The Ghadar Party was founded at Astoria, Oregon, in 1913 by Punjabi labourers and a few students on the American west coast. Sohan Singh Bhakna was its first president, Lala Har Dayal its first secretary. Its paper, Ghadar, was printed in Gurmukhi, Urdu and other languages at San Francisco and posted worldwide.
Its programme was armed overthrow, not reform. It was explicitly non-religious and its membership was Sikh, Muslim and Hindu together at a time when Indian politics at home was fragmenting along exactly those lines.
In 1914, on the outbreak of war, the party called on Punjabis abroad to return and rise. Several thousand did. The plan for a general mutiny in the Punjab garrisons on 21 February 1915 was betrayed from inside by Kirpal Singh.
The Lahore Conspiracy Cases followed. Forty-two were sentenced to death and about twenty were hanged, including Kartar Singh Sarabha Ji at nineteen. Over a hundred were transported to the Andamans.
The Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall at Jalandhar was built by the survivors and holds the movement's records. It is the only museum in Punjab built by the people it commemorates.
The paper went by post to Punjabi communities in Canada, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Manila, Singapore, Fiji, East Africa and Panama, and the authorities tracked it at every port. Its circulation is how a scattered labour diaspora became one organisation.
The party had no religious test and its records name Muslim, Hindu and Sikh members in the same jathas. Gulab Kaur and a small number of other women worked in distribution and as couriers, and almost nothing has been written about any of them.
The men who came out of the Andamans in the 1930s went into the Kirti Kisan movement and the Congress. The organisation failed completely and its people ran Punjab's politics for the next forty years.