Kartar Singh Sarabha
Ghadar Party revolutionary who returned from California to raise a rising against British rule. Hanged in Lahore at nineteen.
Kartar Singh was born in 1896 in the village of Sarabha near Ludhiana. His father died when he was a child and he was raised by his grandfather. At fifteen he went to the United States, enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, and worked with the Punjabi migrants in the lumber mills and farms of the Pacific coast.
In 1913 he joined the Ghadar Party, formed by Punjabi migrants to overthrow British rule in India, and helped print its newspaper, Ghadar. When the First World War began, he was among those who returned to Punjab in 1914 to raise a rebellion among the Indian troops. The rising was set for 21 February 1915; it was betrayed by an informer, and the conspirators were rounded up.
In the Lahore Conspiracy Case he defended himself defiantly and told the court he was proud of what he had done. He was hanged in Lahore Central Jail on 16 November 1915, aged nineteen. Bhagat Singh carried his photograph in his pocket and called him his guru. His village is now a place of pilgrimage.
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Socialist revolutionary hanged in Lahore at twenty-three with Rajguru and Sukhdev. Among the most celebrated figures of India's independence movement.
Founding president of the Ghadar Party in America in 1913. Sentenced to death after the failed rising, he spent sixteen years in prison.
Scholar who left Oxford to organise Punjabi migrants in San Francisco and helped found the Ghadar Party.