Siege of Delhi and Punjab's part in 1857

Who: British forces under Major-General Archdale Wilson besieged Delhi, which Bengal Army sepoys (called Poorbia in Punjab) had seized in May 1857 and held in the name of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah. Sir John Lawrence, the chief administrator of Punjab, drained his own province of troops to feed the siege. Brigadier John Nicholson brought a flying column from Punjab. Sikh and Punjabi soldiers were part of the besieging force, and contingents from the rulers of Patiala, Jind and Nabha guarded the lines of communication.

What: The siege ran from 8 June to 21 September 1857. Punjab had been annexed only eight years earlier and was held by disarming doubtful Bengal regiments. The Corps of Guides marched almost 600 miles in 22 days to reach the Ridge, and in late June the headquarters of the 4th Sikhs arrived with about 850 men, guns and Punjab cavalry. Nicholson's column of about 4,200 came on 14 August. By early September the besiegers numbered about 9,000, roughly 6,000 of them Sikhs, Punjabis and Gurkhas, though other counts run higher. On 29 August Lawrence told Wilson that no more men could be sent and that an assault was essential. The attack began on 14 September in five columns. Engineers blew open the Kashmir Gate, and Nicholson was shot through the chest in the lane to the Burn Bastion; he died on 23 September. In the last days of fighting close to 3,800 of the besiegers were killed or wounded, among them Subadar Ruttun Sing, a Patiala Sikh, mortally wounded on the glacis. The city was back in British hands by 21 September.

Where: Delhi, on the Ridge north of the walled city, at the Kashmir Gate and the Burn Bastion, with Punjab, from Lahore to Attock, as the base that fed it.

Why it mattered: Delhi was the rebels' capital, and its fall broke the centre of the 1857 uprising. For Punjab it showed how quickly a province conquered in 1849 was turned into the Raj's supply base, and Punjab became the main recruiting ground of the Indian Army afterwards. What the Sikh share meant is still argued. Many Sikhs doubted in the late summer that British rule would last and refused to enlist. The Sikh historian Ganda Singh wrote in 1957 (republished in 1969) that the Bengal sepoys never approached the Sikhs, who remembered those same regiments fighting beside the British in 1845-46 and 1848-49. The historian K.C. Yadav, writing in The Tribune in 2007, argued that Sikh rulers were loyal but ordinary Sikhs were not, and that some Sikh soldiers rebelled elsewhere.