Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna (1870-1968) was as
Indian revolutionaryThe term Indian independence movement incorporates various national and regional campaigns, agitations and efforts of both nonviolent and militant philosophy. The term encompasses a wide spectrum of political organizations, philosophies, and movements which had the common aim of ending the British...
, the founding president of the
Ghadar PartyThe Ghadar Party was an organization founded by Indians of the United States and Canada in June, 1913 with the aim to liberate India from British rule...
, and a leading member of the party involved in the
Ghadar ConspiracyThe Ghadar Conspiracy was a conspiracy for a pan-Indian mutiny in the British Indian Army in February 1915 formulated by Indian revolutionaries...
of 1915. Tried at the Lahore Conspiracy trial, Sohan Singh served sixteen years of a life sentence for his part in the conspiracy before he was released in 1930. He later worked closely with the Indian labour movement, devoting considerable time to the Kisan Sabha and the
Communist Party of IndiaThe Communist Party of India is a political party in India. In the Indian communist movement, there are different views on exactly when the Indian communist party was founded. The date maintained as the foundation day by CPI is 26 december 1925...
.
Early Life
Sohan Singh was born in January 1870 at the village of Khutrai Khurd, north of Amritsar, which was the ancestral home of his mother Ram Kaur. His father was Bhai Karam Singh, who lived with his family in the village of Bhakna, 16 km southwest of
AmritsarAmritsar is a city in the northwestern part of India and is the administrative headquarters of Amritsar district in the state of Punjab, India. The 2001 Indian census reported the population of the city to be over 1,500,000, with that of the entire district numbering just over 3,695,077...
. Young Sohan Singh spent his child hood at Bhakhna, where he received his childhood education in the village Gurudwara. He learnt to read and write in the
Punjabi languagePunjabi or Panjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region ....
at an early age, and was also instructed on the rudiments of Sikh faith. Sohan Singh was married at the age of ten to Bishan Kaur, daughter of a landlord near
LahoreLahore is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in Pakistan after Karachi. Historically the main city of the undivided Punjab, it is often called the Garden of Mughals because of its rich Mughal heritage...
by the name of Khushal Singh. Sohan Singh finished school at the age of sixteen, by which time he was also proficient in
UrduUrdu is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of the two official languages of Pakistan. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of five Indian states...
and
PersianPersian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq and Bahrain, and has a status of official language in the first three countries under different names...
. His marriage to Bishan Kaur, however, remained childless.
Sohan Singh became involved in the nationalist movement and the agrarian unrest that emerged in Punjab in the 1900s. He participated in the protests against the anti-Colonization Bill in 1906-07. Two years later, in February 1909, he left home to sail for the United States. After a two month journey, Singh reached Seattle on 4 April 1909.
United States
Sohan Singh soon found work as a labourer in a timber mill being constructed near the city. In this first decade of the 1900s, the Pacific coast of North America saw large scale Indian immigration. A large proportion of the immigrants were especially from Punjab which was facing an economic depression and agrarian unrest. The Canadian government met this influx with a series of legislations aimed at limiting the entry of South Asians into Canada, and restricting the political rights of those already in the country. The Punjabi community had hitherto been an important loyal force for the
British EmpireThe British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom, that had originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height it was...
and the
CommonwealthThe Commonwealth of Nations, often referred to as the Commonwealth and previously as the British Commonwealth, is an intergovernmental organisation of fifty-three independent member states. Most of them were formerly part of the British Empire. They co-operate within a framework of common values...
, and the community had expected, to honour its commitment, equal welcome and rights from the British and commonwealth governments as extended to British and white immigrants. These legislations fed growing discontent, protests and anti-colonial sentiments within the community. Faced with increasingly difficult situations, the community began organising itself into political groups. A large number of Punjabis also moved to the United States, but they encountered similar political and social problems. Early works among these groups date back to the time around 1908 when Indian students and Punjabi immigrants of the likes of P S Khankhoje,
Pandit Kanshi RamPandit Kanshi Ram was an Indian revolutionary who, along with Har Dayal and Sohan Singh Bhakna was one of the three key members in founding the Ghadar Party. He served as the treasurer of the party from its foundation in 1913 to 1914...
