Around 1.4 million people from the subcontinent – now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – are recognized to have served in the British Indian Army in WW1.
In the years that adopted the warfare, officers visited every city and village in Punjab in an effort to document the names and fates of each of the 320,000 servicemen who came from that state alone.
Following India’s partition in 1947 the state of Punjab was break up between India and Pakistan.
Scores of cracked, fragile, leather-bound volumes crammed with hand-written information, and each embossed with a village identify, now line cabinets at the Lahore Museum in Pakistan.
Members of the UK Punjab Heritage Association initiated the project to digitise and analyse the information, a course of that has taken several years.
“As a Punjabi myself I feel really proud that I can do this part for the community,” says Jasmin Basra, a PhD pupil at the University of Greenwich, who participated in the pain-staking analysis.
During the course of, Basra unexpectedly stumbled across the names of two of her own family members, a great-great-grandfather and his brother, who also served in WW1 preventing for the British Indian Army.
“That connection was emotional. As a second-generation British Punjabi, there is almost a disconnect from Punjab as well as not being fully connected to British history, but I think this is a tangible link to all of it,” she says.
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