Ajit Singh

Ajit Singh was born at Khatkar Kalan in 1881, the uncle of Bhagat Singh. He founded the Bharat Mata Society, ran the agitation of 1907 with Lala Lajpat Rai and was deported to Burma.

On release he left India in 1909 and did not return for thirty-eight years. He was in Persia, Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina and Italy, working with Indian revolutionary networks abroad, and was associated with the Ghadar circles and later with the Axis-linked Indian propaganda effort in Europe during the Second World War.

He returned in March 1947 and settled at Dalhousie. He died there on 15 August 1947, the morning of independence.

He is one of the few figures who connects the 1907 colony agitation, the overseas revolutionary movement and the last day of British rule in a single life, and he is barely known outside Punjab.

His house at Khatkar Kalan is part of the Bhagat Singh memorial complex.

He was Bhagat Singh Ji's uncle and led the Pagri Sambhal Jatta agitation of 1907 against the colonisation and canal legislation, a mass peasant movement often called the beginning of the freedom movement in Punjab.

He was deported to Mandalay with Lala Lajpat Rai in 1907 and afterward spent decades abroad, in Persia, Turkey, Europe and Latin America, working with anti-colonial groups.

He returned in March 1947 and died at Dalhousie on 15 August 1947, on the morning of independence.

What we don't know

  • Much of the European period, which is documented only in intelligence files of several countries.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Standard biographies of Ajit Singh.
  • Records of the 1907 deportations.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 49 accounts in Ghadar, the chapter of this site covering the movements against colonial rule, 1907 to 1947.