Talk to Bhagat Singh

Questions to ask

• Why did you throw bombs in the Assembly and then let yourself be arrested?
• Why did you write that you are an atheist?
• Do you think violence was justified, and do you regret Saunders being killed?
• What would you say to Gandhi if you met him?
• What kind of India did you want?

Which Bhagat Singh picks up

• 1930Lahore Central Jail. Aged 23, in custody in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, reading widely and writing, and in early October 1930, shortly before the Special Tribunal's verdict, composing the essay 'Why I Am an Atheist'.
• 1919Amritsar (Jallianwala Bagh). Aged 11 or 12, visiting the site after the massacre of 13 April 1919 and, according to the family tradition, bringing home soil from it.
• 1928Lahore. Aged 21, a leader of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the HSRA, angry at the death of Lala Lajpat Rai after a police lathi charge on a protest against the Simon Commission, in the days around the shooting of Saunders on 17 December 1928.
• 1929Delhi (Central Legislative Assembly). Aged 21, on 8 April 1929 throwing non-lethal bombs and leaflets from the visitors' gallery with Batukeshwar Dutt and shouting 'Inquilab Zindabad', then surrendering.
• 1929Lahore Central Jail. Aged 22, in the 116-day jail hunger strike for equal treatment of political prisoners, during which Jatin Das died on 13 September 1929.

Questions about Bhagat Singh

Who was Bhagat Singh?

Punjabi revolutionary and thinker of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. With Rajguru he shot the police officer J. P. Saunders in Lahore in December 1928 in retaliation for the death of Lala Lajpat Rai, and in April 1929 he and Batukeshwar Dutt threw non-lethal bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and courted arrest. He used the trial and a prison hunger strike to publicise the cause, wrote on atheism, socialism and communalism, and was hanged in Lahore on 23 March 1931, aged 23.

Can you talk to Bhagat Singh with AI?

Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Bhagat Singh, set in Lahore Central Jail, 1930. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.

Is that really Bhagat Singh's voice?

No. No recording of their voice survives. Yuga's voice is designed from how people at the time described it, and every call is labelled an AI recreation.

What did Bhagat Singh say about Atheism?

Bhagat Singh argued that he became an atheist by reasoning and not from vanity, that belief in God is a consolation that a man facing death should not need, and that suffering in the world refutes the idea of a just God. Source: 'Why I Am an Atheist', written in Lahore Central Jail, October 1930 (published 1931).

What did Bhagat Singh say about Revolution and violence?

Bhagat Singh said in the Assembly bomb trial that the bombs were meant to make the deaf hear and not to kill, and that revolution does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. Source: Statement before the Sessions Judge, Delhi, June 1929; HSRA leaflets.

What did Bhagat Singh say about Socialist aim?

Bhagat Singh wrote that the object of the revolutionary movement should be a socialist order and that young political workers must go to the peasants and workers. Source: 'To Young Political Workers', 2 February 1931.

How Bhagat Singh talks

Intellectual and direct; he argues by definitions and by reading (Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Irish revolutionaries, Russian novels), and refuses easy pieties. Humorous and teasing with comrades, formal and courteous with opponents, never grovelling. Speaks as one who has thought about death and wants to be understood before he is judged.