Sardar Ajit Singh
Uncle of Bhagat Singh who led the farmers' agitation of 1907, Pagri Sambhal Jatta, and spent thirty-eight years in exile.
Ajit Singh was born in 1881 at Khatkar Kalan in the Jalandhar doab, into the family that would give the Punjab Bhagat Singh, his nephew.
In 1907, when the British raised water rates and passed the Colonisation Bill against the settlers of the canal colonies, he led the agitation with Lala Lajpat Rai. At a rally in Lyallpur the editor Banke Dayal sang Pagri Sambhal Jatta, guard your turban, farmer, and the song became the anthem of the movement. Ajit Singh and Lajpat Rai were deported to Mandalay, and the bill was withdrawn.
He fled abroad in 1909 and spent thirty-eight years in exile, in Persia, Turkey, Europe and South America. He came home in 1947 and died at Dalhousie on 15 August, the morning of independence.
Connected
The 'Lion of Punjab' of the independence movement. Beaten by police at a protest against the Simon Commission in Lahore in 1928, he died weeks later.
Socialist revolutionary hanged in Lahore at twenty-three with Rajguru and Sukhdev. Among the most celebrated figures of India's independence movement.
Ajit Singh Sandhawalia
Ajit Singh Sandhawalia (Sirdar Ajit Singh (Sindianwala))National Army Museum, London · photo Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons) ↗