Sikh soldiers in the two World Wars

Who: Sikh soldiers of the British Indian Army, and the Punjab villages that sent them. Sikhs were about one to two per cent of British India's population. At the outbreak of the First World War they were 18 per cent of the Indian Army's fighting soldiers according to the Empire, Faith & War project, and over 20 per cent according to the Heritage Fund.

What: Counts of Sikhs who served in the first war range from about 62,000 Sikh recruits among some 320,000 Punjabi recruits (The Express Tribune), to 125,000 Sikhs among about 683,000 Punjabis in fighting, labour and medical service (Empire, Faith & War), to 130,000 (Heritage Fund). The sources do not explain the gap. The first Indian troops, many of them Sikhs, landed at Marseilles on 30 September 1914. Sikhs fought on the Somme, at Gallipoli and in campaigns across Africa and the Middle East, and the Heritage Fund says the 14th Sikhs took very heavy casualties at Gallipoli. Of up to 1.5 million Indians who served, 68,000 to 75,000 were killed. Records are scarce, since some were destroyed after Partition and some service was never registered. By 2016 the project had mapped nearly 8,000 Sikhs killed in action.

In the second war the Indian Army grew from under 200,000 men in 1939 to 2.5 million volunteers, which Britain's prime minister called in 2020 the largest volunteer force in history. It fought in East Africa, Malaya, North Africa, Burma and Italy, and it was no longer a mainly Punjabi army. The sources found give no reliable Sikh total for these years. At Kohima the Cremation Memorial commemorates 917 Sikh and Hindu soldiers of the Indian Army whose remains were cremated according to their customs.

Where: France, Gallipoli, Africa and the Middle East; in the second war, Malaya, Burma, North Africa and Italy. At home, at Sultanwind near Amritsar, a plaque put up by the British honours Sikh soldiers who left the village in the first war. A society held a commemoration there in November 2025, with the family of a Victoria Cross recipient present.

Why it mattered: Britain had favoured Sikhs in recruitment since the revolt of 1857, according to Wikipedia, so the empire's wars fell heavily on Sikh households. Punjabi Muslims were the largest group of Punjabi recruits in the first war, 156,300 against 63,900 Hindus and about 62,000 Sikhs, and the Pakistani writer Ammad Malik argues that Indian writers wrongly present Punjabi success as an exclusively Sikh triumph. He also argues that the first war taught Punjabis that empires fighting for freedom denied it to their own colonies, and that the white ruler was not invincible.