Kartar Singh Sarabha: the Ghadar Party and a martyr at nineteen

This day remembers Kartar Singh Sarabha, a young Sikh of the Ghadar movement who was hanged by the British in Lahore on 16 November 1915, aged nineteen. Bhagat Singh later kept his photograph with him and spoke of him as his guide.

From Sarabha to San Francisco

Kartar Singh was born in 1896 in the village of Sarabha, near Ludhiana, and lost his father as a child. After school he went to the United States in 1912 to study at the University of California at Berkeley. Among the Punjabi labourers on the Pacific coast, many of them Sikhs, he met the racism and humiliation they faced as subjects of a colonised country, and joined the Ghadar Party when it was founded in 1913. He helped print and send out its newspaper, Ghadar, in Punjabi and Urdu.

The planned uprising

When the First World War began in 1914, the Ghadar leaders called on Indians abroad to return and raise a revolt while Britain was at war. Kartar Singh came back to Punjab and travelled tirelessly, meeting soldiers in cantonments, gathering arms and preparing for an uprising set for February 1915. The plan was betrayed by an informer, and arrests followed across Punjab.

Trial and execution

He was arrested and tried in the first Lahore Conspiracy Case. In court he spoke openly of his aims, and was sentenced to death with six companions. He was hanged in Lahore Central Jail. Tradition remembers his calm and his good spirits in his last days.

How he is remembered

He is remembered with tributes, Ardas and gatherings, above all in his village, where a memorial and his ancestral home stand, and in gurdwaras that keep the SGPC's calendar.