Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha

Kartar Singh Sarabha was a young man from a farming family in Sarabha village, Ludhiana district. He left a chemistry course at the University of California, Berkeley, to work for the Ghadar Party, went back to India in 1914 to prepare a revolt against British rule, and was hanged at about nineteen. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls him a central figure in the Lahore conspiracy cases of 1915 and 1916.

Key moments

• 1896: born at Sarabha, the only son of Mangal Singh, a well-to-do farmer. He studied at the Malwa Khalsa High School in Ludhiana and finished school in Orissa, where he lived with an uncle, before entering college.
• 1912: aged about sixteen he sailed to San Francisco and enrolled at Berkeley for a chemistry degree. He joined the Nalanda Club of Indian Students and grew concerned at the treatment of Indian immigrants, especially manual workers.
• 1913: when the Ghadar Party was formed he left his studies to work for it. He worked with Har Dayal on the Ghadar newspaper, oversaw its Gurmukhi edition, wrote articles and poems for it and organised meetings of Sikh farmers. On 31 October 1913, at a meeting in Sacramento, he sang a patriotic song and joined the cause.
• 15 September 1914: he left the United States and came home by way of Colombo. In December 1914, when Bhai Parmanand arrived, he was given the task of building the party's network in Ludhiana district. He went to Bengal for firearms, met revolutionaries including Vishnu Ganesh Pingley, Sachindra Nath Sanyal and Rash Behari Bose, and toured army cantonments with Pingley urging soldiers to revolt.
• 1914 to 1915: his group made bombs on a small scale at Jhabewal and later at Lohatbaddi, both in Ludhiana district, and in January 1915 raided the villages of Sahnewal and Mansuran to raise funds.
• February to March 1915: a police informer exposed the plan for a revolt before it began. Sarabha escaped to Kabul with two companions, returned to carry on, and was seized on 2 March 1915 at Wilsonpur, Shahpur district, while trying to win over troops of the 22nd Cavalry.
• 13 September 1915: he was sentenced to death in the Lahore conspiracy case. He was hanged on 16 November 1915.

Remembered for: giving up his degree and his life at about nineteen for the Ghadar cause. A statue of him stands in Ludhiana, and the Punjabi novelist Nanak Singh wrote a fictional account of his life, Ikk Mian Do Talwaran.