A Critical Review of The Man Who Avenged Bhagat Singh
Abhijeet Bhalerao, The Man Who Avenged Bhagat Singh (Ebury Press, Penguin Random House India, 2023), 376 pp., ISBN 9780143461616.
Written By-
Shambhavi Shivani, Teacher Associate, Chanakya National Law University
International Commercial Law, LLM, University of Glasgow
Abhijeet Bhalerao’s The Man Who Avenged Bhagat Singh is an engaging work of historical fiction that returns to a largely neglected figure of India’s revolutionary movement: Baikunth Sukul of Bihar. The novel is built around the killing of Phanindra Nath Ghosh at Bettiah in November 1932, an act for which Baikunth Sukul was later tried, sentenced to death and executed in 1934. But the book’s real concern is wider. It reconstructs a political world shaped by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), the Lahore Conspiracy Case, prison, hunger strikes, police surveillance, approver testimony, the execution of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, and the continuing life of revolutionary networks after Lahore.
The title gives the reader about the book’s emotional direction from the beginning. Baikunth is presented as the man who avenged Bhagat Singh. That description is powerful as political memory, though historically it is too simple. Phanindra Nath Ghosh’s role as an approver was remembered by revolutionaries as a serious blow to the HSRA, but the executions of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were the outcome of a larger prosecution involving several witnesses, approvers, investigative practices and extraordinary colonial procedure. The title, then, is better understood as a literary and commemorative claim than as a complete account of historical causation.
The novel deserves credit for shifting attention away from the familiar pantheon of Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, Rajguru and Sukhdev. It asks readers to look towards Bihar to Jalalpur, Hajipur, Motihari, Bettiah, Muzaffarpur, Patna Camp Jail and the social worlds of schools, families, small towns and local political organisations. Baikunth enters the novel not as a mythic hero but as a teacher, husband and young man drawn into the revolutionary movement. He is portrayed as a young primary-school teacher from Jalalpur in Bihar whose early involvement with Congress and khadi politics gradually gives way to commitment to the revolutionary movement associated with the HSRA.
Radhika Devi, Baikunth’s wife, is more than a passive witness to this transformation. She questions the personal cost of his political choices and later participates in nationalist activity at the Gandhi Ashram in Hajipur, including picketing liquor shops and boycotting foreign cloth. Their relationship gives the novel a domestic and emotional dimension, showing that revolutionary commitment affected not only those who acted publicly but also the families who lived with its risks and consequences.
This gives the novel both freshness and emotional weight.
Law, Betrayal and Political Violence
The book’s most striking achievement is its treatment of betrayal. Phanindra Nath Ghosh is not merely a witness in a criminal prosecution. He becomes the figure through whom the novel explains the vulnerability of revolutionary organisations. Historical accounts identify Ghosh as a revolutionary associate who later became an approver in the Lahore Conspiracy proceedings. The novel expands his role considerably, presenting him as a recurring prosecution witness across several revolutionary cases and as a person whose knowledge of the movement is used against former comrades.
For a legal reader, the figure of the approver is central. An approver was ordinarily a participant in an alleged offence who received pardon on the condition of making a full and true disclosure and then gave evidence for the prosecution. In a conspiracy case, such testimony could be particularly damaging because it allowed the state to use a person from inside the organisation to prove its activities, membership and plans. Bhalerao understands the emotional force of this arrangement. The novel shows how an individual’s knowledge of a movement could be converted into legally admissible evidence against that very movement.
The book is especially effective in portraying colonial law as lived experience. The legal system appears through CID surveillance, identification procedures, arrest, prison discipline, informers, prosecution witnesses, special tribunals and executions. It is not a remote structure of statutes and courtrooms. It enters friendships, family life, political associations and ordinary daily existence. In this respect, the novel offers an important insight: colonial criminal law could appear procedurally organised while still being experienced by political dissidents as an arm of imperial power.
The narrative repeatedly moves between two competing vocabularies. The colonial state speaks of conspiracy, murder, dacoity, arms, explosives and offences against the King-Emperor. The revolutionaries speak of sacrifice, resistance, political justice, martyrdom and betrayal. The conflict is not only over what happened; it is also over how events are named. A “dacoity” becomes fundraising for the movement; an “approver” becomes a traitor; an execution becomes martyrdom; and the killing of Phanindra becomes retribution.
This is also where the novel requires the greatest critical caution. It adopts the revolutionary vocabulary with considerable confidence. Dacoities are often explained as necessary means of financing the struggle, but the fear or injury suffered by victims receives little attention. The killing of Phanindra is treated as moral justice, although it was also an intentional killing outside any judicial process. The injustice of colonial rule undoubtedly raises serious questions about the legitimacy of colonial law. Yet the injustice of a legal order does not itself remove the moral difficulty of political assassination.
Bhalerao’s larger argument about betrayal is equally powerful and limiting. Through Yogendra Sukul’s speeches, the novel links Phanindra with a long nationalist list of traitors: Mir Jafar, Jai Chand, informers associated with 1857, the Ghadar movement, Kakori and later revolutionary prosecutions. The suggestion is that India was conquered and kept subordinate not merely by British force but by Indian collaboration.
That idea gives the novel a coherent political imagination, but it also simplifies history. Persons who cooperate with the authorities under torture, fear, family pressure or legal inducement are not necessarily situated in the same moral position as persons who seek material reward or ideological advantage. The novel occasionally recognises this distinction, but it ultimately draws most forms of cooperation into the single and emotionally charged category of treachery. It understands why revolutionaries experienced approver testimony as betrayal; it is less interested in the social, legal and psychological circumstances that might explain an approver’s choice.
