At a Glance
Etah to the Underground: The Path into the HSRA
Shiv Varma was born on 26 December 1904 in Etah District in the United Provinces — the agricultural heartland of the Gangetic plain that was also, in the early twentieth century, one of the principal recruiting grounds for the revolutionary nationalist movement. The region had been deeply affected by the executions of Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, and the other Kakori martyrs in December 1927: those executions had been carried out publicly and had been widely reported in the nationalist press, and they had produced precisely the radicalising effect on young educated men in the United Provinces that the government had hoped to prevent by making them. Shiv Varma was in his early twenties when the Kakori men were hanged, politically engaged and in contact with the surviving networks of the Hindustan Republican Association that Chandrashekhar Azad was rebuilding under the new name of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.
He came into the HSRA through the Kanpur and Agra networks — the city connections that the organisation maintained in the United Provinces alongside its Lahore base — and was drawn into its inner circle through his demonstrated reliability, his willingness to undertake the difficult and dangerous technical work that the organisation required, and the trust of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad. The HSRA in the late 1920s was a small, tightly-knit organisation — its active membership at any given time numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds — and admission to its operational core required both political commitment and personal trust. Shiv Varma had both.
Bomb-Making and the Technical Work of Revolution
The HSRA's operations required weapons, and weapons in the context of a clandestine organisation in the 1920s meant primarily pistols and improvised explosive devices — bombs manufactured from available materials in conditions of secrecy and limited resources. Bhagat Singh had studied bomb-making from published sources, including materials produced by European anarchist and revolutionary movements, and the organisation had developed a practical technical capability through experimentation and the knowledge of members with chemistry and engineering backgrounds. Shiv Varma was one of the organisation's principal bomb-makers — a role that required technical knowledge, manual skill, physical courage, and the ability to work carefully under conditions where a mistake could kill not the enemy but oneself and one's comrades.
The bombs manufactured for the Central Legislative Assembly action of 8 April 1929 were specifically designed not to be lethal — they were intended to produce smoke and noise rather than fragmentation casualties, consistent with the HSRA's stated intention to "make the deaf hear" rather than to kill. The technical requirement was, in some respects, more demanding than manufacturing a straightforwardly destructive device: the bombs needed to perform reliably in a specific way, producing the desired dramatic effect without causing the unintended casualties that would have undermined the political purpose of the action. Shiv Varma's work in manufacturing those devices was a direct contribution to one of the most celebrated acts of the independence movement, even though his name is less associated with it in popular memory than those of the two men who threw them.
The Lahore Conspiracy Case: Trial and Sentence
The Lahore Conspiracy Case — the government's prosecution of the HSRA arising from the Saunders killing of December 1928 and the Assembly bombing of April 1929 — drew in the wider network of the organisation beyond the men directly involved in those two actions. Shiv Varma was arrested and charged as a conspirator — the conspiracy charges allowed the government to prosecute members of the organisation who had not personally participated in the killings or the bombing but who had been part of the network that planned, supported, and enabled them.
He was tried before the Special Tribunal that the government had constituted — bypassing the regular court system whose jury procedures the government did not trust to produce convictions — and convicted of conspiracy. He was sentenced to transportation for life: the colonial penal system's provision for long-term imprisonment at the Andaman Cellular Jail, the remote island penitentiary in the Bay of Bengal that was designed to be as far as possible from mainland India and from the possibility of rescue, escape, or political intervention.
The trial was the last time Shiv Varma was in the same room as Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev. They were sentenced to death; he was sentenced to transportation. The divergence of outcomes from the same trial — some men to the gallows, others to the Andamans — was determined by the degree of the government's evidence connecting each defendant to the killings specifically, rather than to the organisation generally. Shiv Varma survived the trial. His comrades did not survive the year.
The Andaman Cellular Jail: Sixteen Years
The Andaman Cellular Jail was the British Empire's most severe penal institution in India — a purpose-built prison on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, opened in 1906, designed to hold political prisoners in conditions of enforced isolation and hard labour that were intended to break both their physical health and their political will. The cellular design — individual cells with no sight lines between prisoners — was explicitly intended to prevent communication, solidarity, and the maintenance of political community among prisoners. The regime imposed on political prisoners included oil-pressing on hand-operated mills, coir rope-making, and other forms of hard physical labour that degraded men trained as lawyers, students, and intellectuals.
Shiv Varma spent approximately sixteen years in the Andaman Cellular Jail — from his transportation in the early 1930s to his release in the period approaching independence. The experience damaged the health of every man who endured it for any significant period: the tropical climate, the inadequate diet, the physical labour, and the psychological isolation produced tuberculosis, cardiac conditions, and mental deterioration in men who had arrived as young and physically vigorous. Batukeshwar Dutt, who was also transported to the Andamans, contracted the tuberculosis that eventually killed him in 1965 during his imprisonment there. Shiv Varma survived, physically and mentally intact enough to return to political activity after his release.
