Revolt of 1857 and the Punjab

Who: Sepoys of the Bengal Army and other rebels against the East India Company across north India. In the Punjab: the Company's officers, the Punjab Irregular Force, the Cis-Sutlej rulers of Patiala, Jind and Nabha, and Sikhs who served the Company and Sikhs who joined the rebels.

What: The rising spread from Meerut, whose mutineers reached Delhi on 11 May 1857. The Punjab had been annexed only eight years before and held most of the Company's available units, so it became the base from which Delhi was retaken. British officers moved fast to disarm Bengal regiments there: four at Lahore on 13 May and five at Peshawar in late May. Risings still came, the largest at Sialkot on 9 July.

For Delhi, the Corps of Guides reached the Ridge on 9 June and Nicholson's Punjab Movable Column on 14 August. The rulers of Patiala, Jind and Nabha sent contingents to secure the route to Delhi. By early September about 6,000 of the roughly 9,000 men besieging the city were Sikh, Punjabi and Gurkha troops. Delhi was stormed on 14 September and declared captured on 21 September.

Sikhs stood on both sides. Inderjeet Singh, writing on SikhNet, notes that Cis-Sutlej Sikhs were recruited into the Ludhiana and Ferozepur regiments in 1846, while Sikhs of Ranjit Singh's former territory in the Majha were not recruited, because the British distrusted them after the two wars. He cites Delhi diaries that record about 200 men from Lahore and Ferozepur joining the mutineers on 28 May and Sikhs petitioning the king for a regiment of their own on 5 August, and records that a Ludhiana Sikh corps came under British fire at Benares on 4 June and charged the guns, and that Sardar Mohar Singh was sentenced to death for a rising at Ropar. The historian K. C. Yadav, writing in The Tribune in 2007, argues that the popular idea of Sikh loyalty is false: the Sikh chiefs were loyal, in his account, but the Sikh masses were not. Historians still differ on the balance.

Where: Delhi and north India, with Lahore, Peshawar, Sialkot and the Cis-Sutlej states in the Punjab.

Why it mattered: After annexation the British began recruiting Sikhs, and the National Army Museum says Sikhs later played a major role in suppressing the 1857 rising. World History Encyclopedia reports that by the First World War about 700,000 Indian Army troops came from the Punjab.