Forgotten Indian WWI Soldiers Recognised After More Than 80 Years: Report

Nearly 10,000 soldiers from pre-independent India who lost their lives in the First World War have been added to official Commonwealth casualty records for the first time, marking the largest update to the database in more than eight decades.

According to a BBC report, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has included the names of 9,909 British Indian Army servicemen after researchers uncovered them in historic records linked to undivided Punjab.

The soldiers were among the 1.4 million people from the subcontinent, now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who served in the British Indian Army during the First World War.

Most of the newly recognised names were traced to handwritten registers preserved at the Lahore Museum in Pakistan. The records were prepared after the war, when officials visited towns and villages across Punjab to document the service and fate of around 320,000 men from the province.

Historic Records Bring Names Back

The project was initiated by the UK-based Punjab Heritage Association, whose volunteers spent years digitising and studying the fragile registers.

According to the BBC, the research helped identify thousands of soldiers who had been left out of formal Commonwealth commemoration records for decades.

One of the researchers, Jasmin Basra, a PhD student at the University of Greenwich, also found the names of her own great-great-grandfather and his brother while working on the registers.

Basra told the BBC that the discovery created an emotional link to both her family history and the wider role played by Indians in the war.

Families Find Long-Awaited Closure

The update has also helped families who had spent years looking for information about relatives who never returned from the conflict.

Sunney Palahey, a dentist from Leicester, told the BBC that researchers had contacted him after finding the name of his great-grandfather, Kesar Singh, in the newly examined records.

“It's been recognised by an authority, which it never was before. He is now an entry in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. All the sacrifices seem to have been worth it,” Palahey told the BBC.

According to the BBC, the CWGC is now trying to trace descendants of several of the newly recognised servicemen.

The Commission said many of the 9,909 soldiers had died of injuries away from the battlefield and were denied war graves status under rules followed by the British Indian Government at the time. Those decisions have since been overturned.

According to the BBC, around 25 per cent of the newly recognised soldiers were Sikhs, another 25 per cent were Hindus and about 40 per cent were Muslims.

The CWGC said the update is part of an effort to preserve the memory of those who died and to reflect the wider global history of the First World War, including the contribution of soldiers from across the former British Empire.