Dan Snow's History Hit - From the Punjab to the Western Front

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Over a million Indian soldiers served during the First World War, but many of the records of the soldiers who fought valiantly for the Allied cause had been lost - hiding their stories from history. Until now. Discovered in a basement of a museum in Lahore, Pakistan, where they had been left unread for 97 years, these newly recovered documents have allowed historians to put the men of the Indian Army back into the story of the allied war effort.To explain the significance of the records that have been found, Dan is joined by Amandeep Madra OBE. Amandeep is the co-author of five books about Indian history, Chair of the UK Punjab Heritage Association and has worked with the University of Greenwich to digitise the files. Amandeep and Dan discuss what the records contain and how they were discovered, some of the stories they have revealed and how this new information is allowing families across the world to shed light on the vital contribution and sacrifice made by their ancestors to the allied victory during the First World War.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. During the First World War, over a million Indians served in British Imperial forces. They served in nearly every theatre, they served on the Western Front, they served in Eastern Mediterranean, Salonika and Gallipoli, they served in East Africa, the Middle East, and some harrowing campaigns there, in Mesopotamia in particular. But all too often, the records, the service records of these individuals, these men who fought and died and were wounded and served, they've been lost. They haven't been treated with the same care and attention as their comrades from the UK. Thankfully, and this is a great story, we have recently

discovered an archive. An archive is discovered in a basement of a museum in Lahore. It's an astonishing story. It has allowed us to fill in some gaps in our history, to put these men back into the story of Britain and its empire during the First World War, to recover these lost stories. It's very, very exciting. On the podcast, I'm going to talk to Amandeep Madra. He is an author of several books about Indian history. He's the chair of the UK Punjab Heritage Association, and he's worked with the University of Greenwich to digitise these files, and of course with the museum in Lahore itself. It is incredibly exciting. Over 320,000 Punjabi soldiers have now had their records recovered and digitised. It is making waves across the UK, across the wider diasporic

community, and in India itself. I'm particularly excited. My great-grandfather, Thomas Carey Evans, served in the Indian Army as a doctor during the First World War. His daughter was born. My grandma, my nine, as we say in Wales. My nine was born in Bangalore just after the war. So I think many of us listening to this across the world, especially in India, will have a connection with these soldiers. And the really exciting thing is, folks,

is that there may be more records left to find. It's just great news. Great news. Also great news is that you can go and subscribe to History Hit TV. It's the world's best history channel. We've got lots of Indian history on there. Lots of episodes of this podcast. It's all good.

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hoodies are selling like hotcakes but in the meantime everybody i'm very proud to say this is amandeep madra we're talking about the recovered records of 320 000 punjabi soldiers it's a wonderful thing. Enjoy. Amandeep, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Not at all. Thank you very much for having me on. Now listen, let's talk about something first. This has been discussed many times on this podcast before. This is a well-known thing. There's a phenomenon here. Whenever you are hanging out with Punjabis, all right, I'm hanging out, we're chatting, within about five seconds, you're hanging out with Punjabis, all right, I'm hanging out, we're chatting. Within about five seconds, the conversation turns to the martial prowess of Punjabi people and how they're the

greatest warrior race the world has ever known. And this is an ineluctable fact. Okay, so what is going on with that? That's definitely a peculiarly Sikh thing. Sikhs are very proud of their martial heritage. It's actually ingrained very much in the religion. It grew out of Punjab at a time of great conflict. And the idea that we not only battle our sort of spiritual demons, but that we are also a force for good in the world. And when that means picking up arms, that means picking up arms. It's just part of our DNA.

So it's very much part of the kind of Sikh ethos, but then it was amplified and really kind of saw itself in the world's eyes because of our role largely in the Indian army in the two world war. Well, let's just rehearse for everyone who isn't absolutely sure. Punjab, northwest India, well, now it's split between modern India and Pakistan. Is it a myth or is it true that there were an unusual number, high proportion of Punjabis in the British Indian army at the outbreak of the First World War? Punjab was very heavily recruited from, extraordinarily sort of over-represented in the Indian army. That's right, Punjab's up in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent. Today it straddles India and Pakistan. It gets its name from five rivers that drain through the land. It's very flat, it's very agricultural, it's very rich

