Sohan Singh was born on 4 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 Amritsar.

A large proportion of the immigrants were especially from Punjab British India 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.

Meanwhile, India House 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 Dayal 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 movement.

[3] In the summer of 1913, representatives of Indians living in Canada and the United States met at Stockton, where the decision was taken to establish an organization, Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast.

[2] Many of its members were also from the University of California at Berkeley including Dayal, Tarak Nath Das, Kartar Singh Sarabha and V.G.

The inflammatory passions surrounding the Komagata Maru 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.

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.

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 detainees better treatment.

Here however, Singh embarked on a hunger strike in protest against Sikh prisoners not being allowed to wear turbans and their Kacchera, amongst their religious obligations.

However, he was seized again, but jail-going ended for him finally at the intervention of Independent India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Bent with age and ravaged by pneumonia, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna died, at Amritsar, on 20 December 1968.