Beyond a martyr: British academic uncovers Lahore archive revealing Bhagat Singh as a global intellectual
Professor Satvinder Singh Juss's research revives calls to access the Lahore archive and revisit Bhagat Singh's ideas.
Prof Chaman Lal (left) with Prof Satvinder Singh Juss.On the eve of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom anniversary, a renewed call to reclaim his intellectual and political legacy has emerged from an unlikely archive on the other side of the border.
Satvinder Singh Juss, a professor of law at King’s College London and a barrister at Gray’s Inn, has spent years examining a cache of documents in Lahore that remain largely inaccessible to Indian scholars. His work, carried out between 2017 and 2019, uncovered not 30 but 65 archival records linked to Bhagat Singh and his revolutionary contemporaries.
Juss’s journey into this forgotten archive began, as many good stories do, with a stray article. Nearly a decade ago, Prof Chaman Lal, a renowned Indian academic and leading authority on the life of Bhagat Singh, wrote about a parallel stream of the freedom struggle that was quietly fading from public memory. While the Congress movement under Mahatma Gandhi dominated the narrative, the revolutionary tradition, with its sharper, more radical edge, was being reduced to a footnote. Lal had pointed to about 30 documents lying in Pakistan, out of reach for Indian scholars.
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