in a sense, but it's also been the entry point for invaders and colonizers, whether that's Alexander the Great, then later, obviously, the Mughals from Central Asia, the Afghans and Persians, and the place where the Sikh religion was founded and really blossomed. And then a very important territory for the British as well. But it was the events of this infamous year of 1857 in Indian history, which really made Punjab then the main recruiting ground for the Indian army. Well, just quickly, talk to me about what happened during the upheavals of 1857 and the role that the Punjab played. 1857, for people that don't know, is the year of the Indian mutiny or the Indian rebellion, or as Indians would call it, the First War of Independence. By 1857, this was a century after Plassey, it's a century after Robert Clive starts to become the great kingmaker of bringing land and governance into the East India Company. So I think it's true to say that there was already scepticism about British rule or East India Company rule in

India, and the East India Company officers were outnumbered like a thousand to one, maybe more, by Indians. And they ruled via a network of local protectorates and nobility, but also with a huge private army drawn largely from a very similar community of high caste elite Hindus. In 1857, there was a rebellion amongst those or a mutiny amongst that army, ostensibly for religious reasons. And it just ripped through the entire army because they were all drawn from the same kind of community. And then it ripped through India as well. It was the point where India could have been lost to the East India Company. But it was Punjab, amongst others, that largely remained loyal. And that's probably because

for Punjabis, whether they were Sikhs or Hindus or Muslims, they had only seen their country taken by those very men from the East India Company army, the Indians from the East India Company, just eight years previously. So they didn't really have a sense of loyalty to some sense of a national Indian experiment. And because Punjab remained loyal, that then became the place where subsequently the British Crown, because of course, straight after the mutiny, the East India Company was dissolved, but the British Crown largely recruited from. And that was kind of codified in this notion of martial races, that there were some Indians that were just more predisposed to military conduct. They were more manly, they were

more loyal. And these were things, people like the Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Gurkhas, Dogras, Bhatans, Afridis, all the regimental names that we're used to if we look at the Indian Army regiments of the First World War. And so Punjab, I guess, is the obvious area to recruit huge numbers of troops before and upon the outbreak of war in 1914. Yeah, I mean, India already had a huge army. It was used by the British Crown largely for border reasons and for all the reasons that states keep an army. It was used by the British Crown largely for border reasons and for all the reasons that states keep an army. It was about the same size as the British army on the outbreak of war,

but obviously stationed in India, but also out in Burma. There was large garrisons up in the northwest frontier province on the border with Afghanistan. So it was already there, it was a veteran army, it had already seen significant actions in the preceding decades. So as Britain entered the war and India followed straight after, it was a natural place to draw large numbers of men. But for them, a very different war, of course, or a very different battleground in the mud and the cold of Northern Europe. Yeah, but of course, we shouldn't forget the well-known, the famous Indian intervention in the Battle of Ypres in 1914, the beginning of the war. There were some troops on the Western

Front after that. But my great-grandpa, Thomas Carey Evans, Welshman, was a doctor in the Indian Army. He served in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. And so would you say that most of the Indian troops would be deployed to those other theatres? Well, no, you're absolutely right about the Western Front. I mean, because they were already ready, the Indian Army was a very significant presence in those very early months of battle in France, the First Battle of Ypres, as you say, the Battle of Neve Chapelle, Victoria Cross was one, thereby a Punjabi soldier, Khuddad Khan, in those early months. At one point, one in three men in France fighting on the side of the British Empire forces was an Indian.

I think that's one of the things that we're trying to draw out is that often we don't see that, and we see whether it's in popular culture like Blackadder or we don't see that necessarily in the books. But then you're absolutely right. They were moved eastwards as we started to see conscripts coming from the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Gallipoli, there was large numbers of Indians at Gallipoli

with the Anzacs and with the British. But then, as you say, Mesopotamia and that whole campaign through what is now modern-day Iraq is really where most Indians saw service during the First World War. Yeah, a nightmarish campaign. Just horrific, not just the sheer scale of the land they were covering, but the conditions as well, the disease and the heat and the lack of preparedness and the ambition actually of British commanders to try to get up to Baghdad and to be stretched and were horribly besieged and taken as prisoners of war by the

Ottomans. But also, there's another kind of almost forgotten front in East Africa, where German colonised areas had tried almost a land grab for British East Africa. And that's where a large number of Indians were also deployed. It reminds me that there's an old expression about Mesopotamia. It's said to be too wet for the army and too dry for the Navy. It's a sort of hellish, marshy middle ground between the two. Now, listen, let's get into detail. So this new archive, this is one of the most exciting discoveries I can think of in recent years. Just talk me through it. Previous to this discovery, what do we have? How many war records do we have of Indian troops?

