After receiving his initial education in his village, Singh entered the Malwa Khalsa high school in Ludhiana; he studied there until 8th standard.

He sailed to San Francisco in July 1912 to enrol at the University of California at Berkeley, but the evidence that he did study there varies.

[3] His association with the Nalanda club of Indian students at Berkeley aroused his patriotic sentiments, and he felt agitated about the treatment that immigrants from India, especially manual workers, received in the United States.

[1] When the Ghadar party was founded in mid-1913 with Sohan Singh, a Sikh from Bhakna village in the Amritsar district, as president and Lala Hardyal as secretary, Kartar Singh stopped his university work, moved in with Lala Hardyal and became his helpmate in running the revolutionary newspaper Ghadar (revolt).

The aim of the Ghadar Party was to get rid of British rule in India by means of an armed struggle.

He accompanied two other Ghadar leaders, Satyen Sen and Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, along with a large number of Gadhar freedom fighters.

With a letter of introduction from Jatin Mukherjee, the Jugantar leader, Singh and Pingle met Rash Behari Bose at Banaras to inform him that 20,000 more Ghadar members were expected very soon.

Two Ghadris, Waryam Singh and Bhai Ram Rakha, were killed in a bomb blast in one such raid.

It was planned that after capturing the cantonments of Mian Mir and Ferozepur, mutiny was to be engineered near Ambala and Delhi.

In the Court room, and also when standing before the gallows, the condemned men refused to accept their endeavour to be termed a 'conspiracy'.

They contended that it was an open challenge to the foreigners who charged the patriots with the offence of sedition, of waging war against the King.

During the period of his detention in Lahore Central Jail, Kartar managed to get hold of some instruments with which he wanted to cut the iron-bars of his window and escape in company with some other revolutionaries.

However, the jail authorities who had learnt about his designs seized the instruments from underneath an earthen pitcher in his room.

[11][12] Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha, an Indian Punjabi-language biographical film on the revolutionary, was released in 1977.