You Can’t Write About Bhagat Singh

When the British colonial government gave the death penalty to Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, they hoped to strike terror among Indians, especially the youth. What happened was the opposite. Bhagat Singh and his comrades became inspirations. Now the colonial government had a new problem - everyone was writing about Bhagat Singh. So they began banning such writing. Dr Gurdev Singh Sidhu was astonished by the range of literature on Bhagat Singh produced in various Indian languages and how much of this work was banned and collected by the provincial governments of British India. Most of these publications are unavailable in their original language since the British held on to only the translations. This book presents over 200 proscribed writings produced in English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, collected by the editor over forty years. You Can’t Write About Bhagat Singh shows how a martyr became a pan-Indian folk hero.