Buried and Forgotten for 157 Years

The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, or India’s First War of Independence, had an alarming death rate. Some events, like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, are well-known, but others, like the Ajnala Massacre, have been buried and forgotten for over a century.

The Excavation Site at Ajnala | Source: The Hindu

In 2014, amateur archaeologist Surinder Kochhar led a group of villagers to excavate a site in Ajnala, Amritsar. He had come here after stumbling across an old, tattered book and seeing the word ‘Ajnala’ in it. What they found at the site was a shock, to say the least. They unearthed the skeletal remains of over 200 people in a well under a gurudwara.

Who these people were was the biggest mystery, along with the question of what time period they belonged to. The gruesome sight did not deter the archaeologist's team. They sent the remains along with the jewellery, uniform stars, bullet casings and coins they found for testing any possible remnants of DNA while speculating amongst themselves- perhaps the people were from the Partition era, or perhaps they were the remains of Britishers.

Science put all these questions to rest. The remains belonged to the soldiers who lost their lives during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. It has been compared to the more widely known Jallianwala Bagh massacre, but the biggest difference is that the soldiers who lost their lives there have a name to them, but the soldiers who were victims of the Ajnala massacre do not have an identity.

The book that Kochhar had read was called ‘Crisis in Punjab’ by Frederick Henry Cooper, who was the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar during the 1857 revolt.

More than a century later, this book reached Kochhar’s hands, leading to the startling discovery that there was a staggering number of people who went missing during the Mutiny and were never found. Ajnala became the resting place for these rebels. Cooper wrote-

“The well’s presence presented itself as a convenient solution as to the one remaining difficulty which was of sanitary consideration — the disposal of the corpses of the dishonoured soldiers.”

It is assumed that after the well was filled up with corpses, the East India Company officials covered the bodies with coal and lime to avoid any emanating smells.

Later, a gurudwara was built over the same land. Kochhar spent years convincing the authorities to excavate the area and finally, it led to the rediscovery of the Ajnala Massacre.

Cooper, in the book, writes in horrific detail about the events of the day. He called it a ‘spectacle’ and summoned all the British officers to witness it. The Indian sepoys were grouped together— 237 of them, according to the book, and shot to death, all of them brutally thrown into the same well.

The bodies found here were those of the soldiers who dared to rebel against colonial power. He wrote that another group suffocated when they were trapped in the nearby police station.

“Forty five bodies. Dead from exhaustion, fatigue, heat and partial suffocation, were dragged into light and consigned into the one common pit, by the hands of the village sweepers.”

There were a total of 246 partial remains found in the well, which is close to the number that Cooper gave in his book.

Kochhar and the rest of the team have attempted to honour the sepoys and keep their names alive as martyrs in public memory but were met with difficulties. The government was disinterested in going forward with it, and there were others who questioned the verification of the remains’ identities after all these decades.

The residents of Ajnala have since tried to get a memorial constructed to honour the fallen soldiers but have not faced any success. J.S. Sehrawat, an anthropologist from Punjab University said:

“[With that,] we’ll locate their families who will be able to cremate them with dignity.”

Sehrawat mentioned in 2022 that they were trying to contact the British government to get a list of soldiers in the specific regiment that the fallen rebels belonged to. They deserve to be laid to rest in a respectful, dignified manner, receiving the honour that they never got.