Azaadi for All | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Azaadi for All | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by S Irfan Habib |Published: May 18, 2019 2:40:57 am

Azaadi for All

An exhaustive documentation of the intellectual legacy of Bhagat Singh

The Bhagat Singh Reader

The Bhagat Singh Reader
Chaman Lal (ed)
HarperCollins
672 pages
Rs 799

Chaman Lal has spent many years documenting the history of revolutionary struggle, particularly the profile of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. He is one of the few who see Bhagat Singh as an ideologue, and not just a nationalist martyr. It is now more or less established that Bhagat Singh was a prolific writer, an insightful thinker and a sensitive young nationalist who left behind a rich intellectual legacy. In recent years, we have seen a good collection of his writings in Hindi, but a more exhaustive collection in English was awaited — a collection not only of his writings but also his letters to family and friends. Though many of the writings included here are available in other collections as well, quite a few letters and documents are accessible for the first time.

The Bhagat Singh Reader displays the extensive and diverse writings of Bhagat Singh within a short active life of just seven years. He wrote in four languages — Urdu, Hindi, English and Punjabi — but was most proficient in Urdu and English. Chaman Lal also says that Bhagat Singh understood Bengali very well, and could recite Kazi Nazrul Islam and Rabindranath Tagore fluently in Bengali. He wrote more than 130 documents, including letters, pamphlets, articles, manifestos and court statements, which run into nearly 400 pages. No mean achievement for someone who spent most of his active life under police surveillance and the last two years in prison.

This volume reaffirms the fact that Bhagat Singh not only sacrificed his life, like many did before him and after him, but he also had a vision of independent India. During the past few years, it has almost become routine to appropriate Bhagat Singh as a nationalist icon, while not much is talked about his nationalist vision. This collection will reaffirm the fact that Bhagat Singh was one of those rare intellectuals who visualised an India where 98 per cent would rule instead of an elite 2 per cent. His azaadi was not limited to the expulsion of the British. Rather, he desired azaadi from poverty, untouchability, communal strife and other forms of discrimination and exploitation.