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Battle Of Saragarhi
The Battle of Saragarhi was a last-stand battle fought before the Tirah Campaign between the British Raj and Afghan tribesmen. On 12 September 1897, an estimated 12,00024,000 Orakzai and Afridi tribesmen were seen near Gogra, at Samana Suk, and around Saragarhi, cutting off Fort Gulistan from Fort Lockhart. The Afghans attacked the outpost of Saragarhi where thousands of them swarmed and surrounded the fort, preparing to assault it. Led by Havildar Ishar Singh, the 21 soldiers in the fort—all of whom were Jat Sikhs—refused to surrender and were wiped out in a last stand. The post was recaptured two days later by another British Indian contingent. All of the 21 soldiers involved in the battle were posthumously awarded the Indian Order of Merit, which was the highest gallantry award that an Indian soldier could receive at the time. The Indian Army's 4th battalion of the Sikh Regiment commemorates the battle every year on 12 September, as ''Saragarhi Day''. Background Saragar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tirah Campaign
The Tirah campaign, often referred to in contemporary British accounts as the Tirah expedition, was an Indian frontier campaign from September 1897 to April 1898. Tirah is a mountainous tract of country in what was formally known as Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Rebellion The Afridi tribe had received a subsidy from the government of British India for the safeguarding of the Khyber Pass for sixteen years; in addition to which the government had maintained for this purpose a local regiment entirely composed of Afridis, who were stationed in the pass. Suddenly, however, the tribesmen rose, captured all the posts in the Khyber held by their own countrymen, and attacked the forts on the Samana Range near the city of Peshawar. The Battle of Saragarhi occurred at this stage. It was estimated that the Afridis and Orakzais could, if united, bring from 40,000 to 50,000 men into the field. The preparations for the expedition occupied s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sikh Regiment
The Sikh Regiment is an infantry regiment of the Indian Army. Sikh regiment is the highest decorated regiment of the Indian Army and in 1979, the 1st battalion was the Commonwealth's most decorated battalion with 245 pre-independence and 82 post-independence gallantry awards, when it was transformed into the 4th battalion, Mechanised Infantry Regiment. The first battalion of the regiment was officially raised just before the partial annexation of the Sikh Empire on 1 August 1846, by the British East India Company. Currently, the Sikh Regimental Centre is located in Ramgarh Cantonment, Jharkhand. The Centre was earlier located in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. The modern Sikh Regiment traces its roots directly from the 11th Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army. When transferred to the Indian Army like its sister regiments, the numeral prefix (in the case of the Sikh Regiment, 11) was removed and extra battalions were raised, transferred or disbanded to meet army needs. With a humb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heliograph
A heliograph () is a semaphore system that signals by flashes of sunlight (generally using Morse code) reflected by a mirror. The flashes are produced by momentarily pivoting the mirror, or by interrupting the beam with a shutter. The heliograph was a simple but effective instrument for instantaneous optical communication over long distances during the late 19th and early 20th century. Its main uses were military, survey and forest protection work. Heliographs were standard issue in the British and Australian armies until the 1960s, and were used by the Pakistani army as late as 1975. Description There were many heliograph types. Most heliographs were variants of the British Army Mance Mark V version (Fig.1). It used a mirror with a small unsilvered spot in the centre. The sender aligned the heliograph to the target by looking at the reflected target in the mirror and moving their head until the target was hidden by the unsilvered spot. Keeping their head still, they then adj ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sulaiman Range
The Sulaiman Mountains, also known as Kōh-e Sulaymān ( Balochi/Urdu/ fa, ; "Mountains of Solomon") or Da Kasē Ghrūna ( ps, د كسې غرونه; "Mountains of Kasi"), are a north–south extension of the southern Hindu Kush mountain system in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They rise to form the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau. They are located in the Kandahar, Zabul, Paktika and Paktia provinces of Afghanistan, and in Pakistan they extend over the northern part of Balochistan and some southern parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In southwestern Punjab, the mountains extend into the two districts of Dera Ghazi Khan and Rajanpur, which are located west of the Indus River on the boundary with Balochistan. Bordering the mountains to the east are the plains of the Indus River valley, and to the north are the arid highlands of the Central Hindu Kush whose heights extend up to . Together with the Kirthar Mountains on the border between Balochistan and Sindh, the Sulaiman Mountains form what ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hindu Kush
The Hindu Kush is an mountain range in Central and South Asia to the west of the Himalayas. It stretches from central and western Afghanistan, Quote: "The Hindu Kush mountains run along the Afghan border with the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan". into northwestern Pakistan and far southeastern Tajikistan. The range forms the western section of the ''Hindu Kush Himalayan Region'' (''HKH''); to the north, near its northeastern end, the Hindu Kush buttresses the Pamir Mountains near the point where the borders of China, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet, after which it runs southwest through Pakistan and into Afghanistan near their border. The eastern end of the Hindu Kush in the north merges with the Karakoram Range.Karakoram Range: MOUNTAINS, ASIA Encyclopædia Britannica Towards its s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sikh Empire
The Sikh Empire was a state originating in the Indian subcontinent, formed under the leadership of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who established an empire based in the Punjab. The empire existed from 1799, when Maharaja Ranjit Singh captured Lahore, to 1849, when it was defeated and conquered in the Second Anglo-Sikh War. It was forged on the foundations of the Khalsa from a collection of autonomous Sikh ''misls''. At its peak in the 19th century, the Empire extended from the Khyber Pass in the west to western Tibet in the east, and from Mithankot in the south to Kashmir in the north. It was divided into four provinces: Lahore, in Punjab, which became the Sikh capital; Multan, also in Punjab; Peshawar; and Kashmir from 1799 to 1849. Religiously diverse, with an estimated population of 3.5 million in 1831 (making it the 19th most populous country at the time), Amarinder Singh's The Last Sunset: The Rise and Fall of the Lahore Durbar it was the last major region of the Indian subc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ranjit Singh
