Handwritten Punjab Registers Help Add 9909 Indian Soldiers to World War I Records
For generations, some families held on to little more than fragments of memory. A great-grandfather who had left for the First World War and never returned. A faded photograph tucked away in a trunk. Stories passed down
A great-grandfather who had left for the First World War and never returned. A faded photograph tucked away in a trunk. Stories passed down at family gatherings about a soldier whose sacrifice was remembered at home, but nowhere else.
For many, those memories never found a place in the official record.
More than a century after the guns of the First World War fell silent, that has finally begun to change.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has officially recognised 9,909 Indian soldiers whose deaths had never been recorded in its First World War casualty records.
The breakthrough came through an extraordinary research project centred on 34 handwritten Punjab Registers preserved at the Lahore Museum, an archive that helped recover the identities of thousands of servicemen from pre-Partition India, many of them from Punjab, whose wartime sacrifice had remained unrecorded for over 100 years.
Together, the volumes documented nearly 3.2 lakh Punjabi recruits who served in the British Indian Army during the war.
Their rediscovery has helped restore the names, identities and sacrifices of soldiers who had remained absent from official commemoration for more than 100 years.
A discovery that began with 34 handwritten books
The breakthrough can be traced back to 2014, when historian and author Amandeep Madra, co-founder of the UK Punjab Heritage Association, came across the Punjab Registers while researching military history.
As he told The Tribune, historians had long known such registers existed, but few expected to find them inside an art museum.
The significance became personal almost immediately.
One of the earliest registers Madra photographed belonged to Ambala district, where his own family hailed from. There, he found the name of his father's uncle, Bishen Singh, the only man from their village known to have served during the war.
"My dad remembered being taken to collect his pension as a boy and that he'd been blinded by sandstorms during the war. That was all we knew. Then I found him in the register," Madra recalled in the interview.
If one family could recover its history through the registers, he realised, thousands of others might be able to do the same.
Piecing together lives, one name at a time
The work that followed extended far beyond simply reading old documents.
More than 26,000 fragile pages first had to be photographed, digitised, indexed and transcribed. The project eventually evolved into a five-year collaboration between the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the UK Punjab Heritage Association and the University of Greenwich.
Researchers, historians, volunteers and military experts painstakingly compared records from the Punjab Registers against approximately 74,000 existing CWGC Indian Army casualty records.
It was painstaking work.
Names had often been recorded differently by different clerks. Villages appeared under multiple spellings. Punjabi naming customs required careful interpretation, while service records from the colonial period frequently varied in detail.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, volunteers began cross-checking soldiers listed in the registers as having martyred during the war. As more records were examined, a striking pattern emerged.
Ultimately, researchers reviewed 15,935 recorded deaths, using computer-assisted analysis alongside manual verification. The result was the identification of 9,909 soldiers whose names had never entered the official record of wartime commemoration.
Restoring names, restoring family history
"Over a century after the end of the First World War, our mission endures, ensuring all those who died in the service of the Commonwealth receive the commemoration they deserve," said Claire Horton, Director General of the CWGC.
"The Punjab Registers project is a landmark moment in that mission. The recovery of every one of these 9,909 names helps restore missing chapters in family and world histories. It stands as a constant reminder that commemoration is not only about the past — it is about personal identity, family legacy and recognising the human cost of war."
Horton added that the Commission is working with Commonwealth governments to explore a permanent memorial that would honour these soldiers with the dignity they deserve.
Filling one of the last gaps in World War I history
More than 13 lakh Indians served during the First World War, making the British Indian Army one of the largest volunteer forces in history. Soldiers fought across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, from Flanders and Gallipoli to Mesopotamia and East Africa.
Punjab supplied nearly half a million recruits, representing Sikh, Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities.
The Punjab Registers have therefore become much more than military documents. They preserve details of villages, families and communities that existed before Partition, offering an extraordinary social record alongside military history.
The work also forms part of the CWGC's wider Non-Commemoration Programme, launched in 2021 to identify individuals whose wartime service had never been formally recognised. So far, the programme has identified more than 20,000 additional names for commemoration.
For the families of the 9,909 soldiers now added to the record, the announcement does not rewrite history. It completes it.
After more than a century, names once confined to fading handwritten registers have entered the historical record they always belonged in, ensuring that the men who left home to serve are remembered as individuals whose stories are part of history.
Sources:
‘Thousands of forgotten World War I Indian soldiers commemorated in UK’: by Aditi Khanna, Published on 6 July 2026
‘The forgotten 9,909: 34 Punjab Registers document sacrifice of unrecorded Indian soldiers who fought in World War 1’: by Shyam Bhatia, Published on 12 July 2026
Source: The Better India
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