How a handful of Indian soldiers rose against the British in Singapore during WWI

Sepoy Ismail Khan fired the first shot around 3 pm on February 15, 1915. He was aiming at a lorry in which ammunition was being loaded in Singapore’s Alexandra Road barracks which housed the C Company of the Right Flank of the Indian 5th Light Infantry.

Members of the A and B company under Colour Havildar Imtiaz Ali and Havildar Ibrahim armed themselves with weapons from the truck and ammunition from the magazine in the same complex. Ali and 80 men headed straight to the German POW Camp at Tanglin Barracks (in today’s Dempsey Hill). It housed over 300 sailors from the warship Emden that had wreaked havoc in the Indian Ocean after World War I had begun, before being captured in November 1914.

And so began the episode that is now known as the 1915 Singapore Mutiny. World War I, the first real global conflict, had broken out only four months earlier. The British Indian Army’s Indian 5th Light Infantry – entirely staffed by Muslims – had been posted to the British colony of Singapore only the month before, to replace a unit that had been sent to the battlefront in France.

There were several reasons for the uprising.

To begin with, the Ghadr (chaos or rebellion)…

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