Somnath Sharma

Somnath Sharma was born on January 31, 1923, in the Kangra region of what was then the Punjab province of British India, in an area that today falls within the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh ^[1]. He came from a family in which military service was less a choice than an inheritance. His father, Amar Nath Sharma, was an officer in the army medical services who rose to the rank of Major General and later served as a senior medical officer of independent India's armed forces ^[2].

The household produced an unusual concentration of soldiers. One of Somnath's younger brothers, Vishwa Nath Sharma, would decades later become Chief of the Army Staff, heading the Indian Army from 1988 to 1990, while another brother, Surindar Nath Sharma, rose to be the army's Engineer in Chief ^[2]. Growing up amid uniforms, cantonments, and constant transfers, the eldest son absorbed the routines and expectations of regimental life early. Family accounts describe a boy drawn to stories of duty and to the Bhagavad Gita's teaching on action without attachment to its results, an influence often mentioned by biographers of the Param Vir Chakra winners ^[1].

Sharma was sent to Sherwood College in Nainital, a hill boarding school with a long record of supplying officers to the army ^[1]. From there he moved to the Prince of Wales Royal Indian Military College at Dehradun, the institution that prepared cadets for commissioned service, and he was noted as a keen sportsman with a particular fondness for boxing and hockey ^[3].

On February 22, 1942, at the age of nineteen, he was commissioned into the 8th Battalion of the 19th Hyderabad Regiment, a unit whose lineage passed after independence into the 4th Battalion of the Kumaon Regiment ^[3]. The Second World War was then at its height, and the young officer went almost directly from training into operational service. Anyone asking who was Somnath Sharma before Kashmir made him famous finds the answer in these years: a professional infantry officer shaped by wartime soldiering rather than peacetime routine.

Sharma's first taste of combat came in the Burma campaign against the Japanese, where his battalion fought in the Arakan, one of the harshest theatres of the war in Asia ^[3]. Jungle operations there demanded endurance, patrolling skill, and steadiness under ambush, and contemporaries later recalled that the Arakan fighting left a visible mark on his approach to command. He was mentioned in dispatches for his conduct during these operations, an early official recognition of courage ^[1].

Accounts of his wartime service record an episode in which he carried an exhausted soldier to safety during a withdrawal, refusing to leave the man behind despite orders to keep moving ^[1]. Whether or not every detail of such regimental stories can be verified, the pattern they describe, of an officer who placed his men's survival above his own convenience, matches the behaviour documented in his final battle. By the end of the war he was an experienced company officer in his early twenties, exactly the sort of leader the new Indian Army would need in 1947.

In October 1947, thousands of armed tribesmen from the northwest frontier, supported from across the new border with Pakistan, invaded the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. After the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession to India, Indian troops were airlifted into Srinagar to stop the raiders before they reached the capital and its airfield, the only lifeline for reinforcement ^[4]. Sharma, then a Major commanding D Company of 4 Kumaon, was flown into the valley with his men. He arrived with his left arm in plaster, the result of a hockey injury, and had insisted on accompanying his company rather than staying behind to recover ^[1].

His company was ordered to the village of Badgam, a few kilometres from the airfield, to screen the approaches from the west. On October 31, 1947, a force of roughly seven hundred raiders converged on his position of about ninety men, supporting their assault with mortar fire ^[5]. Outnumbered several times over, D Company held its ground on open, exposed terrain. Sharma moved between sections under fire, and because his plastered arm prevented him from firing a weapon himself, he filled magazines and distributed ammunition to his light machine gunners while directing air support onto the attackers ^[5].

As casualties mounted he radioed brigade headquarters a message that has since been repeated in nearly every account of the battle: the enemy was barely fifty yards away, his men were hopelessly outnumbered, and he would not withdraw an inch but would fight to the last man and the last round ^[5]. Shortly afterwards a mortar bomb exploded near a stack of ammunition beside him, killing him instantly. He was twenty four years old. His company suffered heavy losses, yet the six hours it bought delayed the tribal advance long enough for fresh troops to secure the airfield, through which the entire Indian buildup in Kashmir then flowed ^[4].

When independent India instituted the Param Vir Chakra on January 26, 1950, as its supreme award for valour in the face of the enemy, the decoration was applied retrospectively to acts performed since August 15, 1947. Major Somnath Sharma was named its first recipient, and his posthumous citation described how his leadership, tenacity, and disregard for his own safety inspired his heavily outnumbered company to hold the enemy at Badgam ^[6].

The citation, published in the Gazette of India, records that his example held the company together after he had been wounded and that the delay he imposed on the raiders proved decisive for the defence of Srinagar ^[6]. Among Somnath Sharma achievements, this award occupies a singular place: not merely the medal itself, but the fact that the very first name inscribed in the roll of India's highest gallantry honour belongs to him. The medal was received on his behalf by his family, and the story of the young major with his arm in plaster became a fixture of regimental instruction and national commemoration ^[1].

Sharma never married; his life ended before his twenty fifth birthday, barely five years after his commissioning. Those who served with him and the biographers who later interviewed his family describe a spare, disciplined man who read the Bhagavad Gita, boxed and played hockey with intensity, and wrote home in the direct, unsentimental style common to soldiers of his generation ^[1].

A letter he wrote to his brother during the Burma years is often cited in books on the Param Vir Chakra winners, in which he reflected that death on the battlefield held no fear for a soldier who had done his duty ^[1]. The sentiment reads differently in hindsight, given how closely his end matched it. His family carried his memory into their own careers: when General V. N. Sharma took over as army chief four decades later, commentators noted that he led the same army in which his eldest brother had won its first supreme honour ^[2].

The action at Badgam is taught in Indian military academies as an example of economy of force and of the effect a single determined commander can have on a campaign. Had the airfield fallen in the first week of November 1947, India could not have reinforced the valley, and historians of the first Kashmir war treat the stand of D Company as one of its turning points ^[4]. Srinagar's airport complex area and several army institutions preserve his name, a residential area near the old airfield is named Sumbal in local memory of the fighting, and the Kumaon Regiment observes the anniversary of Badgam as a day of honour ^[3].

His Param Vir Chakra and personal effects have been displayed in regimental and national collections, and his statue stands among those of other recipients at parks dedicated to the award's winners ^[3]. Popular retellings, from school textbooks to Rachna Bisht Rawat's widely read collection on the Param Vir Chakra recipients, keep the essential Somnath Sharma facts in circulation: the plastered arm, the ninety men against seven hundred, the final radio message ^[1]. For readers coming to a Somnath Sharma biography today, his significance is straightforward. He demonstrated, in the first days of the republic's first war, the standard of conduct against which Indian battlefield courage has been measured ever since ^[6].