by Anita Anand
* * *
* Literally translated as ‘brotherhood’; it carries a particularly tribal/caste/geographical context when used by Punjabis.
CHAPTER 17
LOSING GOD
Multan Jail, Udham’s home for the next five years, was a newly built institution 250 miles south-west of Amritsar. A sentence of ‘rigorous imprisonment’ entailed ten hours of hard labour daily, poor rations, and the strictest of disciplinary regimes. Beatings were frequent. The best way to survive a sentence of RI was to keep one’s head down and attract as little attention as possible. That, however, was not Udham’s style now.
Prisoner Sher Singh was uncooperative from the start. He preached the Ghadar message to inmates, spoke of the evil of British rule and was thrown into solitary confinement and frequently flogged for his acts of agitation.1 Released back into the general prison population, he would do the same thing again . . . and again. Multan jailers eventually tired of his antics. Udham was a contagion. He needed to be sent somewhere else.
As Udham himself put it, in the space of those five years he was ‘transferred from one prison to another’.2 There are few prison records that survive from this time, but it is more than likely that one of the prisons that played host to the troublesome inmate from Multan was Mianwali Jail, some 200 miles north-east of Lahore, in the Dera Ismail Khan Division of Punjab province.
Mianwali was one of the most ferocious penal institutions in India, with a regime specially designed to deal with political prisoners. With a population of around 500 in 1927, the accommodation was basic, consisting of clay-lined walls, bucket latrines, straw mats and little else. When the sun went down after a day of hard labour, prisoners were plunged into exhausted darkness with nothing but their thoughts to wrap around themselves, and the prospect of another back-breaking day ahead.
Dysentery, typhoid and lice were constant companions in Mianwali, as were difficult nationalist prisoners. The most notable among them was a young man called Bhagat Singh. He would become one of the most important figures in Udham’s life.
Articulate, educated and softly spoken, Bhagat Singh seemed out of place in the harsh environment of Mianwali Jail. While other prisoners collapsed in grateful sleep, Bhagat, a bookish young man of twenty-two, spent his evenings in the dim light of his cell studying the Raj’s penal code. He used what he learned against the wardens and higher prison authorities, complaining frequently about conditions, the quality of food and the indignity of tasks he and his fellow prisoners were forced to perform. Objections were polite, succinct and appeared to be written by a lawyer. None of them made his life any easier. Bhagat Singh already knew he was going to die and was resigned to the fact. He just did not want to make it too easy for the authorities while he waited for his execution.
Bhagat Singh, who supposedly made the pilgrimage to Jallianwala Bagh after the massacre in 1919, had murdered a British policeman, Assistant Superintendent John Saunders, and for that he would hang. The intended victim had been another man, a superintendent named James A. Scott; Saunders had just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Scott had ordered baton charges against peaceful nationalist protestors in Lahore on 30 October 1928. They had been taking part in a silent march against the Simon Commission, a parliamentary review of the political situation in India that included not one single Indian on its panel. As a result of Scott’s lathi charges, 63-year-old Lala Lajpat Rai, a prominent nationalist leader, was so badly beaten he later died of his injuries. Bhagat had loved Lajpat like a father and vowed to avenge him.
On 17 December 1928, Bhagat and his associates lay in wait outside the police district headquarters in Lahore. They had watched the station, knew Scott’s movements, and had planned an audacious ambush. To kill a senior police officer right outside his own police station would send a clear message to all British law enforcement: ‘If you kill us, you will not be safe anywhere.’ However, at the time Scott was expected to leave, Saunders emerged instead. Bhagat and his men opened fire. Saunders was killed instantly.
