“Is it due to vanity that I do not believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God?”
The notion of atheism today invokes shallow teenage rebellion and dogmatic atheism à la Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins: in essence, smug individuals with an inflated sense of self. In highschool, I too fell into the trap of replacing a belief in God with faith in my own ego. It was not until I, while researching for my History Extension project, came across Bhagat Singh’s seminal essay Why I Am An Atheist that I started to develop a deeper understanding of what atheism could mean.
Inside of South Asia, Bhagat Singh is one of the most popular anticolonial agitators and thinkers — rivalling even Gandhi’s stardom. In December 1928, Singh assassinated a British police officer and, a few months later, threw smoke-bombs in the Delhi Legislative Assembly before awaiting arrest. While in jail, Singh staged hunger strikes, debated Gandhi and wrote extensively. At just age 23, Bhagat Singh was hanged by the British, being remembered today as a martyr for the anticolonial struggle and the progenitor for a revolutionary movement that challenged Gandhi’s liberalism.
Written during his time in jail, Why I Am An Atheist serves as a response to criticism from his fellow anticolonial comrades who had suggested that Singh had become an atheist because of fame and arrogance. In it, Singh charts his philosophical development towards atheism and ends with a critique of religion. Singh’s essay has remained one of the most popular of his works, serving as an alternative to Anglo-American dogmatic atheism and inspiring a lineage of South Asian atheistic thought. More recently, the essay counters the co-option of Singh’s image by the Hindu nationalist right.
Growing up it was difficult to reconcile my family’s Sikh beliefs, attending a Christian highschool while also not believing in God. Many non-white non-believers are familiar with the intrinsic link between religion and culture; with self-identifiers such as ‘cultural Sikh’ and ‘cultural Muslim’ serving as an expression of irreligiosity in conjunction with cultural pride. The Anglo notion of atheism is largely a Protestant concept that presents a clean separation between religion and other realms such as culture and society.
According to historian J.D. Elam, Singh’s context — coming from a Sikh family and active in the Indian Independence movement, witnessing the horrors of the Great War and the hope of the Bolshevik revolution — helped cultivate a “form of pessimistic utopianism”. As such, “‘atheism’ was the name given to colonial doubt and anticolonial unknowingness — practices that resuscitated the secular human in the absence of metaphysical assuredness.” While not always explicit, Singh’s main point is that the anticolonial agitator must revoke belief in both transcendent truth and self-knowledge – to reject all forms of “metaphysical assuredness”.
It was not for vanity that Singh became an atheist, but through critique: “study to enable yourself to face the arguments advanced by the opposition. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favour of your cult … No more mysticism, no more blind faith. Realism became our cult.” Singh’s study included the revolutionary thought of Bakunin, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and so on. While they were all atheists, their critique extended beyond religion to all forms of mysticism. Indeed, the disbelief in God represents the rejection of ultimate authority which — in the colonial context — is intrinsically linked to the colonial authority: “British rule is here not because God wills it but because they possess power and we do not dare to oppose them”. Singh disavows the transcendent truth of not only religion and colonial rule but also to anticolonial authority:
“You go and oppose the prevailing faith, you go and criticise a hero, a great man, who is generally believed to be above criticism because he is thought to be infallible… Because Mahatamaji is great, therefore none should criticise him. Because he has risen above, therefore everything he says — it may be in the field of Politics or Religion, Economics or Ethics — is right.”
While Singh does not provide said criticism in this text, it is possible to infer it through his atheism. Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha, translated as soul-force, aligns the notions of ‘truth’ and ‘soul’ with political action. As the two offered competing political programs for independence, one can understand Singh’s atheism, which rejects self-knowledge and the metaphysical ‘soul’, as a challenge to Gandhi’s satyagraha. The challenge is not that truth does not exist (in a postmodern sense) but rather that there is no universal truth. Such is one of the basic epistemological insights of Marx’s philosophy of dialectical materialism: theories of reality, through their application, will be critiqued and replaced ad infinitum — nothing is eternal or unchanging. Far from the dogmatic nature of Western atheism, Singh’s anticolonial philosophy embraces critique while rejecting infallibility:
“Any man who stands for progress has to criticise, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item, he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith.… His reasoning can be mistaken, wrong, misled and sometimes fallacious. But he is liable to correction because reason is the guiding star of his life. But mere faith and blind faith is dangerous: it dulls the brain and makes a person reactionary.”
Politics without metaphysics, without first principles, is essential in a revolutionary programme that seeks to make the world anew. Like all revolutionaries, Singh struggled to realise an ideal — sacrificing himself for an imagined future of independence. Notions of sacrifice, martyrdom and fantasy, while familiar within the Sikh tradition, do not sit comfortably with the standard notion of atheism. Instead, Singh recognises the dialectical unity of the ideal and reality: “the most important thing was the clear conception of the ideal for which we were to fight”. It is only through facing reality in all its hardship, without the cushion of belief, that one can set out to change it. Absolute devotion to the cause is the only principle needed by a revolutionary, everything else is to be constantly thought out anew. His atheism, while tested at times, underscored his commitment to the struggle for independence:
“I know, the moment the rope is fitted round my neck and rafters removed from under my feet, that will be the final moment. That will be the last moment. I, or to be more precise, my soul, as interpreted in metaphysical terminology, shall be finished there… A short life of struggle, with no such magnificent end, shall in itself be the reward if I have the courage to take it in that light. That is all. With no selfish motive, or desire to be awarded here or hereafter, (in fact) quite disinterestedly have I devoted my life to the cause of independence, because I could not do otherwise. The day we find a great number of men and women with this psychology who cannot devote themselves to anything else than the service of mankind and emancipation of the suffering humanity, that day shall inaugurate the era of liberty.”
Inquilab Zindabad (“long live revolution”) — the chant that Bhagat Singh popularised during his arrest — should, if we are to stand for progress, reverberate eternally not only in society but in our minds and thoughts as well. Singh’s atheism — the rejection of ultimate authority and transcendent truth — is necessary in any revolutionary thought.
