Saragarhi 1897: The 21 Sikhs, the Signal Post and the Hills That Rose

At about nine in the morning of Sunday, 12 September 1897, the slopes below a small stone post called Saragarhi began to fill with armed men.

The post sat on a bare crest of the Samana ridge, in the hills of Tirah, in what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. It was hardly a fort: a blockhouse with loopholed walls and a signal tower. Inside were 21 soldiers of the 36th Sikhs and one unarmed follower.

About two and a half kilometres away on either side stood the two real forts of the ridge, Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan. Officers in both could watch the whole fight through their glasses. Neither could reach it. By late afternoon Saragarhi was a burning ruin, and every man inside was dead.

In the 129 years since, Saragarhi has become the most famous last stand in Sikh memory. It is also a battle fought in somebody else’s hills, by tribes who had their own reasons. This is the story from both slopes of the ridge, with the myths taken out.

The Samana is a long, steep ridge south of Tirah, looking down on the Miranzai valley near Kohat on one side and the Khanki valley, home of Orakzai clans, on the other. The British occupied its crest in 1891 after their second Miranzai expedition, and built posts along it.

Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan, also called Fort Cavagnari, could not see each other. So the army put a small post on high ground between them, Saragarhi, to pass messages along. The tool was the heliograph: a mirror on a tripod that flashes sunlight in Morse code across miles of hills.

In September 1897, the whole ridge was held by the 36th Sikhs under Lieutenant Colonel John Haughton. An army history published in 1912 gives their spread: 168 men and two British officers at Fort Lockhart, 175 and four officers at Gulistan, and small pickets in between. Saragarhi had 21.

It was, the same history admits, weakly built and badly placed to hold out for long against large numbers. It was there to talk, not to fight.

To the British, the summer of 1897 was a frontier gone mad. To the tribes, it was a fight to stay free.

In 1893, the Durand Line split the Pashtun lands between Afghanistan and British India. Survey parties came, stone pillars went up, and posts appeared deep inside tribal country. One British account, quoted by Colonel H.C. Wylly in 1912, described the tribes’ alarm plainly.

They saw their country mapped and measured.British account quoted by Col. H.C. Wylly, 1912

The Orakzai had their own grievance right on the Samana. They had never wanted British posts on the ridge. In 1891 they told the British to leave it, and when that failed they asked the Amir of Afghanistan, in 1892 and again in May 1897, to help get the posts removed. The Afridis complained to the Amir that the British hold on the Khyber Pass broke their treaty rights.

Religion fired the rising. The Hadda Mullah and, in Tirah, Mullah Saiyid Akbar of the Aka Khel Afridis called for jihad against the British. The Amir himself stayed out: the Afridis later admitted that he had told them not to fight.

The revolt rolled along the frontier: the Tochi valley on 10 June, the siege of Malakand from 26 July, Shabkadar on 7 August. On 23 August the Afridis fell on the Khyber posts. At Landi Kotal, the British-paid Khyber Rifles, many of them Afridis themselves, held out for more than a day against their own clansmen. Their commander, Subedar Mursil Khan, had two sons in the attacking army; he was killed when the gate was opened from inside.

Then the Orakzai and Afridis turned to the Samana. On the nights of 3 and 4 September they attacked Gulistan and lost heavily. By 12 September they were back, in far greater numbers.

The man in charge was Havildar Ishar Singh, about 39, from Jhorran village near Jagraon in Ludhiana district. He had joined up at 18 and moved to the 36th Sikhs in 1887. Later accounts describe a soldier who argued with his superiors and was at his best under fire.

His men were Sikh soldiers from the villages of Punjab, most of them sepoys, the lowest rank. Several shared the same names, so the army told them apart by their numbers.

Look at the last name. Daad was a follower, not a soldier: Panag calls him a non-combatant who joined the fight, and the Wolverhampton memorial’s makers describe Khuda Dad as a Muslim cook and handyman. He received no medal. The famous number is 21; the men who died at Saragarhi were 22.

The morning began badly for the British. A relief column under Major General Yeatman-Biggs had run into the combined tribal army, put by the British at about 10,000 men, and had to go back down to Hangu for lack of water. Now the whole weight of the rising fell on the Samana posts.

Sangar picket was hit in the night and held. In the morning the attack switched to Saragarhi. Gulistan was surrounded from about noon, so it could send nobody.

Gulistan had spotted the men digging in the dead angle under Saragarhi’s wall and tried to warn the post, Panag writes, but the message never got through.

