Beri is a village in the Shekhawati country of Rajasthan, a dry, sandy tract that has sent its sons into military service for as long as anyone has kept records. Piru Singh Shekhawat was born there on 20 May 1918, into a region where the army was not an abstraction but a family trade. Thirty years later, on a ridge above the Kishanganga in Jammu and Kashmir, he would carry out one of the most extraordinary single-handed assaults in the history of the Indian Army.

Shekhawati origins

Piru Singh was born to a Rajput family of modest means in Beri, in the arid belt of northern Rajasthan. He was, by most accounts, a spirited and physically fearless boy who found school confining. Two attempts to enlist were reportedly turned away before he was finally accepted, and on 20 May 1936 — his eighteenth birthday — he joined the army.

He was first taken into the 1st Punjab Regiment and later transferred to the 6th Battalion of the Rajputana Rifles, the regiment with which his name is now permanently linked. He advanced steadily through the non-commissioned ranks, and by the time of Partition he held the appointment of Company Havildar Major, the senior non-commissioned officer of a rifle company and the man responsible for its discipline, drill and cohesion in battle.

The Tithwal sector, 1948

The first war between India and Pakistan began in October 1947 over the accession of Jammu and Kashmir and continued through 1948 as a series of hard, high-altitude infantry actions along the mountain approaches to the Kashmir Valley. By mid-1948 the fighting had reached the Tithwal sector on the Kishanganga river, where the two forces contested a succession of ridges and spurs, each dominating the next.

On 18 July 1948, D Company of 6 Rajputana Rifles was ordered to take a strongly held enemy position on a hill feature above Tithwal. The approach was a single narrow path along a razor-backed ridge, wide enough for men to move only in file, with sheer ground on both sides. The position was covered by medium machine guns sited to sweep exactly that path. There was no cover and no alternative line of advance.

Piru Singh led the leading section. Almost as soon as the assault began, sustained machine-gun fire cut down most of the men with him; grenade fragments tore into his chest and both his hands. With his section effectively destroyed around him, he continued forward alone. He reached the first machine-gun post, cleared it with his sten gun and bayonet, and killed its crew.

Moving on to the second bunker, he was struck in the face by a grenade burst that blinded him in one eye and left him bleeding heavily. He kept going. He reached the second post and destroyed it as well. He then crawled towards a third emplacement, still under fire and by now severely wounded, and had begun his attack on it when he was hit in the head and killed. He was thirty years old.

The Param Vir Chakra

The Param Vir Chakra was instituted by independent India in 1950, with effect backdated to 15 August 1947 so that the gallantry of the Kashmir operations could be recognised. Piru Singh was among the first group of soldiers to receive it, and his award was posthumous.

His citation records not a moment of impulse but a sustained decision, taken repeatedly and while grievously injured, to keep advancing after every reason to stop had already presented itself. Military historians have noted that what distinguishes the action is its duration: he cleared two fortified machine-gun positions in sequence, on ground that offered no protection whatever, after his supporting section had already been destroyed.

Memory in Rajasthan and beyond

Piru Singh is commemorated in several places:

A statue of him stands in his native village of Beri, on the ground where local children play.
A traffic circle in Jhunjhunu carries his name, marked by the Government of Rajasthan.
A bust stands at the Param Yodha Sthal, the memorial to Param Vir Chakra recipients at the National War Memorial complex in Delhi.
His name is honoured within the Rajputana Rifles, whose recruits are taught the Tithwal action as part of regimental history.

The Shekhawati region as a whole has an unusually dense concentration of military families, and Piru Singh occupies a particular place in that local self-understanding — proof, as it is often put there, that the villages of the desert paid a share of the price of independence far out of proportion to their size or wealth. For Beri, a village of a few thousand people, the connection is direct and unbroken. The soldier who left it in 1936 to enlist never came home, but the village keeps the ridge above Tithwal in its own history.