Well, Dan, I'm glad you say it's one of the most exciting discoveries because I believe exactly the same thing. There's very little known about the individual stories of men, oddly enough, in the Indian army and definitely Punjab. We know the story at an aggregate level. There are war histories written by regiments and then by the Indian state, but at the individual level, there was very little known. That's for a variety of reasons. The partition of the Punjab or independence led to a large number of documents being destroyed at the time of transfer of power.

destroyed at the time of transfer of power. Frankly, India and Pakistan have not been great at preserving lots of, particularly military records, which they saw as being quite sensitive. And the regiments have been kind of split and reorganised so many times that really, in a sense, their history starts in 47 for many of them. There's also been this kind of national amnesia about anything from the imperial period. And so much of this history has been discarded. And what us as a charity, I run a heritage group that does all kinds of things. And back in 2014, we were doing a big exhibition in London called Empire, Faith and War, which was specifically about the Sixth and the First World War. And we would have family after family after family come and say, yeah, my ancestor was in the First World War. And that's where the story ended. They knew

nothing more about it. And it was an incredibly common experience that we saw. Listen to Dan Snow's history of talking about Punjabi soldiers in the First World War. More coming up. Hello. If you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast. From the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11, we reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world. I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists, and experts from around the world to bring you

inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force, and there wouldn't have been a Waterloo. It would have been as simple as that. Revolutionary technologies. By the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries disregarded these communities' health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate, light presence.

It always wants to either swamp the place in trillion-dollar wars or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. So when did you first get a sniff there might be documents, there might be an archive somewhere? There might be records that were sort of moulding away in some basement somewhere. As I said, we did an exhibition in 2014. Actually, funnily enough, just before that

exhibition, even though I'd been writing about this and working on this for many years, prior to that, my dad actually told me that his uncle had served in the First World War. He'd never troubled himself to tell me that story before. And all he knew, like all stories of Punjabis in the First World War, was that his uncle had served, that his eyesight was very poor because of the sandstorms in Basra, and that as a teenager, my dad would take him to pick up his pension once every three months. And that was the same story that we basically heard through this exhibition. But we also heard from an Indian military historian who told us that there were some

recruitment registers in the basement in Lahore Museum. And the crucial bit of information that he gave us was that attached to each man's name was the village that they were from. each man's name was the village that they were from. And that village and man's name connection is the way to decode identity. And from that, we can get regiment and from regiments, you get all of the history and any other notes that are with it as well. So it was back in 2014 that we first heard of that, the existence of these things. And then we started this period of many years with the museum to try to gain their trust and negotiate with them and get them to digitise every single page of the almost 30,000 pages of archive that exist there. And Amandeep, tell me, what's in there? Were they just recruiting

documents? Now that you've digitised them, you've been through them, they're available online, what are the gems among these papers? Yes, they're not recruitment registers. They're actually a bit more interesting than that. So after the war was over, there was this giant kind of administrative exercise by the government of the Punjab to go village by village across this vast territory and list the name of every man that went to war. So if they served during that period from

April 14 to October 18, if they served there to be listed, it's their name, it's their father's name, it's the rank regiment. And then there are notes as well. And the notes can include whether they were wounded or if they died, where they died and the date. Sometimes it talks about family groups that have gone. Some registers are very detailed and they've got regimental numbers and dates of recruitment in there as well. So it's this vast amount of data covering some 320,000 of the half million men from the Punjab that went to war, all the way from Raul Bindi in the north to an area just south of modern New Delhi. That is incredibly exciting. I love it. What stories you've been able to tell? Tell me some of them and tell me about the individuals that you maybe have rescued from

obscurity by this find in this process. Who have you found? Well, just for myself, I found my great uncle in there. You go to this tiny village in eastern Punjab, not a big recruitment area. And there he is for the first and only time, I think, written in an actual document, both him and his father's name. A large number of British Asians are from Punjab. You'll know lots of names like Sajid Javid

and Satnam Senghera, Anita Rani, Anita Nunn, Adil Ray. Yeah, several of them, like Anita and Satna have been on this podcast, exactly. Several have been on your podcast, exactly. So we've asked all of them, you know, did you have a First World War background, to try to find their stories. Tan Desi, who's the only termed MP in the House of Parliament, he had this very similar to me, this vague story of his great grandfather, who he knew as an injured man. And we found him, and we found the regiment that he was in, and we sort of figured out where the likely wound took place in the Mesopotamia campaign. Nina Nana, who's an ITV journalist and the arts editor there, she actually called me shortly after the Lawrence Fox comments a few years ago, saying that the inclusion of a sacred character in Sam Mendes' film was incongruous.

