The unknown lives of young Indian revolutionaries
Ram Prasad Bismil’s autobiography debunks some of the myths around the daredevil image of youthful freedom fighters
Only weeks ago, reporters covering state-level Delhi politics were filling column inches about a storm-in-a-teacup controversy. The Aam Aadmi Party, recently removed from power following the assembly elections, claimed that the new victors, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had removed a portrait of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh from the chief minister’s office. The BJP replied with a quick denial and hastily shot video rebuttals. To the unschooled observer, it might seem strange that circa 2025, Indian politicians are devoting so much time to the symbolic significance of Bhagat Singh. But that’s the grip on the imagination that Bhagat Singh and the other revolutionaries of that era like Chandra Shekhar Azad, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru, among others, continue to have.
I was powerfully reminded of this phenomenon while reading A Glimpse of My Life by Ram Prasad “Bismil" (1897-1927), translated into English by Awadhesh Tripathi (the original Hindi memoir is called Nij Jeevan ki ek Chhata). The book is a part of the “Chronicles" series of Indian non-fiction conceived by the Ashoka Centre for Translation at Ashoka University. Bismil was a poet, writer, translator and front-line revolutionary involved in the famous Kakori train robbery of 9 August 1925 alongside the likes of Azad, Ashfaqullah Khan and Rajendra Lahiri. The group looted bags full of tax money collected by the British government from a train travelling from Shahjahanpur to Lucknow. Years later Bismil was captured, convicted and eventually hanged for his role in the operation.
A Glimpse of My Life presents his life story in a linear, largely chronological order. The book begins from his childhood in Tomarghat village near Gwalior, the midsection moves on to his youth and revolutionary exploits in the 1920s, and the final section is a kind of manifesto-cum-prison-diary, peppered with occasional verses of both mystic and nationalistic poetry.
To my mind, this book is a reminder of why the writings of Indian revolutionaries form a sort of alt-history of the interwar period in India. Specifically, the writings of Bismil, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, among others, bust three major myths, which have been sustained and encouraged by mass-media depictions, such as the countless biopics produced by Hindi and Punjabi-language cinema, an honourable exception being Raj Kumar Santoshi’s sincere and kinetic The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002).
The fallacious idea that Indian revolutionaries were primarily youthful daredevils whose greatest feats were more physical than intellectual. The fallacious idea that Indian revolutionaries were monomaniacally focused on expelling the British, and therefore had no plans for “what came after" for the newly-independent India in terms of laws and policies. The fallacious idea that Indian revolutionaries, on account of their relative lack of experience, were not sufficiently cognizant of the fault lines within Indian societies, especially with respect to gender, caste and religion.
To the first point, let us consider Bismil: throughout A Glimpse of My Life, there are copious quotations of well-known lines from Kabir, the Gita and several other foundational Indian texts. A bit of a polyglot, Bismil was fluent in Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bangla and probably a few other languages we do not know of. Indeed, in the original Hindi text, the narration of life events takes place in the Khari Boli register of Hindi typical of the 1910s and 1920s. But the couplets he composes and sprinkles liberally over the text are all in either Urdu or braj bhasha, a completely different Hindi/Hindustani-adjacent register.
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As the moment of execution drew near, Bismil recited some of his own lines: Maalik teri raza rahe aur tu hi tu rahe/ baaki na main rahun, na meri aarzoo rahe./ Jab tak ki tan mein jaan ragon mein lahu rahe/ Tera hi zikreyaar, teri justujoo rahe (Lord, may your will prevail and may you prevail/ Neither I nor my desire may remain./ Till there is life in the body and blood in my veins/ May you be remembered and longed for).
These were remarkably thoughtful and prescient young people with a cosmopolitan ease in the way they read and wrote about the dominant cultural and social issues of the day. In The Bhagat Singh Reader (edited by Chaman Lal and published by HarperCollins India in 2019), there is a letter Singh wrote to his beloved comrade Sukhdev Thapar on the subject of suicide. It starts on predictable lines, with the query: Is suicide justified for the revolutionary in the face of imminent capture? But the letter soon branches out to become something considerably stranger and more wide-ranging.
At one point, Singh launches into a kind of comparative criticism mini-essay about realism in Indian vs Russian literature. “Perhaps you recall that we have talked several times about the fact that the realism that one finds in Russian literature everywhere is not seen at all in our literature. We really admire the painful and sorrowful situations in their stories, but do not feel the sensation of going through that pain. We praise their intense passion and their characters to unprecedented heights, but never trouble to ponder over their reasons. I would say that it is the delineation of suffering in their literature that gives sensitivity, a sharp pang of pain and nobility to their characters."
Reading Bhagat Singh makes you realise the true scale of the revolutionaries’ intellectual ambitions and nation-building vision. In his letters Singh describes his vision for a socialist Indian republic where caste, gender and religion-based discrimination would be eliminated, where agrarian and labour laws would give the working-class lives dignity and security. He would cite everyone, from Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill to the Romantic poets, to support his arguments. His boundless curiosity and rhetorical flair, impressive for a man still in his mid-20s, were proof that India lost a future statesman with his passing. And Singh could be funny in a sardonic way, too, like when he writes about his British-loving classmates at college and their servile behaviour.
Subhas Chandra Bose’s unfinished memoir An Indian Pilgrim also has several funny episodes from his youth as well as his military career. While headed by ship to Cambridge, for example, the beleaguered Bose had to put up with the company of a pair of irritating, henpecked men who he describes with deadpan restraint. “One fellow-passenger had been ordered by his wife not to touch beef. By another passenger he was tricked into taking “copta curry" of beef (which he thoroughly enjoyed) under the impression that it was mutton “copta curry". Great was his remorse when he discovered his mistake after twelve hours. Another passenger had orders from his fiancée to write a letter every day. He spent his time reciting love-poems and talking about her. Whether we liked it or not, we had to listen."
Above all, these revolutionaries had the humility to concede that their paths were exceptional, and not replicable in a widespread way. Indeed, towards the end of A Glimpse of My Life, Bismil came to a similar conclusion. He suggests that for the average educated young man, “organizing the working class and the farmers into unions" was even more important than “secret revolutionary work".
It’s useful to remember that Bismil wrote this at the back end of his imprisonment, when he already knew his fate. He was thinking of the future of the nation even as his own ran the clock. It takes rare mettle to be able to collect one’s thoughts in such circumstances, which is a big reason why these books by Indians revolutionaries remain enduringly relevant.
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