Each Anzac Day, Australia pauses to remember its war dead. Yet woven into that history are lesser-known stories—of shared sacrifice, of unexpected connections, and of India’s place in that memory.
Some of those stories are not found in history books, but in quiet, almost forgotten corners.
Inside a suburban Melbourne basilica, a century-old secret sits in coloured glass. It is one of many things about Australia and India’s shared sacrifice that most people have never been told.
There is a stained glass window in Camberwell that almost nobody knows about. It hangs inside the Basilica of Our Lady of Victories on Burke Road, its colours catching the light as they have for more than a hundred years. The window depicts the Battle of Lepanto, a sixteenth-century naval clash between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire. It was paid for, in full, by an Indian prince.
The story begins in August 1914, days after the world went to war. Captain Jaswant Singh, aide-de-camp to the Maharajah Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, was in Melbourne on a purchasing trip — acquiring horses for the Maharajah’s thirty-thousand-strong army. A champion polo player, he was giving demonstrations at functions across the city when he encountered an advertisement placed by Father George Robinson, then building the church on Burke Road. Robinson was seeking donations for a stained glass window. Jaswant Singh wrote a cheque for £600 — the full cost — and handed it over without ceremony.
The window was installed after the church opened in 1918, in front of a congregation of forty thousand. It has been there ever since, unremarked upon by most of the Melburnians who pass beneath it.
On this Anzac Day — the hundred and eleventh anniversary of the Gallipoli landings — it is worth pausing at that window. Not because it is exceptional, but because it is representative. The connections between Australia and India in the years of the First World War were deeper, more intimate, and more costly than the popular telling of Anzac history has ever properly acknowledged.
The numbers alone are striking. For decades, histories of Gallipoli estimated that around five thousand Indian troops served in the eight-month campaign. Research by historian Professor Peter Stanley, whose book Die in Battle, Do Not Despair remains the definitive account, revised that figure dramatically upward: approximately sixteen thousand soldiers from the British Indian Army served at Gallipoli, including Sikhs from the Punjab, Gurkha infantry battalions, Punjabi Muslims, mountain artillery brigades, and mule drivers who kept the supply lines moving under fire. They landed at Cape Helles, fought at Anzac Cove, and charged Turkish positions in conditions that broke lesser units.
The 14th Sikhs, part of the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, became one of the campaign’s most devastated battalions. At the Third Battle of Krithia on the fourth of June, 1915, the regiment was effectively destroyed in a single day. Of those who went forward, over eighty per cent were killed or wounded — three hundred and seventy-nine officers and men, charging into machine-gun fire across Gully Ravine. Their bodies were cremated on the peninsula according to religious rites. Their names did not make it into most of the commemorations that followed.
Yet the men who fought beside them remembered. Anzac diaries and letters, studied by Stanley in archives across Australia, New Zealand, Britain, India, Nepal, and Turkey, are filled with accounts of respect and affection that cut through barriers of language, culture, and religion. Karam Singh, a Sikh infantryman blinded by an artillery shell, continued issuing orders to his gunners.
Jan Mahomed controlled a vital well under heavy fire, giving commands that thirsty Australian soldiers obeyed without question. Gurkha Subedar Gambirsing Pun led his men in fierce fighting for the Gallipoli heights. A 1916 photograph in the Sydney Mail, captioned simply “Best Chums,” showed Australian soldiers posing proudly alongside their Sikh comrades, sending it home to families as a record of friendship.
Perhaps the most quietly telling detail is this: John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the stretcher-bearer immortalised in Australian memory as Simpson of the donkey, spent his final weeks before his death in May 1915 eating chapattis and curries with Indian mule drivers at Anzac Cove. He chose their company. He preferred their food. The two traditions of remembrance — the Anzac and the Indian — have always been intertwined. History simply forgot to say so.
Last year, a photograph taken at the dawn service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance circulated on social media and set off a predictable argument. A man in a turban and military uniform was participating in a ceremonial procession, and some people on the internet were offended. The debate that followed was familiar in its shape: questions about who belongs in the Anzac story, whose sacrifice counts, whether acknowledging one group diminishes another. It was not an edifying conversation. But it was, in its own way, a sign of something shifting.
Because the facts have never been in dispute. Sixteen thousand Indian troops. One in ten dead. The 14th Sikhs, wiped out on a June morning. Professor Stanley’s assessment is plain: “Despite barriers of language, culture, and religion, it is clear that Australian and Indian soldiers had a deep respect for each other and bonded in battle.” He goes further: “The close ties between Australia and India can be traced back to the landings at Anzac Cove, where Australians and Indians stood together, shoulder to shoulder.”
In 2026, those ties carry more weight than nostalgia. The relationship between Australia and India has grown into one of the defining partnerships of the Indo-Pacific — in trade, in education, in strategic affairs. The Indian diaspora is now one of Australia’s largest. Sikh veterans and their families have marched in the Sydney Anzac Day parade for nearly two decades, and the Sikh Anzac War Memorial in Sydney’s west has become a site of annual reflection.
What began as unacknowledged history is, slowly, being remembered.
In Camberwell, the window on Burke Road still glows. A Sikh aide-de-camp, visiting a country about to go to war, handed over a cheque to a Catholic priest building a church in the suburbs of Melbourne. No record survives of what passed between them. But the glass is still there, and the light still moves through it, and it tells you, if you know to look, that this story has always been longer and more generous than the one most Australians were taught.
Lest we forget — all of them.
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