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) Party led by Indian nationalists, primarily in California, was believed that since Britain was bogged down by a major war in Europe, the time was ripe to rise in revolt and free India from colonial rule.

One of their newsletters noted that in the “Angrezi Raj ka kaccha chitta” (balance sheet of British rule), Indian money and lives had become fuel for British aggression in Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Persia and China.

It is possible that two prominent Indians in Singapore were Ghadarites – Kasim Ismail Mansur, a Gujarati Muslim trader, and Nur Alam Shah, the priest at the Kampong Java mosque. A few days before the uprising, they met Jemadar Chiste Khan of the 5th Indian Light Infantry and urged him to mutiny.

The second factor is that in Europe, after Turkey joined Germany in the war against Britain, both the Central Powers tried to urge the hundreds of millions of Muslims living under British rule to rise up against their colonial masters. The Sultan of Turkey, the pre-eminent Muslim in the world at the time, even issued a fatwa to this effect.

Mansur, the Gujarati Muslim trader, told Chiste Khan that his battalion had been ordered to Hong Kong, but it was possible they would be sent to fight the Turks.

This was connected to the third factor: the German prisoners of war, or POWs, in Singapore were being guarded at the time by a detachment of the 5th Indian Light Infantry. The Germans wanted the help of these soldiers to escape. To ingratiate themselves with the Indians soldiers, the German POWs claimed that the Kaisers and all Germans had converted to Islam, and joined the soldiers in their prayers in the POW camp.

They also spread false news about the war. A few days before the mutiny, Chiste Khan addressed his men and drew maps of Europe on the ground. As he jabbed at the map with his stick, he said, “Belgium is taken, France is taken…In a few days Germany will capture...England.”

Compounding this was the weak leadership of the battalion. The commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel EV Martin, was considered indecisive and was unpopular with British company commanders.

Finally, there was a conflict between the Indian soliders. The Right Flank of the battalion were Rajput Muslims from Rohtak and Hissar near Delhi, and the Left Flank were Pathans.

The Rajputs from Haryana did not want to die for Britain. “Why should we fight for England and be killed in Europe when we are paid half a coolie’s wage and our wives and children are left to starve on two or three rupees a month?” one said.

This reflects the long-standing grouse that Indian soldiers were paid a fraction of what Britons got. The men had also heard of vast battle casualties on the Western Front in Europe where eventually thousands of Indians were deployed. On this, in their letters home, men of the 5th said that those who have gone to the war “have all been destroyed” and told their relatives “Don’t enlist.”

Many Indians of the Right Flank of the 5th joined the mutiny of their own accord, for these very personal reasons. They knew the risks and took them.

For the rebels, the mutiny had begun well. When the Indians reached the POW camp around 4 pm, they fired at the guards in the observation towers and freed the Germans. The British rulers in Singapore were caught off guard.

Chances of a counterattack were remote, for there were almost no other trained soldiers in Singapore. The 800 men of the 5th Indian Light Infantry, well trained and determined, were the only ones there, other than 300 soldiers, 24 km away in Blakang Mati (today’s Sentosa) and Pulau Brani.

A second party of men headed to the Sepoy lines and towards the city where they attacked the Central Police Station. A third party of 150 men, under Subedar Dunde Khan, went to the nearby Malay States Guides Artillery in Normanton Barracks to prevent them from helping the British. Finally, a fourth group went towards Keppel Harbour to stop any reinforcements from landing

Credit: Tfitzp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the mutiny was unfolding, news spread to Singapore’s British rulers and a rapid response was organised. After the first few hours, the mutineer’s steel had also melted. Both resulted in the mutiny ending by the next day.

When the mutiny began, the 300 other trained soldiers were far away in islands off Singapore. Since it was the Chinese New Year holiday, many were on the golf course or in the club. But one of them was not: Captain EA Brown, who commanded the Chinese Company of the Singapore Volunteer Corps.

Out for a walk late that afternoon with his wife Mary in Tanglin near the German POW camp, he noticed something amiss – there were no guards in the towers and no one about. He decided to return to his bungalow nearby and headed to the Volunteer HQ at Drill Hall where he heard what had happened.

First, he called his wife and asked her to leave for home – like many European women, she headed for safety first to the Raffles Hotel and later to a ship in the harbour.

Back at the Drill Hall, Brown was asked to muster as many men as he could and wait for instructions. A group of 200 was cobbled together from a motley crew of the Hong Kong Singapore Royal Artillery gunners, sailors from the gunboat HMS Cadmus and sundry units. They headed to Alexandra Barracks in cars and lorries, and after a night-long skirmish, took back control. Singapore was saved for the British.

As the mutiny fizzled out, most of the Indian rebels of the 5th fled, only to be captured in various parts of Singapore and neighbouring Johore over the next few days. But this was not before the government had to issue an embarrassing and urgent appeal for help from any allied warship nearby French, Japanese and Russian ships aided in the mop up.

The morning after the mutiny, before full control had been restored, The Straits Times in an understatement declared, “Circumstances have made us decide to restrict our issue to four pages.” It is not known how many mutineers died in the uprising. In addition, 21 military and 20 civilian deaths occurred.

Retribution began immediately. The whole episode was sought to be brushed under the carpet with summary court martials and the execution of two men on February 23, 1915, just eight days after it all began.

Eventually, of 202 men tried, all but one was convicted. Forty-seven were executed and 64 were ordered to be transported for life to the Andamans. The others received sentences of transportation for six-20 years or rigorous and simple imprisonment from 11 months to 20 years.

Fearful that the local Asian community might sympathise with the mutineers, public executions, which had been banned in 1890, were brought back. For maximum effect, the executions were conducted in batches – the first on April 1, 1915.

At the grounds outside Outram Road Prison, the mutineers were shot in full view of thousands of spectators gathered at the top of the nearby Golf Hill, where the “gently sloping heights that had served as the sixth hole of the Sepoy Lines golf links now double up as a viewing gallery”, wrote author Umesh Bhatia, in an article recreating the final moments.

The mutineers had only one thing left to do: to die like soldiers – and they did.

The British believed that Indian soldiers would always follow their leaders. But many Indians of the Right Flank of the 5th were not blindly obedient. They willfully bucked the hierarchy.

In the great tumults of World War I, this little-known episode involving Indian soldiers in Singapore exactly 100 years ago is a reminder of the many battles far beyond Europe.

Gautam Hazarika is a Singapore-based author whose book on the Indian Army Prisoners of World War II is being published by Penguin India and Pen & Sword UK in 2025.