Most last stands are reconstructed afterwards from the ground, the bodies and the guesswork of the side that won. Saragarhi is different, and the difference is why it is worth telling carefully. The post reported its own destruction, in real time, by mirror, to an officer five miles away who wrote the messages down as they came in. We know roughly what time the wall was breached. We know when the ammunition ran low. We know that the last man asked permission to stop signalling so that he could pick up his rifle.
Twenty-one men of the 36th Sikhs held a signalling station on the North-West Frontier from about nine in the morning until about half past three in the afternoon on 12 September 1897, against a force they could not possibly beat, having been told before noon that nobody was coming to help them.
A Mirror on a Ridge
The Samana Range runs through what was then the Kohat district of the North-West Frontier and is now Pakistan. The British had fortified it in the early 1890s, and by 1897 the line was anchored on two positions, Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan, roughly five miles apart along the ridge.
The two forts could not see each other. Between them, on an outcrop, stood Saragarhi: a small block house with loop-holed walls and a signalling tower. Its garrison existed to work a heliograph — a mirror on a tripod that flashes sunlight in Morse to a receiving station. Every message between Lockhart and Gulistan went through it.
That is the whole strategic point, and it explains the shape of the day. Saragarhi was not defending anything except the ability of the two forts to talk to each other. It was also, being a relay, exactly where you would attack first.
The 36th Sikhs had been raised at Ferozepur in April 1887 and took over the Samana posts in January 1897. Its commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel John Haughton.
The Rising
Through the summer of 1897 the frontier went up. A general revolt spread through the Pashtun tribes from the Malakand southward, and by early September the Orakzai and Afridi lashkars had turned on the Samana. Fort Gulistan was attacked on 3 September and again on 9 September; both times relief columns from Lockhart pushed through, passing Saragarhi on the way.
On the morning of 12 September, the tribesmen came for the middle.
The Twenty-One
The detachment at Saragarhi that morning numbered twenty-one, all Sikhs, under Havildar Ishar Singh, regimental number 165. The names are recorded, and it is worth setting them down, because the round number tends to swallow the men:
Havildar Ishar Singh (165); Naik Lal Singh (332); Lance Naik Chanda Singh (546); and Sepoys Sundar Singh (1321), Ram Singh (287), Uttar Singh (492), Sahib Singh (182), Hira Singh (359), Daya Singh (687), Jivan Singh (760), Bhola Singh (791), Narayan Singh (834), Gurmukh Singh (814), Jivan Singh (871), Gurmukh Singh (1733), Ram Singh (163), Bhagwan Singh (1257), Bhagwan Singh (1265), Buta Singh (1556), Jivan Singh (1651) and Nand Singh (1221).
Three men named Jivan Singh. Two named Gurmukh Singh, two named Bhagwan Singh, two named Ram Singh. This is a Punjabi village roll, not a heroic cast list, and that is rather the point: these were ordinary infantry doing garrison duty on a quiet stretch of ridge.
The signaller was Sepoy Gurmukh Singh, about nineteen years old.
Nine in the Morning
At about 0900 the lashkars appeared around the post in strength. Contemporary estimates of their number run from ten to fourteen thousand; nobody counted, and the figures come from British observers looking at hillsides. What is not in question is that the garrison was outnumbered by a factor of several hundred to one.
Gurmukh Singh got the mirror working and signalled Fort Lockhart that Saragarhi was under attack.
Haughton moved a relief force out of Lockhart and found the intervening ground held. He could not break through. He signalled back to Saragarhi that no help was coming.
That message is the hinge of the whole story. From before noon, the men in the post knew their position was hopeless in the plainest possible terms — not as a soldier's private suspicion, but as an official communication from their commanding officer. They had a wall, a gate, some ammunition, and no prospect of relief. They kept the mirror working and went on firing.
The Afternoon
The signalled record gives a rough clock for what followed.
By around midday the garrison had thrown back a succession of assaults — seven, in the traditional count — and was down to roughly half its strength. The tribesmen changed method: while one party pressed the gate, others worked at the base of the wall in dead ground where the loopholes could not bear on them, prising out stones.
At about 1400 the post signalled that ammunition was running low.
Somewhere around 1530 the wall came down. The fighting went into the compound and became hand to hand. Sepoy Bhagwan Singh is remembered as the first of the twenty-one to be killed; Havildar Ishar Singh is described in the accounts as having held the gate and, when the position was gone, having covered the withdrawal of what was left of his men into the inner block house.
Gurmukh Singh signalled Fort Lockhart to ask permission to stop sending. It was given. He put down the heliograph, fixed his bayonet, and is remembered as the last of the twenty-one to die — reportedly accounting for a number of attackers in the guardroom before the tribesmen set it alight and burned him out.
He asked to be allowed to stop signalling. It is the only request from inside the post that anybody recorded, and it was a request for permission to fight.
The Cost, and the Arithmetic
The post was taken and burned. The following day a British column retook the ground and found the bodies of the garrison among the ruins.
Estimates of tribal losses vary enormously and should be treated with care: the figure of around six hundred to eight hundred dead is the one most often quoted, and it originates in British reporting rather than in any count that anyone could have made. What the relieving troops did report was a great many bodies around a very small building.
Saragarhi also did its job in the only sense that mattered operationally. The lashkars spent an entire day reducing a signalling station, and Fort Gulistan — attacked in the same operation — held until relief arrived on 14 September.
The Indian Order of Merit
All twenty-one were awarded the Indian Order of Merit, posthumously. At that date Indian soldiers were not eligible for the Victoria Cross, and the IOM was the highest gallantry decoration open to them; the entire garrison receiving it is exceptional.
Three memorials followed. One was raised on the site itself. The Amritsar memorial, close to the Golden Temple, was unveiled on 14 February 1902, with the names of the twenty-one cut into marble. The Ferozepur memorial gurdwara — the regiment's home station — was built by the army at a cost of Rs 27,118 and opened in 1904 by the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab. Both still stand, and both still hold a congregation every 12 September.
The 36th Sikhs is today the 4th Battalion of the Sikh Regiment of the Indian Army, which observes Saragarhi Day as a regimental holiday.
What the Story Collected on the Way
Two claims attach themselves to Saragarhi wherever it is told: that UNESCO lists it among the great collective feats of arms in history, and that both Houses of the British Parliament rose to applaud when the news arrived.
Neither appears to be true. Researchers who have gone looking for the paperwork — among them Jay Singh-Sohal, who worked through the regimental and parliamentary record for his book on the battle — have found no UNESCO listing and no ovation in Hansard. They circulate because they are the kind of thing that ought to be true.
It is worth resisting them, because they are weaker than the facts. A UNESCO citation is a committee's opinion a century later. What actually exists is a signal log: a nineteen-year-old with a mirror, telling his colonel what was happening to his friends, hour by hour, until he asked whether he could stop.
Why It Endures
Saragarhi has been claimed by a lot of people — by the Indian Army, by the British Army, by Sikh communities across the diaspora, by film-makers, and by anyone who wants a clean story about standing firm. Some of that is sentimental and some of it is political.
The core of it survives the handling. Twenty-one men were told, in writing, at about eleven in the morning, that they were on their own. Surrender was available; frontier garrisons had taken it before. They worked out that if the post fell quickly the two forts would be blind and Gulistan might go with it, and they stayed at their loopholes for another four and a half hours.