The Sikh army surrendered at Rawalpindi on 14 March 1849. What was then a modest town of the Pothohar became one of the largest garrisons in British India within a generation, and remains the headquarters of the Pakistan Army.
Rawalpindi district was Punjabi-speaking but not Sikh-majority. Its Sikh and Hindu population was concentrated in the trading quarters of the city and in the surrounding qasbas. In March 1947, months before Partition, the rural areas of Rawalpindi division saw large-scale killing of Sikhs and Hindus. Thoa Khalsa in the same district is the site most often named, where a number of women went into a well.
The March 1947 violence in Rawalpindi division preceded the boundary award by five months. It is the reason a great many families in Indian Punjab today describe themselves as Pothohari, and it is much less discussed than the August killings.
Gurdwara Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal is about fifty kilometres away and is one of the few Sikh sites in Pakistan that receives regular pilgrimage.
The Sikh army surrendered at Rawalpindi in March 1849 and the arms were stacked and the men dismissed with a small payment for the journey home.
The account describes soldiers laying down weapons and saying that this day the Sarkar had ended, and the phrase has stayed in the Punjabi record of the event.
Many of those men were recruited into the British Indian Army within three years, and the regiments raised from them fought at Delhi in 1857.