Battle of Saragarhi, 1897: twenty-one against an army

On 12 September 1897, on a rocky ridge on the North-West Frontier of British India, twenty-one Sikh soldiers held a small signaling post against several thousand Pashtun (Orakzai and Afridi) tribesmen. Refusing to surrender, they fought to the last man, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers before the post fell. The Battle of Saragarhi is remembered as one of the greatest last stands in history and a byword for Sikh courage and devotion to duty.²

Part of Battles of India · Before: Chillianwala, 1849 · Next: Imphal, 1944

A post on the frontier

Saragarhi was a small signaling post that relayed messages between Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan in the Samana hills, held by twenty-one soldiers of the 36th Sikhs under Havildar Ishar Singh. In 1897 the tribesmen rose along the North-West Frontier, and Afridi and Orakzai forces attacked the forts on the Samana Range.³

The summer of 1897 set the whole frontier ablaze. In the middle of August, H. L. Nevill's history records, the British learned that the Afridis and Orakzais were arranging simultaneous attacks on the posts in the Khyber Pass and on the Samana Ridge. On 23 August the Afridis fell on the Khyber forts of Ali Masjid and Fort Maude, and two days later the fort at Landi Kotal was overrun. On 26 August the Orakzais seized the Ublan Pass near Kohat, and Brigadier General Yeatman-Biggs was sent to command the troops of the Kohat district.⁴

The two forts stood on the Samana Ridge above the Miranzai valley, south of the Tirah, the mountain homeland of the Orakzai and Afridi tribes. They were garrisoned by the 36th Sikhs under Lieutenant Colonel Haughton; Fort Gulistan was held by 165 to 175 men under Major C. H. Des Voeux, whose wife and children were with him. The little post of Saragarhi, on the ridge between them, relayed their messages by heliograph, flashing sunlight from mirror to mirror.⁵

Saragarhi itself was weak. It was a small blockhouse with a flanking tower, built, as a newspaper correspondent complained afterward, with its door at ground level and surrounded by dead ground that attackers could use for cover; one account reckoned that a hundred men would have been needed to hold it. On 11 September Major General Yeatman-Biggs, who had brought a supply column up from Hangu, turned back a large tribal force in the Khanki valley, but lack of water forced his column back down to Hangu. Behind him the tribesmen doubled back toward the forts.⁶

Ten thousand against twenty-one

On the morning of 12 September a huge tribal force, estimated in the thousands, surrounded Saragarhi. The British commander put the tribesmen holding the Saragarhi ridge two days later at about 8,000 to 10,000, a figure repeated in later accounts. The defenders signaled the attack to Fort Lockhart by heliograph, but no relief could reach them in time. Refusing to surrender, the twenty-one Sikhs prepared to defend a position that could not be saved.⁷

The last stand

From about nine in the morning until about half past four in the afternoon the defenders held out, throwing back two determined assaults. The signaler, Sepoy Gurmukh Singh, kept up communication with Fort Lockhart to the last and was last seen signaling just before the tribesmen swarmed in. At last the wall was breached and the fighting became hand-to-hand; the defenders fought on until all twenty-one were killed, having inflicted heavy losses on the attackers.⁸

Exactly how the end came is uncertain. As H. L. Nevill pointed out in his history of the frontier campaigns, not one defender survived, so the details come from the attackers. One account published at the time says that at the third rush the tribesmen broke down the door, and when the Sikhs came down from the walls to defend it, others scaled the walls behind them. Another says two attackers sheltering in a dead angle of the flanking tower pried out stones until a breach opened. The same reports tell of a soldier in the guardroom who killed twenty of the enemy and died only when the room was set on fire.⁹

From Fort Lockhart the garrison watched it all and could do nothing. Yeatman-Biggs's official dispatch records the signals that reached his column: at half past three in the afternoon a message that Saragarhi was hard pressed, and at half past four the news that it had fallen and that Gulistan was hard pressed in turn. With the twenty-one soldiers died a noncombatant, Khuda Dad, a servant of the post, who is remembered with them.¹⁰

The siege of Gulistan

The fall of Saragarhi freed the tribesmen to turn on Fort Gulistan, and they pressed up to within twenty yards of its walls. On 13 September Havildar Kala Singh led a sortie of sixteen men from the gate; when they were pinned down a few paces from the enemy breastwork, Colour Havildar Sundar Singh and twelve more men leapt over the wall on their own initiative, and together they drove the attackers out and captured three of their standards. Two wounded men had been left outside, and three sepoys climbed back over the wall to carry them in. In the whole siege the garrison lost two killed and forty wounded. A nurse, Theresa McGrath, cared for the wounded throughout the siege, and was singled out for praise in the general's dispatch.¹¹

Gulistan was not the only post that held. At Sangar, a smaller post nearby, 41 to 44 men of the 36th Sikhs under Havildar Bishen Singh beat off attacks all night and, in a sortie of their own, captured an enemy standard, which they proudly displayed to the relief column as it marched past.¹²

At midnight on 13 September Yeatman-Biggs marched again from Hangu. His column stormed Gogra Hill at dawn, reached Fort Lockhart at ten in the morning of the 14th, and found about 8,000 to 10,000 Afridis holding the Saragarhi ridge. Guns drove them off, and by one in the afternoon Gulistan was relieved, after two days in which, in the dispatch's words, it had been hard pressed by some 7,000 to 8,000 Afridis and Orakzais. The tribal losses around the forts were reported at more than 400 killed. H. L. Nevill's history dates the relief a day later: the garrison heard the relief column's guns at 8 a.m. on 15 September, and the tribesmen melted away at noon.¹³

Saragarhi, wrote a correspondent with the relief column, was "a piteous sight": the post had been almost leveled, and the bodies of its garrison lay among the ruins. A month later the British launched the Tirah expedition into the tribes' own valleys.¹⁴

Honor and legacy

All twenty-one defenders were posthumously awarded the Indian Order of Merit, then the highest gallantry award open to Indian soldiers. The stand is commemorated every year as Saragarhi Day on 12 September by the Sikh Regiment, and is honored across India as a symbol of courage and duty. Military historians count it among the greatest last stands in history.¹⁵

The tribute in the London Gazette was unusually warm. The Commander-in-Chief in India recorded his admiration of the heroism of "a post held by 21 men of the 36th Sikhs," who "fighting against overwhelming numbers" died at their post. The families of the dead received grants of land and money, and the British built memorial gurdwaras in Amritsar and Ferozepur; the Ferozepur memorial was opened in February 1904. On the ridge itself an obelisk was raised from the bricks of the ruined post.¹⁶

The 36th Sikhs live on as the 4th Battalion of the Sikh Regiment of the Indian Army, which keeps Saragarhi Day every year. In Britain the commemoration lapsed after Indian independence and was revived by the British military in 2013. On 12 September 2021 a bronze statue of a Sikh soldier by the sculptor Luke Perry, ten feet tall on a six-foot plinth, was unveiled in Wednesfield, Wolverhampton, paid for largely by the local Guru Nanak Gurdwara.¹⁷ › The Greatest Last Stands in History

Few last stands were fought on so small a scale: twenty-one men, a signal post and a single day.¹⁸ › 12 September in military history: the Battle of Saragarhi, 1897