This time last summer, my filmmaker colleague Juggy* and I walked through the corridors of Royal Military Academy, to discover the hidden history of “Sikhs at Sandhurst”. Being given rare access to film around the site was a tremendous honour- and on a hot English day we were duly rewarded for our efforts in capturing […]

Much is made of Queen Victoria receiving news of the events at Saragarhi – but is this fact or fiction? One myth already established, through my research for “Saragarhi: The Forgotten Battle” is that there was no standing ovation in Parliament as the news of the battle was read out. This is incorrectly stated on […]

Here’s the latest “Remembering Saragarhi” clip. In it, I answer the four questions that people always ask me about Saragarhi:– What is it?– What exactly happened?– Why write about it– Why was it forgotten. In short, here’s some answers from the clip:– It’s a battle of epic proportions that took place  in 1897– 21Sikhs made […]

The film tells the story of the British-Sikh experience captured at Sandhurst, as well as the first person of Sikh descent to attend the Royal Military Academy.

In my speech at the recent launch of the “National Sikh Remembrance Foundation”, I spoke about acts of bravery such as Saragarhi, and its meaning for British Sikhs today:

I had the pleasure of speaking at the launch of the National Sikh Remembrance Foundation yesterday (4th July). The NSRF was launched by the Attorney General Dominic Grieve and Paul Uppal MP. The trustees, including Cllr Santokh Singh Chhokkar, have done a fantastic job in setting up an organisation to work with the Royal British […]

My last post, about losing the heritage of Saragarhi, was met with much response, negative and positive towards the issue of Punjab losing it’s history. But I re-iterate what I said earlier, appreciating heritage and the memorials to those who fought and died is crucial not just for us but future generations. Establishing fact and […]

It was with much sadness that I saw the below scene of the Saragarhi memorial in Amritsar. This was the memorial created after the battle in which 21 Sikhs heroically stood to the last against 10,000 Afghan tribesmen on the frontier. Their last stand, chronicled in my next book, cemented the reputation of Sikhs as […]

During my research into “Saragarhi” I thought long and hard about what to call the book. Is it a lost battle?  Is it a true narrative of events?  Is it about the politics of the Raj or the Sikhs? The original concept for my work was about the “21 Sikhs” and the last stand at […]

It’s late, a little before midnight, and I’m writing my latest book “Saragarhi: The Forgotten Battle.” The chapter I’m currently drafting is about the subsequent aftermath of Saragarhi, where 21 Sikhs fought bravely to the last against the onslaught of 10,000 Pathans in 1897.  And what happened after the Samana range, which was defended by […]