The gunfire drew a stream of police from the station, but miraculously Bhagat and his gang got away. Later that same evening, with the help of Ghadar sympathisers, Bhagat Singh was spirited out of the city. Others may have lain low after such a narrow escape, but Bhagat chose to spend the days after travelling around the north of India, boasting about what he had done. He took with him a specially designed magic lantern, showing images of British oppression and Indian resistance. While he whipped up support in the countryside, his organisation, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, or HSRA, plastered a confession of sorts all over Lahore:
We are sorry to have killed a man. But this man was a part of [a] cruel and despicable and unjust system and killing him was a necessity. This man has been killed as an employ [sic] of the British Government. This government is the most oppressive government in the world.3
We are sorry for shedding human blood but it becomes necessary to bathe the altar of Revolution with blood. Our aim is to bring about a revolution which would end all exploitation of man by man. Long live Revolution!4
The murder of Saunders caused a bump in recruitment for the HSRA, but Bhagat was determined to do more. On 8 April 1929, together with a man named Batukeshwar Dutt, Bhagat Singh crept into the gallery above the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi as members debated. From their high vantage point, the pair threw two bombs into the chamber.
Luckily for those below, the explosives were only smoke bombs, designed to cause maximum pandemonium. Representatives ran in panic and those who could not see their way to the exits crouched under desks in terror. Bhagat Singh had ample time to escape, but instead stood his ground yelling ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ – ‘Long Live the Revolution!’ – from the public gallery. When the police finally made it up the stairs to detain him, they found him throwing anti-British leaflets at the terrified, upturned faces of politicians below.
It was as he served time for the ‘terrorist attack on the Assembly’ that the authorities tied Bhagat Singh to the murder of Saunders. He was transferred to Mianwali, where he would wait three years for an inevitable sentence of death by hanging. Though under close watch, Bhagat still managed to smuggle out incendiary tracts to his followers:
We hold human life sacred beyond words. We are neither perpetrators of dastardly outrages [ . . . ] nor are we ‘lunatics’ as the Tribune of Lahore and some others would have it believed. [ . . . ] Force when aggressively applied is ‘violence’ and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification.5
Bhagat explained why he had made no attempt to run during the bombing of the Assembly: ‘We . . . deliberately offered ourselves to bear the penalty for what we had done, and to let the Imperialist exploiters know that by crushing individuals they cannot kill ideas. By crushing two insignificant units the nation cannot be crushed.’6
Udham Singh was utterly beguiled by Bhagat Singh. Though he was older than him, he took to calling him his ‘guru’, the Hindi word for ‘teacher’. He was especially interested in Bhagat’s atheism, a startling concept to one who had been saved by devout Sikhs at the Khalsa orphanage. Udham had been raised never to question the existence of God.
Bhagat was facing death, yet he refused to fall back on the promise of reincarnation, or the ‘immortal bliss’ of moksha. From his place on death row he found time to write a long and passionate essay entitled ‘Why I am an Atheist’:
If you have no belief in Him, then there is no alternative but to depend upon yourself. It is not child’s play to stand firm on your feet amid storms and strong winds . . . I know that will be the end when the rope is tightened around my neck and the rafters move from under my feet. To use more precise religious terminology, that will be the moment of utter annihilation. My soul will come to nothing . . . Without any selfish motive of getting any reward here or in the hereafter, quite disinterestedly have I devoted my life
to the cause of freedom. I could not act otherwise.7
Bhagat Singh was hanged on 23 March 1931 at 7.30 p.m. When they cut him down from the gallows, no prayers were recited over his body.
Udham lost his belief in God the day his guru died. In the future, whenever anyone asked him what his religion was, he would open his wallet and show a picture of Bhagat Singh, which filled the place where Lupe’s image had once lived. ‘This is what I believe in now,’8 he would say, jabbing the picture of Bhagat with barely contained emotion. Something about the way Bhagat had sacrificed himself touched him deeply. The man had committed the ultimate selfless act, stood his ground when he could have run, and done it for the freedom of his nation. He had done it to inspire countless other Indians to rise up for the cause. He had done it to avenge Lala Lajpat Rai. When his own time came, Udham hoped he would be half the man Bhagat Singh had been.
The execution of Bhagat Singh knocked the fight out of Udham for a while. According to British Home Office records, he was released on 23 October 1931, with almost a year of his sentence left to serve – something that would never have happened had he kept up the insolent disruption that marked the beginning of his prison term. For a while after his release, he simply disappeared. Many in his hometown of Sunam assumed he was dead.
