I come from a village in Punjab that has a memorial gate (not big on cenotaphs here 50-60 years back, so we build a memorial gate on the road that leads to the

I come from a village in Punjab that has a memorial gate (not big on cenotaphs here 50-60 years back, so we build a memorial gate on the road that leads to the village - a practise that Sikhs follow from long) in remembrance of ~120 Sikh soldiers that went to World War 1. The stories that elders told me were about how British imperialists manipulated and threatened young Sikhs into signing up to become cannon fodder because they had quotas to be filled for village to village recruitment. Elders also told how British respected Sikh traditions to the hilt, they understood and had good amount of research corpus of the traditions too. This is why you will see in photographs, Sikhs in Turbans and carrying the holy scripture, Guru Granth Sahib on their head leading the procession. One negative effect was that Sikhs being minority, the population decrease especially young ones, had a detrimental effect later on while India was partitioned along religious lines. Sikhs could not save their most fertile and irrigated plains in Sialkot to Sahiwal belt (present day Pakistan) and were forcibly uprooted and forced to give up their own farms. One positive effect was that after partition, the returnees were able to save countless people from organised massacres along religious lines. They organised village defences, provided logistic know-how and were able to arrest quite a grim situation among the chaos. Sadly, all this literature and memorial diaries are in Punjabi vernacular. Hopefully as new generation grows up, more of these stories will surface in English language. Also, there is marked difference between reporting of same story in Punjabi newspaper and in English newspaper of the same newspaper group: Punjabi newspaper of the same group reports situation more accurately while English newspaper biases it against the Sikhs and even edits direct quotes. So hopefully these stories will surface in either western sources or independent media with correct editing procedure and relevant checks.