Shaheed Bhagat Singh: his life, his writing and 23 March 1931

This day remembers Bhagat Singh, the young revolutionary who was hanged by the British in Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931, together with Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru. He was twenty-three. The day is kept across India as Shaheedi Divas, and the SGPC's calendar keeps it on a fixed solar date.

A family of the freedom struggle

Bhagat Singh was born in 1907 at Banga, in Lyallpur district, now in Pakistan, into a Sikh family whose ancestral home was Khatkar Kalan in Punjab. His father and his uncles were involved in the movements against British rule, and the family's stories of the Ghadar martyrs, above all Kartar Singh Sarabha, shaped him. As a boy of twelve he visited Jallianwala Bagh after the massacre of 1919.

The revolutionary

In Lahore he read widely, wrote for Punjabi and Urdu papers and helped found the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. After the death of Lala Lajpat Rai following a police baton charge in 1928, he and his companions killed a British police officer, John Saunders. In 1929 he and Batukeshwar Dutt threw harmless smoke bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and courted arrest, using their trial to put their ideas before the country. In jail he led a long hunger strike for the rights of political prisoners and kept writing.

The execution

He, Sukhdev and Rajguru were sentenced to death and hanged a day earlier than announced. Their bodies were secretly cremated on the bank of the Sutlej near Hussainiwala, where the National Martyrs Memorial now stands.

How he is remembered

He is remembered with tributes and gatherings, above all at Hussainiwala and at Khatkar Kalan.