Twenty-One Men of the 36th Sikhs Held the Saragarhi Signal Post on 12 September 1897 and Died There. The Number of Tribesmen Who Attacked It Is Still Disputed

On 12 September 1897, 21 soldiers of the 36th Sikhs died holding Saragarhi, a signal post on the Samana Ridge in what is now Pakistan, while Orakzai and Afridi tribesmen closed on them from every side. The London Gazette of 11 February 1898 printed the despatches about them, including the Governor-General in Council’s finding that their devotion had “never been surpassed in the annals of the Indian Army”.

How many tribesmen stood against them is the part nobody can settle. The estimates made at the time cover the whole ridge, and the sharpest modern correction comes from a retired lieutenant general who served as the regiment’s adjutant in 1971 and 1972.

A signal post between two forts

Saragarhi was not a fort in the usual sense. Major A.C. Yate’s 1900 memoir of the 36th Sikhs’ commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John Haughton, places it about a mile and a half west of Fort Lockhart and a mile and three-quarters east of Fort Gulistan, the two stone forts on the crest of the ridge, nine and twelve miles west of Hangu. Captain L.J. Shadwell, writing in 1898, says it was built only as a signalling post, because the forts sit behind a hill and cannot see each other. Messages went by heliograph, a mirror that flashes sunlight in coded pulses to a station in line of sight.

The Ferozepur district administration records that the 36th Sikhs were raised at Firozpur in April 1887, 38 years after the British annexed the Punjab, and sent to the ridge in January 1897. How the army came to recruit so heavily in Punjab is covered in our piece on the census and the martial-race theory. A Gazette table of the garrisons on 11 September lists 168 men at Fort Lockhart, 175 at Gulistan and 21 rank and file at Saragarhi, with no commissioned officer, British or Indian, among the 21. Their commander, the despatches say, was Havildar Ishar Singh (a havildar is an infantry sergeant), leading a party of twenty sepoys, or privates.

The tribes had risen that summer. Colonel H.D. Hutchinson’s account, compiled from letters to The Times, says the Afridis took Ali Musjid, Fort Maude and Landi Kotal on the Khyber road, and a few days later the Orakzais rose on the Kohat border and attacked the Samana forts. By 8 February 1898 the Queen’s Speech was telling Parliament that many tribes had been induced “to attack military posts in their vicinity”.

What the records say happened on 12 September

At daybreak, Yate writes, the Orakzai and Afridi force was in place on both sides of the forts and around Saragarhi, which cut Gulistan off from Lockhart. An early rush at the post was beaten back. The attackers then took cover in folds of ground, worked up to the walls and kept up a constant fire. Lt Gen H.S. Panag, who drew on the regiment’s Digest of Service, puts the start at about nine in the morning.

Two tribesmen stayed behind in a corner of the wall that the garrison’s fire could not reach, and began digging at its base. Major Des Voeux at Gulistan could see them and tried to warn the post by signal, apparently without success. Haughton at Lockhart signalled the garrison not to waste ammunition, of which each man had 400 rounds. About midday he sent Lieutenant Munn with a small party of Royal Irish Regiment soldiers to fire long-range volleys as a diversion, which Yate says had no effect.

In the official record, Panag writes, there are only two messages from the post. The first, around noon, reported one sepoy killed, one NCO wounded and three rifles damaged. A second, a little after three, came from the signaller, Sepoy Gurmukh Singh, and asked permission to close the heliograph and join the fight. At about three, Yate says, the signaller reported that ammunition was running short, and Haughton then set out with Munn and ninety Sikh rifles. After roughly a thousand yards he saw the tribesmen swarm over the walls and knew it was over.

On Gurmukh Singh the Gazette is brief. Major General A.G. Yeatman-Biggs, commanding the Kurram-Kohat force, wrote that he was “last seen signalling from Saragarhi just before the enemy swarmed in”. Later retellings give a longer last message, which HistoryNet quotes as “They are getting in now. Shall I take a rifle, or shall I go on signaling?” Panag notes that the official accounts do not contain a minute-by-minute exchange of that kind.

From Gulistan the garrison watched the wall at the blind corner collapse soon after three, Yate says, and about half an hour later the tribesmen rushed the breach and forced the wooden door. The last defender shut himself in the guard-room and fired until the building was set alight. According to Yate, the tribesmen themselves admitted he had killed twenty of them, and Shadwell, who says the details came from tribesmen who took part, writes of nearly twenty. Retellings since have named this man as Gurmukh Singh. None of the Gazette, Yate or Shadwell names him.

Sources also differ on the clock. By Panag’s reckoning the fight ended at about 3.30 pm, six and a half hours after it began; Shadwell says nearly seven hours. Yeatman-Biggs, away from the ridge with a column, records a heliograph message reaching him at 3.30 pm that Saragarhi was hard pressed and another at 4.30 pm that it had fallen.

Why the wall gave way

Shadwell describes a “dead angle” at the corner of the flanking tower, a stretch of wall that no defender could cover with fire from the parapet or the loopholes. Once the tribesmen loosened a corner stone there, he writes, the fate of the garrison was sealed. Yate’s footnote adds that when India learned a wooden door and weak flank defence had caused the fall, there was “a strong feeling of indignation against the engineering negligence or incompetence that was responsible for the loss of the post”.