The Andaman prisoners staged hunger strikes — in 1932–33 and subsequently — demanding political prisoner status and improved conditions. These strikes attracted attention from the Congress leadership and the nationalist press on the mainland, and Shiv Varma participated in them as part of the collective action of the political prisoner community. The strikes achieved partial concessions but never the full recognition of political prisoner status that the men demanded. The colonial government was unwilling to acknowledge that the men it was imprisoning for fighting against it were anything other than ordinary criminals.
Release, Independence, and the Choice of Communism
Shiv Varma was released from the Andamans in the years approaching independence — the exact timing of his release and any intermediate imprisonments in the Quit India period are less precisely documented than his initial sentence — and returned to the United Provinces as a free man in an India that was in the final years of its colonial subjugation. He was in his early forties, his youth and young manhood having been consumed by the HSRA and the Andaman imprisonment, and he made the political choice that a significant number of the surviving HSRA and related revolutionary nationalist figures made: he joined the Communist Party of India.
The choice reflected a trajectory that had been present in the HSRA's later ideology. Bhagat Singh's political thinking in his final years had moved decisively toward Marxism — the socialism in the HSRA's revised name was not merely rhetorical but reflected a genuine engagement with socialist political economy — and the men who had been formed by that tradition found the Communist Party a natural home in the post-independence period. Shiv Varma worked as a Communist Party activist and trade union organiser in Kanpur — the industrial city that had been one of the HSRA's principal bases in the 1920s — and continued that work for decades.
The Memoirist: Sangram and Remembered Comrades
The most enduring contribution of Shiv Varma's long post-independence life was his written record of the HSRA. He published Sangram in Hindi in 1956 — a memoir of the revolutionary movement that drew on his direct experience as an HSRA member and on his knowledge of the organisation's internal life, its debates, its members' personalities, and the events he had participated in or witnessed. He subsequently wrote Remembered Comrades in English, which brought the material to a wider readership. He gave extensive interviews over decades to historians, journalists, and documentary filmmakers working on the HSRA and the independence movement more broadly.
The value of this testimony cannot be overstated. The HSRA was a clandestine organisation that deliberately minimised its written records — an underground movement cannot leave a paper trail — and many of its most important members were dead by the time the independence movement began producing its own historiography. What Shiv Varma remembered and recorded — the texture of daily life in the HSRA, the arguments between Bhagat Singh and other members about ideology and tactics, the personalities of men like Chandrashekhar Azad and Sukhdev that do not emerge from trial records and government files, the practical details of how the organisation acquired weapons and manufactured explosives and moved people across the country — exists in the historical record because he preserved it.
His accounts have been used and cross-referenced by every serious historian of the HSRA, and they have in some cases complicated or corrected the more hagiographic nationalist narratives that formed around the movement's most celebrated figures. He wrote about Bhagat Singh with enormous admiration but also with the critical honesty of a man who had known him as a human being rather than as a symbol — noting the debates within the organisation, the disagreements about strategy and ideology, the moments of doubt and argument that the martyr-legend tends to smooth away. This honesty is what makes his testimony historically valuable rather than merely celebratory.
A Long Life and What It Meant
Shiv Varma died on 18 December 1997 in Kanpur — one day before the anniversary of the execution of Ram Prasad Bismil and his comrades on 19 December 1927, a coincidence that his obituarists noted with the sense that it was appropriate. He was ninety-two years old. He had outlived Bhagat Singh by sixty-six years, Chandrashekhar Azad by sixty-six years, Rajguru and Sukhdev by the same. He had been a young man in the most dangerous and morally serious organisation in India, had survived when most of his comrades did not, and had spent the remainder of his life doing what the dead could not: remembering accurately, bearing witness honestly, and insisting that the revolutionary tradition he had been part of was not merely a collection of heroic gestures but a coherent political project with an ideology, a history, and a continuing relevance to the questions that Indian society had not yet resolved.
The HSRA's surviving members were, in post-independence India, an awkward presence for the dominant narrative of the independence movement — men whose methods the Gandhi-led Congress had officially disapproved of, whose socialist politics sat uneasily with the Nehruvian mixed economy, and whose revolutionary tradition the ruling party had complicated feelings about celebrating too enthusiastically. Shiv Varma did not allow those complications to silence him. He kept writing, kept speaking, kept insisting on the fullness and the seriousness of the history he had been part of. It is because of men like him that the history survived.