Saragarhi 1897: how 21 soldiers defended a post to the last man

Havildar Ishar Singh — the senior non-commissioned officer commanding the 21-man detachment. Contemporary accounts describe him leading the defence from the front and falling among the last. Posthumous Indian Order of Merit; an eight-foot statue of him stands today at the Saragarhi memorial in Ferozepur. Sepoy Gurmukh Singh — the signaller who flashed the battle to Fort Lockhart by heliograph, event by event, and reportedly asked permission to stop signalling and pick up his rifle only at the very end. He is reckoned the last man alive, killed when the tribesmen set the post alight. The other nineteen — non-commissioned officers Naik Lal Singh and Lance Naik Chanda Singh, and sepoys including Sundar Singh, Sahib Singh, Uttam Singh, Narayan Singh, Ram Singh and Daya Singh, all Jat Sikhs of the 36th Sikhs. Lieutenant Colonel John Haughton — commanding the 36th Sikhs on the Samana, watching from Fort Lockhart, unable to send timely relief. The Orakzai and Afridi lashkars — the Pashtun tribal fighters resisting British expansion into their hills; their own later admission put their dead in the many dozens to low hundreds. The 36th Sikhs — a regiment raised in the 1890s specifically for frontier service, the instrument through which these men were placed on that ridge.

Saragarhi's arithmetic is stark. The garrison numbered exactly 21 soldiers of the 36th Sikhs, a regiment raised only in 1887 for frontier service. Against them, contemporary British estimates put the Orakzai and Afridi lashkar at somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 fighters — Colonel Haughton's own reckoning ran as high as 10,000 to 14,000, so the odds were on the order of 300 to one at the low end. The fight opened around 9 a.m. on 12 September 1897, and the post held for close to seven hours before the walls were breached and the signalling room burned that afternoon. Communication ran on a heliograph — Morse code flashed by mirror and sunlight — between Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan, roughly five to six kilometres apart across ground they could not see over directly. All 21 defenders were killed, and all 21 received the Indian Order of Merit, then the highest gallantry award open to an Indian soldier; the Victoria Cross was not extended to Indians until 1911. Two memorial gurdwaras, built around 1902 at Amritsar and Ferozepur, and Saragarhi Day on 12 September keep the count alive.

Myth: exactly 10,000 attackers. The number is an estimate, not a count. Contemporary British figures range from about 6,000 to 10,000, and Colonel Haughton's own guess ran as high as 10,000–14,000; some later accounts inflate it further. No one censused the lashkar, so any single figure should be read as an order of magnitude, not a fact. Myth: the 21 killed hundreds — some say 600 — of the enemy. The Pashtuns themselves later admitted roughly 180 dead with many more wounded; the '600 bodies' figure comes from British estimates and is not firmly established. That the defenders inflicted heavy, lopsided losses is clear; the exact toll is not. Myth: the British Parliament rose in a standing ovation. This oft-repeated claim has no documentary record — the historian and filmmaker Jay Singh-Sohal found no evidence for it in his book Saragarhi: The Forgotten Battle. The uncomfortable fact usually omitted: these men died defending an imperial frontier, not their homeland. Honouring their courage does not require pretending they fought for India, or that the tribesmen who killed them were simply villains rather than people resisting occupation. The legend is stirring; the record is more honest, and more human.

What sets Saragarhi apart from most last stands is that it was narrated as it happened. From Fort Lockhart, Colonel Haughton and his men watched Gurmukh Singh's heliograph flash across the valley, reporting the attack building, the walls being rushed, the gate burning, defenders falling one by one — a running dispatch from inside a position everyone knew would be overrun. That is why the account is unusually detailed for a colonial frontier skirmish, and also why it is so hard to look away from: the record is, in part, the men describing their own deaths. When relief finally reached the ruined post, all 21 were dead, several found where they had fought around the breach and the burning signalling room. For the villages of Punjab from which they came, the loss was intimate — a single detachment, wiped out in an afternoon, its names read out together ever after. The 36th Sikhs, and later the Sikh Regiment, wove the battle into their identity; the two memorial gurdwaras made it a place of pilgrimage. But it is worth holding the human cost on both sides. Hundreds of Pashtun fighters also died or were wounded assaulting that ridge — men defending their own hills, whose names no memorial records, and whose descendants remember the same day very differently.

Saragarhi matters because it makes us hold two things at once that people prefer to keep apart: genuine, almost unbelievable courage, and the uncomfortable frame around it. Twenty-one men, offered surrender, chose instead to fight to the last and to keep signalling the truth of it until the end. That is real, and no honest telling should shrink it. But they did this on a colonial frontier, in an imperial army, against tribesmen resisting the very expansion those forts existed to enforce — and that context is not a footnote to be embarrassed away. It is why the numbers were exaggerated, why a parliamentary ovation was invented, why a British episode became an Indian national myth. A story that only celebrates the last stand, and never asks whose frontier it defended or who the enemy really was, flatters us but teaches us little. The better way to honour the 21 is to keep their names and also keep the questions: what were they sent to hold, and for whom, and at what cost to the people on the other side. Courage deserves memory. History deserves accuracy. Saragarhi is one of the rare battles where you can give both — if you are willing to.