SUNAM, SPRING 19329
‘What’s the matter with you?’10
Manjit Singh Kassid was looking over his shoulder at the man behind him, who could not seem to sit still. They had been hunting on the back of Kassid’s camel and Udham kept shifting and groaning.
‘My back, it still hurts.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think?’11
Manjit felt foolish for even asking the question. Udham had already shown him the scars.
Rumour had it that Udham had gone straight to Kashmir after his release to recover his strength, but nobody really knew for sure. Months later, he had turned up at Kassid’s door, looking haunted and thin. The British had wrecked his body, leaving him almost unrecognisable. As Kassid wrote sadly in his blue exercise book: ‘He was once a strong, very jolly person.’12 The man who faced him was a ghost of someone he used to know.
Gently Kassid and others in Sunam coaxed Udham back to health. Most avoided the topic of Udham’s recent incarceration, but Kassid was one of the few who encouraged him to talk about his time in prison. The answers were more robust than the man delivering them: ‘I would incite other prisoners inside, you know, against the treatment they gave out in there . . . I started some strikes, refused to cooperate, got others to refuse too . . . They flogged me at least once a month, with a cane, here.’ Udham still winced when he touched his back, even though the beatings had stopped months before.13
Though the welts had hardened and turned silver, it soon became clear that under the surface the scars of his rigorous imprisonment were as raw and angry as the day he had got them. Udham was more emotionally volatile than ever before. One day, Kassid remembered taking Udham to see a mutual friend in Sunam. Bhai Hoshiar Singh kept a picture of Maharajah Duleep Singh in his sitting room, the last Sikh monarch of the Punjab. Many homes in the province had the same print: a reproduction of a portrait of Duleep by the court artist Winterhalter, painted at Buckingham Palace, showing a beautiful teenager bedecked in jewels and silks.
Duleep’s story was Punjab’s humiliation. He had been forced to sign over his kingdom to the British when he was only eleven. His mother had been taken from him and locked in a tower and he in turn had been exiled from his kingdom and all he knew, ending up in Britain. The maharajah’s life had ended in penury, and he had died alone and broken on the floor of a Parisian hotel.
A poem was pinned under Hoshiar’s picture of young Duleep: ‘I have been thrown to the far-flung place, had everything, all that I once cherished, my Kingdoms and my very life taken from me. I am now in a foreign place, so far from my people. So far from my homeland.’14
Udham read the poem and stared into Duleep’s face for the longest time. Suddenly, and without warning, he broke down, crying inconsolably till his bony body shook with the effort. Manjit could make out only a few words amidst the sobbing: ‘To hell with these English . . . To hell with them.’15
Though he no longer spoke of murdering O’Dwyer with the carelessness he had before, Kassid was in little doubt that the rage which was ignited in him after the massacre burned just as hotly as ever.
‘What happened to your hair? Why did you cut it?’ asked Kassid Udham one day.
‘I didn’t. They cut it,’ he replied. ‘The English were not happy with me. Once I got typhoid, I was sick for forty days. When I got better [my fever broke], my hair had vanished. I thought to myself, well this is God’s will, who am I to argue?’16
It was a half-truth. The prison may have cut his lice-infested hair, but he had chosen to keep it short almost a year later, a sign that he, like Bhagat Singh, had cut religion out of his life. Sikhs were required to keep their hair long and wear it covered by the turban.
Kassid, an observant Sikh, never discussed Udham’s fledgling atheism with him. On the contrary, he often accompanied Kassid to the gurdwara, and though they sang devotional songs together, Kassid was canny enough to notice how superficial Udham’s belief was: ‘I noticed he ate Jatka and halal meat, just as if they were the same,’17 he remembered years later.
Strict Sikhs were vegetarians. Liberal ones only ate Jatka, the name given to meat from animals slaughtered swiftly, with one stroke of a blade. None touched the ceremonially bled halal meat eaten by Muslims all over India. It was an early example of Udham becoming whoever his companion needed him to be. Kassid noticed his friend’s chameleon tendencies but did not mind.
