Bhagat Singh’s Atheism

Abstract

Abstract Of the essays that Indian nationalist Bhagat Singh published in his lifetime, ‘Why I am an Atheist’ has remained especially popular. Bhagat Singh published the essay from jail in 1930, largely as a response to his critics among the revolutionaries, who worried that anticolonial stardom had gone to Bhagat Singh’s head – or alternatively that his anticolonial agitation had been motivated by arrogance and egotism. Quite different from the the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army’s response to M. K. Gandhi – ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ – ‘Why I am an Atheist’ marks a different philosophical territory, one that this essay will attempt to explore in detail. This essay demonstrates the productive relationship between religion and interwar philosophy that stands at the centre of Bhagat Singh’s concerns, the global conversation that he thus partakes in, and the relationship, ultimately, between doubt and anticolonialism. Treating this text as philosophical without reducing it to an anti-theological screed reveals the possibilities of an ethics that avoids the transcendent authority of both colonial rule and anticolonial response.