Bhagat Singh Essay

354 Words2 Pages
I would like to examine the impact that Bhagat Singh had on the Indian Nationalist Struggle. Often charecterised by non-violence, in the story for the struggle for Indian Independece, the brief radical period of nationalism is often overlooked. During his very short lifetime of 23 years, Bhagat Singh managed to invoke a certain level of nationalist consciousness although that was largely due to his hunger strike in jail and his death. Named a terrorist by the British and a patriot and a martyr by Indians, he is still remebered fondly in India as a freedom fighter. He remains a popular figure in Indian cinema and in the Indian popular consciousness. Is he impact merely limited in that realm, or did he contribute in his ways, together with his radical contemporaries, to the struggle for Indian Independence as an intellectual and as a revolutionary? The question my assignment will seek to address is how much of an impact did the revolutionary ideals of Bhagat Singh impact the nationalist struggle of India. Bhagat Singh was often seen as an antithesis of Gandhi. Though he was once inspired by Gandhi himself, he was soon disillusioned with Gandhi's non-cooperation movement as it was soon called off the violent Chauri Chaura incident. His ideologies were in many ways at odds with most of the other prominenent leaderships at that time period. Gandhian Nationalists did not take his violent methods lightly and the Hindu Nationalists were not particularly pleased with his secular notions of a nation. His Socialist ideologies were also very much unheard of, nor widely espoused. As such, how much of an impact did Bhagat Singh really have? Was he just a mere blip in the oft-quoted "non-violent" struggle for India? Is he only known today because of his iconicity and as a figurehead for 'freedom fighters'? These are some of the questions that my assignment will seek to
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