On 12 September 1897 twenty-one soldiers of the 36th Sikhs and one non-combatant held a signalling post called Saragarhi on the Samana range against an Afridi and Orakzai force put at several thousand. The post linked Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan.
They refused surrender. The fighting lasted about seven hours. The wall was breached and the post taken. All twenty-one were killed. Havildar Ishar Singh commanded. Sepoy Gurmukh Singh, the signaller, sent the messages until the last and then asked permission to stop signalling and take up his rifle.
All twenty-one were awarded the Indian Order of Merit, then the highest gallantry award open to Indian soldiers, the only occasion an entire unit has been so decorated.
Almost all were from Majha villages in Amritsar, Ferozepur, Jalandhar and Ludhiana districts. Their names and villages are recorded on the memorial gurdwaras at Amritsar and Ferozepur.
It is the best known action of Punjabi soldiers in the imperial service and it is a defensive last stand on a frontier post that had no strategic value and was abandoned afterward. Both of those things are worth stating in the same paragraph.
The post was a relay. Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan could not see each other and Saragarhi stood on the ridge between them, which is the only reason a stone hut on a rock was garrisoned at all.
The Afridi and Orakzai rising of 1897 ran the length of the frontier and this was one action inside it. The Tirah campaign that followed put over forty thousand men into those hills and settled nothing.
12 September is kept by the Sikh Regiment as Saragarhi Day. It is one of very few colonial period actions that an independent Indian army has held in its calendar without amendment.