Sohan Singh Bhaknaਸੋਹਣ ਸਿੰਘ ਭਕਨਾ

Early life

Sohan Singh Bhakna was born on 4 January 1870 at Khutrai Khurd, his mother's ancestral village near Amritsar, though his family belonged to the village of Bhakna, some sixteen kilometres southwest of the city. His father, Bhai Karam Singh, died when Sohan was an infant, leaving the family comfortably off but fatherless. The boy was educated in the village gurdwara, where he learned to read and write Punjabi and absorbed the rudiments of the Sikh faith.

He finished his schooling at sixteen, by which time he was also proficient in Urdu and Persian. At the age of ten he had been married to Bishan Kaur, the daughter of a landlord near Lahore, in the custom of the time; the marriage remained childless. As a young man he drifted for a while, but a meeting with a Namdhari saint turned him toward discipline and purpose. Soon after, the agrarian unrest sweeping Punjab drew him into public life, and he took part in the agitation against the Colonization Bill in 1906 and 1907.

Across the ocean

In February 1909 Sohan Singh sailed for the United States, reaching Seattle on 4 April after a two-month voyage. He found work as a labourer in a timber mill, joining the thousands of Punjabi immigrants, mostly Sikhs, who worked the mills, farms and railways of the Pacific coast. There he saw at first hand the racial discrimination Indians suffered in North America, and the humiliation sharpened his nationalism into something harder and more urgent.

In the summer of 1913, representatives of Indians in the United States and Canada met at Stockton, California, and resolved to form an organisation for India's liberation. The body they created was first called the Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast, and Sohan Singh Bhakna, respected by all for his gravity and experience, was elected its president, with the brilliant young intellectual Lala Hardayal as general secretary. On 1 November 1913 they launched a weekly paper, Ghadar, meaning revolt, to preach armed rebellion against the British. The paper gave its name to the party and to the movement itself.

The Ghadar conspiracy and prison

When the First World War broke out in 1914, the Ghadar leaders judged that Britain's entanglement was India's opportunity, and called on members to return home and rise. Sohan Singh sailed for India, but the British were watching the ports. He was arrested at Calcutta on 13 October 1914, days after landing, and sent to face trial in the Lahore Conspiracy Case. The court sentenced him to death, later commuted to transportation for life, and he was sent to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans and other prisons.

He served sixteen years of that life sentence before his release in 1930, emerging at sixty with his spirit intact. The conspiracy had failed, betrayed and crushed, but it had planted something in Punjab's soil: the idea that ordinary peasants and workers could organise themselves against an empire. Sohan Singh had been its founding president, the elder whom even the young firebrands like Kartar Singh Sarabha revered.

Later life and legacy

After his release, Sohan Singh devoted himself to the labour and peasant movements, working closely with the Kisan Sabha and the Communist Party of India. He had travelled from Sikh revivalism through revolutionary nationalism to the organised left, carrying the same peasant directness through every phase. He lived to the extraordinary age of ninety-eight, dying in Amritsar on 20 December 1968.

Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, as he is affectionately known, remains the grand old man of the Ghadar movement, the founding president who gave the revolt its institutional shape. The Desh Bhagat Yadgar Hall in Jalandhar commemorates the Ghadarites' sacrifice, and his long life, stretching from the 1870s to the late 1960s, bridged the earliest peasant agitations of Punjab and the independent India he had fought to create.