And she said her grandfather had been in the First World War and he said he was at the Somme, which we all sort of did a quick side eye at. which we all sort of did a quick side eye at. But then in researching her great-grandfather, we found that actually he was in the 19th Lancers, which were at the Song. So it took that story, which they had a little family scepticism about, and proved it,

and also proved that he was in the Western Front in 1917. He could well have been the man that Sam Mendes was thinking of when he included that character. But also just regular folk who have just that frustrating knowledge that they have an ancestor, and suddenly we've been able to find out more. A doctor in Feltham, who not only found his great grandfather's regiment, but also discovered photographs of him, the first photographs that he's ever found, named photographs of him. So the stories kind of go on and on and on.

And because Punjabi's, you know, it's a rural agricultural country, because we have so much kinship towards these tiny villages, so much personal kinship, the people there are almost like family members. There have been lots and lots of people who are just researching their tiny little villages and discovering stories of dozens and dozens of men that served all over the world. Is this a place where we see the internet at its best? This is joining communities,

and I guess the diasporic community, but also is this of interest to people in Punjab today? and I guess the diasporic community, but also is this of interest to people in Punjab today? That has been one of the most gratifying reactions to this. We did this thinking very much about the diaspora communities, but knowing it would have resonance back in India and Pakistan, we didn't quite know the reaction that it would have. There's a degree of national kind of ambivalence about the First and Second World War in India. There's even more of that in Pakistan. But one of the most gratifying things that we've seen as we've put it out on social media are the number of Indians that are now just reconnecting to their ancestors' First World War background. And the other gratifying thing, and that's coming

up on social media all the time, are people that are now motivated to learn a little bit more. And they're coming out with documents and medals and things that have been tucked away and forgotten, but helping us kind of recover new histories. And one of the things that we want to do is to make sure that those things are documented and added to our wonderful map on our website so that it becomes a source of new histories for researchers and families in the future. Well, Arandeep, I would love to connect with you offline after this and share my great-grandpa's story as well

and see if we can make any connections there. That would be so fun. I'd absolutely love to do that. That would be a great story. In the meantime, there is a question burning in my mind. How much more can we expect of this? Other basements around the subcontinent, it's so exciting to think there might be. In the meantime, there is a question burning in my mind. How much more can we expect of this? I mean, other basements around the subcontinent,

it's so exciting to think there might be. It is exciting. And I really pay tribute to Lahore Museum in Pakistan. Under very challenging conditions, they've preserved this phenomenal archive for 100 years and been very generous in letting us use it. And I hope it allows us to kind of root around a little bit more in what they've got there. We're so used to so much being on the internet and having been catalogued in archives and collections in the UK. It's quite exciting to think that there are things in India

and Pakistan that have been preserved by those wonderful guardians of our culture, but just need to be unlocked by researchers like us and the University of Greenwich, who we've worked with on this project. Amandeep, how can people listening to this find out more, learn more, follow your work, get involved, find stuff out about their ancestors? Well, you can jump onto our website, which has mapped just the first three out of 26 districts, but that will expand in the coming year. That's banjabww1.com. So you can jump onto there and see our work. You can also see who we are.

But then you can follow us on Twitter at UKPHA, which is my organisation, UK Punjab Heritage Association. Right, brilliant. Well, as soon as we get off this call, I'm going to type UK PHA into my little phone right now on this screen. Amanda, thank you very much for coming on. Congratulations on everything that you've done, the museum have done, your colleagues have achieved. I look forward to talking to you again as you uncover even more. Many thanks, Dan. I really enjoyed this. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods give a little rating five stars or it's equivalent a review would be great thank you very much indeed that really does make a huge difference it's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please don't ever do that can seem like

a small thing but actually it's kind of a big deal for us i really appreciate it see you next time