, Taraknath Das and
Bhai Bhagwan SinghBhai Bhagwan Singh Gyanee was an Indian Nationalist and a leading luminary of the Ghadar Party. Elected the party president in 1914, he was extensively involved in the Ghadar Conspiracy of 1915 during World War I and in the aftermath of its failure fled to Japan...
were working towards and for a political movement. Khankhoje himself founded the Indian Independence League in
Portland, OregonPortland is a city located in the Northwestern United States, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the state of Oregon. As of July 2008, it has an estimated population of 575,930, making it the 29th most populous in the United States. It has been referred to as the most...
. Sohan Singh at this time came to be strongly associated with this political movement taking shape among Indian immigrants. His works also brought him close to other Indian nationalists in United States at the time.
Meanwhile,
India HouseIndia House was an informal Indian nationalist organization based in London between 1905 and 1910. With the patronage of Shyamji Krishna Varma, its home in a student residence in Highgate, North London was launched to promote nationalist views among Indian students in Britain...
and nationalist activism of Indian students had begun declining in the East Coast towards 1910, but gradually shifted west to San Francisco. The arrival at this time of
Har DayalLala Har Dayal was an Indian revolutionary and founder of the Ghadar Party.-Early years:...
from Europe bridged the gap between the intellectual agitators in New York and the predominantly Punjabi labour workers and migrants in the west coast, and laid the foundations of the
Ghadar movementThe Ghadar Party was an organization founded by Indians of the United States and Canada in June, 1913 with the aim to liberate India from British rule...
. In the summer of 1913, representatives of Indians living in Canada and the United States met at
Stockton-Places:Australia:*Stockton, New South WalesNew Zealand:*Stockton, New ZealandUnited Kingdom:*Stockton, Cheshire*Stockton, Herefordshire*Stockton, Norfolk*Stockton, Shropshire*Stockton, Warwickshire*Stockton, Wiltshire*Stockton-on-Tees*Stockton-on-Teme...
, where the decision was taken to establish an organization, Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast. The
Pacific Coast Hindustan Association, was formed in 1913 in the United States under the leadership of
Har DayalLala Har Dayal was an Indian revolutionary and founder of the Ghadar Party.-Early years:...
, P.S. Khankhoje and Sohan Singh Bhakna. Bhakna was its president. It drew members from Indian immigrants, largely from
PunjabPunjab was a province of British India, it was one of the last areas of the Indian subcontinent to fall under British rule. With the end of British rule in 1947 the province was split between India and Pakistan...
. Many of its members were also from the
University of California at BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines...
including Dayal,
Tarak Nath DasTaraknath Das or Tarak Nath Das , anti-British Bengali Indian revolutionary and internationalist scholar. He was a pioneering immigrant in the west coast of North America and discussed his plans with Tolstoy, while organizing the Asian Indian immigrants in favor of the Indian freedom movement...
,
Kartar Singh SarabhaKartar Singh Sarabha Grewal was an Indian revolutionary who was amongst the most famous accused in the Lahore conspiracy trial. A leading luminary of the Ghadar Party, Kartar Singh was executed at Lahore in November 1915 for his role in the Ghadar Conspiracy in February 1915.- Early life :Kartar...
and
V.G. PingleVishnu Ganesh Pingle was an Indian revolutionary and a member of the Ghadar Party who was one of those executed in 1915 following the Lahore conspiracy trial for his role in the Ghadar conspiracy.-Early life:...
. The party quickly gained support from Indian expatriates, especially in the United States,
CanadaCanada is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
and Asia. Ghadar meetings were held in
Los AngelesLos Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the municipality of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123.445 inhabitants...
,
OxfordOxford is a city, and the county town of Oxfordshire, in South East England. The city has a population of just under 165,000, with 151,000 living within the district boundary. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through Oxford and meet south of the city centre...
,
ViennaVienna is the capital of the Republic of Austria and also one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.7 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 10th largest city by...
