Every time I am in London, I make it a point to step into Westminster Abbey and pause before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is an oddly humbling experience. The stone is plain, the space unadorned, yet its silence feels unbearably heavy. One British soldier, chosen from among the countless nameless bodies exhumed from Europe’s battlefields, lies interred there, a symbol for the thousands who never returned home, young men whose names their families mourned privately while the empire celebrated victory in public.

When I stand there, I feel a tightening in the chest, a melancholy that comes from knowing that the man beneath those stones had no idea what “glory” or “nation” demanded of him. He fought, he bled, he died, and history, that selective overseer of collective memory, wrote him out.

History, we are told, is a narrative of great men and decisive moments. Kings, empires, treaties, and conquests occupy the centre of its luminous stage. Yet beneath that bright surface lies a shadowed world of unnamed courage of ordinary individuals who perform extraordinary deeds only to be written out of the official script. The selective illumination of the past, as Edward Said reminds us, is indeed, never innocent. It is a practice of power, the power to name, to remember, and to forget.

And it is in this terrain of forgetting that we must revisit the unsung heroes of the past, the global symbols of anonymous sacrifice, whose stories force us to confront the silences in our historical consciousness. And in that quiet moment, as the Abbey’s light filters through stained glass, my mind travels home. I think of Bhai Jaita, the young Sikh who carried the severed head of Guru Tegh Bahadur from Chandni Chowk to Kiratpur Sahib under the relentless eye of Aurangzeb’s soldiers. On the occasion of the 350th martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur, Bhai Kanhaiya too comes to my mind, his compassion on the battlefield, offering water to friend and foe alike, unsettling the logic of warfare itself. These figures inhabit the same moral universe as the Unknown Warrior: ordinary men who bore the weight of extraordinary times, men who risked everything, not for the certainty of remembrance, but because something in them refused to surrender to fear or cruelty.

Yet such “heroes” remain marginal in the grand narratives of history. Their courage is often mentioned in passing, sometimes reduced to a footnote; Bhai Kanhaiya’s radical defiance of enmity, for instance, is remembered mostly as a devotional anecdote. Guru Tegh Bahadur’s companions – Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Sati Das, and Bhai Dayal Das – who were tortured and executed with him, receive even less attention in popular memory. They, too, are “unknown warriors,” their sacrifice overshadowed by the figure of the Guru, just as the rank-and-file soldiers of Europe are overshadowed by kings, generals, and treaties of the Great Wars.

This tendency is not accidental. It reflects the deeper politics of history-writing – a field shaped not merely by facts but by power. Empires, monarchies, and even modern nation-states craft narratives that privilege rulers, military strategists, and the rhetoric of conquest. The Subaltern Studies historians, from Ranajit Guha to Shahid Amin, as well as the great historian Howard Zinn, repeatedly ask why the “small voices of history” remain inaudible. Edward Said forcefully argued that Orientalist historiography celebrated European adventurers while silencing the colonised subjects who made empire possible. Likewise, Hayden White reminds us that history is not a neutral record but a literary form built through selection, emphasis, and erasure.

This is why standing at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior becomes for me a philosophical act. It forces me to confront the simple question: Whose stories are we allowed to remember? And whose must be forgotten so that national myths can shine unchallenged?

A scrutiny of the Indian epics reveals a pattern of deliberate erasure, wherein the monumental achievements of peripheral figures are eclipsed by the triumphal narratives of heroic protagonists. The Ramayana, for instance, extols Rama's victory, yet relegates to the margins the ingenuity of Nala and Nila, the master engineers who conceived and executed the bridge to Lanka – a testament to their extraordinary prowess in civil engineering that contemporary retellings often overlook.

Similarly, the unsung heroism of Sushena, the Vanara physician who braved the battlefield to tend to Lakshmana's wounds, exemplifies the quiet courage of caregiving. The Mahabharata, too, foregrounds the exploits of Arjuna, Bhima, and Krishna, while largely eliding the selfless sacrifice of Iravan, Arjuna's son, who surrendered his life in a ritual oblation to ensure the Pandavas' triumph. Meanwhile, the legend of Barbarik, a warrior whose posthumous perspective allowed him to behold the battlefield solely through the eyes of others, lies outside the Sanskritic canon, his narrative a poignant reminder of the silenced voices that haunt the margins of epic historiography.

History continues its exclusions well into the modern era. The women of the 1857 uprising, Uda Devi, Jhalkari Bai, and the countless unnamed foot soldiers who stood beside Lakshmibai of Jhansi, receive far less recognition than the male rebels whose stories found their way into colonial reports. During World War II, African soldiers fought in Burma and Italy, often in unbearable conditions, yet their contributions remain obscured beneath the narratives of European heroism. Colonial armies were built on the backs of men who would never be granted full citizenship in the very empires they defended.These are the people who, in the words of Walter Benjamin, constitute the “anonymous toil” upon which every triumphal procession marches.

To remember them is not simply to add new names to an old story. It is to fundamentally challenge how the story is told. It is to acknowledge that the moral arc of civilisation is sustained not by emperors or generals but by ordinary individuals whose courage does not depend on recognition. This acknowledgement instantly turns their stories iconic, and resonate the words of John Berger: “ never again will a single story be told as if it is the only story.”

This is why Bhai Jaita’s journey matters so profoundly. Riding alone through perilous territory, carrying the sacred head of a Guru who had defied an empire, he embodies a form of moral heroism that refuses to be contained within official archives. His act is not just one of loyalty but a defiant assertion of dignity against any form of tyranny. Bhai Kanhaiya’s compassion, too, unsettles the very grammar of war, prefiguring modern humanitarian principles long before the Geneva Conventions existed.

When these stories converge, the Sikh martyrs, the forgotten rebels of 1857, the silent engineers of ancient epics, the anonymous soldiers beneath European soil, they illuminate a truth that postcolonial historiography has long insisted upon, a truth that the real history of the world is written not by those who wield power, but by those who bear its consequences.

And so when I stand at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, I do not see a monument to British nationalism. I see a universal reminder of all those whom history has forgotten, the men, women, and unnamed multitudes who shaped the world without ever claiming to. To honour them is not merely an act of memory. It is an act of justice. And it is, perhaps, the only way to rescue history from the empire of forgetting. Remember, forgetting is not a simple loss of memory but a political and historical act. And, as Milan Kundera elaborates in his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the erasure is often disguised beneath, laughter, celebration, myth-making, nationalism or spectacle.

Shelley Walia, Professor Emeritus, is a cultural critic and former Senior Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. He writes on education, culture, war and international relations.

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