Bhagat Singh was born on September 28, 1907, in village Banga of Lyalpur district, now in Pakistan. This village also celebrates his birthday with pride. I am told they commemorate him every year since quite some time; his birth here turned the remote dusty village into a place of pilgrimage. It has been declared a national heritage site by the Pakistani government.Bhagat Singh evokes respect among many across the border, despite our bitter relationship, because he always stressed on human dignity and rights beyond the sectarian divide. He castigated all those who floundered on these basic values, as is evident from a fairly huge corpus of writings he bequeathed to us.He began thinking and writing at a young age, inheriting this legacy from his family. It is this unique trait of his, thinking and writing, which has ruined many young lives in present times. Bhagat Singh also had the advantage of being born in a family of committed nationalists who were also thinking people. For example, his grandfather, Sardar Arjun Singh, defied Sikh beliefs by planting tobacco in his village, taking advantage of the fertile soil known for its suitability for cultivation.He faced boycott and criticism from his community, but he did not budge. After selling his crop, he sought pardon by explaining the logic behind his action. Bhagat Singh learnt from his family to fight with courage against the superstitious beliefs through logic-based protest.His uncle, Ajit Singh, who was involved with the peasantry, led a farmer’s protest movement in Punjab, maybe the first organised one in India. His other uncle, Swaran Singh, spent several years in prison and died young of tuberculosis.Bhagat Singh’s father, Sardar Kishan Singh, was a Congressman who spent several years fighting against the British colonialism. With this background, it was no surprise that his first journalistic piece appeared in 1924 in a Hindi magazine called Matwala. This article was on ‘Universal Brotherhood’, a difficult subject to write for a young boy of seventeen.Though his writing an essay like ‘Why I Am An Atheist’, just four years later, in 1930-31, should not surprise us. His two years in prison exposed him to diverse scholarship, ranging from politics, economics, sociology, philosophy to various genres of poetry and fiction.Also read: The Image That Became Part of Bhagat Singh’s Enduring AppealHis journey towards rational thinking and the courage to question everything began early in his life. Most of us are familiar with authoritarian regimes; they love a blindfolded citizenry and not one that raises questions. Thus, if we know this background, then it is not difficult to explain why he was able to think and write so profoundly about the complex social, philosophical, economic and political issues.One can easily conclude that Bhagat Singh was one of the first young ‘Dimaagi Naxals’, to use our prime minister’s condescending phrase, because he invoked critical thinking, promoted the ability to question everything and struggled to fight inequalities at all levels.Being a voracious reader, Bhagat Singh read anything that helped him to unravel the complexities of life, from both prose as well as poetry. Amarjit Chandan, the well-known Punjabi poet who had been involved in popular movements in Punjab, has collected Bhagat Singh’s papers and critically analysed his writings.This huge body of work is “invoked against romantic notions of Bhagat Singh as a gun-toting vigilante, encouraging readers to acknowledge, instead, the deep thought grounding the martyr’s famous actions and informing his political trajectory”.All his comrades reported in their memoirs that they never saw Bhagat Singh without a book in his hand and a few in his pockets. Even his mother reprimanded him for pushing books into his jacket pockets, which were mostly torn. He was also passionate about some meaningful as well as romantic films, with Uncle Tom’s Cabin being his favourite. He learnt a lot from the plays he participated in as a young man.When one talks about him as a thinking individual and not just as a raw nationalist, it does not imply that he was a scholar in his teens. It only indicates that he had a profound engagement with world literature through intense reading during his short life. It is also an attempt to bring out his real persona and wean him away from his image of a trigger-happy young man. An image deliberately publicised by the colonial government, which many of us internalised and continue to romanticise every day.Also read: Remembering Bhagat Singh’s Revolutionary Political ThoughtWe know he lived a short life, most of which was spent under the surveillance of the colonial government. Yet, he could pursue his passion of reading and writing. However, Bhagat Singh’s close comrade Shiv Varma did write in the preface of his collection that he published in 1986:“That Bhagat Singh was an intellectual of a high caliber is not known to many. This makes it easy for interested persons to distort the ideological side of the revolutionary movement…To counter every such distortion therefore becomes imperative. That is why I strived to put all available writings of Bhagat Singh at one place and leave it to readers to form their own opinion about the great martyr.”We come across political formations vying with each other to appropriate his emotional legacy of martyrdom and nationalism, while consciously keeping a safe distance from his revolutionary inheritance of ideas. In 2007, Bhagat