Within a year Bhagat Singh was in jail. He was there for two years till his execution in 1931. He was 24. His jail notebook contains notes on his wide reading of European thinkers and about socialism and literature. These were preparation for the books he planned to write: on the history of the state, the revolutionary movement and an autobiography. Apparently some preliminary drafts were smuggled out of jail but destroyed after his death by a cautious comrade.
This edition reproduces many essays and court testaments, including the famous ‘To Make the Deaf Hear’, the leaflet he and Batukeshwar Dutta hurled into the Central Assembly in ’29, as also ‘Why I am an Atheist’, written as a response to the devout Ghadar prisoner Bhai Randhir Singh in Lahore Central Jail. But this riposte, which compares God to Nero and Genghis Khan, is a powerful plea for rationalism which makes it one of the foundational texts of secular republicanism in modern India.