How many tribesmen attacked

Behind the estimates are officers watching from the forts and the hills, and none is a count of the men who stormed the post. Of the whole Orakzai and Afridi force, Yate writes, the “total number has been variously estimated at from twelve to twenty thousand”. In the Gazette, Yeatman-Biggs wrote that on the 14th he found Gulistan invested by about 6,000 Orakzais, after it had been pressed since the 12th by some 7,000 to 8,000 Afridis and Orakzais. That morning he also saw about 8,000 to 10,000 Afridis holding the Saragarhi ridge. Ten to fifteen thousand, Shadwell estimated, were round Gulistan.

Modern summaries mostly round this to 10,000. HistoryNet says more than 10,000 besieged the post, the Ferozepur district website says about ten thousand, and The Tribune in 2000 gave an estimated 7,000.

Panag disagrees with all of them. By his count the force that attacked the post itself was 1,000 to 1,500 men, the ground allowed no more than 80 to 100 to rush it at one time, and nearly 10,000 were around the Samana forts as a whole. There is no Pashtun account of the battle, he adds, against which to check any of this. Shadwell wrote that what was known of the fighting “was chiefly gathered from the accounts of some of the tribesmen who joined in the attack”, though he does not say who the tribesmen were.

How many died, on both sides

On the tribal side, Yate says the capture of Saragarhi is said to have cost the attackers between 180 and 200 lives. For the Samana Ridge as a whole, Panag gives the official assessment as 400 killed and 600 wounded, of whom 180 died at Saragarhi, and he calls the popular figures of 600 to 1,000 dead a myth. Yeatman-Biggs’s despatch reports enemy casualties of over 400 killed for the fighting from 9 to 14 September.

For the Sikhs, the official returns say 21. Panag counts 22 dead, because the post also had a follower named Daad who joined the fight, and that most accounts leave him out. Wolverhampton council’s page calls him Khuda Dhad, a Muslim cook and handyman who died in the battle. The two spellings are the sources’ own.

What the Gazette recorded, and what followed

The India Office released the despatches on 5 February 1898 and the Gazette printed them on the 11th. Beyond the Governor-General’s verdict, the Commander-in-Chief wrote that those who held Saragarhi, “fighting against overwhelming numbers”, died at their post. Lieutenant-General Sir G.B. Wolseley, commanding the Punjab forces, recommended the Order of Merit for all the non-commissioned officers and men Yeatman-Biggs had brought to notice. Yeatman-Biggs asked that the families of those who died at Saragarhi and Gulistan be “considered for pension as if they had survived to receive the rewards they so justly deserved”.

According to the National Army Museum’s record, all 21 were awarded the Indian Order of Merit after their deaths. In Panag’s account it was the highest decoration the British gave Indian soldiers until 1911. Most writers equate it with the Victoria Cross, a comparison he rejects because the 36th Sikhs won 14 more Orders of Merit for the fighting on the Samana.

On money, the sources are thinner. A subscription raised through the Pioneer newspaper produced about 2,000 pounds for the men’s wives and families, Yate says. In 2000 The Tribune reported that dependants received two acres of land and Rs 500. The Gazette records the request for pensions, and none of the sources here includes an order granting them.

The ovation the Hansard record does not show

According to HistoryNet, members of Parliament gave the fallen a standing ovation when news reached London, and The Tribune in 2000 wrote that Parliament “had then risen in unison”. Jay Singh-Sohal, author of the 2013 book Saragarhi: The Forgotten Battle, told Scroll in 2017 that both this and a claimed UNESCO listing are factual inaccuracies. Singh-Sohal found no records for either, Panag reports.

Parliament was not sitting that month. Hansard’s index lists no sitting at all between 6 August 1897 and 8 February 1898. On 8 February the Queen’s Speech referred to the frontier fighting, and the Commons debate on the reply mentions Lockhart and the Afridis. Searching the text of that debate finds no mention of Saragarhi, of Sikhs or of the 36th.

Memorials, and the date the regiment keeps

A monument on the Samana spur near Fort Lockhart and a cairn on the site of the post, Yate records, commemorate the defenders. The cairn, in Panag’s description, is a 30-foot pyramid of stones from the ruins, and Lockhart has a formal obelisk.

In Punjab there are two Saragarhi gurdwaras. According to the Ferozepur district website, the one in Ferozepur Cantonment was built by the army at a cost of Rs 27,118 and opened in 1904 by the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, and that each 12 September a congregation is held there in the morning, followed by a reunion of ex-servicemen in the evening. The Tribune dates the Amritsar gurdwara to 1904 as well, and says the names of the 21 are inscribed on a marble tablet. HistoryNet reports that the Sikh Regiment observes 12 September as its Regimental Battle Honours Day, and Panag identifies the 36th Sikhs as today’s 4 Sikh.

Panag’s own account for ThePrint appeared in March 2019, under a headline addressed to the film Kesari, which Scroll reviewed on 21 March that year. Outside India, Wolverhampton unveiled a bronze statue of a Sikh soldier on 12 September 2021, the anniversary, and the council’s page calls it the first statue in the UK specifically honouring the fallen of Saragarhi. In March 2024 a Saragarhi museum with seven galleries opened in Ferozepur.