#LESTWEFORGET

Did you know? Approximately 1.3 million Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus soldiers served in World War One, and over 74,000 of them lost their lives. But history has mostly forgotten these sacrifices.

As many as 74,187 of these soldiers died during the war and a comparable number were wounded. Their stories, and their heroism, have long been omitted from popular histories of the war, or relegated to the footnotes.

These men were undoubtedly heroes - pitchforked into battle in unfamiliar lands, in harsh and cold climatic conditions they were neither used to nor prepared for, fighting an enemy of whom they had no knowledge, risking their lives every day for little more than pride. Yet they were destined to remain largely unknown once the war was over: neglected by the British, for whom they fought, and ignored by their own country, from which they came.

Part of the reason is that they were not fighting for their own country. None of the soldiers was a conscript - soldiering was their profession. They served the very British Empire that was oppressing their own people back home.

The absence from the commemorations, and its failure to honour the dead, has not been a major surprise. Nor was the lack of First World War memorials in the country (Bangladesh, Pakistan and India): the general feeling was that, then freshly freed from the imperial yoke, the country was ashamed of its soldiers' participation in a colonial war and saw nothing to celebrate.

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