A Remembrance Day editorial highlights the significant contributions and sacrifices of Indian soldiers in world conflicts and South Asian Canadians, advocating for a broader and more inclusive scope of remembrance.
On Wednesday morning, at 11 am, Canada will fall silent for two short minutes. In cenotaph squares from Halifax to Victoria, in school gymnasiums, on city sidewalks and here across Manitoulin Island, we will remember those who served our nation and who did not come home to their loved ones.
The poppy on our lapels is a shared symbol, and it belongs to a wider company than we sometimes acknowledge. This Remembrance Day, it is worth remembering the soldiers of India, who fought in the same wars, often on the same ground, and whose sacrifice is too rarely part of the story we tell ourselves.
The numbers alone should give us pause. In the First World War, well over a million men from British India served overseas, and some 74,000 of those men never returned. The Indian Corps reached the Western Front in the autumn of 1914, when the British line was dangerously thin, and fought through the first brutal winter in Flanders. Sepoy Khudadad Khan, a machine-gunner wounded and left as the sole survivor of his gun team near Ypres, became the first Indian to be awarded the Victoria Cross. The Indian divisions bled at Neuve Chapelle in 1915. That same spring, Canadians held their ground in the gas at Ypres. Two armies from opposite sides of the Empire stood in the same Flemish mud, and neither could have known how closely their histories would one day be linked.
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