Book Excerpt: For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela

An exclusive excerpt from For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

Before the carnage of the Rebellion, there was the Kingdom of Punjab, ruled by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The British stayed away while the Maharaja was alive but, after his death, they waged not one but two wars against the Sikh Khalsa armies. And that is where my story truly begins, with my great-great-grandfather Iqbal Singh Uppal. You have to understand something about Iqbal—he came from a line of men who never knew when to walk away from a fight. His father had ridden with Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s cavalry, and his grandfather before that had served the same colours. In our family, being a soldier wasn’t a choice, it was inheritance, passed down like land or debt.

Iqbal served in the Khalsa Army—the army of the pure. These weren’t just any soldiers. Ranjit Singh had built the finest military force in the world, better trained and better equipped than even the British. The pay was good, the rewards for bravery even better. In those days, if you were Sikh and you were strong, you served. Only the frail got excused from duty, and they weren’t happy about it. Being part of the Khalsa Army was an honour that defined who you were.

Within the Khalsa Army was the Fauj-e-Khas, the elite unit, the best of the best. That’s the unit to which Iqbal belonged, the one that was formed by General Jean-Baptiste Ventura, an Italian mercenary who had served in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. Having run into trouble in France, Ventura was recruited by Maharaja Ranjit Singh to train his forces in modern warfare with European weapons and tactics.

The Fauj-e-Khas wore a blue-and-gold uniform, the blue from Guru Gobind Singh’s original Khalsa army and the gold to mark their elevated position within the larger army. The men who wore these colours wore them only after undergoing gruelling training under the French mercenaries. Not just physically strong, not just capable of fighting with or without weapons, they were also crack shots, grasped complex war plans and strategies, and could endure almost anything. Because the Maharaja always ensured that his armies were well paid, well nourished, and well rested, these groups fought for their king and their land, not merely for a salary.

But the formal records of their service would never capture the full truth of what these soldiers did or what they meant to those they left behind. Only the British wrote things down; the Indians told stories. The story that Balwant heard about his father came in pieces, the way all our stories did. It was folklore, passed along by members of the Khalsa Army. One veteran would mention the morning ritual, another the sound of the British bugle, a third the weight of the musket. It took me years to understand that they were all talking about the same day—February 10, 1846, when five hundred men chose honour over orders.

The day before that fateful dawn broke like any other. Iqbal rubbed his eyes and jumped up off the hard ground, his musket between his legs, his water canteen on his right and his neatly folded uniform in its muslin bag on his left. He put on the bright blue jacket, pulled out a datun stick, and put it in his mouth, chewing vigorously while pulling on his boots, strapping on his ammunition bag, and slinging his canteen across his back. As he picked up his musket, he heard the bugle. Not theirs, the one from the other side. The enemy was ready for battle.

Unlike his father, who had been in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s cavalry, Iqbal was an infantryman. ‘The cavalry is for real men,’ he still heard from his widowed mother. ‘Your father would have laughed at you. Walking along, fodder for their guns.’ He ignored her slur, ignored the accusation that he had chosen the lesser path, the unglamorous slog of the foot soldier. The infantry was important. Infantry held ground, took ground, bled for ground while the cavalry got the glory. But horses were easier to see and mow down with cannons.

Joining his section and getting into formation, Iqbal looked for their jamadar and found him conferring with the subedar along with three other jamadars. The whole group stood shaking their heads, voices raised then lowered. Iqbal looked at the twenty-five men in his section and the other three sections in the company spread out in the field ahead of them. Everyone shifted uneasily, their muskets heavy in their hands. Feet scuffed the dirt. Hands checked and rechecked rifle straps. H e wasn’t t he o nly o ne w ho sensed something was wrong. Then there was movement. The jamadars all strode back to their sections and gathered their troops.

Iqbal heard the jamadar’s words like a slap: ‘We are falling back.’

The next morning dawned like the previous one—Iqbal chewing his datun stick, pulling on his boots, checking his ammunition. The British guns waited across the field and his own generals ordered retreat again.

‘But why?’

‘We can win against these firangis. Let us fight.’

‘We can drive them away in no time. Give us a chance.’

‘This is cowardice. We are not cowards,’ called out several voices around him.

Iqbal’s hand tightened on his musket, his thoughts on his father.

‘It is the General’s orders,’ their jamadar repeated, but his voice carried no conviction.