Singh’s nephew Professor Jagmohan Singh spoke to me in an interview in Frontline magazine, where he said:“It is our duty to liberate Bhagat Singh from current misinterpretations. Mere emotional reference to Bhagat Singh’s sacrifice by most of the political parties helps them to misuse his legacy for selfish political ends. Bhagat Singh cannot be frozen merely in a cheap emotional and nationalistic frame. How could a communalist propagating hatred against one another feel comfortable with his thoughts. Rather, he should feel ashamed of himself in Bhagat Singh’s company.”Perhaps this is why Bhagat Singh is one of our only national heroes, after Gandhi, who is venerated across India. This could be attributed to his appeal as a martyr, which cuts across political ideologies. Alas, if only the same was true for his intellectual legacy as well. Many simply lap him up as a martyr, but few celebrate his political and social vision. This is not to undermine the sacrifice of Singh or, for that matter, any martyr.But it is important to add that there was more to him than just shahadat (martyrdom). I have always tried to point out, while talking about Bhagat Singh’s extraordinary intellectual gravitas, that he thought and wrote about serious political and social issues even before he crossed twenty years of age.Here, let me also refer to another significant episode of Bhagat Singh’s short life, where he, along with a few of his comrades, launched a public platform of the revolutionary group called the Naujawan Bharat Sabha.The Sabha provided salience to their ideas and Bhagat Singh used it to organise peasants, workers and the youth of the country. He was around 19 when the Naujawan Sabha was launched, yet his maturity of thought is reflected in the objectives of the Sabha where secularism and socialism were his prime concerns. The political programme of the Naujawan Sabha included the following:To establish a complete independent republic of labourers and peasants of the whole of India;To infuse a spirit of patriotism into the hearts of the youths of the country in order to establish a united Indian nation;To express sympathy with and to assist the economic, industrial and social movements which, while being free from communal sentiment are intended to take us nearer to our ideal; namely the establishment of a complete independent republic of labourers and peasants;To organise the labourers and peasants.Thus, it is clear from the above objectives, that Bhagat Singh and his Sabha had a definite aim and a clear ideology to offer, i.e., the establishment of an independent socialist republic all over India and also to stop imperialist onslaught on other countries.Also read: Bhagat Singh: An Unsung Hero of Political JournalismBhagat Singh’s intellectual evolution was also given a boost once he was imprisoned after the Assembly Bomb explosion on April 8, 1929. He was already an avid reader, yet Shiv Varma, one of his close comrades in jail, wrote about his love for books:“We had easy access to books in the jail since the day one and the atmosphere was quite congenial for study and exchange of ideas…but Bhagat Singh’s arrival made this livelier… Though we all had a passion for reading, but Bhagat Singh was [in] a class by himself. He was passionate about fiction as well, particularly with political and economic themes. Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Hall Cane, Victor Hugo, Maxim Gorky and Oscar Wilde were among his favourites.”While in prison, Bhagat Singh and his comrades went on a long hunger strike, raising several demands of the political prisoners. Two of those demands are relevant here:All books, except those proscribed, with writing material, should be made available without restriction.At least one daily paper should be supplied to each political prisoner.Bhagat Singh was almost certain about his martyrdom, yet he wanted to read as much as he could and wanted his comrades to read as well. He could leave behind a huge legacy in writing only because his choice of reading material was extensive and diverse. It also led Bhagat Singh to reiterate his final objective categorically in his last statement from the prison on February 2, 1931 saying:“We want a socialist revolution, the indispensable preliminary to which is the political revolution. That is what we want. The political revolution does not mean the transfer of state (or more crudely, the power) from the hands of the British to the Indians, but to those Indians who are at one with us as to the final goal, or to be more precise, the power to be transferred to the revolutionary party through popular support. After that, to proceed in right earnest is to organise the reconstruction of the whole society on the socialist basis.”Our pseudo-nationalists today consciously ignore Bhagat Singh’s intellectual inheritance. For them, it is politically savvy to venerate him as a martyr but not worthwhile to appropriate him as a philosopher and a revolutionary thinker. Many of us today are also uncomfortable with how he persisted with rational and critical thinking throughout his life. Bhagat Singh wanted a social revolution to break age-old discriminatory practices such as untouchability, communalism and gender discrimination.However, most eulogies have ignored his social programme, projecting him merely as a passionate anti-colonialist and nationalist, which is not only inaccurate but incomplete.S. Irfan Habib is a historian of modern Indian history based in New Delhi.