Forgotten Punjabi WW1 soldiers recognized for the first time

About 1.4 million people from the subcontinent – now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – served in the British Indian Army in WW1.

In the years after the war, officials visited towns and villages in the Punjab to record the names and fate of the 320,000 servants who came from that province alone.

Following the partition of India in 1947, the province of Punjab was divided between India and Pakistan.

Scores of cracked, brittle, leather-bound volumes filled with handwritten records, each engraved with the name of a village, now line shelves in a museum in Lahore, Pakistan.

Members of the Punjab Heritage Society of the United Kingdom began the project to digitize and analyze the records, a process that took several years.

“Being a Punjabi myself, I feel very proud to be doing this part for the community,” said Jasmine Basra, a doctoral student at the University of Greenwich who was involved in the pain-inducing research.

In the process, Basra unexpectedly discovers the names of two of her relatives, her great-grandmother and her brother.

“That connection was emotional. As a second-generation British Punjabi, there is almost no connection to Punjab and no connection at all to British history, but it’s a tangible connection to all of them,” she says.