ਊਧਮ ਸਿੰਘਊਧਮ ਸਿੰਘ

Udham Singh (1899 to 1940), born Sher Singh at Sunam in Sangrur district, was a Punjabi revolutionary who is remembered across India as Shaheed-i-Azam, the great martyr. Orphaned as a small child and raised in Amritsar, he was serving water to the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919 when British troops opened fire. Twenty one years later, in London, he shot dead Michael O'Dwyer, the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab who had defended the massacre, and he went to the gallows without asking for mercy.

Early life in Sunam and Amritsar

He was born on 26 December 1899 in the Pilbad neighbourhood of Sunam, the youngest son of Tehal Singh, a low paid manual worker, and Narain Kaur. His mother died while the boys were still toddlers, and his father died in Amritsar in October 1907 after collapsing while taking his two sons there on foot. An uncle who could not keep them placed both brothers in the Central Khalsa Orphanage, where the register records their initiation on 28 October 1907. Sher Singh was renamed Udham Singh, and his elder brother Sadhu became Mukta. Mukta died of a sudden illness in 1917.

The orphanage gave him belonging more than schooling. Still under the official age, he persuaded the authorities to let him serve with the British Indian Army during the First World War, working with a labour unit of the 32nd Sikh Pioneers on railway restoration work toward Basra. Clashes with authority brought him home within months. He rejoined in 1918, did carpentry and maintenance work in Basra and Baghdad, and was back at the orphanage in Amritsar by early 1919.

What happened at Jallianwala Bagh?

On 13 April 1919, the day of Baisakhi, more than twenty thousand unarmed people gathered in Jallianwala Bagh to celebrate the festival and to protest the arrest of Congress leaders Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew under the Rowlatt Act. Udham Singh and his orphanage friends were serving water to the crowd. Troops commanded by Colonel Reginald Dyer sealed the ground and fired on the gathering, killing several hundred people. The Better India, drawing on standard accounts, puts the official estimate at about 400 killed and 1,200 wounded, with unofficial counts higher.

The massacre changed the direction of his life. Punjab's Lieutenant Governor, Michael O'Dwyer, had backed Dyer and later described the action as correct. For Udham Singh, O'Dwyer was not a distant official but the man at the top of the administration that had ordered and defended the shooting. His anger settled into a single, patient purpose.

A revolutionary across three continents

In the early 1920s he left India as a working man, not as a student. He laboured on railway construction in East Africa, crossed to the United States, and in San Francisco came into contact with the Ghadar Party, the organisation of emigrant Indians working to end British rule. He travelled across America building support for the movement and used several names along the way, among them Ude Singh, Sher Singh and Frank Brazil.

In 1927 he returned to India, working his passage as a carpenter on a ship. Soon after reaching Punjab he was arrested. Police recovered revolvers, ammunition and copies of the banned Ghadar paper Ghadr di Gunj, and he was sentenced to five years in prison. He was released in 1931, by which time Dyer had died of natural causes and Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, revolutionaries he deeply admired, had been hanged in the Lahore conspiracy case.

Freedom did not mean safety. The Punjab Police kept him under constant watch because of his links with Bhagat Singh's Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. He moved to Kashmir, slipped away from the police there, and reached Germany. By 1934 he was in London. He earned his living as a carpenter, motor mechanic and signboard painter, joined socialist circles, took part in Indian Workers' Association meetings in Coventry, and even appeared as a film extra in Elephant Boy in 1937 and The Four Feathers in 1939. None of it replaced the purpose that had brought him to England.

Caxton Hall, the trial and the gallows

On 13 March 1940, Michael O'Dwyer was due to speak at a joint meeting of the East India Association and the Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall in London. Udham Singh entered with a revolver hidden inside a book whose pages had been cut to fit it. As the meeting ended and O'Dwyer moved toward the platform, he fired twice, killing him almost at once. Louis Dane, Lord Zetland and Lord Lamington were also wounded. He made no attempt to run and was arrested in the hall.

In custody he gave his name as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad. The name joined the three main religious communities of Punjab, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, and ended with azad, meaning free. While awaiting trial he held a hunger strike of 42 days and was force fed. His trial opened at the Old Bailey on 4 June 1940 before Justice Atkinson. He told the court he had waited 21 years, that he was not scared of death, and that he was dying for his country. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, and on 31 July 1940 he was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London and buried inside the prison grounds.

Why did Udham Singh kill Michael O'Dwyer?

He killed O'Dwyer because O'Dwyer, as Punjab's Lieutenant Governor in 1919, was the senior civilian authority behind the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and had publicly defended Dyer's firing on an unarmed crowd. Dyer himself had died in 1927, so the man Udham Singh held most responsible and could still reach was O'Dwyer. In his own courtroom words, the act was the settling of a 21 year old account for a people he had seen starving and shot under British rule.

The return home and his legacy

For 34 years his remains lay in London. In 1974, after a campaign led by MLA Sadhu Singh Thind, they were exhumed and brought back to India, where the casket was received by senior national leaders. He was cremated at Sunam, and on 2 August 1974 his ashes were placed in seven urns and shared between Haridwar, Kiratpur Sahib, Rauza Sharif, Sunam, the museum at Jallianwala Bagh and the library of the Shaheed Udham Singh Arts College in Sunam. His home town is now officially Sunam Udham Singh Wala, and his ancestral house there has been turned into a museum holding letters and personal objects.

India has kept naming its gratitude. A postage stamp was issued in his honour in 1992, he was posthumously given the Nishan-e-Khalsa in 1999, the district of Udham Singh Nagar in Uttarakhand carries his name, and a statue of him was unveiled at the main entrance of Jallianwala Bagh on 13 March 2018. His martyrdom day, 31 July, is a public holiday in Punjab and Haryana, and marches are held in Sunam every year. His story has been told again and again on screen, from earlier Punjabi films to Sardar Udham in 2021, and in music, from Asian Dub Foundation to the Ska Vengers track named after his alias Frank Brazil. The orphan from Sunam who carried water at Jallianwala Bagh is now part of how Punjab explains 1919 to its children.