,
WashingtonWashington is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Washington was carved out of the western part of Washington Territory which had been ceded by Britain in 1846 by the Oregon Treaty as settlement of the Oregon Boundary Dispute. It was admitted to the Union as the...
, and
ShanghaiShanghai is the largest city in China, and one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, with over 20 million people. Located on China's central eastern coast at the mouth of the Yangtze River, the city is administered as a municipality of the People's Republic of China with province-level...
.
Ghadar Conspiracy
The Ghadar Party evolved from the Pacific coast association. The Ghadar's ultimate goal was to overthrow British colonial authority in India by means of an armed revolution. It viewed the
CongressThe Indian National Congress is a major political party in India. Founded in 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Wacha, Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Monomohun Ghose, and William Wedderburn, the Indian National Congress became the leader of the Indian...
-led
mainstream movementThe term Indian independence movement incorporates various national and regional campaigns, agitations and efforts of both nonviolent and militant philosophy. The term encompasses a wide spectrum of political organizations, philosophies, and movements which had the common aim of ending the British...
for dominion status modest and the latter's constitutional methods as soft. Ghadar's foremost strategy was to entice
Indian soldiersThe Indian Army , now sometimes called the British Indian Army to distinguish it from the modern army of the Republic of India, was the principal army of the British Raj in India during the last half-century before the partition of India in 1947.The Indian Army served both in India and,...
to revolt. To that end, in November 1913 Ghadar established the
Yugantar Ashram press in San Francisco. The press produced the
Hindustan Ghadarthumb|right|Ghadar Newspaper Vol. 1, No. 22, March 24 1914The Hindustan Ghadar was a weekly publication that was the party organ of the Ghadar Party. It was published under the auspices of the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco...
newspaper and other nationalist literature.
The Ghadar leadership,under Sohan Singh Bhakna, began at this time their first plans for mutiny. The inflammatory passions surrounding the
Komagata MaruThe Komagata Maru incident involved a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, that sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai, China; Yokohama, Japan; and then to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1914, carrying 376 passengers from Punjab, India. The passengers were not allowed to land in Canada and...
incident helped the Ghadarite cause, and Ghadar leaders including Sohan Singh, Barkatullah and Taraknath Das used it as a rallying point and successfully brought many disaffected Indians in North America into the party's fold. Sohan Singh himself had contacted the returning Komagata Maru at
Yokohamais the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshū. It is a major commercial hub of the Greater Tokyo Area....
and delivered to
Baba Gurdit SinghBaba Gurdit Singh was born in 1860 at Sarhali, Amritsar District of the state of Punjab in India. His grandfather, Rattan Singh was a high-ranking military officer in the Khalsa Army and had fought against the British during the Anglo-Sikh wars and he declined the British offer of a jagir after the...
a consignment of arms when he learnt of hostillities breaking out in July 1914.
The war in Europe hastened Ghadar's plans. It was already in touch with Indian revolutionaries
in GermanyThe Berlin Committee, later known as the Indian Independence Committee after 1915, was an organisation formed in Germany in 1914 during World War I by Indian students and political activists residing in the country. The purpose of the Committee was to promote the cause of Indian Independence...
and with the German consulate in San Fracisco. Ghadar also had party members in South-East Asia and had made contact with the Indian revolutionary underground. Elaborate plans were made to ship funds and arms from the United States and from South-East Asia, to India in what came to be called the Hindu German Conspiracy. These were to be used for a planned mutiny in India sometime in late 1914 or early 1915. The plans for the latter came to be known as the
Ghadar ConspiracyThe Ghadar Conspiracy was a conspiracy for a pan-Indian mutiny in the British Indian Army in February 1915 formulated by Indian revolutionaries...
