THREE DECADES AFTER Mahatma Gandhi’s visit to Dagshai’s colonial jail, his assassin Nathuram Godse was held in the same building during his transfer to the East Punjab High Court in Shimla for trial. Gandhi occupied the VIP cell; Godse cell number six.
The jail’s curator, Anand Kumar Sethi, has a personal link to the killer’s case. His grandfather, Justice Achhru Ram, was among the High Court judges who upheld Godse’s death sentence.
According to Sethi, Dagshai derives from Dag-e-Shahi, the Mughal practice of branding criminals and exiling them to remote settlements. In 1847 the East India Company acquired the site and four neighbouring villages from Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. Its position in the hills made it a convenient staging point for British regiments and an escape from the heat and mosquitoes of the plains.
The jail, built in 1849, is one of the strongest reminders of the early work of future field marshal Robert Napier. It soon filled with prisoners from the 1857 uprisings and later housed Boer detainees from South Africa.
World War I drew Dagshai into deeper political unrest. The Ghadar movement, which attempted to incite revolt within the colonial army, left a direct imprint on the jail. After the Komagata Maru incident in 1914, four Ghadar supporters were executed here. A year earlier, a mutiny in the 23rd Cavalry led to 12 sepoys being shot by firing squad. The gallows remain sealed but intact.
Other units gave Dagshai different rhythms. Cyclist battalions arrived in 1917 and occupied themselves with drills and theatre. The Gordon Highlanders served here, and their pipers carried the tune “Dagshai Hills” to the Battle of Dargai on the North-West Frontier and, a century later, to ceremonies at Balmoral Castle following Queen Elizabeth II’s death. Dagshai’s regiments also served in Afghan campaigns and on the Western Front.
The infamous Major William Hodson was posted in Dagshai. During the 1857 revolt, he travelled to Delhi and captured and killed the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s three sons. One display shows an army officer once posted here—Ayub Khan, later president of Pakistan.