Kartar Singh Sarabhaਕਰਤਾਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਸਰਾਭਾ

Early life

Kartar Singh Sarabha was born on 24 May 1896 in the village of Sarabha, near Ludhiana in Punjab. His father, Mangal Singh, died when Kartar was very young, and he was raised by his grandfather. After primary schooling in his village he studied at the Malwa Khalsa school in Ludhiana up to the eighth standard, a bright student with an appetite for the wider world.

In July 1912, at the age of sixteen, he sailed for the United States to pursue higher education, with the University of California at Berkeley in view. He found work in mills and factories to support himself, and there he encountered the racism and humiliation that Indian immigrants, most of them Punjabi labourers, endured in North America. The experience radicalised him. Through the Berkeley circle of Indian students his patriotism awakened, and he began to dream of freeing India rather than merely studying abroad.

The Ghadar Party

In 1913 Indian emigrants in North America founded the Ghadar Party, dedicated to the armed overthrow of British rule in India. Kartar Singh, barely seventeen, joined at once and quickly became one of its most energetic members. The party's veteran leader Sohan Singh Bhakna was so impressed by the boy's fire that he nicknamed him Baba General. Kartar Singh threw himself into the party's newspaper, Ghadar, helping edit and manage its Punjabi edition, whose poems and articles called on Indians everywhere to rise.

He learned practical skills for the struggle as well: sympathisers taught him to handle firearms, make explosives, and even gave him flying lessons. When the First World War broke out in 1914, the Ghadar leaders saw Britain's difficulty as India's opportunity and called on members to return home and start an armed uprising. Kartar Singh was among the first to sail back, fully aware of the danger, and set to work building revolutionary networks and training camps across Punjab.

Arrest and execution

The planned uprising was betrayed before it could begin, and the British moved swiftly against the conspirators. Kartar Singh was arrested and tried in the Lahore Conspiracy Case. In court he refused to show fear or ask for mercy; witnesses remembered a young man who smiled even as the death sentence was pronounced. On 16 November 1915 he was hanged in Lahore Central Jail. He was nineteen years old.

Legacy

Though his life was so short, Kartar Singh Sarabha's example electrified the next generation of revolutionaries. Bhagat Singh, who was eleven when Sarabha died, grew up regarding him as his ideal and is said to have carried Sarabha's photograph in his pocket. In Punjab, Sarabha became a folk hero, his name sung in ballads and his village a place of pilgrimage. He remains the enduring symbol of youthful, absolute commitment to freedom, proof that nineteen years can be enough to shake an empire.

His sacrifice was commemorated widely in the years that followed. The village of Sarabha preserves his memory, and in 1976 the Indian government issued a postage stamp bearing his portrait. Memorial statues, a sports tournament named for him, and the Ghadar Memorial in his honour keep his story alive for new generations of Punjabis.