Most people who are executed at nineteen are executed for something that happened to them. Kartar Singh Sarabha was executed for something he chose, repeatedly and in full knowledge of the odds, and he chose it young enough that he is usually described in Indian nationalist writing not as a man but as a boy — a description he seems to have earned rather than merely fit. He ran a revolutionary press before he could legally vote in the country he had emigrated to, sailed back into a colonial dragnet at eighteen because he thought the moment demanded it, and left behind a photograph that a slightly younger revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, is said to have kept on his person until the day of his own arrest.
Sarabha, Near Ludhiana
He was born on 24 May 1896 in the village that gave him his name, Sarabha, near Ludhiana, into a Jat Sikh farming family. His father died while he was a child, and he was raised largely by his grandfather. He was educated first at the village school and then at Malwa Khalsa High School in Ludhiana, before completing his matriculation at Ravenshaw College in Cuttack, in what is now Odisha — a considerable distance to travel for schooling, and an early sign of a family willing to invest in the boy's education even at cost. In 1912, at sixteen, he sailed for the United States, drawn by the promise of higher study and the wages available to Indian labourers on the American west coast. Some accounts describe him enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley; the university itself has no record of it, and the more reliable picture is of a young man who moved in Berkeley's orbit — working at odd jobs, attending lectures where he could, and falling in with the Nalanda Club, an association of Indian students whose conversations turned, again and again, to the exclusion laws and casual contempt Indian immigrants met in America, and the harder question of why a people treated so poorly abroad remained subjects of an empire at home.
The Ghadar Press
That question had already produced an answer by the time Sarabha arrived: the Ghadar Party, founded in July 1913 at Astoria, Oregon, and headquartered from that November at the Yugantar Ashram on San Francisco's Hill Street. Sarabha, barely seventeen, became one of its youngest committed members and quickly made himself indispensable to its newspaper, Ghadar — "revolt." While Lala Har Dayal served as the party's general secretary and public face, Sarabha did much of the unglamorous, essential work of getting the Punjabi edition into print: writing, translating, setting type, and, by several accounts, composing verse of his own urging emigrant Punjabis to abandon safety in America and return to fight. The paper's language did not equivocate. "The time will soon come," it told its readers, "when rifles and blood will take the place of pen and ink." Sarabha, still a teenager, appears to have meant every word of it personally rather than rhetorically — a distinction that separated him from a number of older Ghadar figures who wrote fiercely and stayed abroad.
Return and Betrayal
When the First World War broke out in 1914, the party's leadership judged the moment right and called its members home to spark a mutiny inside the British Indian Army's Punjab garrisons. Roughly eight thousand answered from across North America and East Asia; Sarabha was among the first back, working alongside figures such as Vishnu Ganesh Pingley and the Bengali revolutionary Rash Behari Bose to organise a coordinated rising, set for 21 February 1915. British intelligence had informers inside the conspiracy from early on, and the plan collapsed before it properly began: soldiers were disarmed pre-emptively, returning Ghadarites were arrested at the ports, and the uprising that was meant to end British rule in Punjab in a single stroke ended instead in a long series of courtrooms.
The First Lahore Conspiracy Case
Sarabha was tried between April and September 1915 in what became known as the first Lahore Conspiracy Case, alongside dozens of other Ghadarites. He refused a defence lawyer and used the dock, so far as it was available to him, to defend the uprising itself rather than his own conduct — telling the court, in effect, that agitating Indian soldiers to rebel had been his duty and that he regretted nothing about it. The tribunal's judgment singled him out by name as the most dangerous of the accused, proud of what he had done and undeserving of mercy. He was sentenced to death and hanged at Lahore Central Jail on 16 November 1915, six months past his nineteenth birthday.
The Photograph in Bhagat Singh's Pocket
Sarabha's death, unlike Lajpat Rai's a dozen years later, did not immediately convulse the province — the Ghadar rising had already failed, and the British authorities were careful to keep the mass trials out of the more sympathetic press. But among a narrower circle he became something close to a private religion. Bhagat Singh, eight years old when Sarabha died and raised in a household with its own Ghadar connections through his father and uncle, is documented as having carried Sarabha's photograph with him for years afterward; his mother, Vidyavati, recalled him showing it to her and saying, "this is my hero, friend and companion." When Bhagat Singh founded the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in Lahore in March 1926, one of the organisation's earliest public functions was held in Sarabha's memory. It is not a large exaggeration to say that the revolutionary who shot Saunders in 1928, threw the Assembly bombs in 1929, and went to the same jail's gallows in 1931 had been rehearsing, since boyhood, to become the kind of man Kartar Singh Sarabha already was at nineteen.