Memories revived: After a long spell of neglect, the annual pilgrimage to the Chattri at Brighton is back. The Chattri is a small memorial built for a number of Hindu and Sikh soldiers who died in World War I. They were injured in Europe and brought to hospitals in Brighton for treatment where they died.
A graveyard was earmarked for the Muslim soldiers. The Hindu and Sikh soldiers were cremated just outside of Brighton in a space donated by a local resident. That is where the Chattri was erected by an order of the Prince of Wales in 1921.
Remembrance at the site was more or less abandoned for a long stretch. Not many came, and those who did could not be offered a cup of tea at the site. Then businessman Davinder Dhillon came along to seek a revival and found that he was asked to arrange this. Now hundreds come every year, as they did on Sunday. Wreaths were laid, and there were some moist eyes over the playing of The Last Post.
A day out: Not all eyes were moist, though. For many, it was a Sunday out in fine weather followed by a photo-op and then topped with a fine lunch provided by the Punjab restaurant in London. That lunch was around an exhibition of photographs, mainly of injured Indian soldiers in Brighton hospitals, and it takes reminding that these were all soldiers of the army of undivided India and under the British of course.
As always there were observations around who was there and who wasn’t, and who had what to say after catching up. All that is normal course, and to be expected, it’s been more than a century since those deaths. But at the least, and if only briefly, the hundreds who gathered remembered that many thousands were killed. And that is already a good deal more than abandoning the Chattri and not remembering at all.
Inconvenient truth: Those dead have been forgotten mostly because they died in a political No Man’s Land. The British didn’t care because these were only their Indian subjects. The Indians didn’t because they had fought and died for the British. Their sacrifice remains mostly unsung.
People do forget that a soldier’s first loyalty is never political. It is to his regiment and to the commanding officer. Respecting and following that is an ingrained discipline the soldier knows in his bones, whatever the larger politics. That is known, and respected, at least in the inner defence circles.
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