And then his tone changed. ‘You are right. We are not cowards and we can drive them away.’

There was a loud uproar from the surrounding troops. His fellow jamadars tried to pull him down, but he shook them off.

‘We will not retreat. We will go against the orders of our generals and fight. Who is with me?’

There followed a distinct shuffling of feet in the dusty ground as the soldiers considered defying the orders of their general, maybe even the orders of their own subedars and jamadars. They would lose their incomes, their land, everything. Iqbal heard himself stand up tall and say, ‘I’m with you, jamadar.’ As his voice soared above the shuffling, a few more voices, not many, followed.

Again, the Sikh army began its retreat. But this time the British were closer. This time the British were firing their cannons, mowing down hundreds with their relentless guns.

The Sikh army—more than twenty thousand infantry and artillery men, with their equipment, pack animals, and supply train—had already retreated across the Sutlej. But Iqbal, his jamadar, and four hundred and ninety-eight brave men stayed behind, hidden in the village, cut off from the main force, fighting for their honour, defying orders, almost certain they were going to die. They threw the bodies of dead soldiers into wells so the water could not be used, and spiked any cannons or big guns left behind by the retreating Sikh army so they could not be recommissioned by the enemy. They waited and fired into an enemy line of fifteen thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry.

The British army had their guard down when they saw the retreating Sikh armies. But when Iqbal and the others continued firing into their lines, they thought they had been fooled—that’s how valiantly the five hundred fought. Perched up in a tree, Iqbal loaded his musket and fired into the enemy line. He loaded and fired, loaded and fired, aiming and maiming with each shot. ‘Take that, you dogs,’ he screamed in his best, most chaste Punjabi. Each time he screamed, there was an echo of ‘Take that, you bastards’ from near and far. But the echoes got smaller and smaller with each shot. The British approached quickly and were soon upon him and his remaining comrades. These brave soldiers were killed in battle, fighting valiantly for their home, for their pride, for their legacy.

Had Iqbal considered his wife and children, he would have understood that going against the generals and leaders of the Sikh army would mark him as a traitor. Had he thought of it, even for a moment, he would have realised that fighting against explicit orders would have rendered his family homeless, ostracised them. But none of that happened. Five hundred men raised their hands and not one of their families was punished. Indeed, the dead soldiers were considered martyrs in a war against an invading enemy, and Iqbal’s son was promised a place in his father’s section when he was old enough to join. But the Sikh generals were in no position to promise anything. By the time Balwant was old enough, the British had taken over Punjab in its entirety.

Excerpted with permission from the author and the publishers of For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died by Priya Hajela (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

About the Book

A sweeping multigenerational saga that follows a Sikh family through nearly a century of war, empire and resistance—from the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the uprising of 1857 to the Komagata Maru incident, the freedom movement and Partition.

‘Countries are made up of stories. So are families.’

At the heart of this story is Beant Kaur—sitting on a comfortable chair, shawl wrapped tight on winter nights, gathering her family around her, and telling them who they are.

What begins as a granddaughter listening to her grandfather’s half-mumbled memories soon unfolds into something far larger: a deeply personal history that moves from the battlefields of the Anglo-Sikh wars to the uneasy years of British rule, and into the wider currents of a changing world, from the upheaval of 1857 to the Komagata Maru voyage that carried Indians across oceans and into confrontation with empire.

These stories are not found in official records, but are passed down in fragments—through memory, grief and pride. These are stories of men who chose to fight when ordered to retreat; of soldiers who found themselves serving the very power they had once resisted, and of families who carried both honour and contradiction in equal measure.

As Beant pieces together the lives of those who came before her—her grandfather Balwant, and the generations that shaped him—she begins to understand that history is never as simple as it is told. It lives in the choices people make when survival, loyalty and belief pull in different directions. Intimate and rooted in oral memory, For Whose Dear Sake Our Fathers Died is a story about inheritance—not just of land or name, but of the tales we must choose to tell before they are lost to time.

About the Author

Priya Hajela lives in Pune with her husband and two dogs. Writing is a second career for her. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont in 2017. Prior to taking to writing, Priya got an MBA from Vanderbilt University in 1992 and worked in a variety of telecom and IT organizations in senior marketing and business development roles for twenty-two years. Her debut novel, Ladies’ Tailor, was published in 2022.