Then Gulistan’s own night began. The tribesmen pressed it until morning and dug in 20 yards from its walls. Major Des Voeux’s Sikhs held on and made two sorties, capturing three tribal standards. The British relief column came back up the ridge and reached Gulistan at 1 pm on 14 September. Gulistan’s garrison had lost 2 killed and 39 wounded.

Of everything about Saragarhi, the signaller is the part people remember. Through the whole fight, Sepoy Gurmukh Singh stood at his heliograph and flashed reports across to Fort Lockhart, where Haughton read them knowing he could not help.

Popular retellings give a minute-by-minute log of his messages. Panag, who was the battalion’s adjutant in 1971–72 and kept its official war diary, says the record holds only two: the noon report and the last one, after 3 pm, asking permission to close the heliograph and take up his rifle.

What he did then nobody saw up close. The British record says the last Sikh killed about 20 men before he was cut down; later accounts say 40. In Sikh retellings, the post’s last sound was the jaikara, Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal. That is tradition, not record, and it is how many Sikh families tell it to their children.

Most ‘last stands’ are rarely literal as there are always some survivors.Lt Gen H.S. Panag (retd), ThePrint, 2019

At Saragarhi there were none. That is exactly why so much of the story had to be imagined.

Ask how many tribesmen attacked Saragarhi and you will hear 10,000, 12,000, even 24,000. Ask how many died and you will hear 180, 600 or 1,400. Here is what the sources actually say.

• On the whole ridge: the British estimated about 10,000 tribesmen on the Samana on 12 September; Haughton estimated 10,000 to 14,000. Panag puts the fighting men of Tirah at 20,000 to 25,000 in all.
• At the post itself: Panag puts the force that attacked Saragarhi at 1,000 to 1,500, of whom only 80 to 100 could attack at once on the narrow ground.
• Tribal dead at Saragarhi: 180, the figure the tribes ‘owned to’ according to the British record in Wylly’s 1912 history.
• Across the Samana fighting: about 400 killed and 600 badly wounded, by the same British record.
• Sikh regimental accounts: 450 dead and wounded (Kanwaljit Singh and H.S. Ahluwalia, 1987); about 600 bodies (a 1990 account by Sharma, though some may have died when British guns shelled the ridge two days later).
• Pashtun-side view: Farrukh Husain, writing in Pakistan’s The Friday Times in 2022, calls the higher numbers inflated and suggests 100 or fewer.

So the honest answer is: between about 1,000 and 1,500 men attacked the post, out of perhaps 10,000 on the ridge, and somewhere between under 100 and about 600 of them died. Not one of these figures was counted by someone who was inside the wall.

Saragarhi was not the end of the rising. It was the start of the punishment.

In October 1897 the British sent the largest force their frontier had seen: the Tirah Field Force under General Sir William Lockhart, about 35,000 British and Indian troops by one count and 44,000 by another, with some 20,000 followers. On 20 October they stormed the Dargai heights, with the Gordon Highlanders’ pipers playing them on, at a cost of 199 killed and wounded on the British side.

Through November and December, brigades marched through the Afridi and Orakzai valleys and blew up walled villages and fortified houses, and destroyed stores of grain and fodder. The tribes fought back as guerrillas, and the march out down the Bara valley in December was costly in blood and cold.

John Haughton, who had watched Saragarhi fall from Fort Lockhart, did not see the end. He was killed at the Shinkamar Pass on 29 January 1898, holding a position against heavy odds.

By the spring the tribes had agreed to pay fines and hand over the rifles the British demanded. The force broke up on 4 April 1898. The Orakzai, the British army history says, gave little trouble after 1897. To the tribes, it was a defeat in a fight for their hills, not a crime.

All 21 received the Indian Order of Merit after their deaths. At the time it was the highest gallantry award an Indian soldier could win: the Victoria Cross was opened to Indians only in 1911. The next of kin of each man got 500 rupees and two squares of land, about 50 acres, says the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism.

Those were real honours, and rare ones: a medal for every man in a unit. Panag adds a footnote fans rarely mention: the 36th Sikhs won 14 more IOMs on the Samana and in the Tirah campaign.

Then there is the story everyone has heard: that when news of Saragarhi was read out in the British Parliament, the members rose to their feet. An article in The Tribune in 2000 repeated it, and so do countless posts every September.