. Sohan Singh, as one of the top of the Ghadar leadership, sailed to India in the
SS Namsang at the outbreak of the war, in the wake of the
Komagata MaruThe Komagata Maru incident involved a Japanese steamship, the Komagata Maru, that sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai, China; Yokohama, Japan; and then to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1914, carrying 376 passengers from Punjab, India. The passengers were not allowed to land in Canada and...
incidence to organise and direct the rebellion from India. However, British intelligence was already picking up traces of the revolutionary conspiracy. Returning to India, Singh was arrested in Calcutta on 13 October 1914 and sent to
LudhianaLudhiana is a city and a municipal corporation in Ludhiana district in the Indian state of Punjab. It is the largest city in Punjab, with an estimated population of 15 lacs. The population increases substantially during the crop harvesting season due to immigration of laborers from states like...
for interrogation. He was subsequently sent to the Central Jail in
Multanis a city in the Punjab Province of Pakistan and capital of Multan District. It is located in the southern part of the province. Multan District has a population of over 3.8 million—according to 1998 census—and the city itself is the sixth largest within the boundaries of Pakistan...
and later tried in the
Lahore Conspiracy CaseThis can refer to :* The First Lahore Conspiracy, also known as the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial in the aftermath of the Ghadar conspiracy in 1915* The Second Lahore Conspiracy Case, the trial of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev in 1931...
and sentenced to death, with forfeiture of property. The death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in the Andamans, where he reached on 10 December 1915 and where he undertook several hunger strikes successively to secure the detenues better treatment.
Later life
In 1921, Sohan Singh was transferred to
CoimbatoreCoimbatore , also known as Kovai , is the second largest city in the state of Tamil Nadu. It is the administrative headquarters of the Coimbatore District and a major textile and engineering hub of India, especially Southern India. It is part of the ancient Kongu Nadu region of Tamil...
jail and then to Yervada. Here however, Singh famously embarked on a hunger strike in protest against Sikh prisoners not being allowed to wear
turbanThe turban is a headdress consisting of a long scarf-like single piece of cloth wound around the head. The word "turban" is a common umbrella term, loosely used in English to refer to several sorts of headwear....
s and their
KacchaKachchhera or Kachchha are specially designed a short shalwar loose undergarments with tie-knot worn by all baptized Sikhs....
, amongst their religious obligations. In 1927, he was shifted to the Central Jail at
LahoreLahore is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in Pakistan after Karachi. Historically the main city of the undivided Punjab, it is often called the Garden of Mughals because of its rich Mughal heritage...
, where he again went on hunger strike in june 1928 to protest against the segregation of the so-called low-caste
MazhabiA Mazhabi is a member of the Rangretta clans that are mainly found in the Punjab region, Kashmir and Rajastan...
Sikhs from other 'high-caste' Sikhs during meals. In 1929, while still interned, Sohan Singh famously went on a
hunger strikeA hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance or pressure in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke feelings of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most hunger strikers will take liquids but not...
in support of Bhagat Singh. Sohan Singh ultimately served sixteen years before he was released early in July 1930.
After his release, Sohan Singh Bhakna continued working in the nationlist movement and labour politics. His works were identified closely with the works of the
Communist party of IndiaThe Communist Party of India is a political party in India. In the Indian communist movement, there are different views on exactly when the Indian communist party was founded. The date maintained as the foundation day by CPI is 26 december 1925...
, devoting most of his time to organizing the Kisan Sabhas. He also made the release of interened Ghadarites a key part of his political work.
He was interned a second time during World War II, when he was jailed at the Deoli Camp in what is today
RajasthanRājasthān is the largest state of the Republic of India in terms of area. It encompasses most of the area of the large, inhospitable Great Indian Desert , which has an edge paralleling the Sutlej-Indus river valley along its border with Pakistan...
. He remained incarcerated for nearly three years. After Independence he veered decisively towards the
Communist Party of IndiaThe Communist Party of India is a political party in India. In the Indian communist movement, there are different views on exactly when the Indian communist party was founded. The date maintained as the foundation day by CPI is 26 december 1925...
. He was arrested on 31 March 1948, but released on 8 May 1948. However, he was seized again, but jail-going ended for him finally at the intervention of Independent India's first Prime Minister,
Jawaharlal NehruJawaharlal Nehru was an Indian statesman who was the first, and has been the longest-serving prime minister of India to date, having served from 1947 until 1964...
. Bent with age and ravaged by pneumonia, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna died, at Amritsar, on 21 December 1968.