He was just happy to see Udham becoming stronger and more himself. He got back his appetite and once again took to going missing for days on end, just as he had when he came back from East Africa on his motorbike. It was assumed Udham was doing work for his Ghadar contacts once more, though he no longer held court on the matter.
Kassid pressed him on very little, and bit by bit saw the mischief returning to Udham’s eyes. Before he had gone to prison, he had always been something of a joker, and lately Udham had taken to wandering Sunam in disguise. One of his favourites was that of a Hindu holy man in a saffron turban and long orange robes. It was a brightly coloured camouflage that Udham claimed had come in very handy in Kashmir when he thought the police were spying on him after his release from prison.
He also liked to pull his Western wardrobe out from time to time. On one occasion a local sweet-maker in Sunam was shocked to see a smartly dressed ‘foreigner’ standing by his stall. ‘He looked strange, had an English hat, a tie around his neck and coloured goggles [sun glasses].’
‘Well, Sardar, don’t you recognise me?’ the ‘foreigner’ asked Nand Singh, the halwai (sweet-maker). Nand stood up from behind his stall and leant in to take a closer look. Recognising Udham at last, he exclaimed: ‘Oi, what have you done to yourself?’
‘Give me some sweets and I’ll tell you. . .!’
Absentmindedly, Nand shovelled some laddoos onto a piece of paper, remembering they were his favourite, but could not take his eyes off Udham’s outfit. Looking him up and down for the umpteenth time, he could hold back no longer: ‘What on earth are you wearing? What do you think you look like?’
Laughing through the mouthful, Udham told the sweet-maker: ‘Lovers of this country have no dress, no face.’18
Manjit Singh Kassid would always tell people that Udham’s fate was sealed long before he left for England. Towards the end of 1933, he and Udham had gone for a stroll to visit another of Kassid’s close friends. Bachan Singh was an important man in the town and had organised a photographer to come and take portraits for him and his close friends: ‘At the time Bachan was a naik [the equivalent of a corporal in the British army], and you know how it was back then, no Indian soldier could rise higher in the ranks. Most were just sepoys.’19
While the men waited for the p
hotographer to set up, a passing Hindu priest offered to read Bachan Singh’s palm. Such men usually seek out the most important men in the neighbourhood, hoping that a flattering reading will lead to a healthy ‘charitable donation’. The prediction was sufficiently oleaginous: ‘You will rise to a high post and retire at the top,’ he told the naik.20
‘Don’t you want to look at my hand, Pundit-ji?’21 asked Udham, an impish grin spread over his face. The palm-reader took Udham’s hand, turned the palm up and started to look at the lines: ‘After a while he told Udham: “Some day you will kill a man with this hand and die as a result. No one will know your name, but eventually, after you are gone, you will be praised for what you did.’ ”22
According to Kassid, the comments hung in the air, but an awkward silence was broken by the bustle of the photographer. The pundit was paid, the photographer set up two chairs, one for Manjit and the other for Bachan, who beckoned over a young boy, a family member who had wandered over to see what was happening. Pulling the child into his lap, Bachan Singh told the photographer to take the picture. Just as he was about to click, Udham leapt into the frame, an early example of a photobomb: ‘Hey, and me. You heard what the pundit said, I might do great things one day.’23
Perhaps this tale is part of the legend that later attached itself to Udham Singh, but that photograph is very real, and still hangs in Manjit Singh Kassid’s family home, blown up now to the size of a film poster. Strangers come to the house to ask to see it. Though Bachan Singh surpassed all expectations and rose to the rank of captain in the army, Kassid became a well-known poet in Sunam, and the child would grow up to become a respected public prosecutor, there is only one man anyone is interested in. Standing at the back with his hand casually on his hip, it is the person who was never meant to be in the picture. Udham, dressed in a long white cotton shirt, a white, loosely tied turban and rough cotton tehmat,* looks like a Punjabi peasant. He has something of a faraway look in his eyes as he stares into the lens. Perhaps he, like the palm-reader, was looking into his future.