India’s forgotten WW1 heroes: why it’s taken a century for these soldiers to be recognised

Kavita Puri on the century-long effort to right a First World War injustice

Black-and-white archival photo of Indian Army soldiers in turbans and uniform tunics standing in the doorways and leaning out the windows of a third-class train carriage

Published: September 9, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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Amandeep Madra remembers his father telling him, almost in passing, that his uncle (Amandeep’s great uncle) had served with the British during the First World War. He had been blinded by sandstorms in Iraq; as a boy, Amandeep’s father had accompanied his uncle to Rupar in Ambala, in undivided India, to collect his army pension. “That was the whole story. Nothing else. And this wasn’t ancient history, it was inside my own father’s lifetime,” Amandeep told me.

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Amandeep was born and grew up in Britain in the 1970s, his parents having come over in the postwar years. He never forgot that conversation with his father. Anecdotally, he knew a record had been kept of every man that served in the First World War from Punjab, where his family were from. “It felt almost mythical,” says Amandeep. “Something everyone had heard of, but no one had actually seen.”

But the records did exist. In the basement of Lahore Museum in Pakistan were 34 black, leather-bound registers gathering dust. They had been there largely undisturbed for nearly 100 years, until Amandeep Madra contacted them. Working with the University of Greenwich in the UK, it took Amandeep some years to gain their trust, permission and pull the money together in order for the museum to eventually photograph every single one of the 26,000 pages.

One of the first full registers Amandeep asked for was for Ambala, his family’s district. When the museum sent a printout, he located his father’s village. There he found the name of his great uncle, Bishen Singh, son of Jatti. It was an emotional moment for the family. Amandeep’s mother was tearful at seeing the names written down, but also knowing her husband, Amandeep’s father, was no longer alive to see it. More and more printouts were sent from Lahore. There were thousands of names in the registers, mostly written in dark ink. They listed the soldier’s rank, the village they came from, their caste, any injuries, and if they died.

The registers had been put together by the Punjab government in 1919–20 after the war. It is believed they were compiled for postwar pensions and other veterans’ benefits.

The part that Amandeep and the University of Greenwich team of researchers were looking at was the subset of the register of those who died during the war. They compared the names against the Commonwealth War Grave Commission’s (CWGC) own lists. But the thousands of Punjabis who had died in action, listed in the registers in the Lahore Museum, were absent from the official record. This year, more than a century later, that omission has finally been rectified. Yet if this detail was known, and recorded by British civil authorities in undivided India, why has it taken so long for it to be included?

Rulings made by the British Indian government at the time meant Indian soldiers were not afforded war graves status, but that decision has since been overturned. Historians at the CWGC say most of the 9,909 men who were previously omitted from commemoration records were casualties who died of injuries away from the battlefield.

The CWGC says the new inclusion of the 9,909 names is not just to preserve the names of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice, but also part of a wider effort to redress Eurocentric views of the First World War. Commemoration, it says, should reflect the full global reality of that conflict. Those who have been working on digitising the names, and ensuring they are properly remembered, say that their inclusion represents the righting of a historical injustice.

Descendants in Britain can now search for their family members’ names and details of their service. Amandeep says it connects “people to their own place in history”. But in our collective memory it matters too. Punjab was one of the main recruiting grounds for the British army during the colonial period. The addition of the 9,909 names, even belatedly, puts these men back into the official historical record.

Amandeep believes it’s “a very rare chance to actually fix something, put the record right, commemorate these men and give people the chance to be part of that justice”.

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This article was first published in September 2026 of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Kavita Puri

Kavita Puri is a journalist, author and broadcaster. A new edition of her book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, marking the 75th anniversary of partition, is out now, published by Bloomsbury

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