Ranjit Singh (13 November 1780 – 27 June 1839), popularly known as Sher-e-Punjab or "Lion of Punjab", was the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, which ruled the northwest Indian subcontinent in the early half of the 19th century. He survived smallpox in infancy but lost sight in his left eye. He fought his first battle alongside his father at age 10. After his father died, he fought several wars to expel the Afghans in his teenage years and was proclaimed as the "Maharaja of Punjab" at age 21. His empire grew in the Punjab region under his leadership through 1839. Prior to his rise, the Punjab region had numerous warring misls, misls (confederacies), twelve of which were under Sikh rulers and one Muslim. Ranjit Singh successfully absorbed and united the Sikh misls and took over other local kingdoms to create the Sikh Empire. He repeatedly defeated Afghan-Sikh Wars, invasions by outside armies, particularly those arriving from Afghanistan, and established friendly relat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pashtuns
Pashtuns (, , ; ps, پښتانه, ), also known as Pakhtuns or Pathans, are an Iranian ethnic group who are native to the geographic region of Pashtunistan in the present-day countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were historically referred to as Afghans () or xbc, αβγανο () until the 1970s, when the term's meaning officially evolved into that of a demonym for all residents of Afghanistan, including those outside of the Pashtun ethnicity. The group's native language is Pashto, an Iranian language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Additionally, Dari Persian serves as the second language of Pashtuns in Afghanistan while those in the Indian subcontinent speak Urdu and Hindi (see Hindustani language) as their second language. Pashtuns are the 26th-largest ethnic group in the world, and the largest segmentary lineage society; there are an estimated 350–400 Pashtun tribes and clans with a variety of origin theories. The total popul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (; ps, خېبر پښتونخوا; Urdu, Hindko: خیبر پختونخوا) commonly abbreviated as KP or KPK, is one of the Administrative units of Pakistan, four provinces of Pakistan. Located in the Geography of Pakistan, northwestern region of the country, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the smallest province of Pakistan by land area and the Demographics of Pakistan, third-largest province by population after Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab and Sindh. It shares land borders with the Pakistani provinces of Balochistan, Pakistan, Balochistan to the south, Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab to the south-east and province of Gilgit-Baltistan to the north and north-east, as well as Islamabad Capital Territory to the east, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Autonomous Territory of Azad Jammu and Kashmir to the north-east. It shares an Durand Line, international border with Afghanistan to the west. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is known as a tourist hot spot for adventurers and explorers and has a varied landsca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jat Sikhs
Jat Sikh (also known by the more conventional endonym Jatt Sikh) is a sub-group of the Jat people and the Sikh religious group from the Indian subcontinent. They are one of the dominant communities in the Punjab owing to their large land holdings. They form an estimated 21%–25% of the population of the Indian state of Punjab. They form at least half of the Sikh population in Punjab, with some sources estimating them to be about 60%Taylor, S., Singh, M., Booth, D. (2007) Migration, development and inequality: Eastern Punjabi transnationalism. School of Social Sciences and Law, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, UK; Department of Sociology, Punjab University, Chandigarh, India. to 66% of the Sikh population. History Initially, some Jats started to follow the teachings of Guru Nanak, which did much to remove social barriers created by the ''sāvarṇa'' caste society. Jats were previously indifferent towards deep religious affairs. While followers important to Sikh traditi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Indian Army
The British Indian Army, commonly referred to as the Indian Army, was the main military of the British Raj before its dissolution in 1947. It was responsible for the defence of the British Indian Empire, including the princely states, which could also have their own armies. As quoted in the Imperial Gazetteer of India, "The British Government has undertaken to protect the dominions of the Native princes from invasion and even from rebellion within: its army is organized for the defence not merely of British India, but of all possessions under the suzerainty of the King-Emperor." The Indian Army was an important part of the British Empire's forces, both in India and abroad, particularly during the First World War and the Second World War. The term ''Indian Army'' appears to have been first used informally, as a collective description of the Presidency armies, which collectively comprised the Bengal Army, the Madras Army and the Bombay Army, of the Presidencies of British India ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
36th Sikhs
The 36th Sikhs was an infantry regiment in the British Indian Army. They could trace their origins to 1887, when they were the 36th (Sikh) Bengal Infantry. Composed of Jat Sikhs, it was created by Colonel Jim Cooke and Captain H. R. Holmes. They had one other change in title in 1901, when they became the 36th Sikh Infantry. They finally became the 36th Sikhs in 1903, after the Kitchener reforms of the Indian Army. During this time they fought an action in 1897, in defence of the Samana Ridge against a huge army of Pathans in the Battle of Saragarhi. To honour the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India they took part in the Rawalpindi Parade 1905. During World War I they were stationed as part of the Garrison of Tianjin in China and took part in the Siege of Tsingtao. After World War I the Indian government reformed the army again moving from single battalion regiment to multi battalion regiments.Sumner p.15 The 36th Sikhs became the 4th Battalion 11th Sikh Regiment ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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