Biography of “Kartar Singh Sarabha”
1. Kartar Singh Sarabha, a Ghadr revolutionary, was born in 1896 in the village of Sarabha, in Ludhiana district of the Punjab in the house of Mangal Singh, a well-to-do farmer.
2. After receiving his primary education in his own village, Kartar Singh entered the Malwa Khalsa High school at Ludhiana for his matriculation. He was in tenth grade when he went to live with his uncle in Orissa where, after finishing high school, he joined college.
3. In 1912, when he was barely 16 years old, he sailed for San Francisco (U.S.A.), and joined the University of California at Berkeley, enrolling for a degree in chemistry.
4. His association with Nalanda club of Indian students at Berkeley aroused his patriotic sentiments and he felt agitated about the treatment immigrants from India, especially laborers received in the United States.
5. When the Ghadr party was founded in mid-1913 with Sohan Singh, a Sikh peasant from Bhakna village in Amritsar district, as president and Hardyal as secretary, Kartar Singh stopped his university work, moved in with Har Dyal and became his helpmate in running the revolutionary newspaper Ghadr (revolt).
6. He undertook the responsibility for printing of the Gurmukhi edition of the paper. He composed patriotic poetry for it and wrote articles.
7. He also went out among the Sikh farmers and arranged meetings at which he and other Ghadr leaders made speeches urging them to unite action against the British.
8. At a meeting at Sacramento, California, on 31 October 1913, he jumped to the stage and began to sing: “Chalo chaliye desh nu yudh karen, eho akhiri vachan te farman ho gaye” (Come! let us go and join the battle of freedom; the final call has come, let us go!). Kartar Singh was one of the first to follow his own call.
9. The trial of arrested leaders in the Lahore conspiracy cases of 1915-1916 highlighted the role of Kartar Singh Sarabha in the movement. His defense was just one eloquent statement of his revolutionary creed. He was sentenced to death on the 13th of September, 1915, and received the hangman’s noose on the 16th of November, 1915.
