Indian troops, a large proportion of them Punjabi, served in the Sudan campaigns, in the East Africa campaign of the First World War against the German forces under Lettow-Vorbeck, in Somaliland, and in the East and North African campaigns of the Second World War.
Lettow-Vorbeck kept a force in the field for four years and was never caught, and the men chasing him marched through country that killed more of them than he did. Malaria, dysentery and the tsetse fly account for most of the graves. The campaign is remembered in Germany and in Britain and not at all in the villages that supplied the infantry.
Alongside the soldiers were the labourers and artisans who built the Uganda Railway, and the traders who followed them, which is the origin of the East African Asian communities.
Sikh gurdwaras exist along the railway line at Mombasa, Nairobi, Kampala and Makindu.
The three streams, soldiers, railway labour and traders, produced a community that was expelled from Uganda in 1972 and largely relocated to Britain.
The Ramgarhia gurdwaras of Leicester and Southall descend directly from a railway built by Punjabi artisans in the 1890s.
The Indian dead of the East Africa campaign are commemorated at memorials in Nairobi and Mombasa, and a large share of the names on them are Punjabi. Almost nobody from those families has ever seen them.
Punjabi labour and Punjabi clerks built and ran the Uganda railway, and the East African Sikh and Punjabi communities descend from that work.
Those communities were expelled from Uganda in 1972 and left Kenya and Tanzania in large numbers. Most went to Britain, which is a substantial part of the British Punjabi population.