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History

Forgotten Martyrs of Peshawar

On 10 June 1857, forty freedom fighters were blown from the mouths of cannons in what remains the largest mass execution of the War of Independence — a chapter of history that has no memorial and barely a mention.

By Muhammad Shahbaz | August 2026

On 10 June 1857, on the old parade ground of Peshawar, where today aircraft taxi on the tarmac, forty men were bound to the muzzles of nine-pounder cannons and executed in full view of thousands of assembled troops. It was the single largest mass execution of the War of Independence anywhere in India. One hundred and sixty-nine years later, no memorial marks the spot. The men who died there remain largely forgotten.

They were sepoys of the 55th Native Infantry and other East India Company regiments, charged with open mutiny. In the eyes of the colonial administration, they were traitors. In the eyes of history, they were among the first to rise against an occupying power — paying for that defiance with their lives, and with the deliberate destruction of their remains.

The Road to Peshawar
The uprising of 1857, which the British termed the Sepoy Mutiny and which successive generations of South Asians have called the War of Independence, began in Meerut in May of that year and spread rapidly across the subcontinent. News of the rebellion reached Peshawar almost immediately. The colonial administration, acutely aware that it sat on the volatile edge of the North West Frontier, moved swiftly to suppress any possibility of a sympathetic uprising among the large garrison stationed there.

Charges of open mutiny were brought against sepoys who had deserted or been found with arms. Courts-martial sat in continuous sessions. The sentences handed down were severe: death by hanging for some, transportation and imprisonment for others, and for the mutineers of the 55th Native Infantry — execution by cannon.

The officers who supervised the punishment included some of the most prominent names in British India’s military history: John Nicholson, Sydney Cotton, and Neville Chamberlain. Nicholson, who had first received news of the rebellion in Peshawar, departed the city on 14 June 1857 to join the assault on Delhi, where he would later die of his wounds during the siege.

The Execution
The scene on the morning of 10 June was one of calculated theatre. All troops — European and native, armed and disarmed, loyal and suspected — were drawn up on the parade ground on three sides of a square. The fourth side was formed by ten nine-pounder cannons. The forty condemned men were marched in under heavy European guard, their charges and sentences read aloud at the head of each regiment. They were then marched around the square and brought to the guns in batches of ten.

Each man was blindfolded, his back pressed against the cannon’s muzzle, his arms fastened to the wheels. At the signal of the Artillery Major, the port-fires were lit, and the guns were fired.

The Illustrated London News published a sketch of the scene, showing the parade ground with the Khyber Hills in the background and Jamrud Fort visible in the distance — a haunting image of imperial punishment conducted in the shadow of the frontier.

Similar executions were carried out in Ferozepur in Punjab a few days later, but the Peshawar execution remained without parallel in its scale.

An Eyewitness Account
The most detailed account of the executions was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in November 1858, wrtten by an unnamed eyewitness. The extract, reproduced here in part, reflects the unsparing colonial mindset of the time — yet even its author cannot suppress a note of reluctant admiration for the dignity with which the condemned men faced their deaths:


“It was an awfully imposing scene. All the troops, European and native, armed and disarmed, loyal and disaffected, were drawn up on parade, forming three sides of a square… The first ten were picked out, their eyes were bandaged, and they were bound to the guns, their backs leaning against the muzzle, and their arms fastened to the wheels. The port-fires were lighted, and at a signal from the Artillery Major, the guns were fired…

The executions at Peshawar achieved their immediate purpose: the North West Frontier did not rise

Of the whole forty, only two showed any signs of fear, and they were bitterly reproached by the others for so disgracing their race. They certainly died like men. After the first ten had been disposed of, the next batch, who had been looking on all the time, walked up to the guns quite calmly and unfalteringly and allowed themselves to be blindfolded and tied up without moving a muscle, or showing the slightest signs of fear, or even concern.
Whence had these men this strength? Their religion… at least befriends them well at the very hour of death; it teaches them well that great and useful lesson, how to die.”

The account also records the fate of a havildar, a native sergeant, convicted of seditious correspondence with a hill tribe and sentenced to be blown from a cannon. Tied to the gun, he was offered his life in exchange for turning informer and naming his associates. With the loaded muzzle at his back and the lit port-fire within reach, he wavered briefly, then refused. He was executed without revealing a single name.

Aftermath
The executions at Peshawar achieved their immediate purpose: the North West Frontier did not rise. But the broader conduct of the East India Company in 1857 provoked a crisis of conscience in Britain itself. Public debate over the methods used to suppress the uprising contributed to a fundamental shift in India’s governance. By the Act of Parliament of 1858, the British Crown formally assumed direct control of India from the Company, ending two centuries of corporate rule and establishing the British Empire in its place.

The men executed at Peshawar thus died at a hinge point in history, their sacrifice contributing, however indirectly, to the very reckoning that transformed the nature of colonial rule.

Forgotten
What is striking, and troubling, is how thoroughly these forty men have been erased from collective memory. The parade ground where they died is now the tarmac of Peshawar Airport — a place of constant movement and noise, with no plaque, no marker, and no acknowledgement of what occurred there one June morning in 1857.

Peshawar is a city acutely conscious of its history. That the largest mass execution of the War of Independence took place within its boundaries, and that no memorial exists to mark it, is an absence that speaks to how selectively the past is remembered and honoured.

These men, Hindu and Muslim alike, their remains mingled in the dust of the parade ground, deserve to be remembered not as mutineers, but as what they were: men who refused to submit, and died for it.

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