Professor Malwinderjit Singh Waraich

Professor Malwinderjit Singh Waraich (1929 to 9 May 2026) was a historian of the Punjab's freedom movements: the Ghadar movement, the Babbar Akalis, the Namdhari Kukas and Bhagat Singh's revolutionary circle. He was known for recovering original trial records and for gathering the memories of the people who had lived through those movements. Harish Jain, his publisher, writes in The Tribune that Waraich called himself "Ghadari Babian da Munshi", roughly the scribe of the old Ghadarites, and saw himself as a keeper of memory rather than an institutional historian.

His family came from Laddhewala Waraich in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, and moved at Partition, first to Kapurthala and then to Karnal. He taught humanities at Guru Nanak Engineering College, Ludhiana, from 1960 to 1989. After retiring he studied law, practised briefly with the senior advocate R. S. Cheema, and fought cases in the Punjab and Haryana High Court to win recognition for revolutionary movements and compensation or the return of freedom fighters' confiscated property.

Work

• From the 1960s he travelled the villages by bicycle meeting surviving Ghadarites and recording their memories. He knew Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, Baba Harnam Singh Kala Sanghian, Pandit Kishori Lal and Vidyawati, the mother of Bhagat Singh.
• With Harish Jain he edited and published the judgments of the First and Second Lahore Conspiracy Cases, and recovered the Bhagat Singh Tribunal proceedings that carry Sukhdev's handwritten remarks.
• He wrote Bhagat Singh: The Eternal Rebel, a volume on the trial of Madan Lal Dhingra published in 2003, and volumes on the Ghadar movement, the Babbar Akalis and the Komagata Maru episode. In all he wrote, translated or edited more than 62 books in Punjabi, Hindi and English.
• He documented the names and villages of 66 Namdhari Kuka martyrs executed by the British at Malerkotla.
• He collected thousands of documents, books and belongings of Ghadar revolutionaries, now kept at the Professor Malwinderjit Singh Waraich Revolutionary Research Centre in Jalandhar.
• He helped found the Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha Memorial Hospital and Medical College at Sarabha village.

He died at Panchkula on Saturday 9 May 2026. The Tribune reported his age as 96, and its tribute gives his years as 1929 to 2026, which makes him 96 or 97. As he wished, his body was donated to PGI Chandigarh for medical research.

Remembered for: putting the trial records, memoirs and documents of the Ghadarites, the Babbar Akalis and Bhagat Singh's comrades into print, so that later writers could work from the originals.