sacrifice as a rite of initiation. In some way, he is looking to create a myth for others to make this journey after him. As such, he orchestrates the theatrical dimension of his heroic deed himself.

How do we reconcile the role of violence in this narrative? Is it a part of the journey that the hero outgrows? Is it an act of confrontation, a mani-festation of struggle? What would be the mythology of violence here? First, an absolute position with respect to violence in course of struggle cannot be taken. It cannot be completely delegitimized from the narrative of struggle. The imagery of the bullet and the bomb in Bhagat Singh’s narrative need to be analyzed in the context of Zizek’s conceptualization of endemic violence11 within the perceived order, the violence within the legitimized systems which the bullet and the bomb are accused of disrupting. In this equation, the normative binary of violence and nonviolence is negated, as it recognizes the dangers within the perpetuation of a violent order, even with a peaceful aesthetic on the outside. In the face of such violence, as Zizek warns, ‘sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do’.12

As such, disruption becomes essential. However, the myth of violence here needs a sense of ethic to highlight the dichotomy between its humanity and its tyranny. Violence in the hands of the tyrant becomes an inhuman act, an act of oppression. Violence as a stimulant of transformation, as a challenge to the tyrant, needs an acknowledgement of the humanity of the self and the other. It needs a sense of non-duality in its understanding, a morality inherent in its destruction.

The Ghadar movement, commenting on an assassination attempt on the Viceroy, invoke the question of morality of the bomb, when Lala Hardayal proclaims:13

‘Who can describe the moral power of the bomb? It is a concentrated moral dynamite. When the strong and cunning in the pride of their power parade their glory before their helpless victims, when the rich and naughty set themselves on a pedestal and ask their slaves to fall down before them and worship them, when the wicked ones on the Earth seem exalted to the sky and nothing appears to withstand their might, then in that dark hour, for the glory of humanity comes the bomb, which lays the tyrant in the dust. It tells all the cowering slaves that he who sits enthroned as God is a mere man like them. Then, in that hour of shame, a bomb preaches the eternal truth of human equality and sends proud superiors and Viceroys from the palace and the howdah to the grave and the hospital. Then, in that tense moment, when human nature is ashamed of itself, the bomb declares the vanity of power and pomp and redeems us from our own baseness.

‘How great we feel when someone does the heroic deed? We share in his moral power. We rejoice in his assertion of human equality and dignity.’

The bomb, in this myth of violence, acts as an equalizer. It is essentially a means to confront power through the violent chaos the bomb creates. The bomb is your voice. The bang of the bomb, the violence it creates has a cathartic value for the oppressed. The very act of asserting power is the moral deed, as it equates the oppressed with the oppressor, even if momentarily. But the violence of the bomb in this sense is ontologically impoverished. As the noise of the bomb subsides, the reality remains. Bomb as an act of confrontation can be modeled as a chaotic disruption by the order of the day. However, the tyrant is truly helpless when the chaos in his legitimized order is illustrated.

Bhagat Singh seeks to expose the violence within this perceived order through his heroic deed, not just confront it. In this quest, violence of the bullet and the bomb, the murder of Saunders and the explosion in the Assembly, become the first declaration, the first act of the theatrical performance, that draws your attention towards the unfolding spectacle. The confrontation happens again and again, in the assembly, in the court room in course of their trial, in the jail in course of their hunger strikes. The semiotics are telling – the hero is in the belly of the whale.14The act of sacrifice becomes pivotal here, as it strips away the dominance from the tyrant’s power and violence. The powerful imperial government is rendered powerless as Bhagat Singh and his comrades ‘dare all earthly power to curb their spirit’.15

As the violence of the state unravels in more brazen forms, from the force-feeding during the 114 days hunger strike, to the transgression of their own categorizations on law and justice through countless ordinances, the determinants of the narrative change. The inhuman violence of the state is juxtaposed against the violence of the revolutionaries engaged in for the cause of humanity, devoid of hatred or individual enmity.16The spectacle of power of the tyrant loses its impact, as the climactic act of the revolutionaries’ sacrifice increases in its potency with the violence subjected on them.17The obscenity of violence of the oppressor in his narrative does not end even at the gallows, as the bodies of the martyred Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru are chopped into pieces and are covertly burned on the banks of theSutlej. In an apparent act of erasure, however, the tyrannical violence again unravels a spectacle, a different imagination of the brutality of the execution etched in every memory.

The myth of violence in Bhagat Singh’s narrative, thus, is etched into the mythology of his sacrifice. Hence, the ethics and morality of his violence needs to be reflected upon in the broader context of the themes of commitment, courage, sacrifice and struggle. The appropriation of his appeal, and the glory of his sacrifice has been engaged in widely, across the political spectrums. It is stunning in itself that a person with a political life of seven years can still claim a stake in the socio-political narratives of contemporary India. However, as the appeal and possibilities of Bhagat Singh remain relevant, so do the re-imaginations and reflections that his narrative fosters. The nuances and complexities of violence in his mythical construction, in particular, need a deeper engagement and meaning. It needs to be understood that violence was neither incidental to his journey, nor definitional. It is embedded, instead, in a transcendental struggle for ‘redemption of humanity’18 driven by a vow of truth and sacrifice.

Footnotes:

1. As quoted in Sudheer Vidyarthi, Amar Shahid Chandrashekhar Azad.Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007, p. 264.

2. Piyush Mishra, Gagan Damama Bajyo.Rajkamal Paperbacks, June 2017. The play was first staged in 1994.

3. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 1908.

4. Amar Chitra Katha, Vol 608.

5. Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance. Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 167.

6. SeeArindam Sen, ‘Learn from Bhagat Singh the Communist Pioneer’, October 2007, available at http://archive.cpiml.org/liberation/year_2007/october/bhagat_singh.htm

7. See, for e.g. D. Raja, ‘Uphold Legacy of Bhagat Singh – Defeat BJP and its Allies’, 18 March 2021, available at https://www.communistparty.in/post/uphold-legacy-of-bhagat-singh-defeat-bjp-and-its-allies

8. Amarjit Chandan as quoted inChris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance. Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 135.

9. Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.Anchor Books, Random House, New York, 1959.

10. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth. Doubleday Books, New York, 1988.

11. Slavoj Zizek, Violence. Picador, New York, 2008.

12. Ibid.

13. Lala Hardayal, ‘The Delhi Bomb’, Yugantar Circular,1913, available at https://www.saada.org/item/20130125-1245

14. To understand the mythical underpinnings of ‘The Belly of the Whale’, see John Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

15. The People (Lahore), 13 June 1929. As cited in Moffat 2019, Supra note 3.

16. The pamphlets distributed after Saunders Murder and Assembly Bomb Case offer clear insights into this argument. For instance, in the pamphlet taking the responsibility of Saunders murder, it is stated, ‘we are sorry to have killed a man, but this man was part of a cruel, despicable and unjust system.’ In the leaflets dropped in the Assembly, it is stated, ‘we who attach so great a sanctity to human life…’ This argument can also be traced to the statements given by Bhagat Singh in the Assembly Trial. Available in The Bhagat Singh Reader (ed Chaman Lal) Harper Collins, Delhi, 2019.

17. Latest illustration of this dichotomy has been the farmer’s protests on the borders of Delhi, where we saw images of the farmers feeding langar to the very police officers who lathi charged them. Interestingly, the iconography of Bhagat Singh was also extensively invoked in the protests.

18. See Bhagat Singh’s Statement in the Sessions Court, Delhi, 6 June 1929.