WW1 commemorations forget Punjabi Muslims

CHANDIGARH: They outnumbered Sikh and Hindu soldiers during World War 1 still Punjabi Muslim soldiers have remained a forgotten lot during the centenary commemorations of the war not just in Indian and Pakistan Punjab but also in Britain

Updated At : 06:33 AM Sep 05, 2016 IST

Sikh and Hindu soldiers shared different slaughterhouses than Muslims during World War I.

Sarika Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 4

They outnumbered Sikh and Hindu soldiers during World War 1, still Punjabi Muslim soldiers have remained a forgotten lot during the centenary commemorations of the war, not just in Indian and Pakistan Punjab but also in Britain.

However, their story is now being promoted to honour their bravery and ensure their remembrance.

By the end of the war that began in 1915, undivided Punjab had provided some 3.7 lakh recruits, including 1.9 lakh Muslims, around 97,000 Sikhs and 83,000 Hindus, historian David Omissi writes in his book “Sepoy and the Raj”.

Ever since commemorations began in the UK, the Sikh contribution has been highlighted by Sikh bodies such as Punjab Heritage Association (PHA) and British organisations like Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). Historian Santanu Das points that while Muslims were twice the number of Sikhs in WWI, the latter have been able to draw the archlights because of a better organised diaspora.

“The UK Sikhs also have a fantastic infrastructure. There’s also a celebration, bordering at times on fetishisation, of the Sikh ‘martial ethos’, which gets connected to World War I in an almost imperial way and feeds into ‘British Sikh identity’,” says Santanu. He says with the Muslims, it’s much more difficult because of the contemporary world situation. “Any display of martial prowess is potentially dangerous. Also, they fought against their fellow religious brethren in Turkey. They are also not that well-organised in the UK, in terms of funding and infrastructure,” he says.

However, it isn’t just the commemorations that have been missing, a research conducted by British Future discovered that only one in five people know about the Muslim contribution, and almost nobody (2 per cent) was aware of its scale.

Following that, a project – Unknown and Untold – was launched. Steve Ballinger, director of communications with British Future, feels telling this story is important in Britain today. “Both to show non-Muslim audiences that Muslims have been making a contribution to Britain that goes back over 100 years; and also to show younger British Muslims, unsure of their place and identity in Britain, that they are part of a long heritage.”

The project has involved Muslim and non-Muslim youth in Birmingham; bringing together different South Asian communities in Leicester, and taking this story to the British Army itself through a lecture at Sandhurst, he tells. Efforts are also being made to raise awareness of the first Indian recipient of the Victoria Cross for bravery, Sepoy Khudadad Khan.

Still, Mahmood Awan, a Dublin-based Punjabi Muslim writer, whose great grandfather fought in WWI and was a friend of Khudadad Khan, feels both Sikh and Muslim efforts have failed to commemorate the collective Punjabi contribution. He feels all these efforts are just for their own religious groups. “No one cares for Punjab as a whole. I strongly believe that all these efforts are being funded to showcase the colonial loyalist brigades in the West and it doesn’t matter if they are Muslim groups or Sikh-Hindu groups,” says Awan, who has written extensively on the Great War.