The Lahore Conspiracy proceedings are particularly significant in this respect. The novel invokes the special tribunal and the popular phrase, “Na Vakil, Na Daleel, Na Appeal,” to convey the revolutionary belief that ordinary legal safeguards had been displaced by colonial exceptionalism. This is one of the novel’s strongest legal insights. It shows that colonial law could be altered or accelerated when the state perceived a political emergency. At the same time, the phrase should be read as part of political memory rather than as a complete technical description of procedure. The novel successfully conveys what exceptional law felt like to political defendants, even if it does not explain the full doctrinal structure of the tribunal.
The Risks of Fictional History
The book’s strength as fiction is also its principal methodological problem. Bhalerao writes with immense confidence about private conversations, personal motives, prison encounters, police conduct, domestic life and revolutionary planning. The reader encounters imagined discussions between Bhagat Singh and Jatin Das, scenes in which Phanindra meets former comrades in custody, conversations between Baikunth and Radhika, and detailed deliberations leading to the plan to kill Phanindra.
None of this is objectionable simply because it is fictional. Historical fiction must fill the silences left by archives. The difficulty arises because the novel’s detail sometimes gives imaginative scenes the authority of recovered fact. The reader can easily forget that a private conversation, a prison exchange, an emotional farewell or an attributed motive may be an artistic reconstruction rather than a documented event.
This matters because the imagined scenes shape the novel’s moral outcome. They make Baikunth’s action seem not only understandable but almost inevitable. The reader is invited to see the killing of Phanindra as the culmination of accumulated betrayal, grief and political repression. The narrative does not merely describe an act of revolutionary violence; it creates an emotional world in which that violence appears to carry the force of justice.
The prose strengthens this effect. Bhalerao writes in a cinematic and accessible style. His scenes move quickly, and his prison episodes, surveillance sequences, arrests and preparations for violence hold the reader’s attention. This is one reason the book will reach readers beyond academic history.
Yet the prose often operates at a single high emotional pitch. Faces harden, hearts race, eyes blaze, tears flow, voices choke and resolve intensifies. The result is effective as historical thriller writing, but it can become melodramatic. There is little room for moral uncertainty, ordinary fear or divided loyalties. Revolutionaries tend to be brave and self-sacrificing; colonial officers appear cruel or calculating; approvers are degraded figures. The moral division is sharp, and it leaves limited space for the ambiguity that historical fiction is particularly well placed to explore.
The same issue appears in the treatment of Gandhi. The novel does not wholly separate Gandhian politics from revolutionary politics. Baikunth is shown as having been influenced by Congress activity, wearing khadi, spending time in the Gandhi Ashram at Hajipur and participating in the Anti-Chowkidari Tax movement. Radhika, too, participates in picketing and boycott campaigns with women linked to the Ashram.
This is an important and welcome feature. It shows that the freedom movement did not consist of sealed political compartments. Congress activists, local nationalist networks and underground revolutionaries could inhabit overlapping social worlds. The novel also suggests that Gandhian activity could offer a strategic shelter to revolutionaries facing CID surveillance.
However, the relationship is not fully equal. Congress activity often appears in the novel as a useful disguise or temporary refuge, while revolutionary violence remains the site of deeper courage and moral intensity. Gandhi’s position is frequently represented through the revolutionary complaint that non-violence and negotiation left young militants abandoned. That criticism has historical force, but the book does not always give Gandhian politics its strongest form as a method of mass mobilisation, political discipline, ethical resistance and the public delegitimization of colonial authority.
A Powerful but Partial Recovery
The novel’s portrayal of Radhika deserves a more favourable assessment than one might initially expect in a narrative centred on male martyrdom. She is not simply the waiting wife who appears only to suffer Baikunth’s absence. She questions his understanding of duty, objects to the assumption that national commitment automatically overrides marital obligations and later participates in public political activity through the Gandhi Ashram.
Nevertheless, her development remains incomplete. Her political participation is still tied to Baikunth’s decisions and the needs of his story. The book sees the private cost of revolutionary life, especially for women who endure insecurity, fear and the prospect of widowhood, but it does not fully give Radhika an independent political voice. A more sustained account of her perspective could have expanded the novel beyond the familiar arc of male sacrifice and female endurance.
Despite these limitations, The Man Who Avenged Bhagat Singh is a worthwhile and ambitious novel. Its greatest contribution is its recovery of Baikunth Sukul and its insistence that the history of revolutionary nationalism cannot be written only through a few iconic martyrs. By placing Bihar, provincial political networks, prisons, schools, wives, witnesses and lesser-known revolutionaries at the centre of the story, Bhalerao broadens the map of anti-colonial memory.
For readers of law, the novel is especially useful when read critically. It raises serious questions about approver testimony, the use of emergency criminal procedure, the relationship between colonial legality and political legitimacy, and the power of legal labels to transform a revolutionary into a criminal, a witness into a traitor, and a convicted person into a martyr. It also reminds us that the history of criminal law is not confined to statutes and judgments. It is equally a history of fear, loyalty, prison, violence, evidence and memory.
The book should not be treated as a substitute for trial records, archival history or legal scholarship. Its fictional scenes must be distinguished from documented fact. But that does not diminish its value. Bhalerao has written a forceful and often affecting novel about a forgotten revolutionary, even if his moral universe is narrower and more certain than the history from which it draws.
Its final achievement lies in the discomfort it leaves behind. When a political community experiences law as an instrument of oppression, the ordinary boundaries between legality, justice, violence and resistance become unstable. The Man Who Avenged Bhagat Singh does not resolve that problem. It makes it impossible to ignore.