My endless quest to understand Bhagwan Singh and Bhogwan Singh

It was in the summer of 2016 that I first came across Bhagwan Singh. He was a popular “turban-wrapper” in 1930s Hollywood who shared his name with a revolutionary-turned-lecturer who too lived in Los Angeles. Bhagwan was a common enough name, so I surmised these were two very different men: Bhagwan Singh and Bhagwan Singh.

I was right – and wrong. Soon enough, I gathered that their names were spelled differently. The turban-wrapper was Bhogwan Singh, with an o in his first name, and the revolutionary-turned-lecturer was Bhagwan Singh. This is it, I thought. I have figured them out now.

But their stories kept surprising. When the two appeared in old records and newspapers, their spellings were occasionally changed, leaving me wondering, who is this: Bhagwan Singh or Bhogwan Singh?

The more I read about them, the more their lives seemed to intersect, complement and sometimes even interchange. I felt I was being somehow misled by history.

Fascinated and intrigued, I decided to seek these men out in archives, retrace their footsteps, figure out the years and places where they had lived close to each other, or the times their journeys mingled and merged.

This was not just a mystery of two men with similar names. It was the history...

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