Nearly 10,000 Punjabi World War I soldiers added to casualty records

Nearly 10,000 British Indian Army servicemen from Punjab have been added to Commonwealth War Graves Commission casualty records after their names were recovered from 34 handwritten registers kept for about a century at Lahore Museum. The commission said the update, which identifies 9,909 previously overlooked men, is its biggest to casualty records in more than 80 years.

The Punjab registers were digitised by the UK Punjab Heritage Association in collaboration with the University of Greenwich, turning fragile handwritten ledgers into searchable records. The names came from men in pre-partition India whose deaths had not been properly recorded, and the commission has framed the work as a historical correction after a century of omission. Related reporting says records of 320,000 troops from Punjab were left unread in a basement for 97 years before the material was brought into view.

The scale of the loss is clearer in the wider wartime context. BBC coverage said the soldiers were recognised for the first time and noted that about 1.4 million people from the subcontinent, now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, served in the British Indian Army in the First World War. Background reporting also puts the number of men from Punjab who served in the war at around half a million, showing how many families could have been left without an official trace of relatives who died in the conflict.

The CWGC’s Indian (First World War District Registers) Book of Remembrance page lists the total identified casualties at 9,909. For descendants, that means names long missing from official memorial records are now visible in a public archive that carries weight in both Britain and the former colonies that supplied troops to its war effort. For military historians, the addition rewrites part of the record of the First World War by restoring Punjabi servicemen to the documentary history of imperial sacrifice.