The records of thousands of British Indian Army soldiers from united Punjab have been made available to the public by UK-based citizen historians for the first time after around a century.
The ‘Punjab Records’, as they have been named, which so far lay neglected in an archive in the basements of Lahore Museum, have been accessed and digitised by the London-based UK Punjab Heritage Association (UKPHA) in collaboration with the University of Greenwich to offer an insight into the contribution of Punjabi soldiers to the allied war effort, and uploaded to a website launched to mark Remembrance Day, the day World War I ended, across the world on Nov 11.
Comprising some 26,000 pages listing more than 300,000 individual names, the registers provide village-by-village data on the war service and pensions of recruits from the undivided Punjab, as well as information on their family background, rank and regiment. Un-researched for about a century, these registers were compiled by the Punjab government in 1919 after the war had concluded.
They also offer a detailed breakdown of the recruiting practices of the British Indian Army a century ago and information about individual soldiers revealing insights into their occupational, social, political and faith backgrounds.
Details may be found at https://www.dawn.com/news/1657266.