Dhamupur, a village on the Ganga plain in Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, is today a place of pilgrimage for soldiers. Every September, families travel there to mark the death of a man who left it as a tailor's son and returned to it as the name on India's highest decoration for valour. Abdul Hamid was born in Dhamupur on 1 July 1933, and in the space of two days in September 1965 he became one of the most enduring figures in the country's military memory.

The village and the boy

Hamid's father, Mohammad Usman, worked as a tailor, and the family lived modestly. As a boy Hamid learned the trade himself, and he was known in the village for physical strength and for a fondness for wrestling and swimming in the river. Formal schooling was limited; there was little in his circumstances to suggest the direction his life would take.

On 27 December 1954 he enlisted in the Indian Army and was posted to the 4th Battalion of the Grenadiers. He was twenty-one. Over the following decade he served with his battalion in a range of postings, including duty in the eastern Himalayas during the conflict of 1962. By 1965 he had risen to Company Quartermaster Havildar, a senior non-commissioned rank carrying responsibility for the supply and administration of a rifle company as well as for fighting alongside it. He had married Rasoolan Bibi, and the couple had children waiting for him in Dhamupur.

Asal Uttar, September 1965

In the first week of September 1965, Pakistani armoured formations pushed across the border into the Khem Karan sector of Punjab. The thrust was led by American-supplied Patton tanks, then among the most capable armoured vehicles in the region and vastly superior to anything the defending Indian infantry could field directly. The Indian plan was to give ground deliberately, flood the sugarcane fields and irrigation channels around the village of Asal Uttar, and force the advancing armour into soft, restricted terrain where it could be engaged at close range.

The 4th Grenadiers held a forward position in that killing ground. Hamid commanded a recoilless gun mounted on a light vehicle — a weapon that had to be brought within a few hundred metres of a tank to be effective, and that gave away its own position with a large blast signature the moment it fired. It was, in practice, a weapon that demanded the operator accept that he would be seen.

On 9 and 10 September, as Pakistani armour advanced through the flooded cane, Hamid moved his gun repeatedly from one firing position to another, engaging tanks at close quarters and shifting before return fire could find him. He knocked out enemy tanks in succession, and his action is generally regarded as one of the decisive contributions to the collapse of the armoured thrust at Asal Uttar. On 10 September, while engaging yet another tank, he was killed by enemy fire near Cheema village in the Khem Karan sector. He was thirty-two.

The award and the aftermath

Abdul Hamid was awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously — the highest Indian decoration for valour in the presence of the enemy, and one granted very sparingly. The battle in which he died ended with a large number of Pakistani tanks destroyed, disabled or abandoned in the fields around Asal Uttar, and the sector became a reference point in Indian accounts of the 1965 war.

His body was brought back for burial near the battlefield, and a memorial stands at Asal Uttar. A second memorial and an annual gathering mark his death in Dhamupur itself. His widow, Rasoolan Bibi, lived for decades afterwards in the village, and successive governments made grants and commitments to the family and the settlement.

Why the story endures

Several things keep Abdul Hamid present in Indian public life in a way that most decorated soldiers are not.

The asymmetry of the fight. A non-commissioned officer with a jeep-mounted gun against modern main battle tanks is a scenario that requires no military knowledge to understand.
The place of the village. Dhamupur is unremarkable, poor and far from any centre of power. That is precisely why the story travels: the army that held Khem Karan was drawn from villages exactly like it.
What his name signifies. A Muslim soldier from rural Uttar Pradesh dying to stop an invasion from Pakistan complicates every lazy assumption about loyalty and identity in the subcontinent, and it has been invoked in that spirit for sixty years.

Schools, roads, a park in Ghazipur and army installations carry his name. Recruits are told his story during training. In Dhamupur, the memorial is maintained by the village itself, and 10 September is observed there each year. The tailor's son who left for the Grenadiers in 1954 remains, for the Indian Army and for his district, the standard against which courage under impossible odds is measured.