Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) lived at a time when India's freedom struggle was beginning to flag and when Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent, passive resistance to partial liberation was beginning to test the patience of the people. The youth of India was inspired by Bhagat Singh's call to arms and enthused by the defiance and daredevilry of the army wing of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association to which he and his comrades, Sukhdev and Rajguru, belonged. His call, Inquilab Zindabad!, became the war-cry of the fight for freedom. When Bhagat Singh was executed by the British after a sham trial for his involvement in the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the age of twenty-three, he was glorified by Indians as a martyr - for his youth, his heroism, and his steadfast courage in the face of certain death. It was only many years later – after Independence in 1947– that his jail writings came to light. Today, it is these works that set Bhagat Singh apart from the many revolutionaries who laid down their lives for India. They reveal him as not just a passionate freedom-fighter who believed in the cult of the bomb but a widely read intellectual inspired by the writings of, among others, Marx, Lenin, Bertrand Russell and Victor Hugo; a revolutionary whose vision did not end with the ouster of the British, but who looked further, towards a secular, socialist India.