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 Chandigarh: Some 109 years before Flight Lieutenant Arshdeep Singh Dang was commissioned into the Royal Air Force (RAF), becoming its first Sikh fighter pilot since World War 2, another had already taken to the skies in a military fighter. This happened at a time when the RAF did not yet exist, and Indians faced formidable racial and political barriers to commissioned military service.

That pioneer was Hardit Singh Malik, who joined the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in 1917 and flew operationally as a fighter pilot before the RFC was transformed into the RAF a year later, in April 1918. An Indian Express report this week brought Dang’s achievement into focus, but Malik’s pioneering feat has gradually receded from living memory as the generation that knew his story has largely passed on.

But their respective paths into military aviation could not have been more different.

Born in Chandigarh and raised in Southall, England, 28-year-old Dang began his fighter-pilot training in 2022, before completing the demanding course that culminated recently in his RAF wings. Despite growing up in England, he retained strong links with Punjab, much like Malik.

Malik was born into a prominent landlord family of Rawalpindi in 1894 and carried his Sikh identity with him into early 20th-century England and from there into the newly formed and perilous world of military aviation.

Dang entered an established air force through a formal training system; Malik, by contrast, had to fight his own way into the fighter cockpit.

Malik passed away in New Delhi in late 1985 at the age of 91, after a life of extraordinary variety that carried him from aerial combat in WWI over the Western Front to the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the premiership of Patiala state for three years till 1947 and, thereafter, becoming India’s first High Commissioner to Canada and later Delhi’s Ambassador to France.

 I had the rare privilege of knowing Malik in his later years and, even at 85, he remained an extraordinarily engaging raconteur, with an infectious, charming irreverence and a mischievous gleam in his eyes. He also possessed the rare ability to recount episodes of extraordinary danger, prejudice and absurdity with the amused detachment of someone drolly recounting an especially entertaining afternoon.

But to understand the remarkable life behind those stories, it is worth going back to its unlikely beginning.

An unlikely beginning

Malik’s journey towards military aviation began at the age of 13, when he travelled alone to England in 1908 to attend Clifton College in Bristol. He subsequently entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Modern History and distinguished himself as much on the sporting field as academically, earning a golf Blue and playing first-class cricket for Sussex against the MCC at Lord’s.

By then, the Great War had been raging for two years, and Malik was eager to join the fight. His attempts to secure a British military commission were twice rejected, as the nationalist freedom movement was gathering momentum back home, and the British authorities were deeply suspicious of all........

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