Nearly 10,000 Forgotten Punjabi Soldiers Finally Added to Official War Records After a Century
More than a hundred years after the guns of the First World War fell silent, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has formally recognised 9,909 British Indian Army servicemen whose names had been missing from its casualty records. The majority came from undivided Punjab. Announced in July 2026, the addition marks the largest single update to the Commission’s database since the Second World War and corrects a long-standing historical omission rooted in colonial administrative policy.
During the First World War, more than 1.4 million men from the Indian subcontinent—territories that are now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—served in the British Indian Army. One in six soldiers fighting under the British flag came from pre-Partition India. Punjab alone supplied around half a million men, forming the backbone of recruitment under the colonial “martial races” theory that privileged communities from the region. Officials later recorded the service of approximately 320,000 of these Punjabi recruits in detailed village-by-village registers compiled in the immediate aftermath of the war.
These documents, known as the Punjab Registers, consist of 34 fragile, leather-bound volumes containing some 26,000 pages of handwritten entries. After the war, colonial administrators travelled across the province, noting each man’s name, father’s name, village, caste or religion, regiment, and fate. The registers survived Partition in 1947 and were eventually stored in the Lahore Museum in present-day Pakistan, where they remained largely unread for decades. In the 2010s and early 2020s, the UK Punjab Heritage Association, led by historian Amandeep Madra, began the painstaking work of photographing, digitising and transcribing the material in partnership with the University of Greenwich and later the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
The resulting five-year Punjab Registers project compared nearly 16,000 deaths listed in the registers against roughly 74,000 existing Indian Army casualty records held by the Commission. A CWGC-funded PhD researcher, George Williams, developed a scoring system to match entries using multiple data points. Nineteen volunteers from around the world, many with personal connections to Punjab, conducted double-blind reviews. Computer-assisted analysis and final scrutiny by CWGC historians and an independent panel of Indian Army experts confirmed that 9,909 names had never been entered into the official commemorative records.
Most of these men had not died on the battlefield in France, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli or East Africa. They had survived the fighting only to succumb later to wounds, disease or the effects of service after returning to their villages in India. Under rulings made by the British Indian Government at the time, soldiers who died in non-operational zones within India were denied full war graves status. Their names were therefore never reported to the Imperial War Graves Commission, the predecessor of today’s CWGC. That policy decision has now been overturned.
The newly recognised casualties reflect the religious diversity of undivided Punjab. Roughly 41 percent were Muslim, 26 percent Hindu, 25 percent Sikh, and a small number Christian, with a remaining portion still under review. Their inclusion expands the historical record beyond the European theatres that have long dominated public memory of the war.
For descendants, the recognition has turned family stories into documented history. Dr Inder Singh Palahey, a dentist in Leicester, had long known that his great-grandfather Kesar Singh went to war and never returned, leaving a widow and two young children in poverty. Finding the formal record of his service and death brought a sense of closure. “From just hearsay to now discovering the facts about my great-grandfather’s ultimate military sacrifice… has been incredibly poignant,” he said. “The fact that he will now be remembered in perpetuity within global history ensures the whole family sacrifice is recognised.”
Manjinder Nagra, whose maternal great-grandfather Jagat Singh of the 34th Reserve Mountain Battery died in Mesopotamia in 1918, described the news as overwhelming. Learning that his name would finally appear on the CWGC database felt especially significant more than a century later. “After all these years, he is finally being given the honour, dignity and remembrance he always deserved,” she said.
Amandeep Madra, chair of the UK Punjab Heritage Association, framed the project as the recovery of a missing chapter in a shared history. “Britain and Punjab share a long history, notably during the two world wars, and for over a hundred years, part of it was missing. These men were never commemorated—not because they didn’t serve, but because a decision made a century ago excluded their sacrifice from the record. Putting that right means giving families around the world their history back.”
Claire Horton, Director General of the CWGC, described the addition as a landmark in the Commission’s mission. “The recovery of every one of these 9,909 names helps restore missing chapters in family and world histories. It stands as a constant, timeless reminder that commemoration is not only about the past—it is about personal identity, family legacy and recognising the human cost of war.” The project forms part of the Commission’s wider Non-Commemoration Programme, launched in 2021 to address historical inequalities in remembrance. That programme has already identified more than 20,000 additional names for formal recognition.
The Punjab Registers themselves remain a remarkable archival resource. Organised by district and village, they offer a rare bottom-up view of how the Indian Army was raised and how rural communities experienced the war. They record not only combat deaths but the broader human cost—men who returned home broken by service and died months or years later. In doing so, they challenge the incomplete picture left by earlier official tallies, which had put the number of Punjabi dead at around 13,000.
The recognition does not rewrite the colonial context in which these men served. They fought for an empire that ruled their homeland, recruited under systems that classified communities by supposed martial qualities, and administered policies that treated some deaths as less worthy of permanent memorial than others. Yet the correction of the record matters. It restores individual names to the historical ledger and allows families across India, Pakistan, Britain and the wider diaspora to locate ancestors who had previously existed only as fragments of oral history.
Work continues. The CWGC has created an online Book of Remembrance for these casualties and is exploring options for lasting physical commemoration in consultation with governments and communities. The registers themselves, still held in Lahore, stand as evidence that the names were never fully lost—only excluded from the formal system of imperial remembrance. More than a century later, that exclusion has been reversed. The 9,909 men who left their villages in Punjab to serve the British Empire and never returned have finally been counted among the war dead.
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