THE REMAINS OF1857
Remnants of 282 Indian soldiers executed in 1857 reveal the brutality of the British Raj
Ten by ten, the sepoys were called forth. Their names having been taken down in succession, they were pinioned, linked together, and marched to execution; a firing party being in readiness…” Amritsar deputy commissioner Frederick Henry Cooper’s description of the brutal mass slaughter of 282 unarmed “native” soldiers in Punjab’s Ajnala town on August 1, 1857, is a chillingly cold-blooded account that was designed, as the very act he ruthlessly presided over, to smother what India now regards as its first war of Independence.
More than a century-and-a-half later, over three days from February 28 to March 2, the people in Ajnala exhumed the mortal remains of India’s first freedom fighters, uncovering hard evidence of the tyranny that unfolded under the British Raj—systematic, premeditated mass murder, much like at Jallianwala Bagh on April 13, 1919.
Pursued doggedly by Surinder Kochhar, 42, an Amritsar-based history enthusiast committed to exploring “ignored monuments” in Indian and Pakistani Punjab, nearly 30,000 residents volunteered and took turns at carefully excavating the Kalianwala Khoo (black peoples’ well), a long-forgotten, centuries-old, brick-lined well in the township now fringing the present day expanse of Amritsar city.
What they uncovered is unprecedented: Skeletal remnants—90 intact skulls, elements of nearly 200 jaws and thousands of other precariously preserved bone fragments—of the 282 brave men Cooper had interred here.
SKELETAL REMAINS FOUND DURING THE EXCAVATION OF A WELLIN AJNALA
These were soldiers of the East India Company’s 26th NI (Native Infantry) who had broken free to escape confinement at the Mian Mir Cantonment outside Lahore on July 31, 1857.
“They just had to be in there (the well),” says Kochhar, who fought a lonely five-year battle, desperately trying to cobble support for his conviction that the martyrs were buried there.
“There was ample evidence,” he says, pointing to the detailed, albeit cold and almost self-congratulatory description of the massacre, including the chosen burial site in Cooper’s 1858 book, The Crisis in the Punjab—From May 10 until the fall of Delhi. Much of the deputy commissioner’s chilling testimony, Kochhar says, is also available in the British House of Commons