The House of Commons Library’s own calendar shows that Parliament was not sitting on 12 September 1897. It was in recess and stayed that way until February 1898. The British author Jay Singh-Sohal, who researched the battle for his 2013 book Saragarhi: The Forgotten Battle, found no record of any ovation.

How did the story spread, then? Through the British army’s own histories, which praised the 21 in glowing terms; through the regiment, which kept the day; and, from the 2010s, through books, TV, a film and the internet. In 2017, Punjab’s chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, a former Sikh Regiment officer, wrote a history of the 36th Sikhs in the Tirah campaign.

The first memorials came quickly. Gurdwaras in memory of the 21 rose in Amritsar and Ferozepur, built under the British with army money and public contributions.

The Amritsar one, Gurdwara Saragarhi, stands a short walk from the main entrance to the Golden Temple, and a 1902 newspaper report describes its opening. The Ferozepur memorial gurdwara in the cantonment was opened in February 1904, and the names of the 21 are on its walls. A cairn was built at Saragarhi itself, from the stones of the ruined post.

Every 12 September is Saragarhi Day. For the Sikh Regiment it is the Regimental Battle Honours Day, and the 36th Sikhs’ heir, 4 Sikh, is known as the Saragarhi battalion. (The regiment’s 8th battalion fought at Tiger Hill in 1999; read our Kargil story.) In August 2017, Amarinder Singh announced that Punjab would make the day a state holiday. In September 2023, Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann laid the foundation stone of a new Saragarhi memorial in Ferozepur.

That question is not new. Just 22 years after Saragarhi, the same Empire’s troops fired on a crowd in Amritsar, a short walk from the Saragarhi gurdwara. Read our Jallianwala Bagh story.

For most Indians under 40, Saragarhi arrived through a screen. First came 21 Sarfarosh: Saragarhi 1897, a 65-episode drama on Discovery Jeet from February to May 2018, with Mohit Raina as Ishar Singh. Netflix later picked it up for international viewers.

Then, on 21 March 2019, Kesari opened over Holi, with Akshay Kumar as Ishar Singh and Parineeti Chopra as his wife. Directed by Anurag Singh, it grossed about ₹207 crore worldwide. B Praak won the National Award for Best Male Playback Singer for its song Teri Mitti.

Historians and critics were less kind. Panag wrote that Sikh soldiers of 1897 wore khaki, not saffron, turbans and did not go into battle with flowing beards and kirpans, and that the attacking numbers were wildly inflated. Some critics objected that the main villain was a stereotyped Muslim cleric. Scroll’s critic Nandini Ramnath called it this:

A poor attempt to revisit a chapter in Indian military history.Nandini Ramnath, Scroll, on Kesari, 2019

From Pakistan, Farrukh Husain went further, calling the film’s 10,000 attackers ‘grossly inflated for purposes of creating religious tensions’. Audiences, meanwhile, loved it.

On Saragarhi Day 2021, 124 years after the battle, a 10-foot bronze statue of Havildar Ishar Singh was unveiled on a six-foot plinth in Wednesfield, Wolverhampton, near the Guru Nanak Gurdwara. Behind him stands an eight-metre steel plate cut into the shape of the Samana hills and forts.

The gurdwara’s congregation raised £100,000 and the city council gave £35,000 and the land. The sculptor was Luke Perry of the Black Country. Giani Harpreet Singh, then Jathedar of the Akal Takht, flew in from Amritsar, along with three descendants of Saragarhi soldiers, and British Army gunners fired a salute.

When people are represented, they are empowered.Sculptor Luke Perry, at the unveiling, 2021

Not everyone cheered. Husain wrote in The Friday Times that such memorials glorify imperialism. For British Sikhs, many of them descendants of soldiers, it was the first time their great-grandfathers stood in bronze on a British street.

Saragarhi is a true story with a lot of fiction stuck to it. Here are the claims you will see every 12 September.

Strip away the myths and Saragarhi is still extraordinary. Twenty-one men and an unarmed follower were told to hold a weak post that could not be relieved. They held it for most of a day, kept signalling until there was nothing left to signal, and died there. You do not need 10,000 enemies or a standing ovation to make that brave.

But the men on the other slope were not cartoon villains either. The Orakzai and Afridis were fighting for hills they had lived in for centuries, against forts built on their land and a border drawn without them. They paid for it with burnt villages and fines. Their side of Saragarhi was never written down, and that silence is part of the story too.

The 21 were brave men in the service of an empire. Both halves of that sentence are true. Remembering one half does not mean forgetting the other.