Gyaneshwer Chaubey was surprised when he received a text message in June this year from a man in Canada requesting a conversation about the Ajnala massacre. Mr. Chaubey, who works in the department of zoology in Banaras Hindu University (BHU), wasn’t expecting to have a chat about an event that had transpired in August 1857, with a non-academician. But Sameer Pandey had called him to say that one or more of the soldiers from the 26th Native Bengal Infantry Regiment who had been killed en masse in India’s first war of independence, was an ancestor.
Prof. Chaubey is in the process of analysing the remains of the 282 men whose bones had been found in February 2014 in an old well in Ajnala, near Amritsar, Punjab. Certain markers had enabled scientists to conclude that the men were from the Gangetic plains.
